ThrivingRobin Life Coaching

27/05/2026

🍏 Food for thought

A lighthouse stays warm, visible and safe.
But ships still have to learn to navigate the sea themselves.
—C.Maxwell

18/05/2026

More food for thought from one of my favourite French writers and thinkers 🌿

“Le vrai voyage de découverte ne consiste pas à chercher de nouveaux paysages, mais à avoir de nouveaux yeux.”
— Marcel Proust

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”

Healing can change the way you see life, people… and even yourself.

17/05/2026

Very true 🥰

[not my image]

17/05/2026

Race 4 Life done 💕🙌🏾
Sboy and I have raised a total of £260.

Thank you to everyone who supported us. 🙏🏽

We enjoyed the challenge of the Hopetoun trail.
Thank you to Sboy for pacing me around the route.
A wee afternoon soothing my calves with arnica I think 😅

15/05/2026

“The heaviest burden is to exist without truly living.”
— Victor Hugo

Some quotes don’t simply sound beautiful… they quietly resonate with you.

15/05/2026

If you’re going through something, you don’t have to do it alone.

Why not come along to one of our groups?

No fees. No booking. No registration.

Open to any man 18+, every Monday 7-9pm (except bank holidays).

Just turn up for a brew, biscuit and a chat. 👌

14/05/2026

Stole this from a friend. PDA awareness is important and is not spoken about enough.

Start of Pathological Demand Avoidance (PDA) Awareness Week. You may already be familiar with it.

📚 Where can you learn more?

The UK PDA Society offers helpful guidance, research, and lived experience insights.

PDA Society:
https://www.pdasociety.org.uk/

They have awareness raising events going on this week. It's also a great website to help explain PDA to professionals or family members.

If you are caring for a child or young person with PDA, the Charity for Civil Servants has recorded webinars on PDA, school avoidance and a future webinar on managing child to parent aggression.

https://www.cfcs.org.uk/help-advice/webinars/

If the term is new to you, here is some background information.

🧠 PDA stands for Pathological Demand Avoidance

PDA is often discussed in relation to autism, but understanding is still evolving. Some see it as an autism profile; others believe it may be distinct.
What’s widely agreed is that PDA is about how a person experiences and responds to demands. Many people prefer Persistent Drive for Autonomy.
That shift in language matters. It reframes PDA not as a disorder, but as a strong need to maintain control over one’s actions

📌 What counts as a “demand”?

It’s not just formal requests or deadlines. Everyday expectations - replying to messages 💬, making choices 🍽️, or being given instructions - can all feel like demands.

For people with a PDA profile, these demands can trigger a strong, anxiety-based response. This may look like:

Resistance 🚫
Avoidance 🏃
Withdrawal 🤐
…even when they want to do the task.

This isn’t deliberate behaviour. It’s a nervous system response aimed at regaining a sense of control.

🔍 How is this different from normal avoidance?

We all avoid things sometimes 😅, especially when stressed.

But with PDA:
The response is more constant 🔄
It’s not just situational 📉
It can’t simply be “pushed through” ❌
It’s not about attitude or motivation - it’s automatic.

🌵 Why this matters
Without awareness, PDA behaviours can be misread as:

Difficult 😤
Uncooperative 🙅
Oppositional ⚠️
Typical responses - more pressure ⏰, stricter deadlines 📅, repeated reminders 🔁- can make things worse by increasing the sense of lost autonomy.

🤝 Supporting adults with a PDA profile

Small changes can make a big difference:

💬 Use softer, collaborative language (“Shall we…” instead of instructions)

🎯 Offer choice and flexibility
🧩 Involve people in shaping tasks
👀 Recognise that demands can be broader than they seem
🌿 Reduce pressure before increasing expectations

This isn’t about removing accountability, it’s about helping people meet expectations in a way that feels manageable.

👨‍👩‍👧 For parents of children with PDA

Many of these principles apply at home too ❤️.
Parenting a child with a PDA profile can feel challenging, especially when everyday routines (getting dressed 👕, leaving the house 🚪, homework 📚) trigger strong resistance.

Some helpful approaches include:

🪶 Reducing direct demands (e.g. making things playful or indirect rather than giving clear instructions)

🎭 Using creativity and humour to engage rather than confront

🔄 Offering choices to increase a sense of control

⏳ Lowering pressure in difficult moments rather than escalating

🤗 Focusing on connection first - feeling safe often reduces avoidance

It’s important to remember: this isn’t “bad behaviour.”

It’s a child responding to feeling overwhelmed or controlled.

Supportive, flexible approaches often work better than strict discipline alone.

Sorry this is such a long post!

PDA is not widely talked about and can often be misunderstood or oversimplified, so I wanted to take the opportunity to shine a spotlight on it this week to highlight support and resources.

✍️​ Diagnosis is tricky - see here for more info Identification and diagnosis process -

https://www.pdasociety.org.uk/research-professional-practice/identification-and-diagnosis-process/

In January 2022 the PDA Society published ‘Identifying & Assessing a PDA profile – Practice Guidance’, collating the professional practice and experience

13/05/2026

Totally👍🏽

Always ❤️

13/05/2026

Hi everyone 👋🏽

As it’s Mental Health Awareness Week, I just wanted to offer a gentle reminder that rest is not laziness… it is part of healing, balance, and looking after ourselves, especially when life feels emotionally heavy or mentally noisy.

I offer gentle life coaching discovery chats by phone or online, where we can talk about your goals, challenges, worries, or simply where you may feel stuck in life right now.

More often than not, people are not looking for someone to “fix” them.
They simply need a calm space to breathe, reflect, and feel heard without judgement.

As my work continues to evolve, I am now focusing more on online, phone and text support sessions, allowing me to offer a calm, more adaptable approach that fits around people’s lives and needs.

Through ThrivingRobin®, I offer supportive conversations, grounding techniques, somatic-inspired well-being practices, and holistic support designed to encourage emotional balance, self-awareness, and a gentle reconnection with yourself 🌿

If you feel you could benefit from a little space to pause and reset, feel free to message me.

Corine
ThrivingRobin®
Learn · Grow · Rise

12/05/2026

An excellent game of football tonight and a very good watch 🙌🏾

A wee goal for ThrivingRobin®️… but should really have been 3 😅

12/05/2026

This French hospital is looking into new father's Post-partum depression and the comments are absolutely appalling.

We are in 2026 and yes... fathers can suffer from Post-partum depression.
And guess what... babies can also suffer from depression too...

Let me take this opportunity to put this here...
Yes, babies can experience something that looks very much like depression, although it does not appear in the same way it does in older children or adults.

In babies, it is usually seen as deep emotional withdrawal or distress rather than “sadness” in the way described in adults.

In babies, it may look like:
• less eye contact
• reduced smiling or interaction
• sleep or feeding changes
• lack of curiosity or playfulness

Babies are deeply sensitive to stress, emotional disconnection, trauma and the environment around them.

The hopeful part is that babies are also highly responsive to warmth, safety, bonding, gentle interaction, touch, eye contact, singing, predictable care and loving connection.
Their brains and nervous systems are still developing, which means support and nurturing can make an enormous difference.

The smallest moments of warmth can help shape a little nervous system in powerful ways.

Une étude est en cours à l'hôpital du Havre pour valider un outil qui permettra de repérer les dépressions post-partum chez les papas. Il s'agit du même questionnaire utilisée actuellement pour les mamans et qui est déjà systématiquement proposé aux pères dans les pays anglo-saxons.