In This Together: Same But Different
Welcome to In This Together: Same but Different, a podcast where my co-host Bernie and I have the honest, unfiltered conversations most people only have privately.
This isn’t a polished self-help show with all the answers. It’s just two mates doing what we’ve always done: talking about the spirals, the overthinking, the heavy life shifts and the tiny things that tip us over the edge. From burnout and perimenopause to navigating friendships and living with uncertainty, we dive into the messy, complicated realities of real life and the moments where you realise you aren’t the only one experiencing them.
Whether you need a bit of comfort, a gentle reality check, or just a laugh while you do the dishes, we’re glad you’re here.
I always love hearing from listeners. Drop me a line through my contact page to let me know what made you laugh, what had you thinking, or what you’re still chewing over. And if you like the podcast, leaving a five-star review (ideally 5 stars, obviously ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️) on your favourite platform is the absolute best way to help other people find us.
Season 1
In this first episode of ‘In This Together, Same But Different,’ we explore the essence of our new podcast by giving you a taste of what’s to come – authentic conversations about the challenges of being human.
You know, the type of challenges we all have (after all, we’re all in this together), but we often cope with them differently (because even though we’re the same, we’re also different).
We hope this episode emphasises the importance of connection and understanding as we all navigate life’s ups and downs TOGETHER, while also highlighting how we all have unique perspectives within our shared experiences.
Do you feel an intense pressure to completely reinvent your life the second January rolls around? In this episode, Bernie and I dive into the weird, wobbly, in-between space between Christmas and New Year. We talk about the expectation to reset, refocus, and make massive changes—even when you’re feeling exhausted, grieving, or just not ready for a massive launch.
This is an honest, reflective conversation about how the winter season actually feels, rather than how society tells us it should feel. If you are feeling stuck in a transition period and need a grounded perspective, this episode is a permission slip to slow down.
In this episode, we explore:
- The Liminal Space: Navigating the strange gap between Christmas and New Year without rushing into the next big thing.
- The Weight of January: Recognizing why the start of the year can feel heavy, flat, or emotionally charged instead of motivating.
- Ditching the Resolution Trap: Why rigid goal-setting works for some people but completely backfires for others, and how to approach personal growth differently.
- Grief and Anniversaries: Acknowledging how loss and significant anniversaries heavily impact our energy levels at this time of year.
- Small, Realistic Change: Focus on core values and sustainable habits rather than forced, drastic lifestyle overhauls.
- The Power of a Pause: Shifting your perspective to treat January as a time to pause and reflect, rather than a frantic launchpad.
If you are feeling stuck in a transition period and need a grounded perspective, explore my life coaching options to find the space for slowing down and figuring out your next steps on your own terms.
Trigger warning: This episode includes an honest conversation about suicide. Please listen in a way that feels safe and supportive for you.
Burnout and breakdowns rarely come out of nowhere. They build slowly, often in plain sight, until something in us simply can’t keep going the way it used to. In this episode, Bernie and I talk about what burnout and breakdown actually felt like in our own lives: Bernie’s slow-burn burnout after having her second baby, and my own breakdown years after my mum’s suicide, when my grief had nowhere left to go.
This isn’t a clinical or textbook conversation. It’s an honest, human one about what happens when we keep “cracking on” for too long. These moments aren’t personal failures—they are signals that we’re carrying too much and can no longer cope. If you are currently feeling depleted and recognize these signs in yourself, you can explore my resources on recovering from workplace burnout to help you find a way through.
In this episode, we explore:
- The High-Functioning Mask: How burnout can look perfectly fine from the outside while you are crumbling on the inside.
- The Slow Build: Tracking the quiet accumulation of chronic stress, and the exact moment it turns serious.
- The Invisible Load: Navigating parenthood, extreme sleep deprivation, and the mental weight that comes with it.
- Repressed Grief: What happens when trauma and grief are pushed down, and when the body finally says enough.
- Language and Stigma: Deconstructing the cultural stigma difference between the words “burnout” and “breakdown”.
- Our Coping Strategies: Looking at why things like overworking, exercise, drinking, or hyper-control make total sense in the moment.
- The Road Back: Learning to identify your own early warning signs, and what real recovery looks like over time.
We also dive into questions like:
What if burnout and overwhelm aren’t personal flaws, but our body’s protective responses?
How do you ask for help when you don’t even know what it is you actually need?
What would you want your younger self to know when you’re in the absolute darkest bit?
Content note: This episode includes discussion of OCD, mental health crisis, and suicidal thoughts (non-graphic). Please listen in a way that feels safe and supportive for you.
