Summer Camp Consulting
Dr. Sarnell provides presentations and consultation to camps and schools related to mental health, performance enhancement, leadership, anxiety management, goal setting, motivation, mindfulness, camp culture, and a variety of other topics. Dr. Sarnell is also available to provide mental health support for staff, either through in person visits to camps located in the Triangle Area of North Carolina or virtual support for camps in New York, Pennsylvania, Maine, New Hampshire, New Jersey, and any PSYPACT State.
Dr. Sarnell spent 23 summers working at Tyler Hill Camp in various roles, including Lacrosse Director, Athletic Director, Division Leader, and Girls' Head Counselor. She spent many years presenting at the American Camp Association’s Tri-State Camp Conference, developing a variety of presentations designed to teach skills that address common concerns in the camp industry. Dr. Sarnell draws from her training as a psychologist and her hands on experience working at camp to create sessions tailored to your camp, customizing her presentations in order to best serve your community. If you are interested in having Dr. Sarnell talk to your organization, email DrSarnell@gmail.com to set-up a free 30 minute phone consultation to discuss what would be most helpful for your camp. Here is a sample of the trainings that Dr. Sarnell has led in the past:
Counselor Training Presentations
These sessions can also be presented to leaders, either as a train-the-trainers session or as an opportunity for your leadership team to learn skills that they can implement themselves
Counselor Toolkit: Concrete Strategies for Managing Campers’ Emotions and Behavior
Great counselors are amazing at forming relationships with their campers while also doing an excellent job of managing daily tasks and difficult situations. When campers experience strong emotions or misbehave, counselors thrive when they have concrete tools that help them improve the situation. This session will present a set of foundational skills in emotion management and behavior management. The strategies covered are grounded in cognitive behavioral theory and presented in an interactive way, using movie clips and discussion, and can also incorporate role plays.
This information can also be presented as separation sessions focusing either just on emotion management or just on behavior management.
Being your BEST: Coping with Stress and Performing up to your Potential
Happy counselors make for happy campers. However, counselor happiness can be elusive given that many counselors come to camp with a history of anxiety or other mental health concerns, and the camp environment creates unique stressors that can heighten emotions. While you want to be there to support your staff when they experience difficult emotions, you also need them to get the job done. Counselors need help learning how to cope with anxiety within the camp environment, so this session teaches counselors concrete tools for performing at their best while managing anxiety.
This can also be broken down into sessions that focus on specific aspects of this presentation, such as an interactive session focused on motivation (finding your why) and goal setting.
From Anxious to Brave: Strategies for Helping Campers Cope with Anxiety
When campers experience anxiety, some of our responses, like providing excessive reassurance and permitting avoidance, end up increasing levels of anxiety over time. Strategies that decrease anxiety in the short-term sometimes have the opposite effect in the long-term. This session will help you understand the impact of your responses and teach you a system for helping campers who are struggling with anxiety. You will learn how to prompt campers to cope constructively and how to be a model of brave behavior. This session is filled with concrete tools that you can use to create an environment where campers can manage anxiety, step outside of their comfort zone, and have an amazing summer.
Can’t Sleep? Strategies to Help Campers with Sleep Anxiety
When a camper has trouble sleeping, it negatively impacts their summer. While their counselors try their best to help, they often don’t know what to do. As the child continues to struggle with sleep, both the camper and counselor will start to feel especially run down. Some campers have anxiety disorders that contribute to difficulty falling asleep, some have specific worries about falling and staying asleep, and some have a combination of both. This interactive session will focus on giving you important information about sleep, an understanding of how anxiety impacts sleep, and specific anxiety management strategies for helping campers with difficulty falling and/or staying asleep.
Mindfulness Skills
Being a camp counselor is a non-stop, high energy, emotionally taxing job, and staff members greatly benefit from having skills in place to manage stress on a moment-to-moment basis. Since counselors have little down time, they need an approach to stress management that can have a meaningful and enduring impact. Mindfulness is all about being fully present. It offers skills that help us cope with stressful thoughts and emotions, and mindfulness practice improves our ability to be in the moment and enhances overall well-being. This practical mindfulness session will provide concrete techniques that can be easily integrated into the camp environment. The goal of this hands-on presentation is to teach staff tools to be present, engaged, and resilient all summer long.
