Career change looks brave from the outside and feels like daily panic from the inside. Abigail Fleming spent fifteen years as a fashion designer in London before she did the maths on nursery fees, retrained from scratch, and started Ben the Hoose, her interior design business in Kendal. Four years in, she's still building, still scared, still going.

Listen if...

• You feel a low hum of panic even when things are going well
• You've made a career change and quietly wonder if you got it right
• You walk into networking events in your own town where nobody knows your name
• You did the maths on nursery fees and realised your old job wasn't going to bend around your new life
• You're a few years in and still waiting for it to feel easier
• You wonder if you're brave or just stubborn, and whether there's a difference

Keywords career change, imposter syndrome, business owner panic, working mum, mum guilt, starting a business after kids, building a business from scratch, business owner self-doubt, retraining, leaving London, interior design business, Cumbria business

Five lessons from the conversation

• The old life rarely bends around the new one. Abigail did the maths on twelve-hour days and nursery fees and saw the thing most people don't want to say out loud. The brave bit isn't realising it. The brave bit is acting on it.
• Panic isn't a sign you're doing it wrong. Abigail describes it showing up daily, four years into a business she loves. Most of us are taught to read fear as a stop sign. It's actually just weather.
• You can be direct about what you want without being too much. On the first date with the man who'd become her husband, Abigail told him she wanted children and didn't want to waste her time. The clarity didn't push him away. It got her the life she was after.
• Building something nobody's heard of yet is unglamorous work. There's no breakthrough moment. There's brochures dropped at suppliers, friendly hellos at building companies, networking events where you start from zero, and turning up again next week.
• Trusting yourself isn't a feeling you arrive at. It's a thing you do while the panic is still happening. The closing line of the episode is about dating, but it transposes to every brave thing she's done since.

Quotable moments

"I don't want to waste my time." Abigail on the first date with her now husband, being clear from the start about what she wanted.

"Panic will come on a daily basis." Four years into running her own business, on what nobody tells you about going it alone.

"I can do anything attitude, until you land that job and you're like, gosh, how am I going to do it?" On the gap between confidence and reality the moment a big project lands.

"Just trust yourself to be who you are and be able to meet the person that loves you for being you." The line Abigail would give her younger self. Said about dating, lands somewhere much bigger.

About Abigail Abigail Fleming is the founder of Ben the Hoose, an interior design studio based in Kendal working with residential and commercial clients across Cumbria and Lancashire.

About Ben Ben Hickman is an ILM Level 7 qualified business coach helping small business owners find joy through self-knowledge, courage and brave action.

Support the podcast The best thing you can do is share this episode with one person you think needs to hear it.

Get in touch reflectiverebels.co.uk

Episode length: approximately 1 hour 1 minute

You know that feeling where your career looks successful from the outside but it's quietly running you into the ground? Rebecca Bird was an MD, on anxiety pills and sleeping pills, so deep in the burnout cycle she couldn't see how bad things had got. In this episode she talks about walking away from all of it and starting again at 50 with nothing but a Canva flyer and three months' worth of belief.

Listen if you...

• You've been working until 11pm and telling yourself it's just a busy phase.
• You know you need to make a change but you're waiting until you feel ready.
• You perform confidence at networking events while falling apart on the inside.
• You've built something successful and you're quietly wondering why it doesn't feel like enough.
• You don't know who you are without your job title.

Keywords: business owner burnout, starting over at 50, entrepreneur mental health, burnout recovery, imposter syndrome business owner, work life balance, career change, self-doubt, overcoming anxiety, setting up a business, starting a business after burnout, vulnerable leadership

Five Lessons from This Episode

1. The hamster wheel doesn't announce itself. Rebecca didn't realise how bad things had got until she was on medication and off work. When you're in it, you can't see the wood for the trees.
2. You don't need a plan, savings, or confidence to start. Rebecca's dad told her to "paddle your own canoe." She set up Precision HR in five days, gave herself three months, and assumed she'd end up getting a job.
3. The fear doesn't go away, you just learn to do things scared. Rebecca was so anxious about networking that her counsellor gave her a strategy for what to do if nobody spoke to her. She went anyway.
4. Some things belong in the f*** it bucket. Rebecca's sister bought her an actual bucket. If you can't change it and worrying won't help, it goes in the bucket. She still uses it.
5. Growth and wellbeing don't have to be mutually exclusive. Rebecca's building again, but this time the work-life balance is non-negotiable.