This episode is a direct follow-on from Episode 3, because after sharing the hard parts, Bernie and I wanted to talk about the “what next.” We dive into what actually helped us recover, and what we’ve seen help our clients over the last decade. We’re not offering a shiny, step-by-step “bounce back” story. Instead, we’re talking about the real, slow, messy process of coming back online—bird by bird. We explore the massive difference between change that happens after a crisis, and change you actively choose on an ordinary Wednesday when nothing is technically “wrong,” but something deep inside knows it isn’t working anymore.
In the conversation, I share how OCD played a central role in my breakdown and why having someone finally name what was happening became a massive turning point. It wasn’t because labels fix everything, but because being believed can be the absolute beginning of getting the right support. Bernie talks about the power (and pain) of being dismissed, why capacity matters much more than motivation, and what it looked like to make both small lifestyle shifts and big life changes after burnout. If you are ready to make a choice for yourself on an ordinary Wednesday, you can look through my life coaching options to see how we can map out that change together.
In this episode, we talk about:
- Understanding vs. Analyzing: Why understanding what is happening to you matters long before you try to tackle the “why.”
- The Sharing Boundary: The distinct difference between sharing from lived experience versus offloading your struggles in real time.
- Navigating Support: Therapy, building support systems, and why standard reassurance actually doesn’t help with OCD.
- The Quiet Insistence: Tapping into your “life force,” self-determination, and the inner drive to keep moving forward.
- The Overloaded System: Recognizing why making sustainable changes is incredibly hard when your nervous system is completely fried.
- Crisis vs. Choice: Comparing the forced pivots that happen after a crisis to the intentional shifts you choose for yourself.
- The Basics First: Managing your daily capacity, practicing deep self-compassion, and starting with the absolute fundamentals.
After a few heavier episodes on burnout and breakdowns, Bernie and I wanted to talk about something that can feel “lighter” on the surface, but is often just as loaded: exercise. In this conversation, we talk honestly about our messy, complicated relationship with exercise. This isn’t because movement is bad, but because the way it’s talked about culturally has become so noisy, pressurized, and completely disconnected from real life.
I reflect on what it’s like to renegotiate movement when your body, energy, and life no longer work the way they used to, and why learning what is “enough” can be harder than simply pushing harder.
We explore how exercise intersects with:
- Hormonal Shifts: Navigating perimenopause, changing hormones, and shifting physical identities.
- Limited Capacity: Balancing movement with burnout, chronic stress, and an already exhausted system.
- Demanding Lives: Fitting movement around grief, illness, parenting, and heavy life loads.
We unpack what happens when:
- The Overachiever Trap: You try to do all the things at once and inevitably end up burning out.
- The Total Freeze: You stop completely because the mere thought of movement feels like too much.
- The Motivation Myth: Motivation gets completely confused with true daily capacity.
- Vague Advice: Trying to “listen to your body” when that advice feels vague, frustrating, or impossible.
In the rest of the episode, Bernie brings out her gentle inner nerd to explain stress, recovery, HRV, and tracking tech—including when data can be helpful, when it can become harmful, and why it should never be the boss. Ultimately, this episode isn’t about finding the perfect way to exercise. It’s about context, capacity, trust, and building a relationship with movement that actually fits your body and your life, not someone else’s routine.
It’s the final episode of Series 1 and Bernie and I are ending on something we both care about deeply: what it’s like to show up in your work as a practitioner when your own life isn’t exactly “together.” People love to assume that if you’re a coach, you must be calm and wise 24/7, and that stress, grief, anxiety, hormones, parenting chaos, and real-life admin somehow bounce off you. Spoiler: they don’t.
This isn’t an episode about being perfectly regulated or having all the answers. It’s about being human, being ethical, and building support systems that help you do your work without pretending you’re unaffected by life. If you want to see how this philosophy shapes my day-to-day practice—and learn how to spot a practitioner who operates this way—you can read my guide on how to choose a life coach.
In this episode, we talk honestly about:
- The Reality of Showing Up: What it actually means to hold space for others when you’re in the thick of your own stuff.
- The Tool Trap: Why knowing the psychological tools doesn’t mean you can always access them, especially when you’re tired or triggered.
- Imposter Syndrome: Navigating self-criticism and learning how emotional repair gets quicker with practice.
- Our Frameworks: Demystifying relational and co-active coaching, guidance-based health coaching, and why the relationship itself matters most.
