Comeback Coach

Ask me a QHello 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 flight deck after her second maternity leave. We’ve been chatting over WhatsApp for about six months and we recorded two separate chats. In the first part you’re going to get to hear how Rebecca was feeling about returning to the air before she started her re-induction training in the simulator. Then in the second chat you’ll find out how she’s feeling now that she’s back at work and into the reality of working parenthood and managing two pilot schedules alongside two little children. Yes, she’s married to a pilot.MORE FOR YOU DM Jessica on instagram @comebackcommuk Get Caremail (free, every other Sunday at 7am)Read Mothers Work! How to Get a Grip on Guilt and Make a Smooth Return to Work by Jessica Chivers. Watch five coachees talk about working with us Connect us to your HR team - bring the Comeback Community™ employee experience to your workplace

Ask me a QHello 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 another job.Not introducing yourself in meetings with an apology.Why I walk around my garden barefoot when I first wake up.The daily additional stress of being a working parent of a little boy with autism.Being totally open at work about what’s going on at home.Having the confidence to ask colleagues to reschedule a meeting that you can’t make last minute.Being generous with positive feedback.Laura’s wobbly moments and tips for coming back to work after maternity leave which includes leaning into the chaos.I hope you get plenty from it and if you do, please would you leave a short review and a rating wherever you listen. Thank you so much.MORE FOR YOU DM Jessica on instagram @comebackcommuk Get Caremail (free, every other Sunday at 7am)Read Mothers Work! How to Get a Grip on Guilt and Make a Smooth Return to Work by Jessica Chivers. Watch five coachees talk about working with us Connect us to your HR team - bring the Comeback Community™ employee experience to your workplace

Ask me a QHello 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 place in the Places part of the business to bridge the generational gap between employees and the leadership team and avoid groupthink.MORE FOR YOU DM Jessica on instagram @comebackcommuk Get Caremail (free, every other Sunday at 7am)Read Mothers Work! How to Get a Grip on Guilt and Make a Smooth Return to Work by Jessica Chivers. Watch five coachees talk about working with us Connect us to your HR team - bring the Comeback Community™ employee experience to your workplace

Ask me a QHello 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 Employee Wellbeing Manager, in a career spanning over 20 years. She lives in Scotland with her husband Andy and teenage daughter Charlotte - enjoying cold water swimming, CrossFit, reading and time with family in her spare time.We talk about:Deciding not to walk away from work completely for the duration of her treatment.Coming back on a phased return at the end of last period of chemotherapy.What best in class line manager support looks and sounds like.The impact of a medically induced menopause.How businesses can hang onto women and turn the tide of the numbers of women walking away when they hit menopause.MORE FOR YOU DM Jessica on instagram @comebackcommuk Get Caremail (free, every other Sunday at 7am)Read Mothers Work! How to Get a Grip on Guilt and Make a Smooth Return to Work by Jessica Chivers. Watch five coachees talk about working with us Connect us to your HR team - bring the Comeback Community™ employee experience to your workplace

Ask me a QHello 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 and Dan moved into a bigger, stretch role.REFERENCES FROM THE EPISODESummary paper of Erik De Haan’s meta-analysis of coaching using only randomised controlled trials.What Can We Know about the Effectiveness of Coaching? A Meta-Analysis Based Only on Randomized Controlled Trials MORE FOR YOU DM Jessica on instagram @comebackcommuk Get Caremail (free, every other Sunday at 7am)Read Mothers Work! How to Get a Grip on Guilt and Make a Smooth Return to Work by Jessica Chivers. Watch five coachees talk about working with us Connect us to your HR team - bring the Comeback Community™ employee experience to your workplace

Ask me a QHello 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 include the five questions bosses can ask in team meetings and 1:1s to ensure their people are getting the downtime they need.  The paper I refer to was published in 2023 and can be found here: https://bpspsychub.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/joop.12426MORE FOR YOU DM Jessica on instagram @comebackcommuk Get Caremail (free, every other Sunday at 7am)Read Mothers Work! How to Get a Grip on Guilt and Make a Smooth Return to Work by Jessica Chivers. Watch five coachees talk about working with us Connect us to your HR team - bring the Comeback Community™ employee experience to your workplace

