Mindset is not about positive thinking — it is about courageous reflection, honest reframing, and intentional reinvention.

Simon Calderbank is the founder of Big Knows and a leadership mindset coach dedicated to helping women reflect, reframe, and reinvent their mindset for lasting personal and professional growth. Raised in a strong matriarchal household by his mum, auntie, and sister, Simon developed deep empathy and a coaching style that is both compassionate and challenging. Following a personal health scare in 2015, he shifted from business development into mindset and leadership coaching, supporting hundreds of women leaders and earning recognition on the Northern Women’s Power Inaugural Advocacy List for advancing gender equality.

In this episode, Simon shares his Re3 framework — Reflection, Reframe, and Reinvention — and explains why real transformation requires being comfortable with discomfort, questioning inner narratives, and taking intentional action.

What you will learn from this episode:

  • How to reinvent your mindset without abandoning who you are or conforming to leadership models that were never built for you.
  • Why career breaks, motherhood, and life transitions do not erode capability — and how internal narratives, not skill loss, hold women back.
  • How affirmations and self-talk directly shape confidence, decision-making, and performance — and how to use them intentionally instead of unconsciously.

“You’ve got to be comfortable being uncomfortable if you want to become unstuck.”

– Simon Calderbank

Topics Covered:

00:10 – Growth requires being comfortable with discomfort.

06:22 – Reflection as the starting point for mindset change.

08:57 – Reframing past experiences to unlock new perspectives.

12:18 – How self-doubt and imposter syndrome take hold — and how to release them.

15:49 – Navigating gender dynamics in male-dominated workplaces.

21:38 – Asking the hard question: “Why am I not heard?”

24:35 – Using mantras and affirmations to reshape inner dialogue.

27:30 – A hybrid coaching perspective shaped by male and female lenses.

Key Takeaways:

“Reframing doesn’t change the past — it changes how you see it.” — Simon Calderbank

“Women often block their own capability after life changes, even when nothing was lost.” — Simon Calderbank

Ways to Connect with Simon Calderbank:

Ways to Connect with Sarah E. Brown:

 

Full Episode Transcript:

(AI helped us put this together, so if you see any weird grammar or missed words—just know we nailed it during the actual chat.)

Simon Calderbank

The reflection piece is uncomfortable, but it has to be. I always tell my clients, you’ve got to be comfortable being uncomfortable. If you’re going to go through this process, if you’re really passionate about breaking through and becoming unstuck, that has to be a process where you have to be taken back to understand what happened, why it happened and what maybe you could have done differently.

Sarah E. Brown 

Hello everyone. Welcome to the KTS Success Factor Podcast for Women, where we talk about challenges senior female leaders face in being happy and successful at work. I’m your host, Dr. Sarah E. Brown. 

My guest today is Simon Calderbank. He is the founder of Big Knows, a leadership mindset coach passionate about helping women break through the barriers holding them back. He was raised in a strong matriarchal household by his mom, auntie, and sister. Simon developed a deep empathy, resilience, and a coaching style that’s both compassionate and challenging. After a career spanning hospitality, business development, and consultancy, a personal health scare in 2015 led him to his true calling, empowering female leaders to reflect, reframe, and reinvent their mindset for lasting personal and professional growth. 

His work has supported hundreds of women leaders. earning him a place on the Northern Women’s Power inaugural advocacy list for driving gender equality. Outside of coaching, Simon is a proud dad, devoted partner, loyal friend, and advocate for holistic well-being. He stays active through fitness, competitive tennis, and running with his local club, Run Dementalist. And he has a series of books which we’ll talk about later. Welcome, Simon.

Simon Calderbank

Hey, that’s a lovely introduction. Thank you very much. It made me very proud listening to all of that. So thank you. It’s lovely to meet you as well, Sarah.

Sarah E. Brown 

Well, you’re the one that accomplished all of that. So you can go into your healthcare if you want, but I’m genuinely interested in what drew you to this line of work.

