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Sophie's Survival Kit: Tackling Trauma and Triumphing in a Man’s World · Work It Like A Mum

• 0:01
  Speaker 1: Hey, I'm Elizabeth Willits and I'm obsessed with helping as many women as possible achieve their boldest dreams after kids and helping you to navigate this messy and magical season of life.
• 0:14
  Speaker 1: I'm a working mum with over 17 years of recruitment experience and I'm the founder of the Investing in Women Job Board and Community.
• 0:22
  Speaker 1: In this show, I'm honoured to be chatting with remarkable women redefining our working world across all areas of business.
• 0:30
  Speaker 1: They'll share their secrets on how they've achieved extraordinary success after children, their boundaries and balance, the challenges they've faced and how they've overcome them to define their own versions of success.
• 0:43
  Speaker 1: Shy away from the real talk?
• 0:45
  Speaker 1: No way.
• 0:46
  Speaker 1: Money struggles, growth loss, boundaries and balance we cover it all.
• 0:50
  Speaker 1: Think of this as coffee with your mates, mixed with an inspiring TED talk sprinkled with the career advice you wish you'd really had at school.
• 0:58
  Speaker 1: So grab a cup of coffee or a glass of wine and make sure you're cozy and get ready to get inspired and chase your boldest dreams, or just survive Mondays.
• 1:07
  Speaker 1: This is the Work it Like A Mum podcast.
• 1:11
  Speaker 1: This episode is brought to you by Investing in Women.
• 1:16
  Speaker 1: Investing in Women is a job board and recruitment agency helping you find your dream part-time or flexible job with the UK's most family-friendly and forward-thinking employers.
• 1:28
  Speaker 1: Their site can help you find a professional and rewarding job that works for you.
• 1:33
  Speaker 1: They're proud to partner with the UK's most family-friendly employers across a range of professional industries, ready to find your perfect job?
• 1:42
  Speaker 1: Search their website at investinginwomencouk to find your next part-time or flexible job opportunity.
• 1:51
  Speaker 1: Now back to the show.
• 1:54
  Speaker 1: Hello and welcome to this week's Work it Like A Mum podcast episode.
• 1:58
  Speaker 1: Today I'm delighted to be chatting with Sophie Bridgeton, who is the founder of Be your Best Coaching.
• 2:04
  Speaker 1: Sophie is a trauma-led coach helping women stuck in unhealthy power dynamics at work, empowering them with the strategies to take their power back and thrive.
• 2:15
  Speaker 1: We'll be chatting about why she is passionate about helping people acknowledge and resolve trauma at work, her background working in the Army and being the only female officer in her battalion after she was posted to Afghanistan and how these experiences led to PTSD.
• 2:33
  Speaker 1: How Sophie then left a toxic workplace and is now in a position to help others experiencing similarly toxic environments in their own places of work reboot and regain their confidence and strength to thrive and be happy once again.
• 2:49
  Speaker 1: Thank you so much, sophie, for joining me today.
• 2:52
  Speaker 1: It's such a pleasure to chat with you and learn what about you and your experiences and how you're now using them as a force for good to help others.
• 3:02
  Speaker 2: It's a pleasure to be here.
• 3:03
  Speaker 2: That was a lot, wasn't it yeah?
• 3:07
  Speaker 1: I know I'm pleased that I got to see you.
• 3:09
  Speaker 1: You've had such a varied career.
• 3:11
  Speaker 1: You've obviously done such a lot.
• 3:15
  Speaker 2: Yeah, when I reflect back and other people have said I've done a lot, but at the time, I guess the military was quite a big one.
• 3:24
  Speaker 2: That was eight years and you moved on every two years, so there were plenty of experiences within that.
• 3:30
  Speaker 2: But there's something fundamentally that keeps me driving, and I think my experience has definitely been a key part of that.
• 3:40
  Speaker 2: It's like I want to use this for something positive and that's also healing for me, right?
• 3:47
  Speaker 1: Yes, so did you always want to be in the Army.
• 3:49
  Speaker 1: No how did you get involved?
• 3:55
  Speaker 1: What made you try to?
• 3:56
  Speaker 1: It was a man I love that I don't know, isn't it?
• 4:03
  Speaker 2: I think actually we never married.
• 4:07
  Speaker 2: But lovely relationship.
• 4:10
  Speaker 2: I was a teacher before I joined and I felt very stuck.
• 4:15
  Speaker 2: I just felt like I wanted it more At that point in my time.
• 4:19
  Speaker 2: I loved teaching and I loved giving the relationships that you build with pupils.
• 4:27
  Speaker 2: There's something lovely about teaching.
• 4:28
  Speaker 2: But at that point I was quite young still and I just felt I want to go and see the world.
• 4:34
  Speaker 2: I loved my travelling.
• 4:37
  Speaker 2: I was a bit of a risk-taker.
• 4:42
  Speaker 2: And this guy came along and he was in the Army.
• 4:45
  Speaker 2: He was just off to Sanctis and he said why don't you join the Army?
• 4:48
  Speaker 2: I really thought about it because of the thinking about what the Army represented, etc.
• 4:55
  Speaker 2: But I also discovered that it had an education and training services which is 400 officers strong and it just offers.
• 5:04
  Speaker 2: Its basis is education and training of soldiers and officers, whether you're delivering leadership and management as career courses at soldier and officer level, or it could be all sorts of things.
• 5:18
  Speaker 2: You could learn languages, you could be a platoon commander and manage soldiers.
• 5:23
  Speaker 2: There were all sorts of things, but the basis was education.
• 5:27
  Speaker 2: So I thought, yeah, I'll have to go.
• 5:30
  Speaker 1: Okay, so you went in as like a learning and development in the education part of the Army.
• 5:36
  Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, exactly.
• 5:38
  Speaker 2: That's exactly what happened.
• 5:39
  Speaker 2: In the first two years I was in a place called Tidworth, which is where near Stonehenge, out in the middle of nowhere, after I'd done the sand test, and that was a really fun couple of years.
• 5:55
  Speaker 2: I delivered training up to warrants officers warrants officers who are senior soldiers that may have been long in the tooth, some of them have been there for like 20 years plus and it was great fun.
• 6:08
  Speaker 2: Then I was told I was getting deployed, so I'd only had sort of two years under my belt.
• 6:15
  Speaker 2: You have no control, do you no control?
• 6:19
  Speaker 2: You're told what to do.
• 6:20
  Speaker 2: You have, you know, my officer commander, the person that's managing me, will look at the different deployments and will select perhaps one that they think best fits, and I don't know what he saw in me, but he was like yeah, I think you've really suit a battalion, an infantry battalion.
