- Recognise • Respond • Refer
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Accidental Counsellor Pty Ltd is a training company that specialises in meeting the training needs of organisations seeking to provide a skills-based response to customers, staff or colleagues experiencing Mental Illness, Domestic and Family Violence, Crisis or other Vulnerable Circumstances.
Having had the privilege of training in excess of 3500 people across multiple industries during the 2020 calendar year, Cutty Felton took the exciting step of opening Accidental Counsellor Pty Ltd at the start of 2021.
Cutty did this with the aim of ensuring the sustainability of her highly acclaimed training programs and models going forward, whilst maximising the quality of support and training provided to industries and individuals at this challenging time in our history.
Accidental Counsellor Pty Ltd represents the convergence of Cutty Felton’s unrivalled industry experience as well as Lifeline training and crisis support experience in creating and delivering high quality training programs, with the flexibility to be able to respond to the clients’ needs promptly, whilst continuing to protect the quality and value of outcomes produced for each course participant.
The company delivers skills-based courses, both face to face and via remote digital delivery, to workplaces, industry and community groups, large and small, across Australia.
All courses focus on assisting those in vulnerable circumstances and include ‘Accidental Counsellor’, ‘De-escalating the Agitated Caller’, ‘Customers in Crisis’, ‘Domestic Violence Training’, ‘Dare to Ask’, and various other skills-based courses tailored to meet the needs of their clients.
Our ethos is centered on the overarching goal to increase:
As part of our efforts to reduce our impact on the environment, we will provide workshop reference books in the form of editable pdf files to the registered participants of our training going forward. Please support us and ‘think before printing’. For face-to-face training, we are able to offer QR Code technology for
Sign-In and Feedback purposes.
Central to our aim is also to contribute to the community in a practical way, and so we are pleased to be able to offer preferential Not for Profit Pricing to Community Aid organisations engaged in directly supporting the most vulnerable in our communities.
At the end of each financial year, Accidental Counsellor Pty Ltd will also be donating a portion of the proceeds of training to reputable providers of support to those most in need.
Accidental Counsellor Training Mission
Cutty Felton is founder of Accidental Counsellor Pty Ltd. She is a speaker, consults with and trains those that engage with colleagues or clients in distress or vulnerable circumstances, having regard also to the particular requirements around awareness, management and control of psychosocial hazards and risks in the workplace. Cutty appears live wherever in the world her work takes her, both in person and via remote delivery.
By profession, Cutty is a Solicitor, admitted to practice both in South Africa and NSW, Australia. Over time she felt the need to enhance the human skills required when interacting with clients who had experienced trauma or found themselves vulnerable. She chose to do this by volunteering as a crisis supporter on Lifeline’s 13 11 14 suicide prevention and crisis intervention line and holding various other positions within the organisation for many years, including as an accredited crisis supporter, as well as corporate and DV Alert trainer.
Cutty developed her own highly acclaimed and distinctive approach to crisis and vulnerability communication in the corporate space, and a unique CPR framework for confronting conversations, based on a combination of her legal, commercial and crisis support experience.
Cutty’s approach and training is well placed to assist employers to ensure that they are complying with their WHS/OHS obligations in terms of managing and controlling many of the psychosocial hazards and risks experienced by their staff, particularly those that are inherent to the roles performed by their teams.
Boundaries are an important theme within her approach as it is imperative that, within the corporate arena, employees understand the boundaries (of their role, of the conversations they have and as are provided by policy) when interacting with others who might be deeply vulnerable, agitated , angry, distressed or in crisis.
The universal applicability of the Recognise, Respond and Refer model upon which her approach is based has seen Cutty present to an extraordinarily diverse range of clients
across multiple industries (see below).
Cutty has been privileged to deliver presentations and briefings to staff at the House of Representatives in Canberra and was honoured to deliver her ‘Accidental Counsellor’ for the Office for Women in the Department of the Prime Minister & Cabinet.
Verena Conti is an integral part of the team, having worked closely with Cutty Felton for more than four years now. She is both the Executive Assistant to the CEO and Training Coordinator at Accidental Counsellor Pty Ltd.
As a training coordination expert, Verena is your client liaison contact and will assist you with the logistics for your successful training events. With her keen eye for detail, Verena will provide you with current and relevant training information for your teams, guide you through the booking process including setting up remote platforms and access for virtual training. In the lead up to your training events, Verena will supply the relevant training details including resource material for your participants, and she will follow up all Accidental Counsellor training events with post training certificates and reporting.
A Bachelor of Business with a background in managerial positions in leading hospitality organisations, Verena has thrived in the corporate training industry, using her experience in events management and customer service to assist our clients with the training they need to achieve their goals and support their teams and customers.
participants in Australia, New Zealand, Central America, US, Europe, Canada, Peru, Morocco, India and Egypt. She had the pleasure of training teams from an extraordinarily diverse range of industries including:
Accidental Counsellor Pty Ltd works in close collaboration with the following associations to bring training to their members:
In addition, Cutty Felton regularly addresses larger audiences as a keynote speaker on topics such as ‘Self-Protection and the Art of Self-Care’, ‘Appropriate and Powerful Questions’ and ‘Empathy for the Vulnerable Customer’.
Cutty has been privileged to deliver presentations and briefings to staff at the House of Representatives in Canberra and recently was honoured to deliver her Accidental Counsellor for the Office for Women in the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet.
