Career Espresso

Hosted by Amanda Owen-Meehan

Business Careers Education

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Episodes

132

Latest episode

Jun 2026

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About the show

Career Espresso gives you a weekly shot of career and leadership know-how in under 15 minutes. I’m Amanda, and each week I share real stories and practical ideas to help you handle the challenges of work. from dealing with tricky bosses to building confidence as a leader. These short, straight-talking episodes are designed to give you something useful you can try for yourself and with your team. No fluff, no jargon — just honest conversations about how we work, lead and grow. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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60 recent

June 10, 202614 min

Episode 123 - How to stop being the person everyone vents to

How to stop being the person everyone vents toThere's a queue that forms at your desk that you never advertised for. People bring you the impossible manager, the credit someone took, the meeting that went sideways, and you take it all in because you're the one who listens without making anyone feel small. The trouble is what it costs you. You leave most days wrung out, carrying conversations that were never yours to begin with, while your own work and your own worries sit waiting.This episode of Career Espresso is about how you became the office's unofficial support service, why it falls to women so reliably, and how to stay the warm, trusted one without taking everybody's bad day home with you.What you'll discoverWhy being brilliant to talk to quietly turns into unpaid work, and why being good at it tends to make things worse rather than betterThe reason "just set boundaries" is hollow advice for genuinely kind people, and what to reach for insteadThe one question that lets you be completely there for someone without picking up their problem and carrying itHow to handle the person who's turned you into a daily service, without a big awkward confrontationPerfect for women who are the ones everyone leans on at work, who leave most days carrying other people's weather, and who'd like to stay kind without running on empty.Want more support with real-world leadership challenges? Head to How to Build a Leader on Substack for in-depth guides and scripts.Never miss an episode. Sign up for the weekly Espresso Brief email and get each episode with quick takeaways in your inbox.Get the full episode transcript Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

June 3, 202614 min

Episode 122 - What to do when your job has changed but nobody told you

A new starter joins, and on their first morning they ask the most basic question there is. So what is it you actually do here? You open your mouth to answer and realise you're not entirely sure how to. The job title is easy enough to say. It's just that it stopped describing your days some time ago, and you couldn't tell anyone the exact week that happened.This episode of Career Espresso is about what to do when your job has changed but nobody told you. The role that grew while you weren't looking, the responsibilities that arrived without a single conversation, and the odd guilt that turns up the moment you notice and start to wonder whether you're allowed to say something about it.What you'll discover:Why work quietly drifts towards the most reliable person in the room, and why being that person costs more than it looksThe reason the standard advice to just be flexible can leave you worse off than beforeWhy carrying more in silence often makes you less visible, not moreHow to get an honest picture of what your job has become before you try to change itThe two conversations worth having once you can finally see it clearlyPerfect for: any woman who suspects her job has been rewritten while she wasn't looking, and wants to work out what to do about it.Want more support with real-world leadership challenges? Head to How to Build a Leader on Substack for in-depth guides and scripts.Never miss an episode. Sign up for the weekly Espresso Brief email and get each episode with quick takeaways in your inbox.Get the full episode transcript Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

May 27, 202614 min

Episode 121 - How to ask for what you want at work

How to ask for what you want at workYou've been waiting for your manager to offer you the thing you could have asked for six months ago. You've done the work, you've stayed late, you've been the most reliable person in the room, and you've been hoping that would be enough for someone to notice. It usually isn't.The hard part isn't knowing what you want. It's that the moment you open your mouth to say it, you hear yourself softening it into something so polite and so careful that the person opposite you doesn't even know you've made a request.What you'll discoverWhy "just ask" skips the part that's hardThe calculation women run before saying a word, and why the hesitation isn't irrationalThe gap between how you advocate for other people and how you handle your own careerHow to say what you want without burying it under three minutes of contextWhat a no gives you that silence never willPerfect for women leaders and aspiring leaders who know what they want at work but keep finding reasons not to say it.Want more support with real-world leadership challenges? Head to How to Build a Leader on Substack for in-depth guides and scripts.Never miss an episode. Sign up for the weekly Espresso Brief email and get each episode with quick takeaways in your inbox.Get the full episode transcript Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