• 6:43
  Speaker 2: I think it'll do you.
• 6:44
  Speaker 1: Why is that something different?
• 6:45
  Speaker 1: Because somebody that has not ever really been involved in the army.
• 6:48
  Speaker 1: Are they not all called battalions?
• 6:51
  Speaker 2: No, it's your role that you get posted into, for example, in my cat badge.
• 6:57
  Speaker 2: Perhaps you might go to an education tech, as they call them, which is an education centre that is actually established out in they had one in Iraq and they eventually had one in Afghanistan.
• 7:10
  Speaker 2: Or you might be part of civil military liaison, so you might be working in a Semic House and you might be working and sort of gathering intelligence from local population.
• 7:26
  Speaker 2: There were all sorts of roles that you could have, but I was attached to a battalion.
• 7:32
  Speaker 2: There was no education presence out there, nothing.
• 7:36
  Speaker 1: What was the battalion doing then that you were attached to then with that small like just front line?
• 7:43
  Speaker 2: So their roles.
• 7:44
  Speaker 2: So it was pretty early on in the campaign and their role was observation, mentoring, liaison, which was basically training the Afghan National Army.
• 7:55
  Speaker 2: And we got out there and these guys didn't have uniforms, some of them were high on opiates.
• 8:04
  Speaker 2: We had a guy, a W01, who was a soldier, who was killed by a suicide bomber whilst we were out there.
• 8:14
  Speaker 2: So he'd infiltrated the Afghan National Army.
• 8:17
  Speaker 2: So when we were training and was actually killed by this guy, there were all sorts of reasons as to why the Afghan National Army were there.
• 8:28
  Speaker 2: And you've got this very professionally trained military going out there and these guys they don't know which way up their rifle was some of them and at the end of the day they all throw them on a pile on top of each other and don't look after them.
• 8:42
  Speaker 2: It's complete opposite of what the army would do.
• 8:45
  Speaker 2: So it was starting from the very basics and that was one of my roles out there.
• 8:50
  Speaker 1: I suppose it was involved.
• 8:51
  Speaker 1: Your training, then your training background.
• 8:54
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it absolutely was.
• 8:55
  Speaker 2: So there was part of that.
• 8:57
  Speaker 2: I delivered a PASH2.
• 8:59
  Speaker 2: So I did a basic course on by no means an expert, but I delivered basic training.
• 9:04
  Speaker 2: But I also delivered things like cultural awareness training, which was a bit backward then, but I think it's so important you go out to one of these countries and it was cultural awareness training for the British.
• 9:18
  Speaker 2: Army.
• 9:19
  Speaker 2: So when you're working, for example, you're a soldier on a vehicle checkpoint and the way that you gesture like that might mean something completely different in their language.
• 9:35
  Speaker 2: And knowing the subtleties of that are really, really important.
• 9:40
  Speaker 2: Going into shores which were these meetings and just making sure that your feet weren't pointed towards somebody and that you took your shoes off, all sorts of subtleties that changed the dynamics, because we wanted to build relationships with a local population and those things, even like wearing sunglasses, would mean that the local population quite skeptical and that was kit that we were given to use and they didn't realize that actually that was causing problems in relationships because to them the eyes are.
• 10:19
  Speaker 2: You know, you see a person through the, through the eyes, you know the souls of a person.
• 10:24
  Speaker 2: So there was mistrust from the sunglasses but because the language barriers were there, that wasn't understood.
• 10:33
  Speaker 2: And that language barrier was also a problem because we had interpreters and what we realized over time is these interpreters came from all sorts of different regions.
• 10:42
  Speaker 2: I mean, they were risking their lives and that was amazing, you know, for what they were doing, but they had different types of dialects, you know, and I was being taught the Queen's Pash 2, which I got out there.
• 10:57
  Speaker 2: It was so vastly different.
• 10:59
  Speaker 2: But equally these interpreters that come from different sort of areas and regions were also speaking different and sort of interpreting things differently, and that also caused problems.
• 11:12
  Speaker 1: Wow, what about in Afghanistan, were you?
• 11:15
  Speaker 2: I was in the Helmand province.
• 11:16
  Speaker 2: So the Helmand province was where the farmers were, and when I got deployed out there it was the summer, so the Taliban were quite happy to fight in the summer it was warm.
• 11:32
  Speaker 2: They were much quieter when it was cold in the winter.
• 11:36
  Speaker 2: And in Helmand, next to the river, you had a lot of opiates growing, poppy growing for opiates, and, of course, particular times when they were harvesting the sort of poppies they would pick up arms, and I can't remember what the term was, whether it was a two, I think it was like a two-dime Taliban or something like that, in that whoever was in the area or a most powerful in terms of presence could switch a local person from being just part of the population to picking up arms and fighting and then just disappearing into the population again.
• 12:21
  Speaker 2: So they were really difficult to be accountable for.
• 12:23
  Speaker 2: So yeah, it was when I got deployed.
• 12:29
  Speaker 2: It was quite a frenetic time.
• 12:34
  Speaker 1: They were quite Were you quite early on in the conflicts when you were there Early-ish yeah, absolutely.
• 12:40
  Speaker 2: They were just building places like Kandahar.
• 12:44
  Speaker 2: I was in a place sort of outside of Kandahar.
• 12:50
  Speaker 1: What was that?
• 12:50
  Speaker 1: Like a new town they were building on.
• 12:53
  Speaker 2: They call it a forward operating base.
• 12:55
  Speaker 2: That.
• 12:56
  Speaker 2: I was in.
• 12:57
  Speaker 2: I mean, god, I'm just trying to think circumference-wise it might have been like eight miles.
• 13:04
  Speaker 2: It was so small that the Americans were there, the British were there and the Afghan National Army were there, and then you went to somewhere like Kandahar and it was much bigger.
• 13:13
  Speaker 2: They had coffee shops.
• 13:18
  Speaker 2: They had like proper food you know all of those sort of things that you could get excited about when you would be living on rations that were the same rations over and over again.
• 13:26
  Speaker 2: So, yeah, but that was a journey and that journey was you couldn't just get in a car and drive there, you had to go in convoy, you had to be protected, all of those things, because of course you had roadside bombs and when we were going, that was in that conflict.
• 13:49
  Speaker 2: That's what was happening.
• 13:51
  Speaker 2: They were targeting us in convoys because you're out in the middle of the desert and then you'd see this motorbike suddenly appear, this dust of the streak of this line up, you know, as you're in your vehicles on the road tracking you, and at times this I mean I was in a convoy and I think it was the vehicle in front of me was hit by a roadside bomb, you know.
• 14:18
  Speaker 2: So yeah, it was really vulnerable.
