Doulas have traditionally supported women during childbirth, but recently there has been a surge of interest in learning how to support people at the end of life as well.

UVM’s fully online End of Life Doula Professional Certificate program helps caregivers prepare to meet the growing demand for end of life support as people live longer.

End of Life Doulas support clients with individualized, compassionate care in a number of ways including emotional, spiritual, informational, and physical support, which greatly helps to lower stress levels, aid in comfort, and promote personalized, even positive dying passages for clients and their loved ones.

Francesca Arnoldy, lead instructor for UVM’s End of Life Doula certificate program, recently wrote an article for Today’s Geriatric Medicine magazine highlighting of the many benefits of end-of-life care to the caregiver, patient and famil

It’s never too late to learn. We learn things our whole life, but we don’t think about how we do that. Not surprisingly, only a small amount of everyday skills is turned into long-time habits. Is there a way to become a more efficient person? How to develop necessary learning skills and make them root?

Answers to those questions you can find in this article.

Plans like “read more,” “get up early” or “learn something new” are too vague and uncertain. Specify what you want to achieve. Give your goal a form of concrete, measurable and controlled action. For example: “every month to attend a conference in an interesting to me field,” “read 50 books related to my occupation for a year” or “spend two hours every Thursday, reading articles that were kept in bookmarks during the week.” A defined goal will stimulate you to act.

In the constant chaos of everyday life, there is frequently no time to think about global life goals. Where do you see yourself in five years? How could you develop your skills to make your work more productive, and yourself – a valuable specialist? We are all different, someone is enough half an hour for such reflections, and someone prefers to think about problems of a global scale, having gone on a long bike trip. If you enjoy being alone, take this time to review your skills and aspirations. You may also go a completely different way and discuss everything with colleagues or with old friends, you trust.

Envy is a negative emotion, but it can serve as an excellent stimulus for self-development. If you envy someone, then this person has something that you really want to have. To whom do you envy: your friend, who is constantly traveling, your dad who doesn’t miss any of the mornings runs or your colleague, who successfully passed the MBA program. You don’t envy people; you envy their achievements. Envy helps to choose the direction of personal growth if you treat this emotion wisely.

Control has a strange power over us. Studies show that by simply controlling our behavior, we begin to perform tasks much faster. It does not matter what exactly it will be: counting the steps from the apartment to the nearest store or the number of phone calls made per day. The same can be applied to how frequently we look at teaching materials or devote time to practice a new skill. Watch how the new habit begins to develop, and it will help you to keep growing.

The goal, formulated as “to study something of this sort,” will always be somewhere at the end of your to-do list. Of course, this task is essential, but there is no definite deadline for it, and we always can postpone it for another day. That’s why it’s helpful to create a plan for building new skills.

And, don’t forget that you have to form skills, which will bring you benefits: strengthen your temper, broaden the mind horizon, and train professional features. When we do something for our good, the chances of successfully forming a new skill are doubled.