Comeback Coach

Ask me a Q Hello Bright Minds, today I’m talking to Danielle Wallington who lives in St Albans, the place I’ve called home for 23 years. Danielle was an events manager who had her flexible working request turned down after maternity leave with her first son. From that setback came her first business “Milk & Fizz” where she used to her events management skills to bring mothers together for a di...

Ask me a Q Hello Bright Minds, my guest today is 53 year old journalist Samantha Downes, who last year took up the post of senior news reporter at The Express after many years working freelance. She joined The Express in November after specialising in pensions and investment journalism as an investigative reporter for both trade and national publications including the Financial Times, City AM, and...

Ask me a Q Hello Bright Minds, I wonder whether you’ve seen the Netflix hit Buying London with Daniel Daggers and his team of agents at his property firm DDRE? It’s a lot of fun and very glamorous and my guest today is one of the team who you won’t have seen on screen. I met Serge Cowan on a flight to Nice last September when he was going out to look at a property in Monaco and we got into a deep...

Ask me a Q Hello Bright Minds, today I’m talking to Baroness Helena Morrissey, ex CEO of Newton Asset Management, founder of the 30% Club and founding ambassador of AJ Bell’s Money Matters campaign to help women feel good about investing. She’s also the mother of nine children and author of A Good Time to Be a Girl . We talk about how to ask for a promotion and the power of holding silence when yo...

Ask me a Q Hello Bright Minds, today I’m talking to Francesca Woodhouse who is the MD of UK Workplace Advisory at Edelman and mother of four children. She works full time and is married to Lewis who also works full time as a Head of Communications. You’re going to hear Francesca talk about:  The need to proactively managing your career. Moving between freelancing and employment. Key habits that su...

Ask me a Q Hello Bright Minds, in this episode we go beyond the comeback and discuss the habits, resources, ways of working and ways of thinking that help support career development when you have young children. We recorded this episode in front of a live audience at Arcadis, London - one of our treasured clients. My guests are all professional women who have 13 children between them and they&apos...

Ask me a Q Hello Brights Minds, I’ve been thinking a lot about displays of emotions at work because of the increasing number of women I’ve been coaching over the last 12 months who’ve described being taken by surprise by their tears and worrying about the implications. It tuns out there’s some pretty complex psychology at play when it comes to how crying at work can potentially affect our reputati...

Ask me a Q Hello Bright Minds, my guest coachee today is Amber (not her real name), a past coachee of mine who I worked with years and years ago and is now on the brink of making a second career change. She wanted to have a space to think about how to navigate relationships with different organisations that she’s in parallel recruitment processes with. Over the years I’ve had the pleasure of worki...

Ask me a Q Hello Bright Minds, I am really happy to be back with a very vibrant episode to kick off season eight where Marketing Director Caroline Smith from the toy shop, The Entertainer talk about: Making sideways and strategic ‘downward’ career moves. Finding unexpected fresh drive and ambition after maternity leave. Job search challenges and strategies. Being the wildcard candidate. Nourishing...

Ask me a Q Hello Bright Minds, keen eyes might notice that this episode is out a day earlier than usual. I’ve chosen to release this episode of Tuesday 3rd December to tie-in with International Day of Person’s with a Disability. And it feels fitting to have saved this episode to the last in the current season on COMEBACK COACH because we’re talking about the power of a sabbatical to refresh, re-en...

Ask me a Q Hello Bright Minds, This is the penultimate episode of season seven of COMEBACK COACH and it’s inspired by my 16 year old daughter Artemis, who wants to become a pilot. This is something she decided upon at the start of the year and since then I have had many happy drives around the M25 to Heathrow airport to watch A380 planes come in and take off this year. Plane spotting is actually a...

Ask me a Q Hello Bright Minds, my conversation today is with Laura Scougall, Head of ITV Academy. Knowing Laura is a chatty, confident person we decided to make it a freeform conversation without any pre-agreed questions so it’s a bit of a random episode that covers a lot of ground. We talked about: How to get back to sleep after being up with a baby or an 18 year old in my case. Coping with being...