• 14:25
  Speaker 1: Yeah, terrifying yeah you don't?
• 14:28
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I didn't know, I didn't know.
• 14:32
  Speaker 2: You know they can talk.
• 14:33
  Speaker 2: You had briefs beforehand, but in terms of that kind of preparation I had no idea.
• 14:39
  Speaker 1: No idea.
• 14:40
  Speaker 1: She didn't really feel like you knew what you were getting yourself in for.
• 14:46
  Speaker 2: I don't think anyone knows true reality until you hit there.
• 14:50
  Speaker 2: But I didn't think I'd be facing the bullying.
• 14:52
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it was one thing to be in a war zone, but it was another thing for me to be actually treated the way I was.
• 14:59
  Speaker 2: I mean, I wasn't the enemy.
• 15:01
  Speaker 2: I was like come on, guys, I'm out here to do a job, what's this about?
• 15:05
  Speaker 2: And I was.
• 15:08
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I was really shocked at how inhumane.
• 15:12
  Speaker 2: You know, yes, we're in a war but we're all working together and that team element of it was just not there and I realized there was a lot of misogynistic, bias views, you know.
• 15:28
  Speaker 2: And yeah, it was a really difficult.
• 15:32
  Speaker 2: That side of it was a really difficult experience.
• 15:36
  Speaker 1: So what would talk us through?
• 15:37
  Speaker 1: What were your experiences then with your colleagues?
• 15:40
  Speaker 1: How do they view you then as the only woman in that battalion?
• 16:38
  Speaker 2: I mean, they're not all bad guys.
• 16:39
  Speaker 2: But I think, because of what happened from the very beginning, I actually started to withdraw.
• 16:45
  Speaker 2: And I look back and I think understandably, because I wasn't sure who I could trust.
• 16:52
  Speaker 2: Basically, I hadn't integrated with that battalion beforehand, so they didn't know who I was.
• 16:58
  Speaker 2: And Did they all know each other?
• 17:02
  Speaker 2: Had they already?
• 17:03
  Speaker 2: built a relationship, yeah, and even where there were sort of attached arms we would call them, so you might have logistics or you might have Royal Electronical Mechanical Engineers.
• 17:14
  Speaker 2: They would come in a team.
• 17:18
  Speaker 2: I was the only the only sort of one, and when we so we first got out, got into the desert and there was this situation which just showed me that they didn't want me there.
• 17:34
  Speaker 2: Spot the woman, you don't belong.
• 17:37
  Speaker 2: And I've been asked by the battalion to be attached and to be part of the battalion from the beginning.
• 17:45
  Speaker 2: So it wasn't me saying that this is what I wanted, or the ETS saying this is what you're going to do, but they were asked.
• 17:53
  Speaker 2: And yeah, so we were looking at them, testing all these weapons, and there was a point where they said, who hasn't thrown white phosphorus?
• 18:03
  Speaker 2: And offered them a new weapon.
• 18:06
  Speaker 2: White phosphorus, or phosphorus, is a.
• 18:09
  Speaker 2: It comes in a canister, you pull the pin, you throw as far as you can, because otherwise it's going to melt everything in contact.
• 18:17
  Speaker 2: It's nasty, and so it explodes and goes everywhere.
• 18:20
  Speaker 2: Well, I threw it at best.
• 18:22
  Speaker 2: Well, basically, I hid, thinking I haven't been trained on this, I'm keeping my head down, somebody else can do it.
• 18:31
  Speaker 2: And, of course, because I was the only female, I got suddenly pushed from the back and pushed all the way, pushed right to the front of all of this battalion, and he was like right, you, you throw it.
• 18:45
  Speaker 2: And I was like, no, he's like do it.
• 18:49
  Speaker 2: And so I threw it.
• 18:52
  Speaker 2: It was an all right throw, it wasn't the best throw in the world, but parts of the canister flew by me and sing somebody's boots, but it wasn't that.
• 19:03
  Speaker 2: It was every single eye on me and they just went silent as I stood there and I've never felt so humiliated in all my life and that message was why are you out here?
• 19:20
  Speaker 2: What are you doing here?
• 19:23
  Speaker 2: You sort of don't belong and nobody stepped out.
• 19:26
  Speaker 2: Nobody stepped out at that point and said you know, no, and I was.
• 19:32
  Speaker 2: They were like get your kit, you know, march on, in sort of thing, and I just thought this is going to be a really, really, really long tour.
• 19:43
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 19:44
  Speaker 1: And that was the beginning, and that was the beginning.
• 19:47
  Speaker 2: And then there were, you know, there were the little things, yeah, misogynistic jokes, there was a bit of knee touching.
• 19:52
  Speaker 2: There was, you know, a bit of inappropriateness.
• 19:54
  Speaker 2: But I, you know, I look back and part of my, my difficulty in forgiving me was because I was in such a difficult situation in order to survive well, you're in a war zone and in order to survive, the key part of it that you're accepted by a group and yet you're starting to have these infringements on your boundaries and things that aren't right.
• 20:21
  Speaker 2: But the danger of obviously speaking up is that you're rocking that apple cart and then you are isolating yourself from that group.
• 20:28
  Speaker 2: And so I actually allowed Liz when I look back and I take responsibility for this I allowed things to go beyond a point you know that there was not accepted.
• 20:41
  Speaker 2: I should have nipped things in the bud earlier.
• 20:43
  Speaker 2: I felt so, so unsafe out there.
• 20:48
  Speaker 2: So there was low level, that sort of stuff.
• 20:51
  Speaker 2: And then I was working with Americans.
• 20:53
  Speaker 2: I had a really nice relationship with Americans, really good fun, and we were doing things called psychological operations.
• 20:59
  Speaker 2: So this was anything from looking at.
• 21:04
  Speaker 2: So one of the things I was doing was training the Afghan National Army.
• 21:07
  Speaker 2: They would go out and collect intelligence off the ground from the local population.
• 21:14
  Speaker 2: But they were illiterate.
• 21:16
  Speaker 2: So how do we help them communicate, remember and know what information to gather?
• 21:24
  Speaker 2: And so I created this kind of symbol book look for them, so that they could go out, so they knew, they could remember from the images what they were gathering and then they could talk about these sort of things and bring them back in and that informed patrols where to go, where the Taliban might be, you know, hot spots, et cetera.
• 21:43
  Speaker 2: But we also did radio messages, all those sorts of things, and then went out on village medical outreach programs which was giving out humanitarian aid, water.
• 21:53
  Speaker 2: A doctor came out with us, you know, eventually, when one of the women did deploy out and she was female, all of those sorts of things, and that was great.
