Developing Your Emotional Health: The Compact Guide

This practical, empowering guide provides performers and creatives with a toolkit of techniques to improve, manage and maintain good emotional wellbeing – helping you navigate and overcome the pressures and demands of a career in the arts.

Inside, you'll find key, evidence-based concepts and ideas about emotional health, as well as the benefits of taking a holistic approach to your brain, imagination and body. There are dozens of creative exercises and meditations to help you build resilience, develop your emotional intelligence, reframe negative thoughts, stay motivated, and embrace change when it comes. You'll also discover strategies for tackling auditions, preparing for performances and coping with periods of unemployment, plus guidance on creating your own personalised emotional health plan.

Invaluable for anyone working in the creative industries, this book will equip you to assume responsibility for your own emotional wellbeing, and pursue your passion whilst still enjoying a life of fulfilment and satisfaction.

The Compact Guides are pocket-sized introductions for actors and theatremakers, each tackling a key topic in a clear and comprehensive way. Written by industry professionals with extensive hands-on experience of their subject, they provide you with maximum information in minimum time.

Andy Barker, Brian Cooley and Beth Wood have all worked in the arts in various roles, including as actors, writers, directors and stage managers. Together, Andy and Brian run Mind Fitness, an organisation dedicated to developing mental health and wellbeing and business effectiveness, and Beth is Artistic Director of Prospero Theatre Company.



'An extremely interesting and useful book for anyone in a creative role... this small and light paperback can be easily transported about with you, and just dipping into any page may well be rewarding... an excellent addition to the material currently available on the subject. It is written in a chatty and approachable style, and the bitesize structure is perfect for reading on the go'



'A practical, accessible, friendly book with the potential to support anyone whose emotional health could, potentially, be challenged'



'A refreshing look at how to sustain mind, body and brain… this handy pocket guide offers great insight into the modem creative industries… It is grounded in real-life experience and offers many active exercises for the reader… actively useful with real world application… it's a highly engaging and soothing balm to ensure that we start to take seriously the craft of looking after ourselves'



'Invaluable advice and support... This is the first book, to my knowledge, that looks specifically at how people who work in the creative industries can develop and support their own mental health... It is a timely book, as it explores the triggers for mental health issues, such as unstable work, low pay and lack of support... It is well structured and easy to navigate, and being pocket sized makes it an ideal travelling companion... Each chapter begins with a slice of learning and is strongly evidenced by science... The accompanying online recordings are soothing, relaxing and insightful, and fully complement the exercises in the book. I was impressed with how they engage the reader with the topics it covers... Developing Your Emotional Health should be given to all students at the end of their training as an arts practitioner'