Hello and welcome. Based in Hampshire and covering Berkshire, Surrey, London and throughout the South East, NewDay Coaching is a life coaching and wellbeing practice providing coaching, support, understanding and awareness around all aspects of mental health. I am also available for online coaching wherever you may be.
Ready to return to work, but the thought of it is beginning to stress you out? My practice uses traditional coaching techniques to develop a programme specially focused on getting you back to work, addressing causes of your stress and feeling confident and supported. And we won’t stop there. We’ll continue our coaching sessions after your return to make sure that you have support for the day to day realities of being back at work.
There have been two occasions in my life where I returned to work after a period of absence due to mental illness. The first time, I was desperate to return because I looked at myself in the mirror and couldn’t see anything wrong with me and felt like a fraud. I rushed back too soon and with no professional support. Looking back I remember setting foot outside the front door with my suit on my first day back and as I pulled the front door closed behind me and heard it latch, I felt incredibly alone. I am convinced that that haste resulted in my next period of depression - the only reason it took so long was because I was kept going by the love and support of my family and friends.
That second period of depression, over two years later, was just as hard to recover from. But once I started to make that recovery I was much more structured and thoughtful about my return to work. I didn’t neglect that side of my recovery. I worked with a career coach. I properly assessed what I wanted to do, where my strengths lay and developed a return to work plan and mindset. The result - a far more successful return, working with a bunch of the most supportive and inspiring people you could hope to meet.
My goal with NewDay Coaching is to make sure that you don’t have to take those first steps back into work alone and to ensure that your return is as positive an experience as possible. Plus making sure that you retain that support once you are back at work for the hills, valleys and turns that experience is likely to take.
Everybody is different and everybody’s experience is different so there isn’t a set programme schedule I can show you. How we develop your return to work plan will depend on your circumstances and as your coach it is my job to guide you through the process using whichever tools and techniques are most appropriate to you.
That said the basic support package focuses on four different but connected areas balanced to work best for you and your situation. This 1-2-1 Coaching programme is at the heart of what I do.
Understanding both the practicalities of the return to work and your own feelings, anxieties or expectations is the first step in creating a robust return to work plan. I know that as you recover from mental health issues, corralling those thoughts can be really difficult. An experienced coach is trained to help you make sense of what you are thinking, experiencing and feeling.
What can you do? Your mind is an amazing thing and can generate myriad ideas about any particular issue. Our problem, especially in today’s soundbite world, is finding a way to focus and harness those ideas. That’s where NewDay comes in. Together we’ll take the precise questions about your situation and your return to work and using coaching techniques we’ll generate as many ideas as you want about how to answer or address them.
What are you going to do? So how do those options fit together? What order do you need to do them in? How can we break them down into manageable actions? Who can help you with some of them? Just some of the questions we’ll work on together as we get into the practical part of your programme and develop a detailed plan for the build up to your return to work and the first days back at the coal face.
A 19th Century Prussian military commander said that no plan survives contact with the enemy. And its true that the world rarely behaves exactly as we have anticipated. But the 1-2-1 coaching package includes sessions after your return to work to ensure that we can address any issues or bumps along the way and continue your progress to a successful and rewarding career.