• 22:03
  Speaker 2: And what was sad there was you realized how hard life was because there were women that were my age, so I was in my sort of early thirties.
• 22:16
  Speaker 2: Then who'd had I mean they'd had a hard paper round, liz, you know, a really hard paper round.
• 22:22
  Speaker 2: They looked like, you know, they looked like they were in their seventies and then you didn't, interestingly, see a woman beyond really 12, because they went back into the household and they were married off.
• 22:38
  Speaker 2: You know, really, you know it opened my eyes to, despite the fact that all this was going on how lucky I was as a.
• 22:49
  Speaker 1: Western woman, Absolutely yeah.
• 22:52
  Speaker 2: Really put it in perspective.
• 22:53
  Speaker 2: Anyway I was having.
• 22:55
  Speaker 2: I came back and was working with the American.
• 22:57
  Speaker 2: They invited me to dinner and I had my CO opposite, my commanding officer who was running the battalion, and this adjutant, and up to that point I've been delivering briefs every evening talking about what had gone on and I had the eye rolls or these mutters of sit down or this passing like passing on very quickly.
• 23:20
  Speaker 2: You know when you feel I don't know whether you've ever experienced like an understated psychological pecking order and you're at the bottom and that's what it felt like, I think, the public set.
• 23:34
  Speaker 1: I mean there's somebody that hasn't worked for the public set.
• 23:36
  Speaker 1: It does seem very hierarchical.
• 23:37
  Speaker 1: So you watch police dramas.
• 23:40
  Speaker 1: It's all like God sir, whereas in the private sector you'd call your body.
• 23:44
  Speaker 1: Even someone way above you, you'd still.
• 23:46
  Speaker 1: You know, if you were in the meeting with him, you'd still refer to them as their first name.
• 23:50
  Speaker 1: And there is.
• 23:52
  Speaker 2: I think there are such differences and that sort of hierarchical structure definitely encourages in places unhealthy paradigm.
• 24:02
  Speaker 2: I think it does.
• 24:04
  Speaker 1: You watch medical dramas and I know the dramas and I know it's at least a drama, isn't it?
• 24:10
  Speaker 1: But you think, oh, you watch the consultants speaking terribly to their registrars and junior doctors and the nurses and everyone has to respect them because they are.
• 24:24
  Speaker 2: It's really old school because when you think about, like I did I trained my backgrounds in leadership and management and I've done a load of qualifications around it I think about the history of leadership styles and one of them is trait leadership.
• 24:45
  Speaker 2: These traits are inherently masculine initially and it was at a point where actually you were either born a leader or you weren't.
• 25:00
  Speaker 2: You were either born with this list of qualities or not.
• 25:03
  Speaker 2: Now we've had this argument that leaders are not born, then made and I would definitely agree our life experiences lead to us growing At that point and I think in these kind of hierarchies there is that superiority and there is that kind of you're putting them on a throne and we can give so much power away to somebody above us that we think knows more, has our best interests at heart, has more knowledge and experience, when actually what I realized is the only person in this whole situation bad situation for me was that had my back was me.
• 25:43
  Speaker 2: The only person that knew best was me, and the only way to really control situations in what is uncontrollable outside, which was uncontrollable for me outside, and to give me power, was to really work on my internal self, really know myself well and build my voice and my strength that way.
• 26:07
  Speaker 2: But it took something nasty for that to happen.
• 26:10
  Speaker 1: So you were at your meal.
• 26:11
  Speaker 1: Was it a meal you were at with the?
• 26:13
  Speaker 2: Sorry.
• 26:14
  Speaker 2: So we were at a meal and basically they sort of.
• 26:18
  Speaker 2: They were sort of so yeah, so I had no real proper conversations with the CEO and that background of every evening he kind of brushed things under the pulpit, wasn't interested in.
• 26:31
  Speaker 2: So I was talking to these Americans and I was talking about working out in New York and I've been a waitress out there, you know, as part of my sort of travelling experience.
• 26:40
  Speaker 2: It was great fun.
• 26:41
  Speaker 2: And the first thing he said to me, like a whole sentence, he leaned across and said so were you a topless waitress then?
• 26:49
  Speaker 2: And it's the kind of like, it's the kind of I don't know, schoolboy kind of comment.
• 26:57
  Speaker 1: Yeah, quite immature comment actually.
• 26:59
  Speaker 2: Is it?
• 27:00
  Speaker 2: He is a real teenage.
• 27:03
  Speaker 2: You know, sort of yeah, just really immature sort of thing to sort of say, but the ricochets were that it made the Americans really uncomfortable, you know, when they were like I don't know where to go, I don't know what to do with this, and he didn't stop there.
• 27:21
  Speaker 2: So I was like a bit shocked and said what do you think, sir?
• 27:25
  Speaker 2: And he said I don't know.
• 27:27
  Speaker 2: That's why I'm asking you, provoking it further.
• 27:30
  Speaker 2: And you know, I sort of shut it down.
• 27:33
  Speaker 2: But basically, funnily enough, this converse, this dinner ended very, very quickly and I went back to this Coramex so it's this metal container, you know and at that point no women had been out there.
• 27:49
  Speaker 2: They came out, I think in about the fourth month and I had this camp bed and you have this netting over it and the only privacy you have is this towel over the top and I burst into tears.
• 28:01
  Speaker 2: And I just thought there's absolutely no point bursting into tears, it's going to do me nothing.
• 28:06
  Speaker 2: But I was so exhausted I think that's that, you know, it was not, not, not, it's all these little things like I was saying that I hadn't nipped in the bud and I was stressed, I didn't feel safe and I was exhausted and I.
• 28:19
  Speaker 2: It was at that point that I turned the power dynamic around and I was like I'm done, I don't care who you are.
• 28:26
  Speaker 2: If you're a general, I don't care, because I also shut down.
• 28:31
  Speaker 2: I think this because I was frightened about my career, the implications on my career and I think lots of people.
• 28:38
  Speaker 1: Oh, 100%.
• 28:39
  Speaker 1: A lot of people.
• 28:40
  Speaker 1: That is a big thing, you know.
• 28:41
  Speaker 2: they don't want to speak up because they don't want to rock the boat, they don't want to be seen as a snitch, you know all of that and but the problem is it wasn't me speaking out that caused me complications in in my career, it was what happened to my health that caused the, you know, the end of my career.
• 29:02
  Speaker 2: So I did speak out.
• 29:05
  Speaker 2: I was like, right, right, I was right, his door open, he's like, and I said I don't know who you think I am or what you think I am, but don't you ever, ever, speak to me like that again, you know.
• 29:17
  Speaker 2: And I was a motive and angry, quite you know, forceful.
