SineadBrady

SineadBrady Career & Coaching Psychologist. &Sinead Brady is a coaching & development methodology focusing on how we work, progress and flourish in the workplace.

Sinéad Brady, a Career Psychologist, is a designer of organizational and career change. Standing alongside companies and individuals she uses best practices in psychology, to encourage progressive 21st-century workplace choices. She does so by distilling complex professional challenges into practical implemental strategies. Over the years she has pivoted from a permanent pensionable job to intrapr

eneurship, sidetrepreneurship and to solotrepreneurship. With a professional background in humanities, law, and psychology she has walked in the shoes of change. So, she intimately understands the exciting and scary challenges associated with it. A regular keynote speaker and media contributor, on this topic, her practical insightful approach earned her the title of Today FM’s Sunday Business Show ‘Career Guru’. Founder and CIO (Chief Inspiration Officer) at &Sinead Brady mum to 4, wife, daughter, sister, and friend she chooses to blend life and work. An early riser, a compulsive reader who adores red shoes, she exercises to stay fit and keep healthy. Not surprisingly her specialist subject area is the 21st-century workplace and the future of work.

&Sinead Brady has featured on

The RTE Toady Show
Ireland AM
Today FM's Sunday Business Show,
Newstalks George Hook, Sean Moncrieff and Bobby Kerr,
IMAGE Magazine,
The Sunday Business Post,
The Evening Herald,
Phoenix,
The Sunday World,
U-Magazine,
IMAGE.ie,
Herfamily.ie,
Eumom.ie,
FamilyfriendlyHQ.ie. Mummypages.ie

07/09/2026

Be careful what you’re praised for at work & how you use that praise to make a decision about what next in your career…

It may become the next ten years of your career.

Organisations promote what they need more of.

That doesn’t mean you want more of it.

❌So the place to look is not the praise itself.
✅Instead look at what the praise is pointing at next.

Promotions usually give you more of the work that made you valuable in the first place aka the thing you were prepared for.

so when the promotion based on the praise comes around ask yourself whether you want more of that.

Not whether you could do it, you already know you could, and so does everybody around you.

Ask yourself do you would want your career built around more of it, for longer, with more of that responsibility resting on you.

And if that question is hard to answer, your body has usually answered it already.

Think about the last time you did the thing you are known for and did it well, and ask how you felt straight afterwards.

Sharper, stretched in a good way, more like yourself?
Or mostly relieved that it was over?

Relief does not mean you are not good at it. Quite often it means the opposite, that you have become exceptionally capable at compensating for something that is costing you.

There is more on both praise, promotions & next steps of in this week’s newsletter.

Send me the word NEWSLETTER and it comes directly to you ✨

01/09/2026

We tend to trust career decisions more when we can justify the ‘why’ to ourselves & to others….

A difficult manager.
An unreasonable workload.
A workplace that has become genuinely toxic.

But what happens when there is no dramatic reason except that you don’t like your career or your job & it’s felt like that for a while?

I see it every single day with the women I work with on The Courageous Career Programme.

The facts are you don’t need a reason to want something different or to want more. And you 💯 % are not ungrateful for wanting it.

Sometimes a role stops fitting.
The work feels distant.
The personal cost becomes harder to ignore.
And you don’t recognise the professional person you have become.

That knowing can feel too quiet to act on, especially when the job looks perfectly to everyone else.

But you don’t have to wait for things to become unbearable before you trust yourself & give yourself permission to acknowledge how you feel.

If this is a decision you’re quietly circling save this as a gentle reminder that you are allowed to want more ♥️

31/08/2026

Career chaos doesn’t always begin because the job is wrong.

Sometimes it begins because the language that carried you this far can’t help you decide what comes next.

For years, the questions have been:

❓Can you do the job?
❓Can you meet the objectives?
❓Can you demonstrate the competencies?
❓Are you ready for the next level?

Far less often & as you progress in your career & become more senior far more importantly the questions need to be:

✅What do you bring that isn’t written in the job description?
✅What kind of work brings the best of that out of you?
✅What do you need work to make possible in your life now?

So when the familiar next step stops feeling right, or when the tap on the shoulder stops, you feel disoriented & disconnected from who you are.

The reality is, you’ve been taught (and rewarded) for how to assess yourself against the job.

You may never have been taught how to assess the job against you, who you are, what you need and what has changed in your wider life.

