Vicky Millar

Professional Coach, United Kingdom

Vicky has over 15 years’ experience as a parental transition and leadership coach. In this time, she has made a significant impact across various sectors in supporting parents to be confident, fulfilled and lead balanced lives. As a mother of two, she has real-life experience and empathy with the challenges of working parents. Vicky has coached a substantial number of senior professionals and understands the organisational complexities and specific demands of such roles.

Background

Prior to her coaching career, Vicky spent 15 years as a HR professional in multinational blue-chip companies, working in the IT and FMCG sectors. In the latter half, she worked as a Human Resources Business Partner at Microsoft, driving people strategies and coaching senior leaders. Experience from both the perspective of the organisation and the employee allows her to fully support individuals successfully transitioning around parental leave, managing their careers and developing as leaders.

Experience and qualifications

Vicky had both her children while at Microsoft and experienced the challenges of being a working parent. While there, she initiated their parental transition coaching programme, and she has been running the programme for over 15 years as an external coach.

Vicky also has a wealth of parental transition and leadership coaching experience across many sectors, and at all levels in the organisation. Some examples of this are: Covea Insurance, Allied Bakeries, Sopra Steria, Zoe Global Ltd and Saffrey Champness.

Vicky is a Professional Certified Coach with the International Coach Federation.

Approach to coaching

Vicky’s style is warm and engaging. She works to build trust quickly and loves to positively challenge clients and create a collaborative partnership with a focus on increasing self-awareness and generating practical outcomes. She supports her clients in understanding what’s important to them and leveraging their strengths to find their way to be the parent and leader they want to be.

What Vicky offers the client is twofold: the space and insight to enhance their understanding of who they really are and what they want for themselves and the support, encouragement, challenge and ideas to help them get there. At the heart of her coaching is a desire to support people to succeed, based on their definition, and live an authentic life. Common themes in working with her clients are building self-belief and confidence, increasing impact and visibility, managing priorities and workload and developing management and leadership skills.

“I instantly felt at ease and comfortable with Vicky. Vicky helped me explore shifts in my identity and this has made me feel more confident about stepping back into my role after a year of maternity leave. Vicky’s expertise and approach made a significant difference, and I’m grateful for the positive impact she’s had on my career, personal life and overall wellbeing. Vicky was instrumental in making me feel confident to take on this challenging new role of working mother.”
Coachee

“Having these coaching sessions have been invaluable to me. Vicky is not only empathetic to how hard it is coming back to work juggling a child, nursery, feeling like you don’t know how to have impact etc, but she is able to offer real practical advice, not only to help you survive the first few months, but to help you thrive. She helped me break everything down into manageable chunks, both at work and home. Vicky gave me the space to process the shifts and challenges that I faced in my personal life and at work. Her understanding and questions helped me to explore other ways of thinking and gain some clarity over what could make things better. The coaching has helped me focus on things that I can control.”
Coachee