• 29:21
  Speaker 2: It was like, oh, you know, it was just a joke, can't you take a joke?
• 29:25
  Speaker 2: And I was like, absolutely was not a joke.
• 29:27
  Speaker 2: You demeaned me in front of all those people.
• 29:29
  Speaker 2: How dare you, don't ever do it again.
• 29:33
  Speaker 2: And, funnily enough, after that, so last sort of two, two and a half months, you know, he would stand up after I'd briefed at the evening briefing go.
• 29:42
  Speaker 2: Thank you, Well done, well done.
• 29:44
  Speaker 2: Thank you very much.
• 29:45
  Speaker 2: I was really falsely, and it was also too little, too late and you know news got out and what happened was females did come out.
• 29:57
  Speaker 2: They really kept their distance.
• 29:59
  Speaker 2: So I don't know this for sure, liz, but I'm guessing people got to them and said keep a wide berth from her.
• 30:05
  Speaker 2: And they did keep a wide berth from her.
• 30:07
  Speaker 2: I was very much ostracised by people and I had breakfast, lunch and dinner pretty much on my own.
• 30:15
  Speaker 1: It's quite school, isn't it?
• 30:16
  Speaker 2: When somebody bullied at school and is singled out, that's a really nice way of looking at absolutely, but horrible in that sort of situation and just, you know, just no need for it.
• 30:29
  Speaker 2: And then, beyond that, what happened was yeah, and I it's interesting about the bullying from school, like the behaviors and the dynamics and what we see acceptable and we learn from early on and how that translates into the workplaces.
• 30:49
  Speaker 2: Because if they're not dealt with early enough and we don't look at our behaviors, whether we enabled, whether we were the bully or actually you know, you know we were the bullied and we don't pick up on that early, how actually that can translate across because it doesn't change.
• 31:07
  Speaker 2: We're just human beings, right?
• 31:09
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I wonder, you know, because it was obviously such a stressful set and I feel like this might I don't want to excuse this behavior whatsoever, but it's obviously was a hugely stressful situation for everybody.
• 31:20
  Speaker 1: You know you're seeing your friends being killed right in front of your eyes.
• 31:24
  Speaker 1: I mean that's just awful for anybody and I think you know there might be something in it that those really really stressful situations force people to become a little bit more animalistic.
• 31:36
  Speaker 1: You know, you hear a lot of crimes that happen in war zones that I, you know, we'd like to hope, like to think, hope to think that wouldn't happen in a normal day today, society.
• 31:47
  Speaker 1: I wonder if it's a way of coping.
• 31:51
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 31:52
  Speaker 2: So soldiers do you know mentally prepare and compartmentalize.
• 31:56
  Speaker 2: You know they will shut down and compartmentalize and get themselves psychologically prepared.
• 32:02
  Speaker 2: You know to go in, but even so there needs to be boundaries, you know.
• 32:08
  Speaker 2: Within that, and you know it's one thing, I think fighting an enemy I'm not the enemy.
• 32:19
  Speaker 2: You know, and I think that you know that's what leadership are there for.
• 32:27
  Speaker 2: You know, not, you know, not that.
• 32:31
  Speaker 2: It's not about looking up the opposite way, because ultimately, yes, you're right, it's a high stakes situation.
• 32:39
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm definitely not excusing it.
• 32:40
  Speaker 1: I did think it should be addressed, but I just wondered if that's just absolutely yeah and forces extreme behavior.
• 32:47
  Speaker 1: That does need to be checked and therefore that leadership needs to be even stronger.
• 32:52
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and I think you know it's really.
• 32:54
  Speaker 2: It was really interesting psychology wise to see what happened.
• 32:59
  Speaker 2: You know, in barracks you don't quite see it, so that's back in in the UK.
• 33:04
  Speaker 2: But when, when you go over to one of these sort of sort of war zones, you see people really become like a really close pack and they have to be, because they have to trust each other and they have to have each other's back.
• 33:22
  Speaker 1: they have to trust their soldiers, skilled, you know, they have to have the backs of each other, but they have to trust that their person stood next to them will save their life.
• 33:31
  Speaker 1: If they need to Exactly.
• 33:33
  Speaker 2: Exactly so it's.
• 33:34
  Speaker 2: You know they become really really close.
• 33:36
  Speaker 2: So there was all that element there.
• 33:38
  Speaker 2: You know when I wasn't part of that, but then you could think about that.
• 33:42
  Speaker 2: You could think, well, actually you should have been integrated earlier.
• 33:46
  Speaker 2: So they did know who you were and they did know what you could contribute.
• 33:50
  Speaker 2: There were all sorts of things that were wrong, from how I was brought into the battalion.
• 33:56
  Speaker 2: You know alongside during the battalion and you know out to the other end.
• 34:02
  Speaker 2: So what?
• 34:03
  Speaker 1: happened after you had two months left.
• 34:06
  Speaker 1: It sounded like it maybe got slightly better.
• 34:09
  Speaker 1: I mean sort of not not much you survived anywhere the last two months.
• 34:15
  Speaker 2: And well, I know I was training the Afghan National Army command, second in command, and I was sexually assaulted.
• 34:21
  Speaker 2: And then I went back to the commanding officer to tell him this and he said, oh, you're going to go back and train?
• 34:27
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I said I'm not going back.
• 34:29
  Speaker 2: And he said, yeah, you are, you're going to take a pistol back in with you.
• 34:32
  Speaker 2: And at that point I felt so disempowered at that point and I, you know, I just think I really withdrew.
• 34:48
  Speaker 2: And then there was sort of I think there was a sort of a month left and then everybody else was getting posted back together.
• 34:59
  Speaker 2: They would go back to Cyprus, do something called decompression.
• 35:02
  Speaker 2: They keep an eye on you, look at your behaviors, and then you go back home.
• 35:09
  Speaker 2: But you know, a lot of people's trauma doesn't come out in the first two weeks, you know.
• 35:16
  Speaker 2: So it's actually a lot later on or it spirals slowly.
• 35:21
  Speaker 2: You don't realize.
• 35:24
  Speaker 2: But I got sent back on my own, posted on to a new place.
• 35:27
  Speaker 2: Nobody checked on me and you know you normally get your.
• 35:31
  Speaker 2: So they got their medals awarded at ceremony and mine were just sent in the post.
• 35:36
  Speaker 2: You know, it was just this whole treatment around.
• 35:40
  Speaker 2: You're not a value, or that was the message that I picked up from it.
• 35:45
  Speaker 2: And, of course, because I wasn't checked on and because what had happened, I, you know, I couldn't compartmentalize what had happened.
