“I’m not leaving TV, it’s a passion project really, that sort of got out of control,” laughs Becky Mantin.
Anyone who follows the Norfolk-born ITV weather presenter on Instagram will have seen that she’s recently started posting mindset coaching videos on her grid.
Exploring topics such as how to worry less and create more up than down in your life, they’ve certainly struck a chord, having racked up hundreds of thousands of views and, unusually for social media, lots of positive comments.
Becky is buzzing at the reaction the videos have had – and is excited to share the news that she’ll be launching a six-step online coaching course later this year, with a book set to follow too.
“I’m slightly staggered and completely humbled by the interest in all of this because I’ve only been putting them out there for a very short amount of time. It felt incredibly scary to do, but amazingly they've had nearly three quarter of a million hits so far. It’s amazing. I just feel so incredibly lucky,” she says.
“I’ve always been interested in psychology. I’ve known I wanted to be a presenter since I was seven years old, but one of the things that attracted me to presenting was the connection with people,” she continues.
“I find people fascinating and for some reason people tell me stuff, they always have - if I’m sitting next to someone on a train, they’ll always end up telling me some big, interesting detail about their life, or their secrets or whatever, I don’t know why, but it feels like a huge privilege.”
Becky’s interest in self-help was piqued when she was a first-time mum (she now has four children with her husband, Jack Heald), living in Richmond.
A friend recommended that she read a book called The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin to help her navigate what was a major life change.
“I got it on audiobook and would walk round Richmond Park with the baby in a sling listening to it. It was absolutely fascinating because it was basically a reminder that you are not just being carried along by life. You are not entirely, but significantly, in control of your life.
“There’s a lovely saying that 'when the student is ready, the teacher appears', and I think it’s right because I was absolutely ripe for that information at the time as I had made some decisions which were having quite a negative impact, like I’d committed to going back to work early before I’d had the baby because I didn’t know how unbearably hard it would be to be apart from him.”
Becky describes The Happiness Project as her “gateway” and she estimates that she’s read more than 100 self-help books now.
“I’m a self-help book junkie,” she says. “I never considered doing it for anything other than just as a personal interest. But I am quite an obsessive person and when I find something that excites me, I completely immerse myself in it.”
As she explains, her six-step self help programme came out of a tough time in her own life.
In autumn 2019, Becky gave birth to her daughter, Charlotte – a little sister for Rory, Thomas and Elizabeth.
Then, of course, early in 2020 the pandemic struck and the country went into lockdown for the first time.
With Becky on maternity leave and husband Jack, who is director of rugby at Barnes Rugby Club and runs his own sports coaching business across the south of England, at home rather than travelling as he does much of the year, the family was suddenly spending more time together than they ever had.
They had moved to rural Essex in 2014 and during the spring lockdown in their family bubble, they could make the most of the space and the glorious weather.
But, as Becky explains, the winter lockdown was a different matter entirely.
“I think the second one was quite hard for everyone,” she says. “Home-schooling was incredibly difficult and number four did not sleep at all – I was exhausted. And by that time, I was back at work too.”
Becky thrives on being active, but suffered a serious leg injury which left her with very limited movement for months. And that combined with other pressures led her to suffer with mental health problems for the first time in her life.
“It was awful, I couldn’t do anything,” she says, candidly. “Apart from ante-natal low mood, I had really never suffered with my mental health at all. I naively assumed it would never happen to me.”
But Becky experienced panic attacks for the first time.
“I have four children, I have an incredible relationship with Jack and it was all being put under an intolerable level of pressure because our lives were so over-scheduled. I do a lot of sport and exercise and I think because of my leg injury I couldn’t do that, so I didn’t have any kind of release and it all just built up and up.
“I felt very small inside,” she continues. “I have a job which is a performance job and I remember a sound engineer asking if I was alright because my voice, which normally is projected, was very low on the scale. I just didn’t have the energy.”
Because she had read so many self-help books, when she started having panic attacks Becky recognised what was happening to her and managed to implement techniques to manage them.
“I also started writing down my thoughts and recognising and challenging some of the things that I was telling myself, these so-called self-limiting stories,” says Becky.
“I sort of coached myself through it and then gradually over time as I began to feel better, I realised I’d stumbled across a six-step formula to feeling more in control of my life - in large part through managing my thoughts, words and beliefs.
“I process things through writing them down - and this is what I started doing through this time to try and get myself back on track. And, basically 10,000 words in, I thought to myself, 'golly I think I'm writing a book here.”
She also started informally coaching friends and colleagues.
“I would guide them through this six-step process that worked so amazingly for me - and realised that the results they also got were just as transformative. There are not many things that I could ever be as excited about professionally as live TV, but suddenly this was right up there,” she says.
Becky got in touch with a literary agent, who asked to see some writing samples, and was immediately signed up.
Her book, titled Don’t Go Back to Normal: Six Steps to a Life You Love, will be published in January 2024.
In response to the huge demand, Becky is also launching an online mindset coaching course, Six Steps to a Life You Love, this December, with the website currently under development by Norwich-based company, Adept.
