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Currently, without even realising it, many more of you will be Primitive Leaders, rather than Innovative Leaders, and it’s impacting you, your people, and your performance.

Here’s why!

As your stress levels increase you move from the intellectual part of the brain, the part that always gets things right in life, innovates, and sees possibilities, to the primitive part of the brain, the part where your fight and flight sits, the part where you can operate from previous patterns of thoughts and behaviours, the part that sees you in panic mode, always on the lookout for the next imminent danger.

The primitive part of the brain is what kept the hunters safe when we all lived in caves. It wasn’t weighing up whether any of the wild animals had eaten and encouraging you to sit down in the middle of the field and have a picnic with your friends, it was keeping you on red alert, and keeping you safe.

And it’s this red alert, that many Exec teams have been living...

How can we raise our awareness of what's happening to us when we self-sabotage and are there any repeating patterns we can look out for?

I’m not perfect and I still have these old patterns and old behaviours of self-sabotage that can still come up to the forefront, either when I’m not in my best place or if I’ve been letting go of my non-negotiables.

What happens to our brains, to our thoughts when we end up in this fight, flight, freeze mode? What can happen when our stress levels increase and when we’re not putting our wellbeing first and doing what is best for us?

It’s in this state that we can fall into our old patterns and even though we know that we’re doing things that aren’t good for us, there is that part of our brain that just tells us to keep going.

I invite you to give the self-sabotaging part of you a name. I’ve got 3 parts that I recognise within myself. Twins called Edna and Edith and The Warrior within. 

If you...

The True Cost of Burnout

Burnout, as we know, is chronic workplace stress, and it sucks! It takes a long time to take hold of you and a long time to recover from it. And still, the number of people reaching burnout continues to rise. And it’s probably no surprise that after the last few years, with global events our need to keep pushing, the increase in stress levels, and the need to prove ourselves worthy and good enough, have contributed to these growing numbers.

As we continue to move from one stressful event to another in our outside world, there doesn’t appear to be a time anytime soon that we’ll see burnout numbers decrease.

And I hate to be doom and gloom in your inbox, but if we’re going to reduce, or ideally prevent burnout, then something needs to change.

I keep seeing posts and articles about who is to ‘blame’ for burnout. Is it the employer or the employee? Surely if chronic workplace stress is what’s causing...

Are You A Superhero?

I am not a superhero, and yet in the few years before I burned out, many of my friends, family, and colleagues would describe me as one.

“Hey Superwoman”

“Hey Wonderwoman”

“You’re like a superhero, I don’t know how you do it all”

And on the back of my leaving card as I moved from my penultimate internal role to my final internal role, the Head of Comms and Marketing, Simon, added to the messages of praise for my high-performing, over-achiever ridiculously high standards with this image.

Whilst I have never considered myself to be a superhero, a wonder woman or a superwoman, I can’t deny that the views of others, who saw me as a superhero of sorts, drove me to keep performing at the level I was performing at.

The endless juggling.

Each promotion came in very quick succession to the next.

The non-stop project work and continuous improvements.

The increased performance stats and the targets were all met,...

How steep is the hill?

Last week really took it out of me.

#ThisIsBurnout was incredible, overwhelming in ways I hadn't imagined, emotional, tiring, and uplifting, all in one. My usual routine went out of the window, I'd added two additional things in that I should have said no to, and whilst I was expecting to be tired, I wasn't expecting to be as exhausted as I was. Plus, I'd been sat down for far too long each day, not something I normally do.

My partner Mick and I went on a long walk with Elysa, our rescue pooch, a beautiful Japanese Akita.  Mick has done the route a couple of times with his brother in the past, it was a new one for me, and whilst it was lovely, it was a bloody killer.

The distance was less than four miles, not a length that would normally phase me, and not too much less than I walk with the dog on a daily basis, but with more inclines and a big hill back to the car at the end, my calves are still aching.

The hills on the walk made me think back to a...

In a world full of polarities where one side of the fence is telling you to do more, hustle harder and push yourself to the limit, the other side is telling you to do less, focus on less, and be surrounded by less if you really want to succeed.

If I’m honest, I’ve mostly lived on the hustle-harder side of the fence. A fierce overachieving, high-performing, recovering perfectionist who struggles with ‘slow and steady’, with one pace, fast. If you want sh!t doing, I’m your woman. I gave up on ‘to-do’ lists years ago, instead having a ‘get done’ list, where if it’s down it's done, and I’ve always stuck with that.

In my corporate career, I was the innovator, the rebel, the first one to try things differently, always striving for more, always working harder, always coming up with new ideas and new ways to do things, and it’s been pretty much the same in my own businesses since I left the corporate world in...

One of the first things I usually find myself working with my clients on, is setting and maintaining boundaries, because without boundaries, the people-pleasing, guilt, frustration and stress continues to grow, and we know that these things can lead to burnout.

POWER-FULL Boundaries are a promise to yourself and others where you clearly state what you will do, and won’t do, in a given situation.  The purpose of setting POWER-FULL Boundaries is to set reasonable limits, protect your energy, your sanity and your time, so that you feel more calm, more in control and much more stress-LESS.  POWER-FULL boundaries help you to become rich in time, energy, calm, and joy, BUT, you have to actually maintain them and enforce them in order for them to work!

Many of the clients that I work with say they struggle with implementing boundaries because they hate saying no to people, the trouble is, you’re already saying no, to yourself, ALL. OF. THE. TIME.

Many clients also...

I’ve been getting a number of messages from women saying that the more senior they are becoming in their careers, the more they are starting to feel like an imposter. 

I can relate to this. 

When I got my seat at the table, that was when I really started to feel for the first time that I don’t belong. I started to doubt my abilities and whether I was good enough to be there. 

Much like the Spiderman quote ‘with great power, comes great responsibility’. 

It felt like that responsibility was too much to bear. It didn’t just feel like I had a responsibility for the role and in the organisation, it also felt like I had a responsibility for women, women my age (I was 30) and for young working mums (my sons were 10). I’d never had those feelings before, until I got that seat at the table. 

If we don’t tackle this feeling, we reach burnout. That’s where I got to. 

I didn’t have a big community of people...

As we know core-led women do 3 things:

They know who they are deeply at the core

They set and maintain boundaries 

They take time for themselves 

In doing these 3 things they are empowered individuals and they empower those around them. Core-led women role model empowerment for themselves and others. In doing this we can change the world and the world of work. 

I am committed and passionate about creating a core-led woman revolution, where we will be ditching frameworks and coming out as our true core-led selves. 

I sat down at the weekend to do my annual reflections and my goal setting for next year. I feel really excited about everything I want to achieve over the next 12 months. But I also noticed that my confidence levels have increased and I have a lot less feeling of fear and apprehension. So I thought, does that mean my goals aren’t big enough? But I know from my core that these goals feel right. 

Back in 2014 when I was 33 I attended a women in...

I’m reflecting over the last 3 weeks that I took off. I do deep reflections at the beginning of every calendar year, then again around March, then September and I look at goals, what I’m doing, how I’m feeling, what I’m learning, where I want to be. But these last 3 weeks I’ve had some unexpected lessons. 

Let’s rewind to just over 3 weeks ago; I was looking forward to some downtime. I was thinking about taking time off social media and was in need of a digital detox. That was confirmed whilst I was scrolling through LinkedIn and seeing what only can be described as vileness. If you’re on LinkedIn I doubt you would have missed it, but there was this whole thing of the crying CEO. 

The CEO of HyperSocial posted a selfie of himself crying, talking about how he had to let some of his team go. I’d seen the original post and personally I wouldn’t have gone for the crying selfie, but actually what I took from it was that he...