• 35:52
  Speaker 2: It was too big, you know, the lack of support from leadership, the you know lack of humanity, the poor treatment, the fact that nobody sort of turned and helped that.
• 36:04
  Speaker 2: All of this, the sexual assault, all of it together and it was just too much at that point for me to comprehend and I couldn't get to sleep, liz, and this was the first sign of problems that actually my brain was on overdrive and I was off skiing, on a skiing holiday, and you know you're skiing eight, eight hours a day, nine hours a day, and enjoying, you know, the, the, the, the kind of life, the social life out there.
• 36:34
  Speaker 2: But I was not sleeping at night at all and so it was a slow spiral down and I'd be doing work and I'd be bursting into tears when I'd be going into my room.
• 36:44
  Speaker 2: So my mood started to get erratic and my energy levels started to go down and it was.
• 36:51
  Speaker 2: You know, it was a real slow spiral down, but I could see my behaviors, I could.
• 36:57
  Speaker 2: I could see my mood and my health just getting worse and worse and worse.
• 37:00
  Speaker 2: But I was so frightened frightened to speak to the leadership because I just lost trust and faith in them, and frightened to say that I had a mental health issue because my observations of the how they dealt with people in system was just giving drugs and there was, there was no psychologist, there was only doctors and my own lack of understanding of what was going wrong and also my lack of understanding of how to help myself.
• 37:24
  Speaker 2: So you know, we've got psychologists, we've got clinical psychologists, we've got all sorts of people out there that can help us, and I was like I don't know and that's one of the reasons why I've become a trauma informed coach is that that journey, that four years when I sort of spiraled down before I got a diagnosis of PTSD, I was going to all sorts of people to get help and I couldn't understand why things were getting worse and at worst I'm talking about my hair sort of was falling out, was so thin and my lungs were starting to fill up with fluid and like chronic it's chronic stress.
• 38:04
  Speaker 2: So your stress response goes on, automatic overdrive is secreting all these sort of cortisol and glutacorticoids.
• 38:12
  Speaker 2: So you, your prefrontal cortices is sort of shut down and it's all about fight or flight, preparing your body to fight on flight, and that's what my body was in constantly, which then impacts your immune system.
• 38:26
  Speaker 2: Essentially, you can imagine I was mess and it was at that and I was going to get help, but people didn't recognize what I had and I think you know people are talking about trauma now, which helps a lot, but even back then I think people took my money and they knew I needed deeper help and once they didn't hurt me, they didn't refer me and so you were paying for a lot of these people privately.
• 38:55
  Speaker 1: then I did it all myself.
• 38:59
  Speaker 2: I used my whole mortgage.
• 39:00
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I didn't get anything and I haven't ever got anything of the military for it.
• 39:05
  Speaker 2: No, so, yeah, everything came out.
• 39:09
  Speaker 2: I just thought I have to put myself first here, and it was the beginning of really investing in me and trying everything.
• 39:17
  Speaker 2: And I was just lucky that I found a book.
• 39:19
  Speaker 2: And then I've got curiosity and I am a risk taker and I was so desperate by then that I was like talking about this at this point is actually dysregulating more and causing my stress response to increase.
• 39:33
  Speaker 2: So I know that now.
• 39:35
  Speaker 2: So what do I need to lower my stress response, to calm a central nervous system down?
• 39:40
  Speaker 2: And then I found a series of things and I found tools to help me.
• 39:44
  Speaker 1: What was the tools that helped you then the most?
• 39:47
  Speaker 2: So I think, yeah, so I'm going to incorporate this.
• 39:50
  Speaker 2: So I met some wonderful healers along the way that really really helped me and I realized that actually this there's a myth around having to talk about things.
• 40:01
  Speaker 2: I know inherently women are more likely to talk about things than perhaps women or that's the scene thing if we're talking about gender sort of spirit but actually I realized initially that that is not what was needed for me and understood that it was causing me further harm.
• 40:17
  Speaker 2: So I then investigated things like neurofeedback.
• 40:21
  Speaker 2: Which are these kind of electrodes?
• 40:25
  Speaker 2: Have you ever come across it?
• 40:27
  Speaker 1: No, it sounds a bit like old film where they used to put people, you know, mental asylum.
• 40:33
  Speaker 1: It's not like that, is it?
• 40:36
  Speaker 2: Well, when I explain it, you might think that as well in the electric shop.
• 40:39
  Speaker 2: But actually it was created by a NASA scientist initially and it's been slowly gaining traction.
• 40:49
  Speaker 2: And you put these electrodes on your heads and it's sort of then it's connected to a computer and it reads your brainwaves.
• 40:59
  Speaker 2: Now we produce different brainwaves alpha, beta, gamma, theta, delta brainwaves and they're all responsible for different things, from focus to deep sort of almost meditative state to sleep, and we need these brainwaves in the right frequency in order for our brain to work efficiently.
• 41:25
  Speaker 2: We only have so much cognitive load that we use.
• 41:29
  Speaker 2: And you know, if you think, liz, when you've been ruminating on something, you're using a.
• 41:35
  Speaker 2: You know a part of your brain consistently and you feel tired, don't you?
• 41:40
  Speaker 2: You know so if you are trained, it trains the brain, this neurofeedback.
• 41:45
  Speaker 2: So it will read through these electrodes, it will measure what's going on in different parts of your brain and, based on tens of thousands of people of your age group, it will look at the frequency you're producing and then go okay, on this bell curve, your alpha is an outlier, you know.
• 42:11
  Speaker 2: And instead of diagnosing and labeling you which is what I love about this, because I'm not a fan of labels, really.
• 42:20
  Speaker 2: You know, if they do help you with ways forward to heal, great, but neurofeedback will go.
• 42:30
  Speaker 2: What's your symptoms?
• 42:31
  Speaker 2: So?
• 42:32
  Speaker 2: Oh, I'm not sleeping very well or, you know, my memory's not very good at the moment or I'm not very focused, or you know I've got high anxiety or I'm feeling really stressed.
• 42:43
  Speaker 2: And then it will read and go okay, so your beta brain wave is your overproducing, which would correlate with this anxiety.
• 42:55
  Speaker 2: So the computer then mirrors back to the brain.
• 42:58
  Speaker 2: We're gonna lower the frequency and that's what your brain does the waves lower to that frequency.
• 43:06
  Speaker 2: And so you're training your brain to work in a different way and it encourages neuroplasticity, so different neurons to fire together and work in an alternative pattern.
• 43:21
  Speaker 2: So for me that was amazing because I was ruminating consistently.
• 43:27
  Speaker 2: It creates these like M25 pathways that are leading to chronic stress response, secreting these unhealthy, these hormones consistently and not shutting off.