- The Mirror Effect: Understanding transference, countertransference, and the “parallel process” when a client brings the exact thing you are currently living through.
- Scars vs. Wounds: Practicing healthy boundaries and discernment by sharing from a healed scar rather than an open wound.
- Ethical Support: Distinguishing coaching from therapy, understanding scope of practice, the necessity of supervision, and what ethical support looks like.
We’re taking a short, intentional break after this episode to practice what we preach, but we’ll be right back here for Series 2!
Season 2
Content note: This episode includes discussion of death, dying, grief, trauma, funerals, dead bodies, sudden loss, and parental bereavement. Please listen in a way that feels safe and supportive for you.
We’re back for season two, and in true In This Together: Same but Different style, we’re starting with a nice easy one: death, dying, and the afterlife. In this episode, Bernie and I talk about something most of us spend our lives trying not to think about, even though it touches every single one of us. We explore what happens in our minds when we think about death, how our own experiences of grief have shaped us, and why talking about mortality can be both terrifying and strangely comforting.
I share my lifelong fascination with death, how losing my mum young shaped my worldview, and why seeing my nan after she died gave me a kind of closure I’d never had before. Bernie reflects on growing up Catholic in Ireland, how faith has shaped her relationship with death and the afterlife, and the deep comfort she’s found in feeling connected to those she’s lost.
Together, we talk honestly about:
- The Power of Mourning: How early experiences of deep grief permanently shape your worldview and relationship with time.
- Faith and Tradition: Bernie reflects on growing up Catholic in Ireland, and how faith has shaped her relationship with the afterlife.
- Finding Connection: Discovering deep, unexpected comfort in feeling enduringly connected to those we have lost.
- Existential Psychology: What happens in our minds when we face mortality, and how we handle a child’s fear of death.
- Spiritual Experiences: Exploring the unexplainable moments and ways that mortality strips life back to what really matters.
- Religion and Belonging: Navigating the tension that arises when traditional faith environments haven’t always felt safe or welcoming.
- Making New Meaning: How each of us has intentionally reconstructed our own meaning around what comes after this life.
This episode is full of the kinds of conversations people often only have quietly, privately, or not at all. It’s tender, thoughtful, a bit dark, a bit funny, and deeply human.
In this episode, Bernie and I are talking about friendship, and all the ways it can be both lovely and surprisingly complicated. Friendships are some of the most important relationships in our lives, but unlike romantic partnerships, they rarely come with a script. There’s no clear beginning, no clear ending, and very little public conversation about what happens when things shift, drift, deepen, or quietly fall apart.
I reflect honestly on how moving countries changed some of my own friendships in unexpected ways, why generosity and shared values matter so much to me now, and how I’ve become less willing to ignore things that don’t feel right in my connections. If you want to know a bit more about my background, my journey of relocating, and how I approach relationships in both life and business, you can catch up on my story here.
Together, we explore how friendship operates behind the scenes:
- The Closeness Scale: Navigating the strange grey area between acquaintance, casual friend, close friend, and ride-or-die, body-in-the-boot friend.
- Mismatched Standards: How expectations shape our dynamics, and why different ideas about effort, honesty, and availability create tension.
- The Practical Side: Bernie talks about having lower expectations around the day-to-day logistics of friendship, and the importance of matching standards.
- Shifting Roles: Understanding why different friends play completely different roles in our lives, and why that is actually a healthy thing.
We also dive into the messier realities of staying connected:
- Drifting and Ghosting: Unpacking what happens when connections quietly fizzle out, and the lack of closure that often follows.
- Friendship Admin: The role of vulnerability, self-awareness, clear boundaries, and managing the active “admin” of staying in touch.
- The Voice Note Lifeline: How technology and voice notes keep deep connections alive when life gets full and people live far away.
This one is honest, warm, funny in places, and full of the kind of conversation people don’t often have directly, even with their closest mates. If friendship has ever felt comforting, confusing, painful, sustaining, or just plain hard to define, this episode is for you.
What if grief isn’t just about losing people… but losing versions of your life? In this episode, Bernie and I are exploring the quieter, less visible side of loss—the kind that doesn’t always have a clear name. From those unexpected moments that catch you off guard, to the lives we didn’t live, the choices we didn’t make, and the parts of ourselves we’ve outgrown, this is a conversation about all the ways grief shows up far beyond death.
We dive deeply into the idea that you can absolutely love the life you have, and still grieve the alternative one you left behind. If you are sitting with the weight of paths not taken and trying to figure out how to ground yourself in the choices you are making today, you can read my reflection on deciding what you actually want out of your life.