Ask me a QHello 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 marketing communications consultancy. She returned to her role as an account director after maternity leave earlier this year and we go into depth on:Holding boundaries at work, and how Ramona became adept at this.The signs Ramona spotted during the recruitment process for her role at Ketchum that told her it was going to be a place where she could be herself. How she found people to connect with on maternity leave via the Peanut app and how helpful those friendships have been as she returned to workPlus Ramona’s wobbliest moment as she returned to work.MORE FOR YOU DM Jessica on instagram @comebackcommuk Get Caremail (free, every other Sunday at 7am)Read Mothers Work! How to Get a Grip on Guilt and Make a Smooth Return to Work by Jessica Chivers. Watch five coachees talk about working with us Connect us to your HR team - bring the Comeback Community™ employee experience to your workplace

Ask me a QHello 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 work from maternity leave with less time on their hands than they had pre-baby. If you’re not a new parent or a parent at all I think you’ll get plenty from listening to the psychology and my personal hacks that I’m going to share with you. REFERENCESFicca, G., Axelsson, J., Mollicone, D. J., Muto, V., & Vitiello, M. V. (2010). Naps, cognition and performance. Sleep medicine reviews, 14(4), 249-258.Leroy, s. (2009). Why is it so hard to do my work? The challenge of attention residue when switching between work tasks. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 109 (2) 168-181: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0749597809000399MORE FOR YOU DM Jessica on instagram @comebackcommuk Get Caremail (free, every other Sunday at 7am)Read Mothers Work! How to Get a Grip on Guilt and Make a Smooth Return to Work by Jessica Chivers. Watch five coachees talk about working with us Connect us to your HR team - bring the Comeback Community™ employee experience to your workplace

Ask me a QHello 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 significant evidence base in the academic research literature. It was developed by Professor James Pennebaker in 1986.Here are the links I mention in the episode:Caremail: https://www.subscribepage.com/comebackcommunity Huberman Lab podcast 20/11/23 A Science-Supported Journaling Protocol to Improve Mental & Physical Health: https://www.hubermanlab.com/episode/a-science-supported-journaling-protocol-to-improve-mental-physical-health Professor James Pennebaker research: https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/psychology/faculty/pennebak Emotional and physical health benefits of expressive writing (summary of research findings) by Baikie & Wilhelm (2018) published in Advances of Psychiatric Treatment:  https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/advances-in-psychiatric-treatment/article/emotional-and-physical-health-benefits-of-expressive-writing/ED2976A61F5DE56B46F07A1CE9EA9F9F Therapist Uncensored podcast episode 225 with James Pennebaker: https://therapistuncensored.com/episodes/neuroscience-proven-writing-protocol-james-pennebaker-225/ Opening Up by Writing It Down: How Expressive Writing Improves Health and Eases Emotional Pain: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01GK5817W/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1 MORE FOR YOU DM Jessica on instagram @comebackcommuk Get Caremail (free, every other Sunday at 7am)Read Mothers Work! How to Get a Grip on Guilt and Make a Smooth Return to Work by Jessica Chivers. Watch five coachees talk about working with us Connect us to your HR team - bring the Comeback Community™ employee experience to your workplace

Ask me a QHello 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 have a single colleague near you who understands what you’ve been through. My guest today is NOT that former employee but a Emma Young, a female firefighter who has a lot to say about what it’s like to be a pregnant woman in the fire service. Emma has a 15 month old daughter and she’s currently pregnant with her second, a pregnancy that she found out about just as she was returning from maternity leave.You’re going to hear about:How Emma navigated the lack of maternity policy and the difference a good line manager can make in uncertain circumstances.Lack of knowledge in the fire service around the needs of a person who is put on modified duties.The impact of a disconnect between what organisations say they want to do to be inclusive and what happens in practice.And as ever, my guest’s wobbliest moment as she returned to work, a high point and Emma’s three top tips.MORE FOR YOU DM Jessica on instagram @comebackcommuk Get Caremail (free, every other Sunday at 7am)Read Mothers Work! How to Get a Grip on Guilt and Make a Smooth Return to Work by Jessica Chivers. Watch five coachees talk about working with us Connect us to your HR team - bring the Comeback Community™ employee experience to your workplace