Ask me a Q Hello Bright Minds, my guest today is Sarah Banks from Arcadis, the global design and engineering company.  Sarah has two little children and was promoted after both of her maternity leaves.  We have a wide-ranging conversation including:  Challenges and benefits of after work socialising. KIT days. Being the main earner in her family. Being surprised by feeling a drop in confidence. Wo...

Ask me a Q Hello Bright Minds. My guest today is  someone who wanted a platform to talk about her experience of continuing to work on and off during breast cancer treatment with the single goal of helping others find their way through this really difficult time.  Tara Ferguson is an Associate Director within the People team of a medium sized bio-tech business. She’s worked in a number of different...

Ask me a Q Hello Bright Minds,  I hope you’re on good form and thank you for choosing to listen to this episode of Comeback Coach. Dan Hewitt is the Head of Talent Management and Development at Ocado, the UK online-only supermarket HQ-ed in Hertfordshire just down the road from me. When Dan came back from a few months of paternity leave he thought he was going to stay in a comfortable place profes...

Ask me a Q Hello Bright Minds, this episode is inspired by the previous where my guest, Ramona Aning from Ketchum, talked about how her CEO is open about family time and downtime.    I'm geeking out on "psychological job control" and "segmentation norms" which are talked about in a new paper in the Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology titled The competing...

Ask me a Q Hello Bright Minds, I am really happy to be back with a very vibrant episode to kick off season seven. We ended season six with an episode on the psychology of focus and attention and how to adapt your day when you wake up absolutely shattered. And you loved it and you told me so and I’m so thankful that you did because my brain runs on little drip-drip doses of positive feedback.  Toda...

Ask me a Q Hello Bright Minds, I hope you’re on good form and by the end of this episode got a better sense of how you can help yourself find focus, sustain your attention and experience traction. I'm Jessica Chivers , a coaching psychologist, author and developer of the Comeback Community employee experience, of which this podcast is a part. The idea for this episode has been stirring in min...

Ask me a Q Hello Bright Minds, I'm inspired to bring you this episode as I've been invited to be part of a 'Human Library' at CIPD's Festival of Work where my title is "How to not burnout as a parent of a neurodiverse or challenge child." Journaling or 'free-writing' as a I call it has been one of my consistently useful coping tools, especially over the...

Ask me a Q Hello Bright Minds, at the end of 2023 I read about a landmark legal victory for a former Avon Fire and Rescue Service employee, Sasha Acheson, who won her sex discrimination case against the organisation. Reading that piece got me curious about the experiences of female firefighters after they’ve notified their employer that they’re pregnant; what it’s like to have to shift from active...

Ask me a Q Hello Bright Minds, my guest coachee today is Sabeha, a first time mother based in London who has returned to work for a Californian tech company. It's a conversation about the tension that exists within us when we want to give more to work and also be present at home - and the specific challenge of working for a US organisation who comes online as your working day is drawing to a...

Ask me a Q Hello Bright Minds, my guest today is Yvette Bramley, a woman who describes herself as a full time mum and part time business psychologist. She works with the Quality Team at Lexxic, a specialist psychological consultancy and the focus of her role is ensuring the quality their delivery and reports through training, audits, spot checks and actioning client feedback. She proudly tole me a...

Ask me a Q This short “JUST JESSICA EPISODE” is about managing rumination, how to keep healthy habits going when you’re consumed by work and the psychology of mindful meditation. It’s inspired by a particular coaching conversation I had one Tuesday a few weeks ago. I put these episodes together myself without the lovely Chris cleaning up bumps in the sound or adding in the swanky intro and outro a...

Ask me a Q Hello Bright Minds, this is a very different episode to anything I’ve done before. Brian is a chap whose energy, openness and actions around supporting fathers I’ve admired on LinkedIn for quite some time. Throughout the time Brian and I have been in each others’ orbits he’s worked for Amazon as a Program Manager in Luxembourg, whilst also training to be a coach. In June last year (2023...

Ask me a Q Hello Bright Minds, my guest today is Michaela Thomas , a clinical psychologist I’ve been really looking forward to chatting to because we’ve been batting voice notes back and forth for about a year and then I heard Michaela on a podcast I’ve been lapping up over the last 9 months (Kate Moryousef's ADHD WOMEN'S WELLBEING )  that was the galvanising stroke to get Michaela on. ...