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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 Wooller, a Strategic Sourcing Manager at Sainsbury’s Head Office where she’s also the founder and Chair of Enable, the first ever Sainsbury’s Disability Network. Beth started her career as a Management Consultant at Deloitte, having graduated from Cambridge University and has a lifetime of experience living and working with a hearing loss. She is dedicated to helping people with disabilities and differences excel and focuses on raising awareness, increasing confidence and simplifying workplace processes to better support people with disabilities. Beth has recently been listed as one of the most influential disabled people in the UK in the Shaw Trust Disability Power 100. 

11 years into her career and feeling burned out, Beth took a sabbatical from her corporate role to reset, continue her disability work, and gain her professional qualification in Interior Design with the National Design Academy. 

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• 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

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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 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.

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• DM Jessica on instagram @comebackcommuk
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• Watch five coachees talk about working with us
• Connect us to your HR team - bring the Comeback Community™ employee experience to your workplace

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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 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.

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• 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

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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 place in the Places part of the business to bridge the generational gap between employees and the leadership team and avoid groupthink.

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• 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

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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 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.

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• Connect us to your HR team - bring the Comeback Community™ employee experience to your workplace

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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 and Dan moved into a bigger, stretch role.

REFERENCES FROM THE EPISODE

• Summary 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 

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• Watch five coachees talk about working with us
• Connect us to your HR team - bring the Comeback Community™ employee experience to your workplace

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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 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.12426

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• Connect us to your HR team - bring the Comeback Community™ employee experience to your workplace

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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 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 work
• Plus Ramona’s wobbliest moment as she returned to work.

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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 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. 

REFERENCES

• Ficca, 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/S0749597809000399

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• Get Caremail (free, every other Sunday at 7am)
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• Watch five coachees talk about working with us
• Connect us to your HR team - bring the Comeback Community™ employee experience to your workplace

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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 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