Jess West

Most of the women I work with are good at their jobs. That’s part of the problem. Capability keeps you upright long after the role stopped being sustainable, and it hides the cost until the cost is very large.

I coach senior women through burnout and through what comes after it. Sometimes that means staying in the role with different terms. Sometimes it means leaving. More often it’s a slower piece of work: separating the load that was issued to you, the load you absorbed without anyone asking, and the load you’d genuinely choose.

Burnout is not a personal failing. The evidence points to conditions rather than character — workload, control, reward, community, fairness and values (Maslach and Leiter). So I don’t work from a fix-yourself premise. We look at the system honestly, and then build what’s actually yours to build.

My background is in corporate change management at director level, leading large multi-site programmes in financial services. I know the environments my clients describe from the inside: restructures, relocations, teams delivering through permanent change. I’m also a 500-hour yoga teacher and a certified burnout coach trained with Dr Neha Sangwan, so we treat physical signals as early data rather than metaphor. Broken sleep, a short fuse, Sunday evening dread — that’s information, and it usually arrives before the mind admits anything.

I offer 1:1 coaching, small group programmes, and half-day retreats.

Credentials: ICF ACC. Certified burnout coach (Coaching.com, ICF-accredited). 500-hour yoga teacher. MSc Project Management. I host the Successful AF podcast on burnout and redefining success.