Your title can describe where you work and what you’re responsible for.

It cannot fully describe the person doing it.

Follow for Episode Three of Career Chaos next Monday.

30/08/2026

The difficult thing about waiting is that the reason is rarely unreasonable.

The organisation is restructuring.
Your family needs stability.
You don’t have the energy to make a careful decision right now.

So you decide to wait until things settle.

But when one reason disappears, another takes its place.

And because you didn’t leave, it can feel as though you didn’t make a decision at all.

That’s how “not yet” becomes four years.

Yes, waiting may be the right decision.

But it still deserves to be recognised as a decision, one with a cost, just like leaving.

That cost is rarely dramatic, in fact it’s often slow & silent…

It can look like losing interest in work you’re still very good at.
Or arriving home with so little left that even the things you used to enjoy begin to feel like effort.

So if the same thought returns every weekend, you don’t have to act on it tonight.

But it is worth recognising that waiting is the decision you’re making for now, and asking yourself:

How long have I been waiting for the right time?

You finish a difficult project and move straight on to the next one.You remember the meetings, the deadlines and the pro...
26/08/2026

You finish a difficult project and move straight on to the next one.

You remember the meetings, the deadlines and the problems you sorted.

But you don’t get to eat lunch let alone the time to stop to ask:

What does that experience tell me about how I think, relate, judge or solve problems?

This is how experience amnesia happens.

You remember what happened, but you don’t have the time and were never taught how to extract the skills beneath the experience.

The project is not the skill.

The skill is in what you actually did:
The information you connected.
The dynamics you read.
The judgement you exercised.
The trust you built.
The structure you created when none existed.

Then there is the difference your work made.

That might be a measurable result.

But it might also be a clearer decision, a repaired relationship, a problem caught early or a team finally understanding what was happening.

Naming the skill helps you understand what you can do.

Evidence makes the work behind it and the difference it created easier for someone else to see.

If you want to get better at recognising and articulating the skills you already have, try the exercise & follow me.

S x

25/08/2026

There is a name for the feeling in this reel, and it is experience amnesia.

It is what happens when your experience has only ever been visible to you through the context you developed it in.

The title, the team, the clients, the salary, the status.

Those markers are how you have recognised your own expertise for the past ten, twenty or thirty years, so when you imagine them gone, it can feel as though your expertise goes with them.

But here’s the thing those expertise remain & they are YOURS.

What went missing is the evidence you were using to see it.

It is made worse by how the work was named while you were there.

Relationship building,
Judgement ,
Reading the room,
Seeing the connections
Knowing when to move or not,
all of it was relied on constantly but not seen & when it was it was written up as being good with people.

The thing is what is badly named is hard to see, and what you cannot see is hard to carry into a new context.

So the separation is between three things.

There is the context & title which stays in the building.

There is the outcome, which may never repeat itself anywhere else, because the conditions that produced it belonged to that place and that year.

And there is the expertise underneath it, which is the only one of the three that travels.

So tell me when you think about experience amnesia…
What’s the one thing you do that (you don’t give yourself credit for) that they’d need two people to replace if you left?

24/08/2026

You answer emails at traffic lights, or on a Sunday evening, just to feel on top of things.

I bet you’ll recognise that in yourself, a colleague or a friend.

It’s called rust out, and it’s one way Career Chaos begins to show itself.

Your days are relentless.
Meetings are back to back.
Email after email…
Deadlines, decisions, & everyone needs something from you.

You carry an enormous amount of work and still feel that very little of it is asking you to think differently, stretch, learn or grow in your career

So you begin to question yourself.

Why am I struggling?
Where is this deep tiredness coming from when I know I’m more than capable of doing the job?

The thing is, being busy is not the same as being engaged.

You can be overloaded with activity and underloaded with meaningful challenge at exactly the same time.

That gap is exhausting.

And that disconnect drains you and it is called Rust Out.

But Rust out doesn’t stay at work.

It follows you home.

It shows up in the thing you used to love but cannot be bothered doing anymore.

The friend you keep meaning to ring.

The weekend that passes without a single part of it feeling as though it was actually yours.

And because you’re still delivering, still busy and still getting everything done, notices.

Which is why the amount you are doing doesn’t tell you the whole story.

The Is my work asking too much of my time and too little of me?

