Coach.Bayliss

Coach.Bayliss Professional supervision for social & allied health professionals from an Accredited Mental Health Social Worker. Wherever you are, so too am I. Read to Heal.

Reflective online supervision across Australia. Creator of SHELF-Care.

What ordinary task makes your mind go quiet?Is it something mundane and repetitive?Or do you need to move your body?I've...
04/10/2026

What ordinary task makes your mind go quiet?

Is it something mundane and repetitive?

Or do you need to move your body?

I've discovered that my quiet-mind activities are the slow, slightly boring, repetitive things that leave enough space in my head to reflect rather than concentrate.

Like chopping carrots, apples and sweet potato for my sheep neighbours. 🐑❤️

Post-PhD, I've needed slow.

Quiet.

Space to think.

Being at our rural home, far from the madding crowd, has given me exactly that.

Slow sheep time while I deconstructed three years of academia.

Recently, a couple of my fast-paced Sydney girlfriends came to stay.

They got right into feeding and patting the sheep and commented on how cathartic it was simply being with the animals.

It is soooooo cathartic. ❤️

But here's where I think books can help us find our own version of sheep time.

If you don't have a flock conveniently waiting over the back fence, think about a scene you've read in a novel that made you long to be there.

Someone jogging through a park.

Cooking an Italian meal.

Swimming in a lake.

Walking through a forest.

Sitting quietly beside the ocean.

You identified with something in that scene.

Perhaps you can take the next step and create your own version of it.

Go to the park.

Cook the meal.

Find the water.

Walk through the trees.

Do the thing that quietens your mind and gives you room to simply be.

And if you don't yet know what that thing is?

Pick up a novel and keep reading until you find somewhere you'd like to step inside.

Then see if you can bring a little piece of that story into your own life.

That's one of the things I love about bibliotherapy.

Sometimes we read to escape our lives.

And sometimes we read to discover how we'd like to live them.

So tell me...

What's your quiet-mind activity?

👵🎓 Megan Bayliss
Mental Health Accredited Social Worker | PhD in Psychoed7cation and Bibliotherapy
Read to Heal 📚❤️

I provide online professional supervision to social workers and allied health professionals across Australia. My booking link is in my Featured section.

Hot news. Just a little something worth celebrating. I did it 😀 My PhD is complete. I graduate in Nhulunbuy on Nov 26 at...
28/09/2026

Hot news. Just a little something worth celebrating. I did it 😀 My PhD is complete. I graduate in Nhulunbuy on Nov 26 at which time I can call myself Dr Bayliss the Bibliotherapist.

Thank you to my 18 participants, whom I cannot tag due to anonymity. This would not have happened without you. M######x

👵🎓 Megan Bayliss. PhD in psychoeducation and bibliotherapy. Social work supervisor.

18/09/2026

We visited the State Library of Victoria in Melbourne. Grandson went straight for 'Diary of a Wimpy Kid' by Jeff Kinney. He chose the 'Old school' edition because I'm old school!!!!!!

MASTER Z reads because he sees others reads. Reading is normal in his life and libraries are interesting.

Do your kids and grandkids a favour: expose them to a bit of wimpy reading.

👵🎓 Megan Bayliss
Social Worker | Bibliotherapy Researcher | Professional Supervisor
📚 Read to Heal

What does useful peer supervision look like in your workplace?Does it look like two colleagues meeting over coffee to re...
17/09/2026

What does useful peer supervision look like in your workplace?

Does it look like two colleagues meeting over coffee to reflect on a difficult piece of work.

Does it look like a small group discussing an ethical dilemma, testing different perspectives or sharing useful resources.

Is it face to face, online, on the phone or via email?

Does it involve asking each other:

• What are we noticing?
• What assumptions might we be making?
• Which values, ethics or theories are guiding us?
• What else could we try?
• What support do we need?

Good peer supervision is more than having a vent with workmates and peers.

It is intentional, respectful and reflective. Everyone contributes. Everyone learns. Nobody needs to be the expert with all the answers. It is about togetherness and contributions.

Peer supervision does not necessarily replace formal professional supervision, particularly where accountability, accreditation or complex practice issues are involved. It offers something different: shared experience, collegial challenge and the reassurance that we do not have to think through everything alone.

Here's two pictures of two different peer supervision forums I contribute to and recieve from with my social work colleagues.

What does useful peer supervision look like in your workplace?

👵🎓 Megan Bayliss
Social Worker | Bibliotherapy Researcher | Professional Supervisor
📚 Read to Heal

Even in a hotel my beside table is deliciously stimulating. Who knows who owns the quote that Waleed has borrowed from?...
14/09/2026

Even in a hotel my beside table is deliciously stimulating. Who knows who owns the quote that Waleed has borrowed from?

Hint, hint, he was one of my PhD theorists.

Hands up if you know and love the most famous wombatador in history, the zoophilist bibliophile, Andrew Griffiths

Post a picture of your current read/s...and make sure you read at least 15 minutes a day.

👵🎓 Megan Bayliss
Social Worker | Bibliotherapy Researcher | Professional Supervisor
📚 Read to Heal

We live such transient lives now that keeping in touch with friends is not always top of mind.But I deeply value my long...
13/09/2026

We live such transient lives now that keeping in touch with friends is not always top of mind.

But I deeply value my long-term friendships, and I have always tried to stay connected.

Today, I met up with my longest-standing friend. We met in Grade 2 at St Joseph’s in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea.

Life has been both kind and unkind to each of us over the years.

Bad things happen to good people. Yet somehow, balance returns. We hold on to the belief that after the darkest nights, lighter days will come.

You cannot have a light without a dark to hang it in.

I want to be the friend who is willing to turn the light on. I can do that because I have surrounded myself with friends who do the same for me.

