Episode 5 of Series 3 of the emPOWER Podcast is Live! James Brook Partridge Talks About Modern Masculinity and What Reinvention Teaches Us About Belonging and Coming Home To Ourselves.
In the latest episode of The emPOWER Breakfast Podcast, Athene Parker sits down with production leader James Brook-Partridge, Head of Production at WPP Production, for an unfiltered conversation about relocation, identity, mental wellbeing and the complicated process of coming home.
Across a career that has taken him through London, Hong Kong and Singapore and into senior leadership roles across global advertising production, James has experienced first-hand how changing place can also change our sense of self.
In this wide-ranging conversation, he reflects on the freedom that can come from leaving somewhere familiar and beginning again. Moving abroad created space to reinvent himself, both personally and professionally. Returning to the UK, however, proved far more complex.
James describes the strange disorientation of coming back to a place that is supposed to feel like home, while realising that neither you nor the life you left behind are quite the same. Together, Athene and James explore how relocation can shape identity, belonging and confidence, and why returning can sometimes be more emotionally difficult than leaving in the first place.
The conversation also reaches further back into James's story. He reflects on family, masculinity and emotional inheritance, speaking candidly about his brother's alcoholism, his own experiences of anxiety and depression, and the pressure many men still feel to appear capable even when they are struggling.
Rather than separating these experiences from his professional life, James considers how they have informed the leader he has become.
At the heart of the episode is a discussion about what modern leadership can look like when vulnerability and authority are allowed to coexist. James speaks openly about burnout, emotional safety and the importance of creating working cultures where people do not have to hide what they are carrying in order to be taken seriously.
It is a conversation about movement and reinvention, but ultimately it is about belonging.
About the places we leave, the versions of ourselves we outgrow, and the quieter process of finding our way back to who we have become.
The full emPOWER Breakfast Podcast episode with James Brook-Partridge is available now. Listen wherever you get your podcasts, subscribe and rate to widen the reach for people to
join the conversation.
With thanks to our podcast partners String & Tins and their brilliant production team for bringing these conversations to life.