May 20, 202612 min

Episode 120 - How to say "I Don't Know" without losing credibility

You're in a meeting and someone turns to you with a question you can't answer. You know it immediately. But instead of saying so, you start talking, because silence feels worse than noise and admitting a gap in front of people feels like handing them a reason to doubt you. So you give a long, circular response that touches on something adjacent, sounds confident enough to get through the moment, and answers a question nobody asked. By the time you stop talking, you're not even sure what you said. But you're fairly sure it wasn't convincing.The strange part is that the people you admire most at work tend to handle this completely differently. They're honest about what they don't know, and it doesn't seem to cost them anything. If anything, it makes you trust them more.This episode is about closing that gap between what you do and what you wish you did when you don't have the answer.What you'll find inside:Why performing confidence you don't have is more visible than you think, and what colleagues notice when you do itThe career advice that teaches women to treat the appearance of knowing as more important than the reality of it, and why it creates terrible leadersWhat separates the people who handle this well from everyone else (it's simpler than you'd expect)How being selective about when you're certain makes everything you say worth moreThe one thing you do after admitting a gap that determines whether it builds trust or erodes itWant more support with real-world leadership challenges? Head to How to Build a Leader on Substack for in-depth guides and community.Never miss an episode. Sign up for the weekly Espresso Brief email and get each episode with subscriber-only resources and practical tools in your inbox.Get the full episode transcript Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

May 13, 202614 min

Episode 119 - I messed up at work and everyone saw

I messed up at work and everyone sawSomeone mentions a meeting from three weeks ago. An ordinary reference, nothing loaded in it. And your stomach drops because your brain has decided that any mention of that date, that room, that project, is a direct reference to the thing you got wrong.That's what it's like to carry a public mistake. Not the first 48 hours, when everything's raw and obvious. The bit after that, when the flinch reflex is still firing but you're supposed to be past it.This episode of Career Espresso is about what happens when you make a mistake at work and there were people in the room when it happened, and why that audience changes everything about how you process it afterwards.What you'll discoverWhy a mistake with an audience is a fundamentally different experience from one you can fix quietly, and what that audience does to your thinkingWhat the research says about how much attention other people pay to your slip-up compared to how much you think they doWhy women tend to carry public mistakes harder and longer, and why that's a rational response to an uneven system, not a personal failingThree patterns that turn a bad moment into a months-long problem, and how to catch yourself before they take holdHow to separate the practical question (does anything still need fixing?) from the emotional one (what story have I told myself about what this means?)Perfect for women who are carrying a visible mistake and can't seem to stop replaying it, whether it happened last week or six months ago.Want more support with real-world leadership challenges? Head to How to Build a Leader on Substack for in-depth guides and scripts.Never miss an episode. Sign up for the weekly Espresso Brief email and get each episode with quick takeaways in your inbox.Get the full episode transcript Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

May 6, 202614 min

Episode 118 - How to stop taking work home in your head

How to stop taking work home in your headYou're on the sofa. Or making dinner. Or lying in bed. And your brain is still at work. It's replaying that conversation from this afternoon, rewriting the email you already sent, rehearsing tomorrow's meeting complete with responses to things nobody has said yet. You know you're doing it. You can feel yourself thinking about work, and knowing that doesn't help you stop.This isn't a willpower problem. Your brain is doing exactly what it's designed to do: holding onto open loops. Every unresolved conversation, every decision you haven't made, every task you didn't finish, it's all running in the background because your brain doesn't trust the information has been saved anywhere else. And for women in leadership, this runs deeper, because the things keeping you awake aren't just tasks. They're relational. Did that feedback come across the way I intended? Is she upset with me? Was I too direct?This episode covers:Why your brain treats unfinished business like an unsaved document, and what that means for how you end your dayThe two types of after-hours thinking (task loops and emotional residue) and why they need completely different solutionsWhy the usual advice about boundaries, mindfulness, and shutdown rituals misses the pointA practical way to give your brain the "save signal" it needs so it stops running everything in the backgroundHow to name the feeling that keeps you awake when there's nothing specific to write on a to-do listWant more support with real-world leadership challenges? Head to How to Build a Leader on Substack for practical guides, scripts, and Manager Hours, the monthly live Q&A for women leaders.Never miss an episode. Sign up for the weekly Espresso Brief email and get each episode with a subscriber-exclusive resource in your inboxGet the full episode transcript Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

April 29, 202614 min

Episode 117 - How to say the thing you’ve been putting off saying at work

You owe someone a conversation at work. You've owed it for a while. And every week you tell yourself this is the week, and every Friday it's still unsaid. Maybe it's a deadline you know isn't realistic. Maybe it's feedback you should have given three weeks ago. Whatever it is, it started as a straightforward thing to raise and it's quietly become something much bigger than it ever needed to be.In this episode, Amanda talks about why the gap between knowing what you need to say and saying it out loud keeps getting wider, and what to do about it before the conversation has itself in the worst possible way.You'll hear about:Why the preparation most people do for these conversations makes them harder, not easierThe calculation women are doing that rarely gets acknowledgedWhat the unsaid thing is costing you while you wait for the right momentWhy one sentence is more useful than a bulletproof argumentWhat to do after you've said it (and why most people undo their own clarity in the first ten seconds)Espresso Brief subscribers get Before You Say It this week: a one-page conversation prep sheet for the thing that keeps not getting said. Get yourself on the listWant more support with real-world leadership challenges? Head to How to Build a Leader on Substack for in-depth guides and scripts.Get the full episode transcript Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

