S9E21017 December 2025

S9E210: Healthy Habits for Busy Project Professionals with Becky Holliday

S9E210

S9E210: Healthy Habits for Busy Project Professionals with Becky Holliday

0:000:00
100%

Dale flies solo (briefly!) to close out 2025 and welcomes first-time podcast guest Becky Holliday - a project manager turned health coach. Becky shares how redundancy in October 2023 became the catalyst for a career pivot, and why she now helps busy professionals (especially women) build sustainable health habits. Val drops in mid-episode and the conversation expands into discipline vs motivation, managing workload pressure, eating well without weekend meal-prep marathons, and why small wins beat heroic last-minute sprints. In this episode, you’ll learn

Why Becky left project management and what she brought with her into health coaching

How to start improving health when you “don’t have time”

Why trying to change everything on Monday usually backfires

A simple way to reduce stress and decision fatigue: the “3-item to-do list”

Practical approaches to healthier eating that don’t require your Sunday afternoon How movement can support mental resilience when work pressure spikes

Discipline vs motivation—and why habit size matters

The role of identity, purpose, and values (and a thoughtful detour into spirituality)

To get your FREE 5-Step Guide to Creating Healthy Habits that Stick, click here: beckyholliday.com/free-guide Join 400+ women getting free health tools and advice every Wednesday by signing up for Becky's FREE newsletter here: beckyholliday.com/free-newsletter

Guest

Becky Holliday

Becky Holliday

Women's Health Coach at Founder of BeckyHolliday.com

Project Manager turned Health Coach, Becky Holliday, helps kind, ambitious women feel happier, healthier, and more confident in themselves — so they can look and feel their best inside and out. She’s the founder of a life-changing, tailored-to-you wellness program and weekly wellbeing newsletter that’s helping over 400 women become the person they really want to be. Becky encourages you to put yourself and your health first through 3 simple pillars: Train your mind. Eat good food. Move your body. Her popular guide, 5 Simple Habits You Need to Feel Positive In Your Mind, Confident In Your Body & Full of Energy, is available for free at BeckyHolliday.com/free-guide.

Connect

Related Episodes

More conversations on similar topics

S10E222

S10E222: Why Great Project Leaders Go to the Movies with Dawn Mahan

What if the fastest way to align a project team wasn't another 47-slide deck, but a two-minute film clip? In Episode 222, Dale and Val sit down with Dawn Mahan, project leader, educator and author, to unpack why movies are surprisingly powerful tools for project leadership, communication and team alignment. Dawn coined the term "Project Land" to explain why the world of projects behaves so differently from the day job, and it has stuck with thousands of people since. We get into: Dawn's origin story, from Y2K coder to accidental project manager after one out-of-the-blue phone call Why Apollo 13, The Martian and The Matrix explain iteration, problem-solving and belief better than most training courses The real reason projects fail, and why the root cause almost always traces back to the start "Are you good?" vs "How do you feel?" and why that one change transformed how Dawn led teams Why communication is everyone's job, not just the project manager's Assessing people on ownership rather than leadership, and why that is fairer Trust, vulnerability and healthy conflict, drawing on The Five Dysfunctions of a Team Whether you are being parachuted into a live project or just trying to explain what you actually do to your family, this one is full of practical, human ways to lead people better. Dawn's books: Meet the Players in Project Land: Decide the Right Project Roles and Get People on Board Project Land Goes to the Movies: 22 Blockbuster Strategies for Project Success Connect with Dawn: LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/dawnmahan Instagram: instagram.com/dawnjmahan Project Guru Academy: linkedin.com/showcase/projectguruacademy PMOtraining on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/pmotraining PMOtraining on YouTube: youtube.com/channel/UCLYJDA7-15rotZyEDEv8gyg PMOtraining on Facebook: facebook.com/PMOtiger This podcast is free and always will be. If you got value from it, pay it forward and share it with someone in your team. Stay safe, be disruptive, and have fun doing it.

Listen Now
S10E219

S10E219: Why 88% of Schedules Fail, and What AI Still Can't Fix with Michael Pink

88% of project schedules don't follow best practice. So why are we so keen to feed that data into AI and trust the output? In this episode, Dale and Val are joined by Michael Pink, Founder of SmartPM, for a sharp conversation on the forensic side of delay and the state of AI in project controls. Mike has analysed hundreds of thousands of schedules and built a career on working out who delayed what, and why nobody could ever agree. His core message: clean data is not the same as honest data. A technically tidy schedule can tell you a story that never happened, and if you point AI at it, you don't get insight, you get a confident wrong answer at scale. What we cover: Mike's route into construction, from a study-abroad debt to KPMG's construction consulting group 25 years of change in the people and process side of scheduling The shift from reactive forensic work to proactive project controls Data honesty vs data quality, and why integrity is the combination of both (framing credited to Isaac Dyer and Carlos Sanchez) The 88% problem: missing logic, inflated float and moving dates The compression factor, and the exact point a schedule becomes infeasible Why a weekly update beats a monthly one, for almost no extra time P6 vs Microsoft Project, and grading schedule quality across 35 metrics Where LLMs genuinely help, and why quantitative AI is still the long game The future of the scheduler: less building and cleaning, more strategy A genuinely optimistic look at where the profession is heading, and why this might be the best time yet to be in project controls. This episode is proudly sponsored by nPlan.nPlan Summer AI Day 2026: Construction Superintelligence takes place in London on Thursday 25 June 2026, with a fireside featuring Peter Hancock, Project Director at National Grid, and Dima Pogorelsky, MD and Partner at BCG. February's event sold out with standing room only. Register here:https://www.nplan.io/events/nplan-summer-ai-day-2026-construction-superintelligence Connect with Michael Pink at https://www.smartpm.com or on LinkedIn. If you enjoyed this episode, help us pay it forward and share it. Stay safe, be disruptive, and have fun doing it.

Listen Now
S10E216

S10E216: CaSA Digital Community of Practice Fight Night

We recently hosted the Controls and Skills Authority Digital Community of Practice Fight Night in Birmingham. This lively panel debate explores the impact of AI on project delivery, jobs, and industry practices. Experts challenge the notion that AI is just a tool or a threat, examining cultural, technical, and structural factors shaping AI adoption in construction and beyond. 3 Fights Culture is the No.1 Enabler for AI Adoption - Ronald Dyer vs Andrew Knight AI is just a tool, it won't replace jobs - Lisa Silander vs Marco Frisenda AI Does Not Improve Project Delivery - Sarah Crawley vs Kashan Ratyal https://www.controlsandskills.co.uk/

Listen Now

Enjoyed this episode?

Subscribe to never miss a conversation with project experts