Our Story
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Nina MitchellCo-founder & Company Director
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Nina is an accredited Psychotherapist, Clinical Supervisor and Transformational Coach. In addition, she has trained with the mental health charity MIND to teach the renowned MBSR program (Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction), and more recently has trained with the Oxford Mindfulness Centre on the ‘Mindfulness: Teaching in the Workplace’ programme.
Nina’s own continuing professional development includes studying CBT at the University of Oxford's Department for Continuing Education, bereavement training with the NHS, and training with the charity Anxiety UK. Nina formerly lectured at the University of East London on the Integrative Counselling and Coaching programme.
Nina excels at charity shop book hauls that'll make most people jealous, always ready to catch up (or arrange a business meeting) over a glass of wine and has a special talent for arranging amazing breaks and holidays to nurture her soul.
Nina also owns a rescue dog, which makes her ridiculously cool!
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Co-founder & Creative Director
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Teri holds a BSc and MSc in Psychology and a Postgraduate Diploma in Counselling, as well as a Diploma in Transformational Coaching and Coach Supervision.
Teri spent the past 18 years abroad, travelling and trying to satisfy her thirst for knowledge but has recently returned to her native country Denmark where she runs her private practice The Manual of You™ and spends as much time as possible writing.
Teri specialises in narratives and neurodivergence and is the creator of NeuroStories™ - a self-advocacy programme for autistic adults - and of the coaching framework Curious Inquiry™ .
Teri is, likewise, a bibliophile, hopeless training course addict, sapiosexual and a committed tsundoku practitioner, as well as a sufferer of Shiny New Thing Syndrome - always chasing new ideas and projects (failing at completing most of them).
She doesn't yet have a rescue dog but she's still a nice person (living with three cats instead).
The Training ComPenDium is a personable and dedicated, boutique business on a mission to offer high-end, quality CPDs for counsellors and coaches - with a twist!
Our Philosophy & Mission
We’re passionate about learning, knowledge, thinking, expanding our horizons and challenging our perspectives and we’re fairly sure that if you’re looking at our page, you are too – after all, that’s not exactly uncommon among us counsellors and coaches. Us, counsellors and coaches, seem to share this commonality of thirsting for self-improvement and development, both personally and professionally, regardless of our ethnicity, gender or geographical location. We also seem to, universally, share a deep passion for the work we do and the people we interact with.
And that’s at the core of The Training ComPenDium – personal and professional development and continuous learning, stemming from a place of passion, and a motivation for growth.
But, what we – as the founders – are guilty of and what we see in our peers and supervision clients is also a drive for buying more and more training, feeling we don't know enough, insecure in our knowledge and expertise.
Am I good enough? Can I apply this/myself yet? Am I a fraud? Will I hurt my clients if I don’t learn even more?
We may feel passionate about learning, but we also feel the sting of self-doubt a lot of the time. It’s important for us at The Training ComPenDium to address this.
We focus on doing that in three ways:
- We, literally, have a workshop called ‘Stop Throwing Money at Your Insecurities’ that will give you the tools and knowledge to push through your perfectionism, imposter syndrome and fears and apply what you already know instead of carrying on buying courses you don’t actually need (and probably won’t get through because you’ve already bought too many – am I right?)
- By ensuring that our training isn’t just theory and practice based but also includes application – how can you take what you’ve learned and actually go and earn money!
- We won’t offer you accreditation or points with any membership bodies. If that’s your motivation to buy training courses that’s not only entirely okay but also understandable when you’ve paid to belong to a professional membership body and they have CPD rules that need to be adhered to. But at The Training ComPenDium we’ve decided to apply a different model: Only sign up for our training because you feel passionate about learning more for the sake of learning more.
And if our perspective on this and our business model annoys you, know that that’s entirely okay too.
