Speak Up Without Fear: Proven Tips to Find Your Voice
Many women struggle with speaking up at work, often because of unconscious bias, fear of judgment, or past experiences where their voices weren’t valued. Overcoming that fear is possible, and it’s both a mindset shift and a set of practical strategies. Here are some ways: 1. Reframe Your Inner Narrative 2. Prepare and Ground Yourself…
Qualified Quiet: Why Women’s Voices Often Go Unheard
In a world that often rewards visibility, volume, and self-promotion, the quiet, capable contributors can go unnoticed. These individuals, often labelled as “qualified quiet”, possess deep expertise, strong work ethic, and sound judgment—but they don’t clamour for attention. Instead, their power lies in their steady presence, thoughtful insights, and understated confidence. As a result, quiet…
Spit It Out
“Just spit it out.” That was my response when my daughter came to me and said, “Mum, can I just ask you something?”“Yes,” I replied. And then… nothing. For the next five or ten minutes she danced around the subject, skirting the edges, dropping hints, but never quite saying what she needed to say. Eventually,…
10 Challenges Women Still Face at Work
Despite the progress made in recent decades, many women continue to face unique and persistent challenges in the workplace. These challenges often go unnoticed or unspoken, but they are very real—and they can have a significant impact on confidence, career progression, and overall well-being. Based on countless conversations, coaching sessions, and workshops with women across…
What is Imposter Syndrome?
Imposter syndrome is a psychological phenomenon where individuals doubt their accomplishments and have a persistent fear of being exposed as a “fraud.” While it can affect anyone, research shows that it is particularly prevalent among women, especially in professional settings. Here are some key points to consider regarding imposter syndrome in women: 1. Definition and…
Breaking the Bias: Unpacking Unconscious Gender Bias in the UK Workplace
Have you ever been in a meeting where a woman’s idea was overlooked, only for a man to repeat it and receive praise? Or noticed leadership teams predominantly male, despite a company’s commitment to diversity? These subtle patterns aren’t mere coincidences; they’re manifestations of unconscious gender bias at work. What Is Unconscious Gender Bias? Unconscious…
Finding Your Voice Launches
Two leading Coaches Launch ‘Finding Your Voice’ Workshops Fiona Porter and Yvonne Devereux, two leading Derbyshire coaches announce the launch event of their new ‘Finding your Voice’ workshops. The new Finding your Voice workshops, looking to support women who may feel that their voice is not being heard or that they could be achieving so…
How Women are Impacted by Unconscious Gender Bias
Unconscious gender bias refers to the automatic and unintentional associations or attitudes we hold about genders, influencing our understanding, actions, and decisions without conscious awareness. These biases stem from societal stereotypes and cultural norms, affecting various aspects of life, including workplaces, healthcare, education, and daily interactions. Manifestations of Unconscious Gender Bias Addressing Unconscious Gender Bias…
How do Organisations Mitigate Unconscious Gender Bias?
Unconscious gender bias refers to the automatic and unintentional associations and judgments we make about individuals based on their gender, influenced by societal norms, cultural traditions, and personal experiences. These biases can subtly permeate workplace decisions and interactions, often without conscious awareness, leading to disparities in hiring, promotions, and daily workplace dynamics. Manifestations of Unconscious…
Finding Your Voice: Empowering Women in the Workplace
Finding and asserting one’s voice in the workplace is crucial for personal and professional growth, especially for women who may face unique challenges due to unconscious gender biases. Here are some strategies to help women amplify their voices and make a meaningful impact: 1. Develop Self-Awareness Understanding your values, strengths, and areas for growth is…
Women in business: Inspiration to achieve more
Reading the local paper, the Derby Telegraph, it was fantastic to see the success of just some of Derby’s women in business. It’s great to see so many women talking about their journey and experience and offering advice. The stories were focussed on business women from a range of sectors but the common theme through…
EMCC UK Mentoring Special Interest Group
The Mentoring Special Interest Group was formed to bring together mentors and those involved in mentoring programmes. The aim of the group is to explore all aspects of Mentoring within today’s organisational, public and charity sectors and provide support to mentors.