Simon Calderbank

It probably was a health scare. And when you’re told, when your company’s called Big Knows, and that’s spelled K-N-O-W-S for those people who are thinking, has he got a big nose? I was told by a consultant that I might have cancer in my sinuses. So to be told that you’re going to have cancer in your nose when you’re called Big Knows, I just found it hilarious.

Sarah E. Brown 

That is kind of ironic.

Simon Calderbank

Yeah. The consultant said, yeah, people do respond in very different ways when they hear this news. And I said, no, it’s not. I said, if I’ve got cancer, I’ve got cancer. I said, I can deal with that differently. My company’s called Big Knows. And it took about three minutes to explain the play on words to the point where I just thought I’m just wasting my time. It just kind of went over their heads. So thankfully it wasn’t cancer. It was benign, but what it gave me was two and a half months of time out of the business. 

And I’ve been in the business day in, day in, day in literally seven days a week, probably for two years as in my own business. So it gave me a chance to practice what I eventually started to preach, which was the power of reflection and the power of reframe and ultimately the power of reinvention. So yeah, out of bad. Came for me a huge tipping point. 

So the health scare is what enabled me to realize that my passion for helping people have perhaps been misplaced. I’d always been a business development consultant. I always help people buy or make it easy for people to buy. And I suppose that my time alone gave me the opportunity to think actually, well, What do I love doing? Helping people, serving people. 

Am I serving them in the right way? And the realization was that business development sales was, I’d lost my mojo, Sarah. So I decided to take the leap of faith from business development to personal development because I’d always been fascinated by what made people tick, myself included. I’ve got more self-help books over the two or three decades, I’d become a library of answer. 

All my friends would stay over and would come down for breakfast with a different book each time saying, do you believe this stuff? And I was all, well, you tell me because I wholeheartedly believe in it. I don’t really know how it works. I just know that it works. So my time away gave me the chance to explore that deeper and realize the science and the psychological science, the neurological science behind it. 

And therefore my path was set. And as one threat or a pair of mine said, after they’d been on my first workshop, they said, finally, you found your true calling. And this is something I really admired and I’ve known since probably my late teens. So that for me was the accolade I suppose I’ve been searching for was that recognition and validation that I’d made the right decision to step back from a very successful career to start a new one. It cost me a marriage. It cost me being with my children and my now ex-wife, thankfully still friendly ex-wife. 

But it was the right thing to do, not just to help me and to help them, but to help, to help others. And I was drawn to working with women because of my upbringing. Raised by three women leaves a profound effect on you. 

So I’m naturally drawn to women because that’s why I was brought up around. So all my decision-making was. influenced by three very different individuals, but all shared the same attributes, which was they looked at life from a female perspective. 

And I thank them wholeheartedly for that. I’m so proud of who I am and that’s how I shifted. So the cancer scare was the, I suppose, the kick, the slap in the face that I probably wasn’t aware I was looking for.

Sarah E. Brown 

There you go. Well, you mentioned three things and I got the first one and the third one. The first one was reflection. The third one was reinvention. What was the middle one?

Simon Calderbank

Reframe. Reframe. Reframing the thinking. And that’s now become a process that I, it’s my framework. We call it the Re3 effect. So there’s the reflection, there’s the reframe, and then there’s the reinvention. And I’ve always been fascinated by the power of three. So three for me, it’s, you know, ABC one, two, three, it’s always resonated. So when it came to repurposing my career, my business, the re-three effect was kind of, is the foundation of everything that we do. And yeah, it works. It’s lovely to see.

Sarah E. Brown 

Say more about each of the steps. So what is reflection?

Simon Calderbank

Reflection in my framework is really just taking stock of where you are and where you’ve come from. And as far as revisiting your past, and sometimes that can be a recent past, what I find with a lot of female leaders is it’s normally taking them way back through many challenges in the workplace, but also maybe through to childhood, teenagers, you know, when their lives are being shaped and their sort of behaviors are being morphed. 