Perhaps that is what enduring friendship looks like. We do not have to remove one another’s darkness. Sometimes we simply stay close enough to help find the light switch.

Who switches the light on for you?

And whose light do you help turn on?

👵🎓 Megan Bayliss
Social Worker | Bibliotherapy Researcher | Professional Supervisor
📚 Read to Heal

We're on the road. 🚗📚 My husband and I love doing road trips together. Right now we're somewhere outside of Melbourne af...
12/09/2026

We're on the road. 🚗📚 My husband and I love doing road trips together. Right now we're somewhere outside of Melbourne after driving down from Orange, NSW.

Apart from talking deeply with each other, with a modicum of ridiculousness mixed in, we listen to books on Audible when traffic conditions allow.

We discovered the joy of listening to books together on road trips about six years ago.

We still talk about our first joint listen: The Pact by Thomas Keneally.

It was definitely imPACTful on us both. 😉

This trip we're listening to the award-winning The Midnight Library by Matt Haig.

There's something quite lovely about sharing a book this way. Same story. Same kilometres. Two people listening, but not necessarily hearing or interpreting exactly the same things.

And that makes for some great conversation along the road.

Speaking of reading together...

Have you finished The Yield by Tara June Winch yet?

It's our next SHELF-Care online book club read, beginning in October. Date to be advised.

And if you haven't started yet, there's still time.

Fifteen minutes of reading today.

Then another fifteen tomorrow.

Before you know it, you've travelled quite a distance through a book too.

What are you reading, or listening to, this weekend? And where are you?

Pic is Mary Poppins and I in Maryborough. Taken by Paul on one of our road trips.

👵🎓 Megan Bayliss
Social Work Supervisor
PhD in psychoeducation and bibliotherapy under examination.

I provide online professional supervision to social workers and allied health professionals across Australia. My booking link is in my Featured section.

Did you know that I studied Brené Brown as psychoeducation and bibliotherapy in my PhD?Waiting for my PhD examination re...
10/09/2026

Did you know that I studied Brené Brown as psychoeducation and bibliotherapy in my PhD?

Waiting for my PhD examination result was bittersweet, I can tell you!

But something that brought me joy and glee was checking my feelings against Brené Brown's Atlas of the Heart.

Glee, by the way, is the behaviour associated with the feeling of joy.

Atlas of the Heart is a bit like a dictionary of feelings. I think it needs to be on every helping professional's bookshelf.

I often refer to it when I'm supervising Social Workers.

Interestingly, my supervisees inevitably develop further insight into themselves and their practice when we use it. That's quite different from using the book as a low-impact psychological intervention with a client.

Same book.

Different purpose.

That's one of the things I find so fascinating about bibliotherapy. A book doesn't necessarily tell us what to think. Sometimes it simply gives us the language we need to understand what we're already experiencing.

However you use Atlas of the Heart is your business.

But if you haven't opened it yet, perhaps it's time to get yourself a copy and read it.

And then tell me: what feeling would you look up first?

👵🎓 Megan Bayliss
Social Worker | Bibliotherapy Researcher | Professional Supervisor
📚 Read to Heal

I provide online professional supervision to social workers and allied health professionals across Australia.

07/09/2026

Motivational Interviewing is one of the Focused Psychological Strategies under the Better Access program in Australia.

This means it is an evidence based intervention that mental health professionals can use.

The strategy says there are three different types of clients that come to us. It is our job to ask them the right questions to help gently move them into a different classification of problem integration.

Visitor
Complainant
Customer.

Chapter 10 from 1001 Solution Focused Questions by Fredrike Bannink is a resource that provides the questions you need to gently move people from visitor, to complainant to customer.

My supervisees get a copy of the questions because this is a resource that takes their practice from ordinary to above average. However, you can look the book up. It is available as both an audio and eBook.

👵🎓 Megan Bayliss
Social Worker | Bibliotherapy Researcher | Professional Supervisor

📚 Read to Heal

I provide online professional supervision to social workers and allied health professionals across Australia.

📚 My book club is coming back!I've missed discussing books with other people.While I was completing my PhD, my online bi...
06/09/2026

📚 My book club is coming back!
I've missed discussing books with other people.

While I was completing my PhD, my online bibliotherapeutic book club had to take a back seat. Now I'm ready to bring it back, with everything I've learned from the research incorporated into it.

And it has a new name:

SHELF Company Book Club.

This isn't quite an ordinary book club.

We're not gathering to write a book review or decide whether a book was "good" or "bad".

Instead, we're putting books under SHELF examination.

We'll use the stages of bibliotherapy and my SHELF-Care framework to explore:

📖 Self-reflection
🌱 Hope
💬 Expression of empathy
💡 Learning
🤝 Fostering friendships

What did we recognise in ourselves?
What did we hope for while reading?
Did the book help us understand someone else's experience?
What did we learn about ourselves or others?

And what happens when we share those discoveries with other readers?

Because reading alone changes minds, but discussing our reading together changes lives.

Our first book under SHELF examination is a wonderful Australian novel:

📚 The Yield by Tara June Winch
Wednesday 28 October
7.30 pm AEDT
Online via Microsoft Teams
Free

After that, we'll meet on the last Wednesday of every month, except December.

You have plenty of time to borrow The Yield from your library, find a copy at your local bookshop, buy it online or listen to the audiobook.

And yes. Audiobooks absolutely count as reading.

I'll post the joining details closer to the evening.

For now, I'd simply love to know:
Who's putting The Yield on their SHELF? 📚

👵🎓 Megan Bayliss
Social work supervisor. PhD in psychoeducation and bibliotherapy under examination.

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Ipswich, QLD
0880

Telephone

+672355512

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