We explore what it looks like to face these invisible shifts:
- The Bittersweet Mirror: Navigating that complex, heavy feeling when you see someone else experiencing something you never had.
- Sliding Doors Moments: Looking back at the paths not taken, the choices we didn’t make, and the alternative versions of our lives.
- Ambiguous Loss: Processing unmet needs, outgrowing old parts of yourself, and understanding yourself differently later in life.
We unpack the emotional weight behind our decisions:
- The Cost of the Right Choice: Why even the healthiest, most correct decisions can still come with a profound sense of loss.
- Timeline Pressure: How societal timelines, heavy expectations, and invisible milestones complicate the way we process our own timelines.
- The Parallel Grief: Unpacking why it is entirely possible to love your current life completely, while still grieving the other one.
This one is honest, deeply reflective, and very “same but different.” Because sometimes the hardest losses to process are the ones no one else can see.
In this episode, Bernie and I are talking perimenopause. Not as experts with all the answers, but as two women right in the middle of it. This one is honest, emotional, funny in places, and deeply validating for anyone who’s ever wondered: “Is it just me?”
I share my terrifying experience of dealing with intense neurological symptoms, going through scans and hospital tests, and being told it might be MS or a brain tumor before finally discovering it was perimenopause. If your own body and energy levels are going through wild, confusing shifts right now and you’re trying to make sense of it all, you can read my take on navigating perimenopause to help you understand how to better manage your daily routines.
In this conversation, we lay it all out on the table:
- The Scary Realities: My journey through terrifying neurological symptoms and medical testing alongside Bernie’s experiences with endometriosis, anxiety, UTIs, and body changes.
- The Medical Fight: Navigating acute health anxiety, being dismissed by medical professionals, and why so many of us feel we have to fight just to be heard.
- The Overlap Trap: Unpacking the messy, confusing overlap between burnout, chronic stress, overwhelm, and hormonal changes.
- The HRT Pivot: Our honest experiences with HRT and the massive difference it made to our well-being within just a few days.
We also explore the mental and physical transitions:
- Changing Identities: Dealing with weight gain, brain fog, fatigue, forgetting basic words, and learning how to live in an entirely different body.
- Nervous System Overwhelm: Recognizing the profound emotional and psychological impact of hormonal shifts and learning how to regulate your nervous system differently.
- The “Me Too” Power: Why connection, sharing these raw stories, and hearing “me too” matters so much when you feel isolated by your symptoms.
Anyone else feeling like the world has collectively lost the plot? Between politics, wars, rising costs, climate anxiety, social media, and the endless stream of breaking news, it’s no wonder so many of us are feeling overwhelmed, anxious, and emotionally exhausted. In this episode, Bernie and I dive into what happens when our nervous systems are exposed to a constant flow of alarming information, and why so many people are walking around carrying chronic stress, fear, and uncertainty.
This isn’t a conversation about ignoring what’s happening around us. It’s about finding ways to stay informed, stay connected, and stay human without burning ourselves out in the process. If you’re feeling completely consumed by the chaos right now and want to learn how to navigate these heavy feelings, you can explore my support options for living with uncertainty.
We explore how global instability impacts us behind the scenes:
- Nervous System Overload: What happens to our bodies when we are exposed to a constant stream of alarming information, keeping us stuck in survival mode.
- The Psychology of Control: How uncertainty affects our day-to-day wellbeing, and why we desperately seek certainty when life feels highly unstable.
- Trauma and Contagion: Understanding vicarious trauma, emotional contagion, and the heavy impact of constant news consumption.
- The Doomscrolling Trap: How social media algorithms intentionally exploit our fear and keep us hooked on negative cycles.
We look at how to navigate the noise without burning out:
- Politics and Belonging: A thoughtful look at politics, community, difference, and fear, and how to stay engaged without becoming consumed.
- Community over Chaos: The vital importance of community, deep connection, and staying curious rather than defensive.
- Glimmers and Bloom-scrolling: Learning to actively look for “glimmers,” practicing a little more bloom-scrolling, and finding simple ways to feel grounded.
Maybe the answer isn’t carrying the whole world on our shoulders. Maybe it’s putting the phone down for a bit, looking for the helpers, watching cute Shetland ponies run around a field, and remembering that we’re all just doing our best to make sense of a very noisy world.
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“Listening made me reflect on my year and choose to nourish myself instead of setting another resolution I’ll give up on.”
“So great and took so much away from you both. Burnout sucks — this made me feel less alone.”