• 43:41
  Speaker 2: So this calmed my stress response down and it allowed me to have more cognitive load to be able to think, and it changed the way my brain started to work.
• 43:54
  Speaker 2: Anyway, there's lots.
• 43:56
  Speaker 2: I didn't just do it like pie in the sky.
• 43:58
  Speaker 2: There is science behind it and I'd done my masters in psychology, so I was looking for interventions that had science back in.
• 44:07
  Speaker 2: But it's also used for peak performance, so you've come across Tony Robbins.
• 44:12
  Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, he's used it.
• 44:15
  Speaker 2: Quite a few entrepreneurs have used it to actually raise their game and get their brains in peak shape.
• 44:21
  Speaker 2: So while it was used for me for trauma, it's used in different ways.
• 44:26
  Speaker 1: So how do you help people?
• 44:27
  Speaker 1: So you, when did you launch this?
• 44:29
  Speaker 1: I was gonna say do you use it to your clients?
• 44:33
  Speaker 2: So I initially launched in 2015 after I left the armies, went and worked at a university and then set up my business and it was around leadership and I wanted to work with young leaders at that point so that they were better leaders than the ones that I saw.
• 44:55
  Speaker 2: So teaching leadership and management at university, et cetera.
• 44:57
  Speaker 2: So I started them and then slowly, over time, it's evolved and obviously I wanted to get in a place ethically where I had the training and the backing in order to help the people that I wanted to, based on these kind of bullying experiences, because that's not what I experienced.
• 45:18
  Speaker 2: So I wanted to make sure that it wasn't just lived experience I was coming from, but there were qualifications that backed up that I could understand the signs and signals of trauma that if somebody needed to be signposted, but I was also able to help them and have the signs backing there.
• 45:35
  Speaker 2: So, yeah, it's been an evolving journey really and there's three aspects.
• 45:42
  Speaker 2: So there's coaching and coaching groups and there's consultancy.
• 45:46
  Speaker 2: So that's been designing a training that, like we were saying earlier, yeah, talking to companies where there's more institutional kind of power dynamics about what's going on there and helping them, and then sort of talks as well.
• 46:05
  Speaker 1: And is there anyone in particular you help?
• 46:10
  Speaker 2: Yeah, women who perhaps have just experienced unhealthy power dynamics.
• 46:19
  Speaker 2: So it could be.
• 46:20
  Speaker 2: For example, I've been working with one lady who was basically five years of retirement, okay, and her belief is that you work hard, you're loyal and they'll look after you.
• 46:38
  Speaker 2: So that was her belief and basically she was really aggressively managed out and she then was faced with not being at a place where she could afford to retire.
• 46:50
  Speaker 2: It obviously really transgressed her core values around and beliefs around treatment, et cetera, and she had to find herself a new job.
• 47:00
  Speaker 2: So that was one lady, another lady who basically she was biracial and her boss said, wow, you're really acting white today.
• 47:14
  Speaker 2: It's such a shame you're not.
• 47:15
  Speaker 2: And that really hit her core values in terms of equality and who she was, and that impacted her by her losing sort of 30 pounds and she left.
• 47:29
  Speaker 2: She left that organization.
• 47:31
  Speaker 2: That's what she chose to do, because it really knocked her sideways that a leader could be like that, and so we worked through that choice.
• 47:43
  Speaker 2: So it's people that are in these kind of unhealthy power dynamics.
• 47:49
  Speaker 1: Unhealthy power dynamics that work or personal relationship.
• 47:52
  Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely.
• 47:53
  Speaker 2: Thanks for clarifying.
• 47:54
  Speaker 2: Yeah, so, in unhealthy power dynamics at work, and I think it's when you start to notice changes in yourself.
• 48:03
  Speaker 2: So where do you put a mask on?
• 48:07
  Speaker 2: And is that really authentic?
• 48:09
  Speaker 2: And why have you got a mask on?
• 48:11
  Speaker 2: Is it part of a survival strategy?
• 48:13
  Speaker 2: What's the energy around you?
• 48:15
  Speaker 2: Is it really masculine and is that your way?
• 48:18
  Speaker 2: And is that who you really want to be?
• 48:20
  Speaker 2: Because the more that we suppress our true selves, the more we carry ourselves away from who we truly are, and so we're not necessarily performing at our best selves.
• 48:31
  Speaker 2: So that wearing of a mask or are we just really exhausted and depleted by an environment?
• 48:38
  Speaker 2: So it may not be us that are experiencing the bullying.
• 48:41
  Speaker 2: It could be us witnessing other people being treated really badly and then actually that person leaves and you're left with the people that treated that person badly in the system.
• 48:54
  Speaker 2: And actually what does that say?
• 48:56
  Speaker 2: You know you're now in that unsafe space, really, and I think it signals quite a lot about that sort of culture.
• 49:05
  Speaker 2: Or maybe you've been put in a situation over COVID where you've been over-tasked, you weren't given the resources, and these have all had an adverse impact on your health or your relationships and you've just felt stuck.
• 49:20
  Speaker 2: And so I'm working with women who are sort of wanting to unpack this and decide what is right for them.
• 49:28
  Speaker 2: Is it about me developing strategies to perhaps reinforce my boundaries, to take things less personally, to be more asserted, or actually is it a case of it's really impacting my health?
• 49:46
  Speaker 2: I'm not putting that as a priority.
• 49:48
  Speaker 2: What will that look like?
• 49:49
  Speaker 2: What do I need to do to feel more healthy and what will that give me?
• 49:56
  Speaker 2: And from there deciding what is right for them, moving forward.
• 50:02
  Speaker 1: Has the army changed?
• 50:03
  Speaker 1: You know, since you were there.
• 50:09
  Speaker 2: I'm not there enough to know, but I would say that I've never had an apology, I've never had anyone recognise what I went through and I went back to speak out, so I wanted to call out.
• 50:24
  Speaker 2: I decided, as part of my building my strength and stepping into my power, was to go back and call it out, and it was probably quite a risky thing to do.
• 50:33
  Speaker 2: But I just thought I don't want any other woman to go through what I went through.
• 50:36
  Speaker 2: And, yes, so I've had no recognition of that.
• 50:43
  Speaker 2: But of course, if there is recognition, it opens a can of worms for them.
• 50:48
  Speaker 2: So they are going to keep a lid on things, so things might change from inside.
• 50:55
  Speaker 2: But there's only so much you can do, isn't there?
• 50:58
  Speaker 2: When you don't want to expose something, you want to keep a lid on it and I think part of the you think the exposure, because obviously we're recording this.
• 51:05
  Speaker 1: it's the day after the Met reports come out, is it Baroness Casey?