April 22, 202614 min

Episode 116 - How to make good career decisions when you can’t trust the information you’re getting

There's a career moment most people know well: you've just had a conversation with someone who should be able to tell you what's going on, and they did tell you, clearly and at length, and you left that conversation with nothing you didn't already have. The words were positive. The tone was warm. And you walked away with nothing you could stand on.So you go back to what you can observe. The project timelines, the meeting invites, the way certain conversations have started to feel slightly different. And somewhere in that process, without quite deciding to, you've already reached a verdict about what the signals mean, what's coming, and what you should do. That verdict is running your decisions. And you haven't tested it yet.This episode of Career Espresso is about how to make good career decisions when the information you're getting is unreliable.What you'll discover:Why the verdicts your brain reaches in uncertain situations feel like facts, and what that does to your decision-makingThe specific difference between what you've observed and what you've concluded, and why that line matters more than any conversation you could have with your managerWhat managed vagueness is, why it's so common during periods of organisational change, and why the clarity you're looking for might not exist yetThe two default responses to workplace uncertainty that both tend to make things worseHow to find the single piece of information that would genuinely change your next movePerfect for: Women navigating periods of workplace change, restructure, or uncertainty, where the official messages aren't giving them what they need to make confident decisions.Want more practical help with the real challenges of leadership and career? Join How to Build a Leader on Substack, with in-depth guides, practical tools, and Manager Hours, a monthly live Q&A for women leadersNever miss an episode. Sign up for the Espresso Brief, the weekly email that includes a subscriber-only resource you can use straight away.Read the full transcript for this episode Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

April 15, 202612 min

Episode 115 - What to do when a career opportunity you were counting on disappears

What to do when a career opportunity you were counting on disappearsYou weren't just hoping it might happen. You'd actually been working towards it, observing, positioning, getting yourself ready. And then a restructure was announced, or the budget disappeared, or a new director arrived who had no interest in anything that existed before them. The thing you were heading towards was gone. Nobody chose someone else. Nobody said you weren't ready. Which, if anything, makes it harder to know what to do with.This episode of Career Espresso is about that specific kind of career loss, the one that doesn't fit neatly into failure or rejection, and why that makes it so much harder to process than most setbacks.What you'll discoverWhy the absence of an explanation doesn't make this easier, and what your brain tends to do to fill that gapWhat the rush to have a new plan is really about, and why the first two weeks are the worst time to act on itThe part of the loss that nobody talks about, and why it deserves to be treated as the specific thing it isWhy the most common well-meaning responses miss the point entirelyWhat the path through this actually looks like, and when you'll know you're ready to take itPerfect for women who've had the ground move beneath them through no fault of their own and aren't sure what to do next.Want more support with real-world leadership challenges? Head to How to Build a Leader on Substack for in-depth guides and scripts.Never miss an episode. Sign up for the weekly Espresso Brief email and get each episode with quick takeaways in your inbox.Get the full episode transcript Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

April 8, 202612 min

Episode 114 - When what worked early in your career stops working

When what worked early in your career stops workingYou learned something early on in your career. How to read a room, when to speak and when to stay quiet. What got you noticed in the right way and what got you into trouble. Those instincts kept you safe. They probably got you promoted. And at some point, without anyone telling you, they stopped working.This episode of Career Espresso is about what happens when early career survival strategies become senior career obstacles and how to tell the difference between a pattern that's still protecting you and one that's just holding you back.What you'll discoverWhy the things that made you successful early on can quietly become your biggest career ceilingThe reason "just be more confident" is useless advice and what to do insteadHow to spot whether you're being strategically cautious or running on an outdated rule from a job you left years agoWhy over-preparation stops being thoroughness and starts being avoidance at a certain levelA practical way to trace exactly where your holding-back patterns come fromThe gap between how you see yourself and how others experience you, and why it's usually kinder than you expectPerfect for women who know they're holding back but can't quite put their finger on why.Want more support with real-world leadership challenges? Head to How to Build a Leader on Substack for honest conversations and practical help from women who get it.Never miss an episode. Sign up for the weekly Espresso Brief email and get subscriber-only resources you won't find anywhere else.Get the full episode transcript Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.