Why Mentorship benefits Women Leaders
“Women hold up more than half the sky and represent much of the world’s unrealised potential.” Ki Moon (2011) The unbalanced representation of women in leadership is a significant social, cultural, and organisational issue. Given that women now represent 40% of the global working population1, it would be reasonable to expect a comparable gender ratio…
Training Mentors to support young people on King’s Trust programmes
The aim of the mentoring programme is to support and drive change to mentoring and provide wider support to young people at King’s Trust. The mentor development is aimed at existing and new mentors and will create a ‘toolkit’ for taking the young person on the journey. The programme utilises a range of interventions to…
Finding a Great Mentor
Are you feeling less than certain about your career, how to achieve your goals or what your goals are? Have you plateaued in your career? Maybe it’s time to find a mentor, someone that can help you to the next level. But how do you find the right Mentor? A mentor doesn’t have to be…
Key Skills of a Mentor
Skill #1: Open mindedness By far, one of the most important skills you need to have is the ability to keep an open mind. We all have our own thoughts, our own value system, and our own prejudices but by being open-minded we are open to other’s ideas, arguments, and thoughts that may not typically…
Can training take us only so far in raising levels of performance?
There is a saying ‘you don’t know what you don’t know’. The question is, knowing we don’t know everything, what’s the best way to learn more? We all have gaps in our knowledge, yet we are often expected to perform at a level that is beyond what we have been trained to do. Training teaches…
How Learning and Development is changing and the growth of Mentoring
The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted on the way people learn and develop the skills they need now and in the future. However, the crisis has proved to be an opportunity to examine how learning and development is delivered, to embrace digital technology and to support employee reskilling and redeployment. Evidence collected by CIPD: Learning and…
How Mentoring can benefit Apprentices
Mentoring is particularly important for apprentices as they are often young people entering the workplace for the first time it is an effective way of helping them to progress in their careers and helps them acclimatise to the workplace and gives them valuable support. Mentoring also improves communication between the employer and the apprentice, often…
The pandemic has hit young women the hardest, how Mentoring can help them
As employers we play a central role when it comes to improving young people’s access to the labour market, it is vital that organisations recruit young people if they are to build the skills they need for future success. Young people have been hit the hardest by the pandemic, not just with getting into work,…
The changing world of L & D post pandemic and the role of Mentoring
This last year our world has been turned upside down and this has had an impact on skills and learning. CIPD research (Learning and Skills at Work Survey 2021) highlights the upheaval and rapid changes in learning and raises questions for the future about how we continue to reinvent and reimagine learning and skills for…
Mentoring Ideas for Introducing Mentoring in your Organisation
Why Mentoring? When it comes to seeing tangible results and ROI from developmental initiatives, mentoring has a lot going for it, mentoring provides the follow-up, accountability and bedding-in of newly acquired skills and knowledge. Mentoring can be used in supporting other development initiatives in the organisation such as graduate programmes, talent management initiatives, succession planning;…
Why Mentor training is important to the success of Mentoring Programmes
The success of mentoring in the workplace is at risk if the mentor is not well equipped for their role. Effective mentor training is the key to avoid mentoring programmes from failing. Training gives guidance and maps out the path to a successful relationship. For mentor relationships to be successful it requires the mentor to…
Just-In-Time Mentoring
When people talk about mentoring as a way of supporting individuals, we often think about long term relationships that last anything from 6 months to 2 years and in some case longer. However, mentoring can be delivered over a much shorter time frame, Just-in-Time mentoring can be a useful method of providing fast, targeted support…
12 Interesting Facts and Statistics on the Benefits of Mentoring in Organisations
94% of employees say they would stay longer at a company if they were offered opportunities to learn and grow Nine in 10 workers who have a career mentor say they are happy in their jobs 67% of businesses reported an increase in productivity due to mentoring 55% of businesses felt that mentoring had a positive impact on their…
Has Traditional Training had its day?
There has been a shift in employee development and a greater awareness that training on its own, does not produce the transformational changes that organisations and individuals are looking for. There is a realisation and recognition that to change behaviours in the workplace and for people to achieve their full potential, on-going and more individual-led…
What are the similarities and differences between Coaching and Mentoring?
As a Coach and a Mentor, I am often asked this question. Coaching and mentoring are development techniques based on the use of one-to-one discussions to enhance an individual’s skills, knowledge or work performance. Development activities are designed to suit client’s personal needs (whether aspiration or performance related) and learning styles. Both are highly effective…
Are you are Considering Introducing Mentoring in your Organisation?
