About Me

Welcome

I'm Jill - a Chartered Psychologist, counsellor and executive coach, with more than 25 years' experience in psychology.

But Uptrained Brain isn't based on my professional experience alone. In 2014, I experienced severe burnout myself. At the time, I knew a lot about psychology. I had a PhD specialising in human motivation and emotion and was working as a university psychology lecturer. But knowing the theory and feeling the warning signs didn't make me immune to burnout.

That experience changed the direction of my career. I trained as a counsellor, initially worked within the NHS, and later established ReThink Therapy, to be able to offer the kind of quality service I take pride in. Over the years, I've increasingly specialised in helping people with issues like burnout, work stress, confidence, perfectionism, procrastination, assertiveness, imposter syndrome, worry and overthinking.

I've also never really stopped being a teacher. For many years I taught psychology at university, including teaching mental health and neurobiology online with The Open University. Those years of experience taught me a great deal about how to take complex psychological ideas and turn them into clear, engaging online learning that people can actually use.

Uptrained Brain brings those parts of my experience together. It combines the psychology I've studied, taught and used professionally with what I've learned from working with clients — and from going through burnout and recovery myself.

My aim isn't simply to give you more information. It's to help you understand what is happening in your brain, emotions and behaviour, why you've become stuck in certain patterns, and what you can realistically do differently.

Because although everyone's experience is different, I know from both sides of the fence that burnout isn't solved by simply being told to relax, become more resilient or practise better self-care. Sometimes we need to understand ourselves differently before we can start doing things differently. That's what Uptrained Brain is designed to help you do.

My professional background:

I'm a Chartered Psychologist and Associate Fellow of the British Psychological Society (BPS) and a registered member of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP).

My qualifications include a PhD in Psychology, MSc Psychology, Postgraduate Diploma in Counselling and Diploma in Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT), alongside further specialist training in areas including Compassion-Focused Therapy, workplace psychology and online psychological services, with continual professional development. Read more here

I'm committed to providing psychologically informed support that is evidence-based, practical and grounded in real life.

Behavioural Science with a human touch.