Dr. Rachel is part of the Guest Faculty in the Mindfulness Teacher Training Programme of the Centre. She has developed world leading research on decision making, mindfulness and behavioural insights working with government and policy leaders in the Welsh and UK Government. She has over 20 years’ experience working on environmental, social, individual and organisational change.

She has worked intensively with the Welsh Government developing and delivering innovative approaches to project and organisational development using behaviour change and mindfulness. Her work has been described as 'radical' by the Welsh First Minister Mark Drakeford. She is an expert behaviour change consultant and has pioneered a programme which builds capacities for understanding and delivering behaviour change and working with complexity. Her mindfulness based behavioural insights and decision making course builds capacities of attention, emotion and cognition improves decision making, collaboration and creativity whilst also mitigating bias. Rachel has worked with leaders and teams from across the public and private sector

Her Publications:

• Pykett, J., Lilley, R., Whitehead, M., Howell, R. 2016. Governing Mindfully, Emotional States Sites and spaces of affective governance, Edited by Eleanor Jupp, Jessica Pykett, Fiona M. Smith, 2017 – Routledge

• Pykett, J., Lilley, R., Whitehead, M., Howell, R. 2016. Mindfulness, Behaviour Change, and Decision Making: An Experimental Trial. University of Birmingham, Birmingham

• Whitehead, M., Lilley, R., Howell, R., Jones, R., Pykett, J. 2016. (RE)Inhabiting Awareness: Geography and  Mindfulness. Social and Cultural Geography 17 (4) pp. 553-573. 10.1080/14649365.2015.1089590

• Lilley, R., Whitehead, M., Howell, R., Jones, R., Pykett, J. 2016. Mindfulness, Behaviour Change and Engagement in Public Policy – Evaluation Report 2. Prifysgol Aberystwyth | Aberystwyth University, Aberystwyth

• Mindfulness Initiative, contributing author: Building the case for Mindfulness in the workplace. Ver 1.0, published October 2016.  http://themindfulnessinitiative.org.uk/publications/building-the-case

• Lilley, R. Whitehead, M. Does mindfulness in politics make any difference? Improving democratic governance is a challenge that goes way beyond cultivating calm and compassion.   https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/transformation/does-mindfulness-politics-make-any-difference/