Gerard O’Dea is the Director of Training at Team Dynamis Ltd., providing advice and guidance in conflict management, personal safety, and protective physical interventions since 2006. His clients are in the education, social care, healthcare, and community work sectors, wherever frontline staff meets (often vulnerable) people who present with difficult, distressed, or dangerous behaviour. Dynamis has been helping teams in the UK & Ireland, the UAE, Qatar, Turkey, and in Europe since 2007 with a growing international presence. Gerard published his first book “Lone Working Personal Safety - a guidebook for health and social care staff” in 2012 and is a qualified expert witness. He is the European representative for the Vistelar conflict management approach, which embodies a core principle of ‘treating people with dignity by showing them respect in every encounter’. The Dynamis core curriculum covers Relationships, Crises, and Responses in any environment where frustration could lead to aggression or even dangerous behaviour. It promotes a team approach to how a community of people in a service communicates when big feelings lead to escalation and focus on keeping everyone safe, verbally wherever possible and physically only when necessary as a last resort. Trainers use a leading scenario-driven approach to lead training sessions, an approach which is now adopted by the UK College of Policing and NHS Trusts, for example.