Beatha Coaching

Dear friends

Booking now open for Burnout Rewire…

When I started Beatha Coaching in 2022 I launched on a single focus: burnout. I had seen so much (and experienced so much) in academia – truly amazing women (and men) with fantastic brains, top notch qualifications and experience, full of passion and empathy, getting crushed by the weight of expectations placed on them and the sheer demands of the job. What shocked me was how often I heard some version of, that’s the price of success. I also heard a lot of, the system is broken, but that didn’t come with any practical solutions. Instead, burnout seemed to be generally accepted as the cost of being an academic.

Burnout can look like a lot of things – fatigue and low mood; reduced capacity for work; loss of passion and motivation. These are the obvious things. But it can also look like feeling unable to take breaks, neglect of hobbies and relationships, multiple unfinished projects, forgetfulness, regular colds and infections, poor skin, loss of appetite, weight gain, physical injuries, and rapid cycling between anger, tears, and exhaustion. These are all predictable outcomes from living in a state of high stress for a long time. Cortisol gets a bad rep for being the hormone that causes anxiety and those nasty jittery panic feelings. But it is also responsible for getting us out of bed in the morning. It’s an anti-inflammatory too, so when cortisol is in balance our cells have better protection from illness and damage. Extended periods of stress without rest ultimately result in low cortisol levels as the adrenals become fatigued. This is something that many academics don’t seem to understand – burnout isn’t a state of mind, burnout is physical. If you push your system beyond capacity for long enough, there will be consequences.

Over the last two years I have had the pleasure to work with lots of lovely clients facing a wide range of challenges and looking for tools to feel more in control. My practice deals with a lot more than burnout these days – I particularly love the Refresh Your Writing retreats I started this year, getting to work with amazing writers to boost their confidence and creativity is one of the favourite things. But burnout still shows up in so many of my clients and coaching enquiries. That’s why I created the Burnout Rewire programme last year and piloted it with a small group of community members. Over three months we explored the roots of burnout and how to be in the best place for recovery, how to repair the damage caused by burnout, and how to resource for the future. Most burnout trainings only address recovery, with the aim of getting people back to work pronto. I am more interested in helping clients to find genuinely sustainable ways to protect themselves against becoming burnt out again – real healing, not just a sticking plaster.

This year I am running the Burnout Rewire course over three weeks in September, and I’m making the first seminar free so that as many people as possible can at least access some first aid. My hope is that by offering the entire course at a reduced price and compressing it into a month it will be possible for more people to attend before the academic year starts up again. We’ll be approaching burnout holistically, looking at the physiology, the neurology, and those pesky emotional issues, so that each participant can put together a tool kit of approaches that work best for them.

On Thursday 5th September join me FREE at 2pm for BURNOUT RECOVERY. This 1.5hr seminar will explain what causes burnout, give you the opportunity to do a self-assessment of your state of burnout, and offer first steps in coming back to full health.

You can register your interest in the BURNOUT RECOVERY workshop here:

The remainder of the course takes place of the subsequent two Thursdays and costs £75.

On Thursday 12th September we’ll be looking at BURNOUT REPAIR, how to rewire your brain and reinstill self-care principles after a long period in extended stress. On Thursday 19th September join me for BURNOUT RESOURCE to learn how to widen your window of tolerance (your nervous system’s capacity for stress) and establish boundaries that you are able to protect going forward. Both these workshops last two hours and include group coaching. The sessions are recorded and you have access for one month to download them. Participants in the course can also access reduced cost 1-2-1 coaching with me after the end of the programme.

You can book in for the whole programme here now. I hope you can join me!

Community events in August

Our members community is a busy place this month. Co-writing and group coaching take place as usual. We also have a workshop coming up next week on Wednesday 7th at 1pm – take a Deep Dive into Values and learn more about what makes you tick, why some choices are easier than others, and how to move more into alignment with your core values. This will be a guided journaling workshop so come ready to write and explore!

We also have a mini Refresh Your Writing on Wednesday 14th at 2pm! This is open to all participants from the retreats at Easter and June, I hope you can rejoin us and spend some more time writing together. The retreat will last about two hours with fun exercises and a chance to chat about our projects. Look out in your emails for the zoom link.

The community is a low cost way to access workshops, coaching, and support with me and a lovely group of women from all stages of the academic journey. Membership costs just £18 a month to access everything, including a library of previous workshops on topics like Boundaries, the Inner Critic, and the 3 Ps of Academia. And there are lower cost subscriptions for PhD students and precarious academics. Members get FULL ACCESS to Burnout Rewire so if you think you might like to come to the course and some other events it is a much better financial option!

Find out more and join the membership here!

My news…

I’ve been covering for some local yoga teachers whilst they took holidays this month – I’ve never taught so much yoga in my life! It’s been really interesting teaching in a gym setting where people come expecting a movement class rather than nervous system work and somatic therapy, but I still dropped in some little bits of neuroscience like eye movement drills and postural tips. I have to say I am ready to drop back to my usual one or two classes a week now – I probably put too much effort into planning but it takes a lot of effort to create new flows several times a week. Respect to full time teachers!

I also went to a fantastic writing workshop at Arvon this week – if you don’t know Arvon they run accessible online masterclasses with an amazing array of writers, you can find their class schedule here. The workshop was with Dr Jessica J Lee, an environmental historian and author of several literary non-fiction books, including Dispersals which I am listening to on Audible at the moment. It was so encouraging to work with another former academic who is writing successfully in a different field and genre to the one she started out in, and especially helpful to see a sneak peak into her Scrivener! I came away with lots of new ideas and fresh juice for my own academic-writing recovery journey!

And finally…

That’s all for me for now, I’ll be back with another newsletter later in the month, but you can connect with me more regularly over on Substack where I recently wrote a piece about how the things we have been told by others can haunt our writing process. And if you fancy some movement I’m still releasing a weekly class on YouTube including this one for a boost of energy:

How are you doing? I’d love to hear from you so drop me a comment or send me an email!

Francesca x