Ask me a QHello 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 a working parent.Wanting to work more hours than you’re able to.Discomfort and tension leaving work before you feel ready to, to be with your child(ren)Tensions with our partner about what time we go ‘on duty’ caring for our child(ren)MORE FOR YOU DM Jessica on instagram @comebackcommuk Get Caremail (free, every other Sunday at 7am)Read Mothers Work! How to Get a Grip on Guilt and Make a Smooth Return to Work by Jessica Chivers. Watch five coachees talk about working with us Connect us to your HR team - bring the Comeback Community™ employee experience to your workplace

Ask me a QHello 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 weird one. She also told me – and I quote:"Patience does not come naturally to me and I am a control “freak” but it works for my family. However, my daughter has taught me to be more relaxed and spontaneous. I no longer live life focusing on the next qualification or physical achievement. I now live to have fun and experience as much joy daily as possible".Yvette is my most energetic guest yet and you’re going to hear about:Why KIT days are a brilliant thing to do when you’re on maternity leave.Getting comfortable with changing your mind about career development activities you simply don’t want to find the time and energy for now you’re a working parent.Recognising how successful you already are and remembering to question self-talk that suggests otherwise. COMEBACK COACH is part of a broader package of support that we call the Comeback Community employee experience. It’s a blend of online resources, coaching, live expert Q&As, career development tools and line manager support that we deliver in organisations such as ITV, Lily’s Kitchen, GAM Investments, Federated Hermes, Veolia and more. Find out more and help us start a conversation with your HR team at www.comebackcommunity.co.uk/introduce.MORE FOR YOU DM Jessica on instagram @comebackcommuk Get Caremail (free, every other Sunday at 7am)Read Mothers Work! How to Get a Grip on Guilt and Make a Smooth Return to Work by Jessica Chivers. Watch five coachees talk about working with us Connect us to your HR team - bring the Comeback Community™ employee experience to your workplace

Ask me a QThis 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 you think might like it too.The "DAILY CHECK-IN" tool you can download and print for your wellbeing: https://comebackcommunity.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/dailycheckin.pdfThe meditation mantras I mentioned in this episode:Hummee Hum – The Other is you by Mirabai Cieba (12 mins) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7CFI0hslXv8Ramadasa by Satkirin Kaur Khalsa (12 mins)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrVewRvqNrE The article I mentioned about meditation and the DMN on the Mindfulness Association’s website: https://www.mindfulnessassociation.net/science-of-mindfulness/meditation-and-the-default-mode-network/ MORE FOR YOU DM Jessica on instagram @comebackcommuk Get Caremail (free, every other Sunday at 7am)Read Mothers Work! How to Get a Grip on Guilt and Make a Smooth Return to Work by Jessica Chivers. Watch five coachees talk about working with us Connect us to your HR team - bring the Comeback Community™ employee experience to your workplace

Ask me a QHello 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 offer my condolences and to tell him how much I liked reading what he was writing about what he was anticipating and we started swapping voice notes. I do love a voice note!I asked Brian whether he’d be up for coming on the podcast later in the year when he’d made his comeback and then a thought occurred to me: why don’t we document, through voice notes, what’s happening for Brian on the run up to redundancy and what happens next. I do all of this with you in mind dear listener – I’m constantly thinking about how I can bring you ideas, insights and tips to make your comeback smoother, easier and more enjoyable. I’m also always wanting to bring you the hard stuff that people are going through and the emotions they’re experiencing as a way to give you hope when you’re going through similar struggles. At the end of the episode you’re also going to hear from Dr Madeline Stevens who is the author of Strategic Redundancy Implementation: Re-Focus, Re-Organise and Re-Build. She knows a lot about how to help people through redundancy..MORE FOR YOU DM Jessica on instagram @comebackcommuk Get Caremail (free, every other Sunday at 7am)Read Mothers Work! How to Get a Grip on Guilt and Make a Smooth Return to Work by Jessica Chivers. Watch five coachees talk about working with us Connect us to your HR team - bring the Comeback Community™ employee experience to your workplace

