Helen Mason is a leadership coach and former UK Marketing Director for IVC Evidensia, with nearly two decades of experience in animal health. After witnessing the challenges women face in balancing career progression with societal expectations, particularly after becoming mothers, she retrained as a coach to support women navigating systems not built with them in mind.
Now working full-time in coaching, Helen helps women keep their careers alive and thriving through mindset work, resilience, and leadership development. She is also a Director of the Veterinary Management Group (VMG), where she champions the importance of veterinary leadership training and community, and supports the ongoing development of the VMG/ILM Level 5 qualification.
Passionate about equity, personal growth, and empowering women to lead authentically, Helen brings together her marketing expertise, coaching skills, and deep connection to the veterinary profession to drive meaningful change within the industry.
Please summarise your journey:
I’ve always loved animals. As a kid, I dreamed of becoming a vet, but my A-level grades closed that door. I pursued zoology instead, hoping to eventually reach vet school, but after weighing up eight years of university, I chose a different path and went into animal health marketing instead.
I spent 18 years in that space, ultimately becoming UK Marketing Director for IVC Evidensia. It was work I loved but, during those years I became acutely aware of the impossible standards women face – what’s called the ‘double bind dilemma.’ Be agreeable and you’re ‘too soft.’ Be assertive and you’re told to ‘tone it down.’ I felt this deeply in my own career, and it seemed profoundly unfair.
When I became a mum in 2020, I discovered a whole new set of unspoken rules. I watched talented women – colleagues who’d been on par with or outperforming their male peers – suddenly struggle after becoming parents. The leak in the leadership pipeline became crystal clear to me: it happens when women have children.
Coaching became transformational in my own journey through these challenges. The mindset shifts it enabled were so powerful that I trained as a coach myself in 2019. Last year, I made the leap to full-time coaching.
Today, I help women navigate systems that weren’t built for them. My mission is to support them in keeping their careers alive and thriving after having children, bringing more female voices into leadership where they’re desperately needed.
When I left my corporate job, I really wanted to keep my connection to the veterinary profession alive. When the opportunity came up to become a director of the Veterinary Management Group (VMG) I jumped at the chance. It seemed the perfect opportunity to blend my marketing and coaching skills to support a profession I care deeply about, in an area that’s very underserved in my view.
Describe your typical day from waking to sleeping:
To keep the domestic balance and mental load fair, we use the ‘Fair Play’ method in our home, as I’m a trained facilitator. My husband does most of the morning routine, so I’ll probably help get one of the kids dressed and then disappear off to walk the dogs or go for a run while he wrestles their shoes on and takes them to school and nursery. My work is varied which is one of the things I love most about it. So I might be facilitating a workshop on resilience, leadership or the mental load, I’ll perhaps be interviewing some members of a team I’m coaching, I might be working with my 121 clients or preparing to give a talk – and in between all that will be the day to day running of a business – marketing, issuing invoices, paying the bills etc.
It’s also likely there’ll be some work for the VMG in there somewhere. We’re keen to shout louder about how transformational the VMG/ILM Level 5 Certificate in Veterinary Leadership and Management qualification can be – and to build the community of folks in leadership in the veterinary space. It can be lonely as a leader or manager so being able to share with others in the same boat is golden.
It’s my job to pick the kids up from nursery and after school club so I’ll do that then bring them home and make dinner, before we do bedtime with the kids (always chaos!) My husband and I then have a ’communication ritual’ as part of the Fair Play Method (which is basically a cuppa and a chat) before we watch a bit of TV before bed. Celebrity Traitors is our current obsession!
How would you describe yourself in a sentence?
Forward-moving, balanced, growing and learning
How would others describe you in a sentence?
Calm, self-assured and sweary!
What has been your top success and what have you learned from this?
I would say my top successes have felt like my most epic fails in the moment. How I approach feedback has been a real learning journey for me. I received some tough feedback in a 360 review once that made my cry and feel really rubbish at my job. But it taught me that seeking views beyond your immediate manager to assess the impact you’re having is golden. Yet in the same vein, learning to let go of external validation has been one of the biggest game changers for me. I can’t claim that I’ve cracked it, I’d be a liar if I said I don’t enjoy a pat on the head, but I rely on it far less than I used to. I’m better able to filter the feedback that’s important to me and let go of the rest. Dealing with conflict has been another lightbulb moment. I had a difficult relationship with a friend that felt like an epic fail at the time, but my learning from it was that in order to find peace, you sometimes have to go via conflict. Difficult conversations are a fact of life and avoiding them doesn’t make the issue go away.
What has been your biggest challenge, setback or failure and how have you overcome it? How did you grow or change as a result?
My biggest setback has always been my own mindset. One of my favourite quotes is from Edith Eger who is a holocaust survivor from Auschwitz and now a psychologist. She says – ‘The greatest prison you’ll ever live inside is the one you create in your own mind’. As a I described above, things like avoiding conflict and seeking external validation have held me back from trusting my own intuition about what’s right for me. This has been particularly true since becoming a mum. I feel there are a set of unwritten ‘rules’ about how women ‘should’ behave which are often unhelpful, but then when you become a parent there are even more ‘shoulds’ to battle with! Overcoming it has involved a LOT of coaching and internal reflection to tune into my own wisdom, rather than doing what I think is expected of me. Establishing my own values was the start of overcoming these things for me, they serve as a brilliant anchor point for all my decisions.
What compromises have you had to make and what, if anything, could have helped?
The biggest compromise I’ve had to make recently is financial security. Leaving a well-paid job with a regular salary for the feast and famine of freelance life is a scary leap. But the benefits of doing work that is meaningful, purposeful and flexible is a trade-off I’m willing and able to take for this period of my life. I think I’m too early in my journey to say what could have helped beyond winning the lottery!
What advice would you have given to your younger self, that you would now give to others wanting to follow your path?
Follow your own path, not the path you think others expect you to. Living your life according to others’ expectations means you put your happiness in the hands of other people, which means you hand over control of it. Know your values and trust your intuition.
I couldn’t have got where I am today without…
A support network – my husband and family, my brilliant friends and excellent colleagues. The people we choose to include in our lives are what make it rich!
What are your three top likes?
Walking my dogs in the woods
A pub lunch with friends
My kids’ giggles
What are your three top dislikes?
Bullying or controlling behaviour
Love Island (unpopular opinion)
The dark in the winter
What is the most helpful book you’ve read and why?
Such a tough question!! I’m going to go with ‘Playing Big’ by Tara Mohr.
Contact:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/helenmasoncoaching/
Email: hello@helenmasoncoaching.co.uk
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