So the reflection piece is really powerful and some people are comfortable to go deep and some people not so. So it’s guiding them through that process to enable us to understand, I suppose, the journey that they’ve been on to get them to where they are today. And the reflection piece normally enables us to discover or for them to discover the baggage or the blockers. Normally from that reflection piece is where all the, as I call them, all the gold nuggets come out. 

All the triggers that enable us to understand why they are the way they are. And it’s usually because of past behaviors or past scenarios that have created a set of behaviors that in some ways can serve them really, really well, but in others is holding them back. So the reflection piece is uncomfortable, but it has to be, I always tell my clients, you’ve got to be, you’ve got to be comfortable being uncomfortable. 

If you’re going to go through this process, if you’re really passionate about breaking through and, and becoming unstuck that you referenced that at the start, there has to be a period where a process where you have to be taken back. to understand what happened, why it happened and what maybe you could have done differently. 

And my job then is to guide them through that and share stories of other women leaders who’ve been in exactly the same situation, different context, but they’ve been in the same situation. And those breakthroughs in the reflection piece enable us then to guide into the next level, which is the reframe.

Sarah E. Brown 

And what is that? Say more about real frame.

Simon Calderbank

It’s really, I suppose it’s looking at the same scenario through a different set of eyes. And when you’re with a coach and I’m sure you’ll understand this is, and I’ve been coached as well, and I always validate and vindicate that is just having someone’s fresh perspective. Because what we do is our bias is kicking when we are looking at a situation that we’ve been involved in and all the memories, all the unusual, the uncomfortable memories come flooding back. 

And therefore that clouds our thinking. So I ask people if they are comfortable to maybe re-edit or reframe the situations of which they need to talk about so they can actually almost remove themselves from the actual scene. And imagine what they tell themselves if they were actually a bystander watching this unfold. So again, sometimes that can be, again, uncomfortable. It can be risky. So it’s about making sure that people are safe and the reframe piece. Sorry.

Sarah E. Brown 

Can you give me an example of a reframe of a specific incident and how you would reframe it?

Simon Calderbank

Yeah, well, I had one client, I was watching a testimonial that she just shared and she said the key thing she got from the workshop, and that was like a challenge workshop, was her understanding of the reframe process. She’d always felt as a mom returning to work that she was stuck, that she was stuck in, as she called it, mummy brain behaviors. 

And what we did was just ask her, I suppose, specific questions to enable her to look at her situation through a different set of eyes. And she felt that going back to work, she wouldn’t be as good as she was. And she was the MD. She is the MD. But that time out, and obviously she’d taken on a whole new career in terms of bringing a child into the world. 

So she just felt as if she wouldn’t be capable. That was the word she used. She wasn’t capable of being able to deliver to the standards of which she’d delivered before. She felt 12 months out of the business would have impacted her where people would see her differently. So for her, she got into a mindset where she felt everybody was looking at her through, not that she was incompetent, but she wouldn’t be able to fulfill. the role that she’d successfully left behind. 

So the reframe for her was actually to listen to those people because it was all about her thought process and actually reach out to those people and find out exactly what they did think of her. And really take that, take that feedback on board. I think she was scared. She was scared of what she thought she would hear based on her own biases kicking in that 12 months out of her business would mean she wouldn’t be capable. 

So her reframe in her eyes was for me, it was really straightforward, but for her, it was monumental. The shift literally within 15 to 20 minutes. You could almost see the light bulbs flashing and her testimonial just referred back to that. And it was lovely to watch and just sort of see how this person who I’ve always known was capable, I’ve experienced her capabilities and competencies, had basically unstuck herself just by looking at the same scenario in a different way.

Sarah E. Brown 

Did she actually go and ask other people? Yeah. And what did she hear?

Simon Calderbank

She heard what we knew and what everyone else knew, but she’d almost blocked out. Because she’d say, to be a mom, I could never appreciate all I can give is utmost respect, but to be a mom, in her eyes, it just sucked all her professional knowledge. That was her word, sucked all my professional knowledge away from me. So to return to work, she had self doubt. 