Ask me a QHello 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 once you have a baby and go back to work and the pressure ramps up drawing upon her own lived experience as well as her professional insight. She’s the author of a book called The Lasting Connection – which is about developing compassion for yourself and your partner - and has a podcast called Pause Purpose Play. I’ve since learned that Michaela also has a special interest in perfectionism and she has an ADHD brain and is starting to do more work in that area too. Given my recent diagnosis of ADHD and our growing interest in neurodiversity as a coaching team my mind I thought wow, let’s get Michaela on to talk about her return to work and all of these things. So, you have an extra long episode today because there’s so much I wanted to chat to her about. If you like what you hear from Michaela then you can find her on Instagram @the_thomas_connection and Facebook @TheThomasConnection.**Michaela is going to be joining me on Tuesday 21st May 2024 12 NOON for a live Q&A on HOW TO LIVE & WORK WELL WITH AN ANXIOUS MIND AND OTHER MENTAL HEALTH CHALLENGES. The Q&A is part of the Comeback Community employee experience programme and once our clients have had first dibs we open spare spots to all absolutely free**. ..MORE FOR YOU DM Jessica on instagram @comebackcommuk Get Caremail (free, every other Sunday at 7am)Read Mothers Work! How to Get a Grip on Guilt and Make a Smooth Return to Work by Jessica Chivers. Watch five coachees talk about working with us Connect us to your HR team - bring the Comeback Community™ employee experience to your workplace

Ask me a QHello 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 and engagement, bringing in forward thinking and inclusive policies. Enfuse Group is recognised as a Great Place to Work, Top 5 Best Companies and best new Management Consultancy at the MCA Awards. Lianne has previously spoken up about the importance of flexible working to enable parents to parent as well as have a career in addition to writing various articles of managing IVF and Fertility treatment alongside work. You’re going to hear about:How to have smooth harmonious relationships with family members who care for your children.Wanting to work during maternity leave and how to communicate that to your team.Tips for returning to a new role and/or a new organisation after a period of extended leave.Owning your decisions and tuning into what’s right for you and your family.Knowing your worth and feeling good at work.And as always the wobbliest moment and peak moment of my guest’s return to work experience.MORE FOR YOU DM Jessica on instagram @comebackcommuk Get Caremail (free, every other Sunday at 7am)Read Mothers Work! How to Get a Grip on Guilt and Make a Smooth Return to Work by Jessica Chivers. Watch five coachees talk about working with us Connect us to your HR team - bring the Comeback Community™ employee experience to your workplace

Ask me a QHello 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 arbitration.**LINK TO "MOTHERS WALK" on 8/3/24 for International Women's Day**Ros is originally from Singapore and came to study in the UK. She became a stay at home mum after she had children and when her youngest went to nursery she took a part time job in a nursery and after four years became a freelance photographer. When the divorce happened she was told to get a proper job, was forced to sell all of her photography equipment and then made 50 applications for jobs, and got only one interview. That interview was with John Lewis – I love JLP sooooo much – but even that didn’t work out. Fast forward to today and Ros IS working for John Lewis and she’s worked her way from an entry level role to being a fashion merchandiser and instagmmer for JLP. Today Ros is thriving and this episode talks about how she got there. I think many employers are recognising just how destabilising any big life can be for their people and divorce is right up there. If you’re going through divorce or it’s on your mind I’m sending you all the love because I know how hellish it can be. I’m a child of divorced parents and I have people around me going through divorce at the moment. To you all I send love and hope, more of which at the end of the episode.MORE FOR YOU DM Jessica on instagram @comebackcommuk Get Caremail (free, every other Sunday at 7am)Read Mothers Work! How to Get a Grip on Guilt and Make a Smooth Return to Work by Jessica Chivers. Watch five coachees talk about working with us Connect us to your HR team - bring the Comeback Community™ employee experience to your workplace