Quotable Moments

"If I don't do it now, I never will. I'm going to be 50."

"I come across as this confident, outgoing person. I wouldn't have my photo taken. I never went networking anywhere."

"Are those emails you're doing till 11 o'clock at night going to make any real difference?"

"The worst thing for me would be sitting there thinking, well I failed and it's because I didn't do those things."

About Rebecca

Rebecca Bird is the founder of Precision HR, based in Cumbria. Find her on LinkedIn.

About Ben

Ben Hickman is an ILM Level 7 qualified business coach based in Carlisle. Reflective Rebels exists to spread joy, the kind that comes from knowing who you are, what you want, and having the courage to go and get it.

Support the Podcast

Share this episode with one person you think needs to hear it.

Get in Touch

For coaching enquiries visit reflectiverebels.co.uk. Find Ben on Instagram, or LinkedIn.

Something weird happens when things are actually going well. You hit your targets, good stuff is happening, and then one piece of bad news lands and suddenly that's the only thing you can see. This episode is about why your brain does that, and what you can actually do about it.

Listen if you...

• You've hit a goal you've been chasing for months and felt absolutely nothing when you got there.
• You know rationally that things are going well, but one bad thing happens and it wipes everything else out.
• Your response to stress is to work harder and quietly drop all the things that actually make you feel human.
• You're so fixed on where you want to be in six months that you've stopped noticing where you are right now.
• You've heard of gratitude journalling and always thought it sounded a bit naff, but you're starting to wonder.
• You feel like you should have your shit together by now, and somehow that just makes it worse.

Keywords

business owner burnout, entrepreneur overwhelm, imposter syndrome, negativity bias, arrival fallacy, gratitude practice, mindfulness for business owners, fear of failure, self-worth, burnout recovery, overcoming self-doubt, business owner mental health

Key Moments

00:00 - Ben's recorded the intro five times and decides to just open with that. It tells you immediately what kind of episode this is going to be.

01:30 - A client leaves the Badass Business Lab saying they didn't get value for money. Ben fixates on it despite hitting his revenue targets the same week.

03:27 - The negativity bias, explained without the jargon. Why our brains do this and why it's not a personal failing.

04:05 - The arrival fallacy. How we're so busy chasing the next thing that we forget we're already standing on the last one.

05:05 - What Ben actually did about it, and it wasn't working harder.

07:54 - Getting curious about failure instead of just feeling bad about it. How sorting his own state first meant he could actually learn something and do something with it.

Quotable Moments

"I was taking away the things that make me feel good and acting habitually out of a sense of panic." The moment Ben clocked what his stress response was actually doing to him.

"Energy in is energy out." Not a throwaway line. This is the thing that got him out of it. If you're running on empty, you cannot do good work for the people who are counting on you.

"There only exists this one beautiful moment in the present." The reminder that the future you're anxious about doesn't exist yet, and right now is the only place any of this actually happens.

"There's no such thing as failure, only data." The reframe that made it possible to learn from the client leaving rather than just feel terrible about it.

About Ben Ben Hickman is an ILM Level 7 qualified executive coach based in Carlisle, Cumbria. He works with business owners and leaders who want to build something worth having. reflectiverebels.co.uk

Support the Podcast The best thing you can do is share this episode with one person you think needs to hear it.

Get in Touch Interested in coaching? Head to reflectiverebels.co.uk or find Ben on Instagram and LinkedIn.

Episode length: 10:23