Confidence has hit the floor. She used the word in praise, imposter syndrome, and she’d built this imposter of herself. Whereas in fact, people thought the complete opposite, but she kind of almost convinced herself that she wouldn’t be good enough. And to see her go, say literally over the five days, she felt powerless. That was it. She said she was powerless. 

And when you hear somebody that you respect, thinking like that and therefore feeling like that, she started to exhibit the behaviors and the performance of somebody who was powerless. So it was incredible transformation. But as I said to her, all we needed to give you was the ability to unlock that part of you that you clouded. 

Or that you’d allow to become Clyde because you were so focused on raising your son. So that alone to try and keep the two parallels is a challenge. You did the right thing. All those memories and all those behaviors that made you successful, they hadn’t disappeared. You thought they had, they just needed reigniting. They just needed to be dusted down. It’s the whole riding the bike scenario. 

And to see her now, she’s the person that she always knew she was. She just needed reminding and also reframing her own mindset to give her that confidence to go and ask everybody to get that 360 fever insurance. God, I can’t believe it was that easy. Yeah, but obviously it wasn’t easy because you put yourself into that bubble where you felt like you weren’t worthy.

Sarah E. Brown 

So I probably know the answer to this question after this discussion, but answer it anyway. So what is the biggest mistake that female leaders make before they start working with you? 

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Simon Calderbank

Sometimes accepting the status quo, accepting what they think is actually, is their reality, which it can be. But I suppose for me, it’s being reluctant to challenge not just their own thinking, but also to challenge the thinking of others within their workplace. The reticence because of the fear of what might come back. 

And that’s understandable because I think as women, you are, the workplace is male dominated and it’s as if the workplace is not built for purpose. So I think there’s a lot of systemic biases that still occur, but by the ton load, particularly in the UK, that’s all I can sort of speak for.

Sarah E. Brown 

I can see how your three steps, the reflection, the reframe, and the reinvention addresses how they think about it. But what do you tell them about accepting the current situation, tips for doing that? And it’s particularly pertinent to me right now. I’m reading a book about the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu. 

And they say, they’ve got a whole chapter on acceptance, that that is the fundamental basis for all transformation, is total acceptance of the current situation. But they don’t tell you how to do it. So what do you tell your clients? How do you help them to accept the current situation and not resist it?

Simon Calderbank

Well, the first thing I do is tell them, cause usually there’s a, the current theme that I kind of pick up on through the stories that I hear is usually there’s men or there’s a male influence in both news. It’s toxic male behaviors in the workplace, which again, it disappoints me, horrifies me in equal measure. And I think one of the things I tell people is. 

Please don’t think that to be successful, you have to join that party or you have to join that brigade. You know, so it’s the case that if I can’t be them, I may as well join them. So that’s the first thing I always implore women to do is, is not think to be successful. You have to act and behave and perform like a man in the workplace. 

Men seem to undergo some transformation when they leave, wherever they live in the morning, it’s like they put on a new skin. And when they come to work, they are very different beast. to the one that leaves the home. So that’s the first thing I asked them to do is to, is not do that and not fall foul of that and to believe in themselves, to believe in themselves, to rise up. 

The t-shirt probably only you can see this, but the t-shirt says rise. It’s about how do you rise up? How do you rediscover that voice? Accepting where you are is the first part of core and taking your first steps out of your comfort zone to actually make that change. That for me is important. Intention is good. 

The intention to change is good, but only if that intention is followed up by action. And I think as well, it’s also about being comfortable to speak out, to speak out. I think what I found in the workplace in the UK is that men are so much more confident around selling themselves, even if they don’t have the necessary qualifications to do the job. 

Whereas women aren’t, women don’t seem to have the confidence of men to make that leap. It’s as if women feel they’re underqualified, where they’re not, they have exactly the same potential. They can have exactly the same skill sets in most workplace scenarios. So really it’s, I suppose it’s don’t be misled to accept a higher level of confidence as a sign of strength.