This webinar introduces you to the 5 steps, specifically designed for organisations that want to create successful mentoring programmes Download the guide here Mentoring is fast becoming the go-to development option for organisations that want to provide individual-led development programmes that are cost-effective and targets specific issues. From succession planning, equality, diversity and inclusion, leadership…
What is Effective Leadership?
“Leadership is a process by which a person influences others to accomplish an objective and directs the organisation in a way that makes it more cohesive and coherent”. There is no single definition that satisfies everyone. John Adair says ‘leadership, like all personal relations, always has something unknown, something mysterious about it’. However, there is…
Can Managers Be Coaches?
Line managers have a crucial role to play in people management and development and the ‘line manager as coach’ role is increasingly being advocated as an important part of line managers’ responsibilities, there has been a huge shift in thinking about management and leadership styles of line managers and how they play an important role…
How Mentoring can benefit Women in Leadership
This week we celebrated International Women’s Day and brought into focus the underrepresentation of women in leadership roles. What could organisations be doing more of to support women into leadership roles? The evidence shows that women are underrepresented among managers, directors and senior positions. While female representation in the overall workforce stands at just over 47 per…
Why Focusing on a Leader’s Mindset Makes a Difference to a Leader’s Performance
The mindset of a Leader defines who they are, what they do and why they do it. Mindsets influence our thought process which in turn influences our behaviours and actions. To change what Leaders do, you need to change how they think. Mindsets are leaders’ mental lenses that dictate what information they take in and…
What is Mentoring in an Organisation?
Mentoring can be used as a form of long-term cost-effective and tailored development for the individual which brings benefits to the mentee, mentor and the organisation. “Off-line help by one person to another in making significant transitions in knowledge, work or thinking” Clutterbuck, D & Megginson, D, Mentoring Executives and Directors (1999) “The purpose of…
How Leadership Mentoring can Support your Leaders’ Development
Mentoring leaders is a targeted and cost-effective method of developing your leaders. Mentoring provides the resources and support that is specific to the mentee’s needs, the result is positive action, goals achieved and mentees taking on responsibility for their development and performance. In my experience of delivering leadership development programmes, leaders take away a greater…
How can Mentoring benefit your Organisation?
Being mentored is one of the most valuable and effective development opportunities you can offer employees. Mentoring is primarily about developing capability and potential in the role rather than performance and skills and is distinct from training and coaching. Where training can provide development in skills and performance, mentoring provides the support to reinforce and…
To Be Effective, Leaders Need Their Team’s Trust
Trust Lies at the cornerstone of every relationship between a team and their Leader. To be effective, leaders need their team’s trust. Trust is empowering, improves overall employees’ motivation, productivity, wellbeing in the workplace and corporate culture. Trust is detrimental to leadership because leaders have the power to make decisions that can impact their team…
How Coaching Can Change Your Life
Have you been thinking about attending workplace coaching sessions but not sure how it will benefit you? Or is this whole ‘coaching’ idea new to you and you simply want to find out a little more info? Below, we’ve put together a handy list featuring ten super important reasons why coaching can change your life….
Coaching and Resilience
Have you ever felt completely bowled over by life’s challenges and threatening events? Do you struggle to stay positive or see a light at the end of the tunnel when things aren’t necessarily going your way? Now, think about a time where you feel you handled a difficult situation in a calm and collected manner….
The Benefits of Group Mentoring
People coming together to be mentored in a group has many benefits, group mentoring not only reduces cost as opposed to individual mentoring but also provides a support network. How I can help… If you would like to explore mentoring in your organisation and how it can work for you and your staff, then please…
Are You An Authentic Leader?
Over the last 15 years or so the views of what makes a good leader has changed somewhat. When I first set out as a leader in the 80’s the emphasis was on what you knew, your skills and knowledge, your title and the number of years of experience. Now I train people who have…
How Emotional Intelligence Can Improve Our Wellbeing and Happiness
During these unprecedented times there has been a lot of talk and advice about how to get through it. How to build our resilience, manage our stress, manage ourselves, stay motivated. How to effectively work remotely with family life going on, how to social distance but still stay connected.All good advice, the underlying themes as…
What Sets Emotional Intelligent Leaders apart?
