Collaborative Minds

About Us

Collaborative Minds has been founded by Louise Pawson. Louise is a member of MINT and provides training in Motivational Interviewing and other brief interventions approaches. Training is provided to enhance client outcomes from brief interventions across multiple sectors such as education, health and social services. A combination of workshop and small group coaching to support implementation and ongoing connection between theory and practice is encouraged. 

An observation and/or coding service is available to explore the quality of practice occurring in the field. This enables services to identify and tailor ongoing mentoring needs to staff within their teams.

All lead trainers are members of the Motivational Interviewing Network of Trainers (MINT). This is an international training membership held in high esteem within the field. MINT provides members with access for up to date research and training approaches within this field. Membership is achieved through a detailed application including a practice assessment followed by completion of a train the trainers workshop if application criteria have been met.

Counselling Services are provided by arrangement and are provided through the philosophy that the client remains the expert of themselves. Given this, the counselling approach remains strength based, utilising past and current strengths to move forward towards preferred futures. Additional strategies are inter-weaved into your current knowledge and strength based approaches. Louise, the founder of Collaborative Minds in New Zealand believes that it is possible for a counsellor to hold hope for another until that person is able to hold hope for themselves. Louise practices with this in mind and believes in hope for the client towards their preferred future.

Louise provides professional supervision to non-clinical staff seeking support related to practice, employment, stress management and lifestyle balance, building resilience and communication skills. Louise currently supports employees in the education sector and has a passion to support those working with young people who reflect additional challenges.

Louise has a background working within fields related to rehabilitation, child protection, sexual abuse both perpetrator and survivor and also family violence. Louise has been a trainer for Child Matters. She was a Detective in Child Protection within the UK Police Constabulary and has been a Policy Advisor, Service Manager, Probation Officer and Practice Leader within Corrections while also holding specialist training and facilitation roles.

Louise completed a research thesis exploring how hope is co-constructed in counselling adolescents. Louise holds a Masters in Counselling and Post Graduate Certificate in Health Science (behaviour change).  In addition to private practice, Louise is employed part time as a school counsellor and contracts to Nelson Marlborough Institute of Technology lecturing on degree programmes.