Ask me a Q Hello Bright Minds, I have a completely wonderful powerhouse for you today who returned from maternity leave eight months ago. Her dream job came up whilst she was away so she decided to return six months early and on day two of her comeback there was a wholescale restructure of the entire business which changed everything. She’s just returned from a company celebration trip to Miami in recognition of her being one of the business’ peak performers and I think you’re going to love her....
Jun 11, 2025•53 min
Ask me a Q Hello Bright Minds, my guest coachee today is Emilia, which isn’t her real name. She’s been an avid listener of the podcast and got in touch about having a coaching session to support her in making a lateral move in a large multinational healthcare company. Not long after we arranged to speak she e-mailed to say her line manager was going to be leaving and could we talk about how she navigates shifting from peer to boss in her current team on an interim boss. There was so much ground ...
May 28, 2025•46 min
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 different type of gathering to what was on offer at the time. She’s now the founder of Flock Here – a ...
May 14, 2025•45 min
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 Pensions Expert. She’s a mother of two teenage girls and writes about midlife, parenting and money ...
Apr 30, 2025•51 min
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 conversation about his life, including his four children. Serge is a global real estate advisor at D...
Apr 16, 2025•37 min
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 you do. The gender ISA gap, pensions and investing for children. Helena’s experience of returning to w...
Apr 02, 2025•39 min
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 support working full time and caring for four children. The difference having a true partner at home ma...
Mar 19, 2025•45 min
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've all previously been on the podcast. They were tremendously candid for which I am truly grateful. Emmi...
Mar 05, 2025•1 hr
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 reputation. I’m Jessica Chivers, a psychologist and executive coach. For the last 20 years I’ve been coachin...
Feb 19, 2025•28 min
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 working with coachees years down the line after their first coaching engagement and it’s so wonderful to ...
Feb 05, 2025•40 min
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 your professional network. Using LinkedIn to showcase your expertise. Discipline and structure duri...
Jan 22, 2025•40 min
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-energise and have a bit of a rest, which I hope you’ll get later in the month. My guest today is Beth ...
Dec 03, 2024•37 min
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 lot of fun. My guest today is Rebecca Andrews is a pilot and a few months ago she returned to the f...
Nov 20, 2024•38 min
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 placed at risk of redundancy and dragged out of your maternity bubble to think about finding anothe...
Nov 06, 2024•49 min
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. Worrying about not being able to do her job when she came back. The shadow board that Arcadis has put in ...
Oct 23, 2024•29 min
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 sectors and types of business, in roles ranging from People Business Partner to Lead Coach to Employe...
Oct 09, 2024•48 min
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 professionally, not striving for the next job. This was so he could focus on family, but that was not to be...
Sep 25, 2024•30 min
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 influence of psychological job control on family-to-work conflict. As ever, there are practical takeaways from the episode which...
Sep 11, 2024•20 min
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. Today I’m bringing you a conversation with Ramona Aning, a coachee of ours from Ketchum, the PR and marke...
Aug 28, 2024•38 min
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 mind for some time because focus is a frequent source of conversation with coachees who are returning to wor...
Jun 26, 2024•32 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 last two years, and I'll be talking about that. I'm talking you through the science of a very specific journaling protocol that has a very signi...
Jun 12, 2024•20 min
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 frontline duty to something else and what it’s like to return to an environment where you may not h...
May 29, 2024•35 min
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 close. In this coaching session we explore: How to experience more joy, not just “getting through it” as ...
May 15, 2024•44 min
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 after we’d chatted that was she was always a “weird” kid growing up and hopes she continues being the...
May 01, 2024•45 min
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 and I hope you get something from it. If you do I’d love it if you shared it with someone else who yo...
Apr 17, 2024•13 min
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) I spotted a very candid post from Brian about expecting to be made redundant so I got in touch to ...
Apr 03, 2024•1 hr 11 min
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. I originally wanted to have a chat with Michaela about how to keep partner/spousal relationships feeling good on...
Mar 20, 2024•57 min
Ask me a Q Hello Bright Minds, my guest today is Lianne Baker, Head of People & Culture at Enfuse who had surprise baby number three last year and we caught up at the end of her five month maternity leave. Lianne is an award-winning People professional with over 15 years’ experience working within TV for Endemol, publishing for Condé Nast, recruitment, hospitality and now for Enfuse, a digital transformation management consultancy. Since joining Enfuse Group, she has been focused on culture ...
Mar 06, 2024•37 min
Ask me a Q Hello Bright Minds, my guest today is Ros Kwok, a woman I was introduced to after asking one of the wonderful Partners at our past podcast sponsor, Rayden Solicitors if she had a client who had had to return to work due to a change in financial circumstances following divorce. Thank you Emily Watson for coming up trumps in less than 24 hours! And you’ll also hear from Emily at the end of the episode where we talk through several questions about divorce, spousal maintenance and arbitra...
Feb 21, 2024•1 hr
Ask me a Q Hello Bright Minds, my guest today is Andrea Byrne, one of the faces of ITV News and a past coachee of mine. She anchors the BAFTA award-winning daily news programme Wales at Six, as well as ITV’s national bulletins. This includes ITV Weekend News, Lunchtime News, Evening News and News at Ten and Prince Harry is among the many high-profile names she has interviewed. Andrea also presents the current affairs programme Wales This Week; hosts her own fertility podcast ‘Making Babies’; and...
Feb 07, 2024•38 min