Sarah E. Brown 

Do you find that taking a step to empower yourself or change the situation helps you to accept the situation as it is?

Simon Calderbank

I think it helps you to challenge the situation, Sarah, is how I’ll push back on that. I think it enables you to, I think it’s easy to go through life just going, this is how it is. It’s fine. I’ll just toe the line, but I’ll just accept even if I don’t agree with it or it’s uncomfortable or it makes me uncomfortable in terms of how it makes me feel. 

So I think accepting the situations for me would be a, not saying a backward step because there are some scenarios that perhaps people might not be comfortable to rise up against. But I suppose it’s, I always look at it from the perspective of, I’ve got children. I’ve got a son who’s 17 and I’ve got a younger daughter who is just turned 14. 

And I look at myself and think, what can I do in my small world? What steps can I take to ensure that I’m not just safeguarding and helping the women leaders of today, but I’m also leaving a legacy for the women leaders of tomorrow. And we’re all leaders in our own guise. And I want my 14 year old daughter to work, to be able to go to work and be respected and to be respected for what she brings and who she is, irrespective really of what gender she is. 

I want her to have the opportunities that men get. So that’s my drive is thinking, well, if I can have that drive, if women are uncomfortable to think, why should I make a change? Why should I challenge? Think about the legacy that them doing nothing will leave behind. How will it help their daughters or sisters or nieces? 

If everyone can make a step change, men included, if people can think with more emotion around you know, what the world will look like in 5, 10, 15 years and how that will impact their family, their friends, particularly their friends who aren’t male. That for me would be one big step forward. One big step.

Sarah E. Brown 

Well, what are the right questions that women should be continually asking themselves?

Simon Calderbank

Great question. I think the toughest one would be to ask, why am I not heard? Why am I not heard? What’s driving, what thinking, what current thinking is driving my current behaviors? And look inside and ask the question, what am I telling myself? What’s my inner narrative? Who are my influences? Because if they’re not happy with our situation, yes, that can be influenced and imposed by others, but what are they doing to change that? 

And I always think that there’s a great sentiment, isn’t it? That we are what we eat and that’s true, but we are what we think. And I think the one thing I’ve learned down the years is that what we tell ourselves will either make or break us. So therefore, for me, the first question is, what are you telling yourself? Not just haphazardly, but what are your voices? 

Because they’re your compass. So today, I believe that we all have a choice about how we think and how we feel and how we behave, therefore, if we start on the baseline, what are you thinking? And are you aware of what impact that’s having on your conscious world and how you operate within it?

Sarah E. Brown 

Do you use affirmations in your work with women?

Simon Calderbank

Yes.

Sarah E. Brown 

And tell me what you think about the power of affirmations and how you counsel women to properly create and use them.

Simon Calderbank

I have been a big user of affirmations I mentioned before about the self-help books. And I just thought, well, I’ll do this because the book says it works. And I’m going back about 25 years. And what I found was when I did them, I’d always do them the night before either a big presentation or a job interview, or if I was pitching to clients. 

And I always found that if I’d done the affirmations or mantras, as I call them, I always look back on the, the event and thought that went really well. But on the flip side, if I didn’t do the mantras, whether it’s because I forgot or for whatever reason, I always felt that something was missing. So on that, on that very sort of light touch basis, I continued to do them. 

And I mean, continued, I learned very quickly that. saying them out loud in public, perhaps wasn’t the best idea. So I do them internally. I use post-it notes and I do them as I fall asleep. And the advice I give people is it’s always present tense. So it’s, I am, and it’s, I always emphasize the word always because people say, I am learning. 

And I’ll say, well, I am learning is it’s a mantra, but when are you learning? Are you learning now? Are you learning tomorrow? I said, so I will say, I am always, and then describe the action. And I, I go through the alphabet, Sarah, every night, A to Z. Within that, there are 26 characteristics that I’m either wanting to become better at, or I’m just strengthening what I’ve already got. And that’s the process I teach my clients. 