We call ourselves a training school with a ‘twist’. This also comes in multiple ways:
1) As mentioned this twist comes both in the form of not offering accredited courses and also by ensuring we teach theory, how to apply theory in practice as well as how to apply your learning to increase your impact and, potentially, your income
2) The majority of our courses will be unique and not available anywhere else in the world
3) Because we’re taking a step away from the business model that’s based on earning money off your insecurities of not feeling good enough or ready, we don’t just focus on courses where you learn new skills to apply in your practice, we’ll also focus on taking care of you, as the practitioner, which means, we’ll also offer training focusing on professional self-care (as well as offering several supervision packages)
4) We’re all about the community! And psychological safety – both for our learners as well as our freelancer staff. We’re a values-based company and those values include being approachable as a company, transparent, respectful of our community and their needs, open to feedback and always eager to learn more about making and applying reasonable adjustments to how we’re running our company and offerings to be as inclusive as possible (while being the first to put our hands up and acknowledge we’re flawed, biased and will make mistakes along the way, so we rely on our community to help us improve as a company and training providers), equity, fairness and having ethics at the heart of all our decisions
5) We’re not the experts! Maybe that’s a poor selling point but we believe in independent thinking and honing people’s critical thinking skills. We believe that expertise can create blinkers and limit new-think and growth. We have something to say – absolutely – but your learning is your responsibility. We want you to own your journey and feel empowered in your right to process, mould and shape what you learn into what you need it to be – for you and how you, uniquely, run your business and practice, as you’re much more an expert in what you and your client group would benefit from than we are
6) We not only embrace but celebrate imperfection! So much so that we’ve created a workshop we call Failing Brilliantly
And that’s at the core of The Training ComPenDium – personal and professional development and continuous learning, stemming from a place of passion, and a motivation for growth.
But, what we – as the founders – are guilty of and what we see in our peers and supervision clients is also a drive for buying more and more training, feeling we don't know enough, insecure in our knowledge and expertise.
Am I good enough? Can I apply this/myself yet? Am I a fraud? Will I hurt my clients if I don’t learn even more?
We may feel passionate about learning, but we also feel the sting of self-doubt a lot of the time. It’s important for us at The Training ComPenDium to address this.
We focus on doing that in three ways:
- We, literally, have a workshop called ‘Stop Throwing Money at Your Insecurities’ that will give you the tools and knowledge to push through your perfectionism, imposter syndrome and fears and apply what you already know instead of carrying on buying courses you don’t actually need (and probably won’t get through because you’ve already bought too many – am I right?)
- By ensuring that our training isn’t just theory and practice based but also includes application – how can you take what you’ve learned and actually go and earn money!
- We won’t offer you accreditation or points with any membership bodies. If that’s your motivation to buy training courses that’s not only entirely okay but also understandable when you’ve paid to belong to a professional membership body and they have CPD rules that need to be adhered to. But at The Training ComPenDium we’ve decided to apply a different model: Only sign up for our training because you feel passionate about learning more for the sake of learning more.
And if our perspective on this and our business model annoys you, know that that’s entirely okay too.
We call ourselves a training school with a ‘twist’. This also comes in multiple ways:
1) As mentioned this twist comes both in the form of not offering accredited courses and also by ensuring we teach theory, how to apply theory in practice as well as how to apply your learning to increase your impact and, potentially, your income
2) The majority of our courses will be unique and not available anywhere else in the world
3) Because we’re taking a step away from the business model that’s based on earning money off your insecurities of not feeling good enough or ready, we don’t just focus on courses where you learn new skills to apply in your practice, we’ll also focus on taking care of you, as the practitioner, which means, we’ll also offer training focusing on professional self-care (as well as offering several supervision packages)
4) We’re all about the community! And psychological safety – both for our learners as well as our freelancer staff. We’re a values-based company and those values include being approachable as a company, transparent, respectful of our community and their needs, open to feedback and always eager to learn more about making and applying reasonable adjustments to how we’re running our company and offerings to be as inclusive as possible (while being the first to put our hands up and acknowledge we’re flawed, biased and will make mistakes along the way, so we rely on our community to help us improve as a company and training providers), equity, fairness and having ethics at the heart of all our decisions
5) We’re not the experts! Maybe that’s a poor selling point but we believe in independent thinking and honing people’s critical thinking skills. We believe that expertise can create blinkers and limit new-think and growth. We have something to say – absolutely – but your learning is your responsibility. We want you to own your journey and feel empowered in your right to process, mould and shape what you learn into what you need it to be – for you and how you, uniquely, run your business and practice, as you’re much more an expert in what you and your client group would benefit from than we are
6) We not only embrace but celebrate imperfection! So much so that we’ve created a workshop we call Failing Brilliantly