Rachel Colla International Positive Psychology Association 8th IPPA World Congress 2023

Rachel Colla

Rachel Colla (B.Soc.Sci, M.Psych, MAPP, PhD Candidate) is a wellbeing, motivation and performance specialist, whose work has spanned multiple sectors including education, health, business, and not for profit. Rachel is an experienced facilitator and coach with expertise in wellbeing, goal setting and achievement, and leadership development. Prior to her work in organisational settings, Rachel worked as a psychologist in the education sector, promoting flourishing for individuals managing psychological distress and mental illness. Her work in schools is now focussed on consulting at an organisational level to create the conditions for the whole community to thrive. She is also the designer of the innovative Hope Labs approach, a curriculum that fuses systems science, wellbeing, and neuroscience of learning. The underlying vision driving her work is to identify strategies and pathways to support individual and collective wellbeing through education. Rachel is the inaugural University of Melbourne Education Innovation Fellow representing Melbourne Graduate School of Education. She co-ordinates and teaches into a broad range of undergraduate breadth subjects and postgraduate qualifications, including the Masters of Applied Positive Psychology and Masters of Education. She is a dual-recipient of University of Melbourne Teaching Excellence awards recognising her outstanding achievement in teaching, skill and imagination in the design and evaluation of teaching programs. Her current research draws on the intersection of wellbeing and systems science with storytelling to create a dynamic systems approach to the study of hope, as well as developing a pedagogy of wellbeing.