Narelle Lemon

Helping the people who hold everyone else · Wellbeing literacy, cultures of care & the practice of tending · Author · Speaker · Researcher

I help the people who hold everyone else. Leaders, carers, educators — the ones responsible for everyone else’s wellbeing, who are usually last on their own list. I don’t think that’s a personal failing. I think it’s a design problem, and design problems can be redesigned.

I call the practice tending: not self-care as a product you reach for once you’re already empty, but the small, repeatable, unglamorous things that keep a person — and a culture — from running dry in the first place. I’ve spent my career building this where it’s hardest, inside real organisations with real constraints. I research it, I write about it, and I build the frameworks, keynotes and card decks that leaders actually use.

These days I work two ways: with organisations and leaders on cultures of care and leading through uncertainty, and with individuals on non-medicalised self-care. I edit an international book series on wellbeing and self-care, and I write books — including Hey. How Are You. Actually. and the forthcoming Tend.

Because you are also someone who needs tending.

Narelle blogs at www.drnarellelemon.com, Tweets and grams as @rellypops. She can be found on Spotify, Apple and your favourite platform with the podcasts: She Speaks, Teachers Supporting Teachers, and The Whisper Collective Podcast.