Anaïs Comot is owner of HerCode Podcast and HerCommunity. In this episode, she tells her story about how she is originally from France and the corporate journey that led her to London where she is now a career strategist who helps women build a career they're truly happy with. Coming from a procurement and consultancy background, she has made multiple career transitions herself and experienced the struggles associated with a career that is not fulfilling, even impacting her own health and other aspects of her life. She has found connection with other expats who are living and/or working abroad and the unique set of challenges that comes with that. Ultimately, she is enjoying the freedom she can have to travel back home with the option to work from a traveling home office while visiting friends and family on occasion.

Anaïs has worked with 200+ professionals from various backgrounds and industries, generally meeting with her clients in 1-on-1 online coaching sessions, but she also offers group coaching and runs HerCommunity virtually as a free space that includes weekly resources available to anyone looking to make the most out of their careers. She strongly believes that life is too short to fill unfulfilled at work and actively supports her community through various channels, including the HerCode podcast in addition to HerCommunity.

Anaïs can be found in the following places:

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anaiscomot/

Website: https://www.hercode.co.uk/

Joe Gallant is from Kent, England, and he is the owner of Be Gallant where he designs websites and other content and helps create visual identities for small startup businesses and charities. His passion is helping people and organizations to find their voice online, through effective branding and quality content.

In this episode, Joe tells his experience of how he has worked for a variety of small companies and also churches and how his family recently made a move from a coastal location back to closer to home now that he has a wife and young daughter and dog and what it was like to build a home office that was more intentional this time around. Joe is officially leaving some of his former part-time and in-person work in order to dedicate his attention to his remote business at this time.

Joe recommends finding ways to make a workspace enjoyable to be in and personally finds that starting his day with prayer and meditation sets his day on the right path. Joe believes if someone can find what works for them in terms of a routine, they can discover more productive times of day but don’t sweat it if it doesn’t always go to plan.

You can find out more about Joe and his work at begallant.uk

Instagram: Jgchurchcomms 

Kelly McGinley, from Mechanicsburg, PA, is the principal consultant and owner of her company Function & Flow where she serves as a productivity specialist who loves to explore different tools and tactics for time and task management. She comes from a background of working in a remote job where she was working long hours and felt overloaded and working all the time and has transitioned to her new role where she has much more autonomy over how and when she works which has shifted her balance so that it feels so much closer to the perfect fit. In this episode, Kelly discusses how she organizes her work day and how she has had to combat letting her work bleed into the rest of her life life, especially when she didn't plan her downtime. She has put defaults in place so she can do a better job of enjoying life outside of work as well. She and her spouse have both been working from home, and she tells the story about how she's accidentally trapped her husband on one end of the house while conducting meetings in a shared space.

Kelly offers productivity coaching for people and project managers and has actually just published her book Start With Better Meetings, a tool for managers of any kind of team, but especially practical for those leading remote and hybrid teams with an aim to help foster more effective meetings and ultimately restore about 2-3 hours of usable time to a given work week while still making steady progress toward goals and deliverables. She often meets with small teams remotely to work on meeting management and also offers group and individual sessions on calendar and time management help as well as assistance with task prioritization and teaches reflection. Her Procrastination to Action Package focuses primarily on identifying "procrastination preference," roadblocks, distractions, key goals, and a path to consistently make progress toward those goals. She comes with a rich history of working with nonprofits and other organizations including connecting classrooms to communities, designing productivity strategies for corporations and non-profits, and turning a maximum-security cell block into an award-winning, tail-wagging incubator for compassionate change at the HOPE Dogs Program. Kelly has spent the last 25 years designing and building programs, partnerships, and place-based projects and is a professional member of the National Association of Productivity and Organization Professionals (NAPO) where she serves on the Education Advisory Committee.

Ever on the hunt for the best remote-work tools, Kelly has decided that ClickUp is her favorite app for managing multi-stage projects and loves how she can map a project any way she likes and then have reminders automatically integrate with her Google calendar.

