The Super Helper Syndrome: A Survival Guide for Compassionate People – The Happy Menopause Podcast

Season 4 • Episode 8
Jess Baker, Chartered Psychologist & Author

Are you a caregiver? The shoulder for everyone else? The fixer in your family? The workplace workhorse? Is there no time for self-care?

Women are hardwired to nurture, and it can be very difficult to know where to draw the line if we think that other people need us. Women are hardwired to nurture, and it can be very difficult to know where to draw the line if we think that other people need us. And that can be a real issue, because selfcare is a non-negotiable for women in midlife and it can make a world of difference to the way we experience the menopause. But many of us aren’t very good at it, although we’re brilliant at looking after other people!

And that’s why I’ve called in the big guns for this episode, with Jess Baker, psychologist and co-author of The Super Helper Syndrome, which is a survival guide for compassionate people. She’s a chartered psychologist and an award-winning coach, and her new book is a fabulously helpful guide to supporting people who want to adopt a healthy helper mindset so that they can meet their own needs, as well as supporting those around them.

In this episode we explore where the urge to help comes from and how it can often lead back to childhood and the influences we encounter as we grow up. Jess talks us through the classic signs of someone who is a compulsive helper and explains the implications this can have on health and wellbeing. We discuss how to set boundaries in our professional and our personal lives so that we don’t overload ourselves and can take the time to look after ourselves too.

She’s full of very practical advice on how to get the balance right in our lives, so that we become healthy helpers. As she so beautifully puts it: “When helping comes from a place of compassion and not from compulsion, that’s when caring gives us courage.”

This episode is for all the women out there who are so busy helping everyone else that they often don’t give a thought to themselves, their health and their wellbeing.

Show Notes

Find out more about Jess and the work that she does by visiting her website.

Buy your copy of The Super Helper Syndrome: A Survival Guide for Compassionate People by Jess Baker & Rod Vincent. When you order a copy here you can also join the FREE Super Helper Book Club and access a whole community of support.

Discover Jess’s FREE workbooks and other courses here.

Follow Jess on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and Linked In.

Sign up for Jess’s Tame Your Inner Critic course.

Follow Rod as @RodVincent on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram

and as one half of O’Reilly & Vincent on Twitter, Facebook & Instagram

Biographies

Jess Baker is a Chartered Business Psychologist, Associate Fellow of the British Psychological Society, and Women’s Leadership Coach (CPsychol AFBPsS). For the past 20 years she’s worked in the areas of leadership and wellbeing with individuals and global organisations. Jess started her career in healthcare before specialising in business psychology. She regularly deliver wellbeing webinars to global audiences of up to 15,000 people. As well being an award-winning coach for her private 1:1 sessions, she runs online programmes. Over a thousand women have been through Tame Your Inner Critic, a course that helps people overcome the inner critic, one of her  oldest friends!

Rod Vincent is an Anglo-Irish Chartered Psychologist, a writer and a musician. He is an Associate Fellow of the British Psychological Society, and during his previous career as a business psychologist he helped to develop leaders in forty-one countries. He is now doing his best to rebalance that carbon footprint by confining himself to walking the Shropshire hills. His poems and stories have won prizes in competitions and been published in a number of literary journals including Poetry Ireland Review, Stand and The Rialto. His poems are also in the Iron Book of New Humorous Verse (Iron Press). He writes the lyrics and plays bass as one half of O’Reilly & Vincent.