About Garth Castle – Facilitator | Coach | Author
Positioning himself as an Emotional Wellness Thought Leader, Garth shares his knowledge on Emotional Wellness, which he gained through his personal experiences, via his courses and coaching sessions called ‘A Coffee with Garth’.
Garth’s purpose statement is… ‘enabling people to flourish through living a healthy emotional life’. To support this, he has set a personal goal… ‘to expand the Emotional Wellness of 1 Million Individuals by 2030 – starting with Kiwis’. Garth focuses on two areas of Emotional Wellness, for which he has developed Emotional Wellness Models of Practice. His Emotional Wellness Models are evidence-based.
Focus One: Changing the reactive and destructive emotional cycle and pattern around recurring situations.
Garth’s interest in Emotional Wellness evolved from the lessons of his personal journey of emotional self-realisation. He wondered why certain situations triggered emotions within himself, which usually had a negative impact on him to function in a normal and healthy manner. Through wanting to change the reactive and destructive emotional cycle or pattern around recurring situations, Garth created his coaching model Castle’s Coaching Model for EQ Self-Realisation©. Garth believes the better we know and understand who we are, i.e., our ‘Self’, the better we can manage our emotions around current and future situations.
Focus Two: Achieving Emotional Wellness when faced with life’s evitable waves (challenges).
As mentioned, Garth has experienced several of life’s waves, which include losing his house due to business ventures, being made redundant 4 times over a period of 6 years with no pay-outs and encountering long periods of unemployment, supporting his mother to accept and adjust to living in a Care Home after suffering a stroke and then sadly passing, relationship breakup, plus dealing with narcissistic people personally and professionally. Throughout these experiences, Garth had times where he struggled emotionally, however, by applying proactive and constructive Emotional Wellness strategies he reduced the window of suffering and managed to successfully ride life’s waves. These experiences resulted in the creation of his Emotional Readiness and Responsiveness Model©.
He is a published author of Bite Size Chunks to Success – Controlling Stress, which is endorsed by Sir Stephen Tindall – founder of The Warehouse and is currently writing his second book on the topic of Emotional Wellness. Garth is a certified International Coaching Federation (ICF) Transformative Coach.
As an entrepreneur he has developed several business ventures from conception through to commercialisation. He has a diverse professional background across different sectors including retail, finance, and social services within organisations such as The Warehouse, Westpac, McDonald’s, Youth Horizons Trust, and Aspire2 Business – holding Learning & Development (20+ years), Operations Management, Human Resources, BDM, and Account Manager roles.
Garth’s professional and personal achievements has been featured in a range of published articles in New Zealand and Australia. These include; the NZ Herald, NZ Business magazine, PC World magazine, Business to Business paper, Start Up magazine, The Aucklander, MLM magazine, Brisbane City News, Gold Coast Health & Harmony Guide, plus appearing on TVNZ’s Good Morning Show.
Garth enjoys sharing his knowledge and experience to support individuals to expand their state of Emotional Wellness. Garth’s delivery style of storytelling, combined with his practical, positive, and engaging personality, ensures that his content truly connects with his audience, whether during a course or in a coaching environment.
Garth’s Key Strengths
- A genuine passion and life purpose/calling to make a positive difference by help individuals
- Exposed to challenging life experiences both professionally and personally. These experiences provide credibility as he links the course theory to real life examples.
- 20+ years in the field of Learning & Development
- Certified International Coaching Federation (ICF) Transformative Coach
- Completed course in Positive Psychology (Member of NZ Association of Positive Psychology)
- Published author on Stress Management
- Held role of Training Manager for Youth Horizons Trust – NZ’s largest NGO working with young people who are at risk of poor life outcomes due to complex behavioural and/or mental health needs, including conduct disorder and antisocial behaviours. This experience provided Garth with insights into clinical intervention programs and clinical models of practice from NZ and globally
- A passionate life-long learner… continuously striving to be a better person.
Garth Castle enjoying a coffee in his training
environment called ‘A Coffee with Garth’.
Garth’s Emotional Wellness Strategy
The adverse impact on the state of mental health and wellbeing of New Zealanders (and globally) over the last few years due to covid, the weather events, and the cost of living, does not require any research or studies. All you need to do is to simply ask, “how are you coping?”. Sadly, the normal response Garth receives are stories of challenges, struggles, and hardship.
It’s a bold assumption, but one Garth believes is true, and that is, no-one has escaped from the negative tentacles of these events… himself included! Knowing this, and since his focus is in the area of Emotional Wellness, the question he asked himself was, “what can I do?”.
This resulted in Garth’s vision to expand Emotional Wellness through evidence-based courses and coaching. Heuses the term ‘Emotional Wellness’ rather than the more commonly term ‘Mental Health’. This is because hisobjective is to provide an early proactive intervention by building a strong Emotional Wellness foundation to support an individual’s state of Emotional Wellness for when they are faced with life’s evitable challenges, or as Garth refers to them, life’s waves.