Kelly can be found on her website: https://www.findfunctionandflow.com

Instagram: @findfunctionandflow

Steve Mellor is from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, USA and he is owner and executive coach of Career Competitor LLC for 2 Years. His "first & final 30" advice is his key to every day where, in order to maximize productivity and mental health, he focuses on how he uses the first and final 30 minutes of his day in order to make the most of his time. In this episode, Steve shares how he feels that having commitments that intentionally pull you away from your desk throughout the week are vital for social reasons and to provide some variety for certain tasks.

As an executive coach, Steves's motto is "pursue your optimal self," and he likes to bring everything back to clients who work from home to the importance of serving the optimal self. He works with clients currently on ensuring they are focused on their optimal selves so they can build a workday and lifestyle that embodies their growth of it. To this end, Steve wrote a book called "SHOCK THE WORLD! A Competitor's Guide to Realizing Your Potential" which could certainly be a powerful resource to anyone looking to better lead their work-from-home lifestyle. 

Steve actually has almost 2 decades of experience working with elite performers within high-performance environments as an olympic swim coach, and he talks about how Covid-19 helped push him into coaching for business execs and more. Whether in his role as an executive coach, culture consultant, speaker, or author, Steve’s work targets bringing the best out of individuals, while ensuring teams and organizations are optimized through the process. This native of England, former top-50 world-ranked swimmer, husband, father, and lifelong competitor is driven to pursue his optimal self by working with those that are eager to do the same.

Email: Steve@careercompetitor.com 

Website: Careercompetitor.com

Instagram: @Coach_Steve_M

Jill Wright is is an author, podcaster, and coach at Grow Like a Mother based out of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. She has two gigs and is currently commuting into the city for her corporate job while building up her coaching business with an eye toward perhaps eventually transitioning out of her 9-5 to focus solely on her own business. In this episode, Jill shares some time management and productivity tips for working mothers, including those who juggle things as work-from-home mamas. Jill shares some tips that might be of use, especially to single moms and those with shared custody, and gives some of her own advice about how she has managed her time around her family's unique schedule which, for her, sometimes means that her down time and a chance to decompress happens on her commute to her day job so that she has more time for focus on her coaching business and clients when she's working from home.

Jill has dedicated the last 4 years to personal development as she grew her business and taught others how to achieve alignment and balance in all of their roles through a variety of techniques. She does have free workshops, digital courses, and offers 1:1 and group coaching, and is willing to share her free 5-day video series. She is an entrepreneur-turned-life coach focused on helping moms achieve alignment with themselves and balance in all areas of their lives.

Jill can be found in the following places:

Website:  www.livingwithheart.ca

Podcast: Grow Like A Mother

Instagram: @growlikeamother

Jessica Rhys-Griffith, from Shropshire, UK, is a work/life coach for female "mum" executives who are feeling not quite good enough. She helps her clients get to a place where they feel, calm, and confidently in control of their lives as the role model they want to be for their children and the leader they want to be in their professional life. In this episode, Jessica shares insight on her own journey coming from a corporate world where she was considered a key player in senior management to working from home for the same organization (1 day a week was adjusted to 5 days a week starting in 2020), and then the more recent transition to working for herself. She shares some of her personal experiences as she's made the shift and how she can now turn around and help others, including remote executives, in making their day-to-day better. She comes from the perspective of being someone who has had to juggle the challenges of building a supportive and positive home environment for herself and her child while handling the increasing demands and expectations of an executive role in what has become an increasingly volatile world. At the beginning of her remote-work life, Jessica experienced some discomfort with the changes and experienced some of the ups and downs but has worked to minimize the negative aspects and enjoy a more balanced life.

Jessica now runs JRG Coaching, Ltd, and her coaching is centered around health and positivity, time management, and manageable to-do lists. She offers tips for connecting with children and different ways to keep them motivated in the home environment. Jessica enjoys being able to walk her child home from school in the afternoons and has just planned for that as part of her daily routine. Some of her strategies also include heading to a local coffee shop for a change of scenery and ensuring she has meetings scheduled to help with motivation and keeping engaged. She speaks about adjusting her mindset and being present for family and changes she made to herself as a leader to ensure that she keeps positive and energized. When she made key decisions around being clear on what kind of life she wanted for herself and her daughter, by setting boundaries, asking the right people for help, and changing aspects of how I worked, she found a way to enjoy home and work and even find time for herself!