• 51:08
  Speaker 1: She has opened the can of worms.
• 51:10
  Speaker 1: It's laid bare what the Met is like as an organisation and how it treats the public and people that work for it.
• 51:20
  Speaker 1: Do you think that's a good?
• 51:22
  Speaker 1: I mean, obviously we're so early days, we don't know what's going to happen with this report, but do you think it's a good thing to basically open that can of worms and expose it?
• 51:32
  Speaker 2: I from my own experience, when I swept those little things under the carpet, I was also enabling that behaviour in terms of the message that it was accepted and you were just going to put up with it.
• 51:50
  Speaker 2: Now, rocking the apple cart and speaking up is really, really difficult because of the consequences of it.
• 51:59
  Speaker 2: But I came back to my values and I thought this is wrong and I cannot live my life knowing what I went through.
• 52:09
  Speaker 2: Lucky that I got through it, knowing that I'm not an anomaly.
• 52:13
  Speaker 2: There will be other people like this and there are worse cases than me.
• 52:18
  Speaker 2: So I needed to speak up, but you also and I write about it in one of my blogs speaking up the question mark.
• 52:26
  Speaker 2: In order for it to happen, you need the connotations of whistle blowing to be taken away and for actually people to be seen as courageous, authentic and those messages to be reinforced around people that are speaking up, because if you think about a person speaking up, they're speaking up because they want to improve the culture and not just for themselves.
• 52:49
  Speaker 2: It's about others around them.
• 52:51
  Speaker 2: But this whistle blowing has real connotations, so that needs to change.
• 52:55
  Speaker 2: And then also how leadership are dealing with it.
• 52:58
  Speaker 2: So, in the situation you just gave.
• 53:02
  Speaker 2: Then you've got a woman that's saying this has to stop, we need to call it out.
• 53:09
  Speaker 2: This is not good, and that is because too much has been brushed under the carpet and they think in the short term, great, we've got rid of the problem, but actually what you've created is a really long term cultural problem like this.
• 53:24
  Speaker 2: So absolutely I don't think it's any one thing, it's collective.
• 53:29
  Speaker 1: It's so much worse for them because now these repercussions, are this going to be last few years, whereas if they call out that low level behaviour, as it happens, you know, and they catch it early, then there is less long term repercussions for that organisation shortly.
• 53:47
  Speaker 2: You're absolutely right.
• 53:48
  Speaker 2: It was one of the things that I definitely would say to anyone is nip stuff in the bud, and it's really interesting what happens, like you can have.
• 53:59
  Speaker 2: For example, I deliver in a training company and one of the things they're teaching leaders is you know, the power of know.
• 54:06
  Speaker 2: So I thought, okay, when I had an idea for a training programme and I took it to this director and they said absolutely, we'd love to have your ideas.
• 54:20
  Speaker 2: And I said you can absolutely have my ideas for this course, but this is what I'd like from it.
• 54:25
  Speaker 2: And they said, oh, we can't really guarantee that.
• 54:27
  Speaker 2: And so I said, no, the repercussions from that work.
• 54:31
  Speaker 2: I got no more work from that director as an associate.
• 54:35
  Speaker 2: So that was a really interesting experiment and although it caused me problems, I realised do I really want to be in an organisation that has those values?
• 54:44
  Speaker 2: What messages does that send within a culture?
• 54:48
  Speaker 2: You know, to other people around?
• 54:51
  Speaker 2: You know, because they've seen you do this.
• 54:53
  Speaker 2: So when are they authentic?
• 54:56
  Speaker 2: How are they behaving?
• 54:57
  Speaker 2: You know, are they also playing the system?
• 55:00
  Speaker 2: Does that create a healthy culture, you know?
• 55:03
  Speaker 2: So I think, nipping things in the bud, even if it doesn't work out the way you want it to, gives you so much information and so much you can do from it.
• 55:16
  Speaker 1: You know well, you're an absolute inspiration, sophie.
• 55:19
  Speaker 1: Thank you so much for chatting with me today and telling me your story and your experiences and obviously about your, your business as well be your best coaching.
• 55:28
  Speaker 1: So how can people, if someone's listening to this and what you said resonates with them, where you feel they're in a toxic workplace or maybe they've recently left a toxic workplace and they want to acknowledge and, you know, be at peace with those feelings?
• 55:40
  Speaker 1: How can people connect with you and learn more about you and the services you offer?
• 55:46
  Speaker 2: Thanks, thanks, Liz.
• 55:47
  Speaker 2: So I offer one to one coaching.
• 55:51
  Speaker 2: So if you're interested in you know, discovering whether it's right for you, whether we would work well together, I offer a free sort of 30 minute chat and you can either go through my page on investing in women or you can find me on wwwbeyourbestorguk and just get in contact with me there.
• 56:17
  Speaker 2: I'm also just creating a group coaching program which will be sort of over six sessions and this will be again to create a really nice safe space something I just didn't have where people can bring their workplace current problem to be shared, to be heard and for them to experience, you know, support ideas that they can take away and implement as they move through this coaching journey together.
• 56:55
  Speaker 2: And I'll also be giving worksheets and strategies and I'll be doing a bit of teaching with that and then later on in the summer, what I'm also looking at is pulling together all the people that helped me with my chronic stress to deliver a retreat I've got the words now which will be abroad, which will offer all sorts of interventions and just lovely tools that people can take away, as well as coaching with me in a really nice sunny environment where you can really reboot and de-stress, so that's something else.
• 57:39
  Speaker 2: So look out for these sort of coaching group and the retreat.
• 57:45
  Speaker 2: Look how I'll be doing some posts through Liz's Facebook group and I'll also post it on my LinkedIn page so you can find me, Sophie Brigden, and you can DM me there.
• 58:00
  Speaker 1: Well, we'll put all the links in the show notes.
• 58:01
  Speaker 1: Thank you so much, Sophie, for your time today.
• 58:03
  Speaker 1: It was an absolute pleasure to chat with you.
• 58:06
  Speaker 2: Oh, and you Take care, liz.
• 58:07
  Speaker 2: Bye, thank you, bye.
• 58:11
  Speaker 1: Thank you for listening to another episode of the Work it Like A Mon podcast.
• 58:16
  Speaker 1: If you enjoyed this episode, please rate, review and subscribe, and don't forget to share the link with a friend.
• 58:22
  Speaker 1: If you're on LinkedIn, please send me a connection request at Elizabeth Willett and let me know your thoughts on this week's episode.
• 58:29
  Speaker 1: You can also follow my recruitment site Investing in Women on LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram.
• 58:34
  Speaker 1: Until next time, keep on chasing your big dreams.