I had a cynical client. And she just kept demonstrating it and demonstrating it. So I said, well, your mantra is I’m always cynical. And she just laughed. And on the following day, after giving her the affirmations to practice, she came back the next day for the third hour and said, I did that thing last night. And I said, and she said, I can’t believe it. I feel different. 

I said, wow, that’s quick. She said, I do. She said, I feel more comfortable. I feel more alive. I feel happier. So for her and her life had got, she was quagmired in a job that was uncomfortable. There was a lot of, a lot of challenges around it with other people. There was a lot of fraud that she was, she wasn’t embroiled in, but she was embroiled in this fraud. 

So therefore she had good reason to be cynical. But she applied, she applied what she’d learned and the following day, and then the consequent days, she was like a breath of fresh air. So I quote Dr. Emile Coué and that’s the first reference point I can, I’ve researched. And that’s, I think from 1922, 23. And I, I shared a book with people. 

I shared the audio book and said, listen or read. It’s a simple science and it works. It works. There’s enough testament. It works. I’m proof of that. There’s hundreds of thousands and probably millions of other people. It does work. So yeah, mantras for me are the fuel that I need to become and remain the person I want to be. And therefore I share that with my clients and I see the change and they feel the change sound.

Sarah E. Brown 

So Simon, what questions should I have asked you that I didn’t?

Simon Calderbank

The question that I get asked quite a lot, and I think it’s, whether this is a development question to answer your question is, why should I, as a career woman, listen to a man? Why as a woman should I be coached by a white middle-class CSI gender male? So that’s the question that maybe you could ask me.

Sarah E. Brown 

All right. Well, I’ll ask you that. Why should I?

Simon Calderbank

Because of my background, I think we said at the start, raised by three women, I was raised as a, I’m not saying I was raised as a woman, but I was raised by women. Therefore, that’s all I knew. There was no, my dad left when I was just under four years old. So my recollection of him is minimal. I just see him lying in bed. and refusing to take me to school. 

I don’t think he ever took me to school. That’s my recollection. So therefore my male influences I always found were useless. So I was guided by women, but because I’m a man and I’ve grown up a man, I suppose you could say I’ve got the best of both worlds. So I’m a hybrid in terms of my, my perspective is very empathetic. And I, I pass that down back to my, to my family. 

But I’m obviously accepted as a man in a man’s world. Therefore, I understand how man works. And therefore I can share that knowledge and those perspectives with my clients. And they find it uncomfortable at first to let themselves go to trust. 

But once they do, they realize that I see the world very differently to, for example, the female coaches that they’ve used because the female coaches sometimes can really, not always, but can sometimes reinforce their own biases. Whereas I don’t. Is it two hemispheres working potentially? 

I have got bucket loads of empathy and I never realized it until probably six, seven years ago. So yeah, I would say that I can see the world through a very different, through different lenses. And I feel that enables me to, to provide different solutions that help women because they come from a male perspective with a very female, heavy female leaning.

Sarah E. Brown 

So Simon, how can women contact you?

Simon Calderbank

I suppose the easiest way is via LinkedIn. I suppose that’s my playground. That’s the place where I’ve spent many years making great connections, being challenged. I always get challenged. Why should I work with a man? That’s the usual challenge I get. But no, LinkedIn is where I’m most comfortable. It’s where I’m most accessible and where I’m in it every single day because I love to learn from others as well, Sarah.

Sarah E. Brown 

And we’ll include that in the show notes.

Simon Calderbank

Thank you.

Sarah E. Brown 

So, Simon, thank you very much for being with me today. 

Outro

Thanks for listening to the KTS Success Factor podcast for women. If you like what you are hearing, please go to iTunes to subscribe, rate us and leave a review. And if you would like more information on how we can help women in your organization to thrive, then go to www.sarahebrown.com. You can sign up for our newsletter, read show notes and learn more about our podcast guests, read my blog, browse through the books, or contact us for a chat. Goodbye for now.

Sarah E. Brown
Sarah E. Brown