Jessica has always been motivated by working with individuals and teams to achieve their best and wants to take what she's learned to support others in similar situations to find their way to be their best selves and be successful at home and work. She does offer a 30-minute free consultation (with no obligation) to do a work/life balance audit and provides some practical tips that people can start to implement.

Jessica can be found in the following places:

jessica@jessicarhys-griffith.com

https://jessicarhys-griffith.com/ 

Shane Spraggs left his role in the office at the start of the pandemic and joined Virtira, a Canadian company that helps organizations work without boundaries by optimizing their remote teams and processes. Virtira had been working remotely since 2007. It was interesting for him to learn their best practices while remote work was evolving as a result of the pandemic. He is now the CEO of Virtira. He lives in PST a few hours from Vancouver, but most of his team is out East, and the company serves teams in the USA as well.

In this episode, Shane talks about his experiences working remotely as a CEO. He is passionate about remote management, strategic planning, and culture. They have a "no meeting Friday" policy at their company that is followed, for the most part. If someone can book at least a week in advance, they'll be guaranteed to be able to pick any time of day. He feels that at this point in his career and his role, he has a pretty good handle on being able to moderate his work with everything else and enjoys how he has the flexibility to go for a morning hike with friends every morning and can fit in the occasional urgent project. He shares some of his remote-work advice: "Don't eat at your desk - it's far too easy to overeat, plus you miss an opportunity to take a break." He's also a fan actually using his sit-stand desk.

Shane has been driving successful projects for a variety of notable media and software start-ups for 25 years. Shane recently co-authored a book with Cynthia Watson, The Power of Remote, which just launched on February 7, 2023. Virtira's website offers a remote readiness assessment that reviews an organization's fitness for remote work.

Connect via LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shane-spraggs/

Virtira website: Virtira.com

https://books.forbes.com/books/the-power-of-remote/ 

Janet McKenna Lowry is a small business owner running Massachusetts Tax School for Practitioners out of Greenfield, Massachusetts. Janet says that she is not a tax expert and never was particularly confident in her math skills, but she's learned that preparing taxes is more about organization, and there's very little math involved. There's a huge demand for the work despite more and more people having access to the software to do it themselves, droves of people would still rather pay for help. It's a great field for anyone who needs flexibility (moms, artists, people who want to travel so many months out of the year, gig workers who have a slow season, etc). Janet and her business partner had been running their course onsite at a local university but moved everything to an online format with the blessing of the IRS during the pandemic, and they've decided to keep it online as it offers more flexibility to the attendees. She's now wearing multiple hats as CFO, webmaster, marketing, registrar, and operations. This tax school partners with tax experts who teach the courses to meet the 72 hours of continuing education hours tax preparers are required to complete every 3 years. 

In this episode, Janet shares how the topic of tax preparation has become an especially exciting one, because she's helping get people access to flexible work in a way she wishes she had earlier in her life, like when she had younger children. There's actually an extreme deficit of tax preparers as many of the people in the field are entering their retirement years, so if people want flexible work or to just work 3-4 months out of the year, this is a great field to look at (and it can be lucrative too, especially for those who go on their own and/or take the extra steps to do business taxes and trusts and estates). Some big name tax preparation sites do require their employees to have a degree, but it's actually something that is available to people with or without high school diplomas or college degrees as the methods can be learned just by working alongside someone in the field and learning online, keeping up with the continuing education hours. Some people do go into accounting to have more consistent work throughout the year, but it's not necessary.

Janet has actually been living the dream working from home on and off in different capacities for about 10 years, and currently she has gotten it to where she has a busy season where she's working 40 hours a week for a few months while they're putting on their course and then it relaxes down to about 25 hours a week for the rest of the year where she focuses coaching and consulting around being a better boss, skills like learning boundaries and negotiation skills as an employee. She went back to school at age 50 and earned her MBA from Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland. 

Janet can be reached through her website at:

Massachusetts Tax School for Practitioners mtsfp.com

She also has a podcast Working 9 to Thrive: https://working9tothrive.com/