Send this to the woman you thought of while I was talking ♥️

You’ll do the school run, book the dentist, have the meeting, every single thing that’s for someone else, and you will n...
12/08/2026

You’ll do the school run, book the dentist, have the meeting, every single thing that’s for someone else, and you will not book one Sunday that’s entirely yours.

So we’re giving you one.

I’ve teamed up with Skin Formulas to give away two tickets to The Female Formula on Sunday 23rd August at Fitzgeralds Woodlands House Hotel & Spa in Adare, Limerick.

One for you, one for the person you’ve been meaning to see properly since January.

It runs 10am - 4pm, an expert-led day around women’s health hosted by Geraldine Jones, founder of Skin Formulas Geraldine Jones. Gentle Pilates to start, a guided self-care facial, a curated lunch, an honest panel on sleep, nutrition and female health, and a breathwork session to finish.

And you’ll both go home with a gift bag worth over €130.

Two tickets, two gift bags, and one Sunday where nobody needs a single thing from you.

HOW TO ENTER:
- Follow Sinéad Brady | The Career Psychologist, Skin Formulas and The Female Formula
- Like this post and share it to your story
- Tag who you’d bring in the comments

One tag per comment, and you can comment as often as you like, every tag is an entry.

Entries close Monday 17th August at 11pm. Winner drawn at random and announced Tuesday 18th August. I’ll only ever contact you from this account, so ignore anyone else claiming you’ve won.

Open to residents of Ireland aged 18+. Travel not included, no cash alternative. This giveaway is not sponsored, endorsed or administered by, or associated with, Instagram.

Good luck!
S x

11/08/2026

Here are the 3 podcasts I listen to every time a new episode is released, and I talk about them with my CCP and 1:1 clients 👇🏻

by
by
by

Why?

They all speak about the real life issues and lived experience we all have but those same topics tend to be written into the margins.
Grief
Politics
Women’s Health
Relationships
Business

And all of the wider issues that shape people’s lives particularly the lives of people who have not always had a voice or heard their lived experiences being spoken openly about.

AND every single episode is done with depth, integrity & kindness…

And what I really love is the fact that they each make space for complexity rather than turning every episode into a lesson about how to fix or optimise ourselves.

You might wonder what any of that has to do with your career & leadership identity?

Quite a lot and the research tells us so because our colleagues, team members, clients, customers, leaders, never arrive at work separated from the rest of their lives.

We each arrive at our desks living the experiences that these women are speaking about.

So if we (and we should) want to work and lead at a human level,
we need to listen to experiences beyond our own, encounter perspectives that challenge what we think we know,
and question assumptions that have started to feel like facts.

That’s why I broadening what you listen to, read and engage with matters for your career, even when it has absolutely nothing to do with careers.

What are you listening to, reading or watching at the moment that is making you think differently?

S x

06/08/2026

You keep telling yourself you’re behind but what if you asked a different question?

So before you answer think about this…🤔

How do you know?

What evidence are you using to decide that?

Is it because someone you know got promoted?

Because your LinkedIn feed is full of career announcements?

Has it’s been a few years since your last pay rise?

Or is it that you thought you’d have your next role by now?

Here’s what fascinates me about this….

Every week I meet brilliant ambitious people who are convinced they’ve stalled in their career.

Then we start looking more closely.

Evie, a lady on CCP, told me she’d plateaued because she hadn’t been promoted for years.

Yet during that time she’d learned to hold her boundaries, stop answering emails at traffic lights and at 9pm, navigate difficult conversations without shrinking, and lead with far greater confidence and clarity.

By the scorecard she’d been using, she’d gone nowhere.

By almost every other measure, she’d changed completely.

So it makes me wonder…

How many of us aren’t actually behind?

How many of us are simply measuring ourselves using a definition of success we never consciously chose or wanted in the first place?

Because if promotion is the only thing that counts as progress, what happens to everything else?

What happens to becoming a better leader?

Making decisions with more courage?

Learning to protect your energy?

Developing stronger boundaries?

Building a career that fits the season of life you’re in?

None of those things appear beside your name on LinkedIn.

But they shape how you experience your career every single day.

So what if the question isn’t about being behind.

Maybe it’s that you’re using a scorecard that was never designed to measure the career you’re trying to build.

So here’s a different question.

What evidence have you been using to decide whether you’re making progress in your career?

I’d love to know drop a comment below or send me a DM.

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