Ask me a QHello 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 is a Tedx speaker. She has recently been nominated for several broadcast awards for her documentary work.She is an ambassador for ‘The Duke of Edinburgh's Award Scheme’ and a Non-Executive Director for Hockey Wales. Andrea is married to Wales and Lions legend Lee Byrne.  She is passionate about wellbeing and pioneered the introduction of Mental Health First Aiders in ITV’s newsrooms.Away from the newsroom, she is a keen yogi, a novice stand-up paddle-boarder and a budding novelist!In this conversation with Andrea you’re going to hear about:Remembering how good you are at your job before you start back.Why it’s a good idea not to expect too much of yourself when you first return to work.It not being selfish or wrong to want to have time to yourself or not liking every moment of parenthood even when your child was very hard ‘won’ as Andrea’s daughter Jemima was.Pitching to be involved in projects and activities that are outside of your role.The time it takes to adjust to working parenthood.And a few random bits about the psychology of perfume and what wearing stretchy clothing does to our minds.We do also talk about baby loss and miscarriage towards the end where Andrea shares something harrowing that happened to her when she was about to do a very significant day of broadcasting.And as always you’ll get to hear the wobbliest moment and peak moment of my guest’s return to work experience as well as her three top tips for returning to work after a break.MORE FOR YOU DM Jessica on instagram @comebackcommuk Get Caremail (free, every other Sunday at 7am)Read Mothers Work! How to Get a Grip on Guilt and Make a Smooth Return to Work by Jessica Chivers. Watch five coachees talk about working with us Connect us to your HR team - bring the Comeback Community™ employee experience to your workplace

Ask me a QHello Bright Minds, and welcome to the start of season six of COMEBACK COACH. I am so pleased to be back sharing stories and coaching sessions about returning to work and onward career development after a break. My guest today is Joanna Jacobs who took a career break straight after maternity leave from Vodafone. Prior to that she was living in Shanghai and working for Sainsburys, sussing out whether China would be a viable market for them and now she’s the HR Director for UK Twinings Commercial. In between Vodafone and Twinings she experimented with a few things including the library assistant role (which wasn’t for her!)If you are thinking about taking a career break or you’re on one now you are in for an energising treat because this is a conversation that shows it IS possible to have a gratifying and stretching career after a significant career break.You’re going to hear about:A useful way to think about your career break when you describe it to recruiters and potential employers.The power of experimentation and doing dramatically different work to what you used to do. How to set about finding a new role in the sector you were in before. Also Jo’s wobbliest moment when she returned to work and her top tips for coming back from a career break.MORE FOR YOU DM Jessica on instagram @comebackcommuk Get Caremail (free, every other Sunday at 7am)Read Mothers Work! How to Get a Grip on Guilt and Make a Smooth Return to Work by Jessica Chivers. Watch five coachees talk about working with us Connect us to your HR team - bring the Comeback Community™ employee experience to your workplace

Ask me a QHello Bright Minds and welcome to another JUST JESSICA episode of COMEBACK COACH where I’m reflecting on three things that have been top of mind for me lately that I think could be useful to you too. I’m a coaching psychologist, author and founder of The Talent Keeper Specialists which is home to the Comeback Community employee experience of which this podcast is a part.A few weeks ago I went away for three days, two night by myself to my favourite hotel in Cornwall.  It’s something I booked in September – when they were doing an offer - in anticipation of needing a break from home. None of the girlfriends I asked to go with me could commit and so I decided to book to go solo. And this solo trip brings together three things I wanted to mull over here:Knowing your needsThe power of a solo trip to develop your intuition How to focus on your career as well as your jobIn this episode I mentioned an article on Psychologytoday.com and our COMEBACK CONVERSATION live Q&A listings.MORE FOR YOU DM Jessica on instagram @comebackcommuk Get Caremail (free, every other Sunday at 7am)Read Mothers Work! How to Get a Grip on Guilt and Make a Smooth Return to Work by Jessica Chivers. Watch five coachees talk about working with us Connect us to your HR team - bring the Comeback Community™ employee experience to your workplace