Purpose Statement: ‘Enabling people to flourish through living a healthy emotional life.’
For many people, challenging situations trigger emotions which usually have a destructive impact on them to function in a normal and healthy manner. Garth supports people to understand, embrace, and manage their Emotional Individuality – enabling people to flourish through living a healthy emotional life.
Strategic Goal: ‘To expand the Emotional Wellness of 1 Million Individuals by 2030… starting with Kiwis.’
Garth will achieve this strategic goal through his Emotional Wellness courses and coaching. These will be delivered directly by Garth and by accredited licence providers who currently work with his target audience – Business, Aged Care Section, the Community, and Individuals. The course outcomes are evidence-based.
The Ripple Effect
To achieve the target of 1 million Individuals will be a combination of participants completing the Emotional Wellness courses and the ‘Dropping a Pebble in a Pond Ripple Effect’ through the participants supporting and sharing with others (ratio of 1:10) their Emotional Wellness knowledge and skills.
World Stage
Once the Emotional Wellness courses have been established and proven in New Zealand, Garth’s vision is to present the findings and evidence to other countries with the objective of selling course licences into these countries. This will result in putting New Zealand on the ‘world stage’ as the leaders in developing, embedding, and sustaining Emotional Wellness within the target sectors.
Garth’s Emotional Wellness Process
Emotional Wellness Overview
“A state of self-awareness and readiness to proactively and constructively respond and cope emotionally to life’s challenges.” – Garth Castle
Emotional Wellness includes:
• Positive attitude and optimistic outlook towards life
• High self-esteem with balance between emotional states within a person
• Self-respect by having a feeling of wellness and confidence
• Ability to recognise and cope with normal changes in life
• Share desired (happiness, love, keen, forgiveness, concerned, etc.) and undesired feelings (sad, anger, jealous, hate, etc.) with others
• Mood stability in both normal (happy life with good house, car, partner, and children), and extreme conditions (divorce, sadness due to someone’s death in family, excessive loss in business)
• Ability to experience, manage, and express feelings appropriately
• Ability to respond resiliently and effectively to changing emotional states and effectively cope with situations that present challenges and obstacles in life
• Emotional wellness is balance of our thoughts, feelings, and behaviours all integrated and connected, both positively and negatively. For example, able to acknowledge and express appropriately the feelings of sadness, anger, happiness, joy in a healthy and productive way may enhance person’s emotional wellness.
Benefits of Emotional Wellness:
• Helps in being emotionally balanced and stable in challenging conditions. Emotionally healthy people can bounce back more quickly than others – resilience
• Able to identify desires or goals in life, take positive actions which can help to fulfil desires and can make changes in life
• Heal from stress, anxiety, depression, and other health issues like decrease in blood pressure, reduced risk of heart disease
• Alter the undesired feelings and thinking and behaviour patterns like sadness, hate, anger, frustration, which in turn lowers blood pressure
• Increase self- confidence and believing in oneself. An emotionally positive person has better health, mental stability, and productive in doing all activities
• Optimistic thinking towards growth in life. For example, take every obstacle as a challenge in life and try to eliminate that by having attitude that nothing is impossible in this world
• A full life with vision and purpose, which will help to think positively to accomplish that purpose
• It will improve social skills that are your connection with the whole community and how to interact with different kinds of people
• Helps in self-control and improves your concentration level
• Helps to become an emotionally strong person who won’t be distracted by negativity.
Source: Centre for Lifestyle Medicine and Wellness Care
Since there are amazing individuals and organisations whose purpose aligns with Garth’s, which is to make a positive difference to state of Emotional Wellness of New Zealanders, wouldn’t it be incredible to collaborate for the greater good and establish a ‘Tribe’ of like-minded people instead of an individual approach. Therefore, Garth wants is to establish a tribe of like-minded individuals and organisations to address the psychological impact of covid, the weather events, and the cost of living.
The first phase is to gain initial interest from the potential tribe, which could consist of:
- Funders; Investors, Charities, NGOs, Community Groups, Corporates
- Private Training Establishments (PTEs), including Wellbeing Training Providers, e.g., resilience, positive psychology
- Employee Asisstant Providers (EAP)
- Social Services NGOs (incorporating into their model of practice)
- Clinicians; psychologist, counsellors, coaches
- Natural Health Providers, e.g., naturopaths, reiki
- IT; website, app development, LMS, online systems.
Contact Garth to discuss this exciting opportunity to collaborate for the greater good.
Garth’s Other Emotional Wellness Courses
Apart from supporting the Emotional Wellness of communities, Garth also supports business, the Aged Cared sector, and individuals.
Down to Basics Ltd is the registered company trading as expand. A Coffee with Garth is the brand under which Garth Castle delivers his courses and coaching.