Panic Attacks: Calming Techniques to Help Campers Through Intense Episodes of Anxiety
What’s it like to sit with a camper who is experiencing a panic attack? Their heart is racing, they feel like they can’t breathe, they think they’re going to pass out, and you might feel powerless in your ability to calm them down. Panic attacks are intense episodes of physical symptoms, coupled with a flood of anxious thoughts, particularly about the physical symptoms. Some children come to camp with a history of panic attacks. Others experience them for the first time while at camp and will therefore have very little ability to understand and cope with what’s going on. This session will help you understand this type of anxiety attack so that you can effectively coach campers through difficult moments. The goal is to help campers manage their anxiety by empowering them with an understanding of the cycle of anxiety and offering concrete techniques to help them feel calm.
Emotion Management Role Models: Tools for Increasing your Emotional Intelligence
In a perfect world, our counselors would demonstrate an awareness and understanding of their own and others’ emotions that allows them to appropriately express and manage their own emotions while being a great resource for helping our campers cope with emotions. Do most of your counselors come to camp with these skills in place? If not, what do you do to teach them about emotions? This interactive session will provide creative training activities that target the development of emotional intelligence. Your staff will be trained in emotional awareness and understanding, listening skills, and the creation of coping plans. Campers soak up everything, including both explicit and implicit messages about emotions that your counselors demonstrate through the ways they react and cope. By helping staff members acquire skills aimed at increasing emotional intelligence, we can develop emotion management role models that have a widespread positive impact on your camp community.
Diet Culture and Camp: Fostering Body Positivity and Balance Through Thoughtful Conversations
Imagine one of your campers standing in front of the mirror picking apart how they look. The negative comments they make not only have an impact on that camper, but every camper listening makes judgments about their own bodies based on those comments. Negative body image is a pervasive problem that’s amplified by diet culture, which values one’s physical appearance over their health and well-being. This session will help you consider diet culture’s presence at your camp and ways of talking with campers and staff to promote a more positive culture around food and our bodies. Built into this session is a guide for a reflective small group discussion that you can utilize at your camp with staff or teenage campers. By asking the right questions and teaching campers how to cope with negative self-talk, we can foster an environment that promotes body positivity and balance.
Leadership Presentations
From Boss to Coach: Leadership Lessons from Sports
While bosses direct their employees, coaches develop their players, teaching and encouraging them to reach their maximum potential. Coaches give constant feedback, both positive and constructive. They also give their players the skills needed to implement the changes that will improve their performance. The best coaches motivate players by creating an environment that enhances intrinsic motivation. They define roles and goals and create team cohesion. When you adopt a coach leadership style, you can transform your team and help your counselors thrive. You can increase your staff’s performance, motivation, and their ability to work together. This session will provide specific leadership strategies that you can implement to become an effective coach that brings out the best in your team.
Nixing Negativity: Creating a Culture of Positive Thinkers
From complaining about the weather, to criticizing a counselor behind their back, to making fun of an activity that went poorly, to talking negatively about a camper, some members of your community rarely focus on the positive. Their negative attitude can infiltrate your culture and bring those around them down. As a leader, you have the opportunity to set the tone and create a more positive culture within your camp. Once you have an understanding of how negativity arises among your staff members, you can create a plan to turn things around. This session will teach you systems that you can put in place to foster positive thinking styles that will benefit everyone at your camp. By learning concrete strategies for promoting positive thinking, you can teach your staff to radiate positivity and create the best environment possible for your campers.
Leadership Excellence: Strategies for Optimal Performance, Personal Development, and Mentorship
Who do you want to be as a leader? What is your plan for performing at your best this summer? How are you developing leaders in your organization and what skills are you teaching them? The goal of this session is to help you answer these questions and create a road map for success this summer.. Drawing from Dr. Sarnell’s work providing sport psychology services for elite athletes, this session will teach you concrete tools for attaining optimal performance. We will start with self-reflection, mindfulness, and goal setting exercises, with a focus on personal development. Then, we’ll consider how to create positive relationships as a mentor and dive into skills that you can teach your team to help them achieve leadership excellence.
Escalating Staff Stress: Creating a Plan to Cope with the Mental Health Needs of your Staff
Happy counselors make for happy campers. However, counselor happiness can be elusive given that many counselors come to camp with a history of mental health concerns, and the camp environment creates unique stressors that can heighten emotions. The mental health needs of our staff are increasing, and we need to adjust by offering more support so that we’re equipped to help them cope effectively within the camp environment. This session will help you create a plan for addressing staff mental health by considering how you’re training staff during orientation, what you’re teaching them about emotion management and mental health, and how you can enhance the support systems you have in place. This is an interactive session filled with skills, strategies, and reflective exercises, so you can walk away with an action plan for this summer.