There’s a phrase we hear constantly around comebacks: bounce back. Get back to normal. Return to who you were before the divorce, before the layoff, before the diagnosis, before whatever it was.
It’s well-meaning. It’s also, according to two coaches who spend their careers helping women through exactly this, the wrong goal entirely.
At this week’s HERizon Insights session, “The Comeback Strategy,” host Megan Bozzuto sat down with Mardi Winder, a divorce and leadership coach with more than 30 years in mediation and conflict resolution, and Jennifer Perri, a divorce and mindset coach and founder of Shero Life and Empowerment Coaching. Neither talks about a comeback as a return trip. Both talk about it as a sequence: a question of what to protect first, what to grieve, and what to rebuild, and in what order.
That distinction matters more than it sounds like it should. Here’s what emerged from the conversation.
Feelings Are Not Facts
Ask either coach where a comeback actually starts, and neither points to a five-year plan. They point to a single skill: telling the difference between how you feel and what is actually true.
“Feelings are not facts,” Mardi said. “They’re two completely different things.” It sounds almost too simple — until you’re three days from a diagnosis, or you just got the divorce papers, and your brain has already written the worst-case ending.
Jennifer’s version shows up in what she tells clients to do in the first hours of a crisis: pause, name the feeling, then ask a separate question — what actually has to happen right now? Not everything. One thing. “Just focus on that one thing, and only what feels urgent,” she said, “so that way there you don’t get overwhelmed.”
Neither coach is suggesting the emotion gets suppressed. Both were clear it needs to be felt, not stuffed down. The point is refusing to let the feeling make decisions the facts haven’t earned yet.
Protect Your Time Before You Protect Anything Else
Once the feeling/fact split is in place, the next step is defining where the day’s energy actually goes . Mardi and Jennifer both land on some version of radical simplicity.
Mardi’s system: three columns. What must get done today. What would be nice to get done today. What can wait indefinitely. Most to-do lists, she pointed out, treat everything as urgent. Almost nothing actually is. The instinct to research every option before deciding anything is its own trap. “That’s just another form of procrastination,” she said.
Jennifer’s caution runs parallel: the early days of any transition come loaded with well-meaning people offering questions and suggestions, and answering all of them is its own kind of overwhelm. The fix isn’t hardness. It’s a short list and permission to say, out loud, “the only thing I’m answering today is this.”
Identity Doesn’t Rebuild in One Decision. It Rebuilds in a Hundred Small Ones.
This is where the conversation moved from strategy to something closer to psychology.
Rebuilding who you are, Jennifer argued, isn’t one dramatic choice. It’s the accumulation of small ones: setting a boundary, asking for help without apologizing for needing it, choosing what you actually want instead of what’s expected. “Every small decision that we make just becomes evidence that you can trust yourself again,” she said. She has every client keep a running “win file” for exactly this reason — not to track achievements, but to build a record they can reopen on the days it feels like nothing has changed.
Mardi’s version of the same signal is a shift from tunnel vision to choice. Survival mode narrows focus to just getting through, she said. Rebuilding mode is the moment you notice you want something again — a trip, a new car, the gym — and that wanting isn’t indulgent. It’s data. “It’s not an overnight bolt of lightning,” she said. “It’s gradual little things.”
Money and Boundaries Are Never Really About Money and Boundaries
Maybe the sharpest reframe of the session: “Money is never really about money,” Jennifer said. “It’s what money represents.” Freedom. Comfort. Options. The number matters less than what a person believes it says about them — and untangling that belief is where real financial confidence starts.
Boundaries got the same treatment. Not as walls, but as information. “Boundaries are not punishment,” Jennifer said. “They’re bridges” — the mechanism by which people learn how to treat you, one honest no at a time.
The Actual Work
None of this adds up to a formula, and neither coach offered one. What it adds up to is closer to permission: to stop measuring progress against the person you used to be, and start measuring it against the small, specific choices in front of you today.
As Mardi put it, closing the session: whatever is causing the difficulty right now, there’s already been a version of it in your life before — and you got through that one. The question worth asking isn’t how to get back to normal. It’s what that earlier version of you already knows.
Watch the full replay of “The Comeback Strategy” with Mardi Winder-Adams and Jennifer Perri here.