What is Emotional Intelligence? In a world of work where people are increasingly accepted to be the competitive edge, any idea that seems to offer the possibility of enabling them to work together more co-operatively and productively is likely to raise a great deal of interest.Interest in emotional intelligence (EI) has grown over the last…
Why It Can Be So Hard for Leaders to Change
I recently attended a networking event and got talking about the link between organisational transformation and good leadership. I was asked “What do organisations do if leaders can’t see that they are a barrier to transformation and success therefore unwilling to change?” It’s a good question. As Manfred Kets de Vries says in The Leader…
Leadership Behaviours That Undermine Trust
Trust, as a Leader, is essential. It lies at the core of our relationships and interactions with everyone and everything around us. On a pure biological level, the human brain is programmed for survival, which drives us to take certain actions that are all affected, one way or another, by trust. If we trust something,…
The Skills and Behaviours of an Effective Leader
Much has been written about Leadership over the years, including what makes a good Leader, what makes a poor Leader and the impacts they have on their people. Yet while Leadership has evolved and different styles have come and gone as trends have changed, the core characteristics and traits of good Leadership have remained the…
Growth vs Fixed Mindset and the Implications for Leadership Development
Are the qualities of leaders carved in stone, are they ‘fixed’? Are leaders selected based on the traits that they demonstrate and that these traits are fixed? Are leaders born not made? There is an alternative viewpoint, that leadership qualities and traits are things that can be cultivated through effort, strategies, and help from others….
How Leadership is Changing in the 21st Century and Why We Need to Re-think Leadership Development
I have been training leaders and managers for the last 25+ years and amazed at how leadership has changed in that time. Firstly, there weren’t leaders, there were managers, individuals who were, more often than not, promoted because of their technical skills rather than their people skills. Managers went on training courses because of the…
How to Develop Your Future Leaders
Organisations need to be planning as to how they can develop and retain the next generation of leaders. Often, managers are promoted leaving a void of talent, skills, experience and knowledge behind them often due to a basic lack of succession planning. The result is a hurried exercise in developing staff to fill shoes, this…
Tribal Leadership: The Key to Building Great Teams
Tribes in companies decide whether work gets done, their influence is greater than that of teams, entire companies even CEOs. In companies, tribes decide whether the new leader is going to flourish or get taken out. They determine how much work gets done and to what quality. In my experience of working with teams in…
How to Identify Future Leaders in Your Organisation
In my experience more and more companies are reporting an urgent need to develop employees with leadership potential. This is alarming because, as more boomers retire, and Millennials move into management roles, today’s companies just aren’t prepared to meet the demands with leadership in their pipelines. As an employer, leadership development is crucial for your…
Finding Your Voice Workshop: Setting Goals
January can feel a bit like the Monday of the year, and it’s so easy to want to hibernate at home and put off setting your goals until the weather gets a bit warmer. Every now and then, we all need a bit of guidance to help set us up to follow the right path, so here…
What is a Vision Board?
On the topic of the new year and setting goals, a great place to start is to create a vision board, to give you a physical idea of your ambitions. Visualization is one of the most powerful mind exercises we can do. It allows us to invest our emotions such as excitement into future goals,…
Tips to set your New Year’s Goals
Setting goals is really important for self-development, as well as raising our motivation levels and giving us a sense of purpose. The Christmas period gives us all some much-needed time off to relax, spend time with family and indulge in one too many mince pies! But as the new year draws closer, we may be…
Happy Christmas from Finding Your Voice!
Now that Christmas is just around the corner, and the New Year is fast approaching, it’s the perfect time to review all your achievements over the past year. Studies have found that making progress towards your personal goals generates improvements in well-being, satisfaction and happiness. Therefore, it can be really rewarding to look back on…
My Authentic Self
Over the next few months, we will be choosing a different theme each week in which we will post videos, write blog posts and create statistics pictures about. Each topic coincides with something which is taught in our workshops and is a really useful bit of information if you’re wondering what our coaching entails. This…
Affirmations
So, what are affirmations? This refers to the emotional support and encouragement that we receive in life. This could be reinforcements from friends and family, such as verbal praise, or even something as seemingly insignificant as a hug. It can also come from ourselves, from within the voice in our heads which speaks to us. The…
Realising Your Values
Why are our values something which we should pay attention to? Our values are important because they help us to grow and develop. They inform our thoughts, words and actions. The decisions we make are a reflection of our values and beliefs, and they are always directed towards a specific purpose. Our values also help us to decide what is a…
Self-Limiting Beliefs
Over the next few months, we will be choosing a different theme each week in which we will post videos, write blog posts and create statistics pictures about. Each topic coincides with something which is taught in our 6 workshops and is a really useful bit of information if you’re wondering what our coaching entails….
When have you been at your BEST
Over the next few months, we will be choosing a different theme each week in which we will post videos, write blog posts and create statistics pictures about. Each topic coincides with something which is taught in our 6 workshops and is a really useful bit of information if you’re wondering what our coaching entails….
Recognising Your Strengths
Over the next few months, we will be choosing a different theme each week in which we will post videos, write blog posts and create statistics pictures about. Each topic coincides with something which is taught in our 6 workshops and is a really useful bit of information if you’re wondering what our coaching entails….
Finding Your Focus
Being able to grow and develop in your coaching sessions comes hand in hand with a lot of self-reflection, and finding out just what’s important to you is a great trick to learn in the earlier sessions. At Finding Your Voice, we will ask you to write down 20 things that are important to you…
Wheel of Life
Wheel of Life: What is it and how to use it? Over the next few months, we will be choosing a different theme each week in which we will post videos, write blog posts and create statistics pictures about. Each topic coincides with something which is taught in our 6 workshops and is a really…
How to set a goal (and stick to it!)
How many of us are guilty of setting a goal that we don’t stick to? In the spur of the moment, it’s relatively easy to decide that we are going to do something, however with this we have to take on a whole load of responsibility! Setting the goal is actually the easy part of…
We’re in the Derby Telegraph!
For those of you who may not have known, back in August (where has the time gone?!) we were really excited to have an article published by the Derby Telegraph! Our article focused on a current issue of the time: celebrity gender pay gaps. We discussed whether women feel that they have a voice when…
Coaching and Resilience
Have you ever felt completely bowled over by life’s challenges and threatening events? Do you struggle to stay positive or see a light at the end of the tunnel when things aren’t necessarily going your way? Now, think about a time where you feel you handled a difficult situation in a calm and collected manner….
Coaching and Procrastination
Procrastination: We’ve all done it. There may be an errand that needs to be completed- big or small- but for some reason you just can’t bring yourself to start it. At first, you may feel a slight nagging feeling, maybe a small weight pressing onto your shoulders as you push your list of tasks to…
Finding Your Voice Workshops: The Benefits
The change in me from starting the workshops to now is incredible. When I started the workshops I realised I had lost my mojo over the last couple of yeras. Since then, I’ve definitley got it back. Lucy Wondering about the benefits of Finding Your Voice Group Coaching? read our interview with Lucy! Want to…
5 reasons why coaching can change your life
Have you been thinking about attending workplace coaching sessions but not sure how it will benefit you? Or is this whole ‘coaching’ idea new to you and you simply want to find out a little more info? Below, we’ve put together a handy list featuring five super important reasons why coaching can change your life….
Finding Your Voice: Breakfast Event
We were very excited to host a breakfast morning for business (and aspiring business) women of the Derby and East Midlands area. As well as giving us a chance to talk about Finding Your Voice and demonstrate coaching in action, the morning was also a networking event allowing like-minded women to get together. We wanted…
Changes that coaching can bring about for women in the workplace
Did you know that 47% of women make up the UK workforce? Yet for every £1 earned by a man a woman earns only 81p. That’s almost 20p less! As women, we all know how frustrating it can be facing challenges around gender inequality in employment. What with Britain being ranked 11th out of 18…
The Benefits of Coaching
A problem shared is a problem halved, so they say, and we would say that when that problem is shared with a fully trained coach, with a wealth of experience in trouble shooting and conflict resolution, the problem is considerably more than halved. More often than not, it is resolved. Here at Finding Your Voice…
Mental Health: Give it the Attention it Deserves
Now that many more people from the media to the Royal Family are talking about mental health, it seems that this long “silent” family of illnesses are beginning to be taken more seriously. With Mental Health awareness week taking place last week, we can only hope that the stigma that has surrounded the severe illnesses…
6 Benefits of Women’s Group Coaching
Women coming together to be coached in a group has many benefits, group coaching not only reduces cost as opposed to individual coaching but also provides a support network for women. To hear how group coaching has benefitted someone on or Finding Your Voice workshops, go here>>>