Becky’s programme will help participants identify what they really want out of life using her now-famous Perfect Day exercise, understand what's really holding them back, re-write self-limiting stories and put in place a practical plan to work towards their goals. The course also touches on money and how to make as much as you want, and helpful added extras such as worksheets and audio downloads for a bit of hand-holding through the process.
“Of course, this is a self-help course and no self-help anything would be complete without a gratitude list too, so I do include two, but I do it quite tongue-in-cheek,” says Becky.
She says that she’s found the experience of creating her coaching plan “enriching”.
“I can't say I'm brilliant at lots of things, but there is a thing that I’m brilliant at, and that’s being a cheerleader for people! I get so incredibly excited for what they can achieve for themselves,” she says.
“I don’t have time to do a one-to-one coaching practice, but if the course and the book and the videos on Instagram help people - and I’ve had so many gorgeous comments already - it honestly makes me feel like I could fly.
“And what’s been extra special, is the fact that it has all come out of something so dark.”
Spending an hour or so in Becky’s company is a joy – appropriately, given her job, she’s an absolute ray of sunshine. She really does have a natural ability to connect with people - if I was sat next to her on a train, I would probably end up telling her my secrets too.
One of four sisters, she grew up in the village of Saxlingham Nethergate, south of Norwich and is a former student of Norwich High School for Girls and Norwich School King Edward V.
She started her media career at the EDP, where she was a features assistant, before becoming a weather presenter at ITV Anglia.
She then moved to London to present the national weather and also became a roving reporter for This Morning with assignments as far flung as Australia.
But back in 2007 Becky had a setback when, while on holiday in Devon, she had a surfing accident.
What was initially believed to be concussion turned out to be a very serious head injury. She spent several weeks in hospital and was left suffering from debilitating migraines.
Suddenly it looked as though everything was going to be put on hold – the TV career that was going from strength to strength and her plan to take part in the Clipper Round the World Yacht Race.
But determined not to let it hold her back she made an incredible recovery – and, in another example of how good things can come out of challenging times, it was while training to take part in the race that Becky met her now-husband Jack and after a bit of a whirlwind romance, the pair married at Walberswick in 2009.
Becky came off daily medication for the migraines about 10 years ago – and last year she went surfing for the first time since the accident.
“I now mostly keep the migraines under control with regular osteopathy to make sure my neck is in alignment,” she says.
“When I went surfing again, it was as if I'd never been before, I was so terrified being churned around under the water, feeling like I was going to get hit again.
“But I finally got up on the board, gave a triumphant yell, jumped off, and burst into tears. I can't say that I'll ever go back to it - but it doesn't haunt me anymore,” she says.
Day to day, Becky has so many plates spinning, it is dizzying.
Her high-profile job presenting the national weather during ITV’s recently expanded Evening News Hour sees her out on the road much of the time.
During the summer she went on location reporting on July’s record-breaking temperatures from Cambridge University Botanic Garden and Cavendish on the Suffolk/Essex border.
“Normally I’m upbeat and positive, but actually in the run up to that and on those days, all I could feel was alarmed,” says Becky.
“I was on duty the last time the record was set, in 2019, and I thought I shouldn’t be here again, this soon after. We were up by nearly three degrees in three years.
“From a professional point of view it’s exciting to be covering a topic that everyone is talking about, but from a scientific point of view, it’s deeply alarming, and I really recommend Laura Tobin’s book about climate change, which is fantastic and very readable.”
She and Jack are very much a team when it comes to raising their family. And, in the evenings, she grabs what time she can to work on her book and course.
“My background is in writing and to me it is total heaven to be able to sit quietly in a sunny room with a big cafetiere of coffee, just the computer, no sound, just being able to know that I’ve got two or three hours to write,” she says.
"This is a total fantasy at the moment, by the way. It could be in my perfect day,” she laughs. “Because actually what happens is that I’m in my pyjamas late at night cramped up on the sofa, hoping that the tippety-tap of the computer is not going to wake any of my sleeping family!
“When writing is going well and it flows, it’s just gorgeous, like jumping off a cliff and paragliding down. Other times you can spend two hours slogging away and it’s like getting blood out of a stone. I love it and it‘s torture at the same time.”
Home is near Saffron Walden, where they are in the midst of a huge renovation project.
But Becky admits to missing Norfolk, and would love to move back some day if they could make it work with family and work life.
In the meantime, she returns as much as she can – with family in Norwich, she comes to the city to catch up, and also have her hair cut with her long-time stylist and chum, Brian at Savino and Coombes.
As you might expect, sport and being outdoors and active is at the heart of family life.
“There's very little lying around time at home; we're either on the side-lines or participating,” she says.
“My eldest, Rory, has just started secondary school with a sports placement at a big sports school in Essex and plays cricket for Essex too - so he's really following in his dad's and grandad's footsteps. He dreams of cricket nets and rugby posts at home - one day I hope, I've told him I'd like to just get a kitchen back in there first.
“As well as the endless sports, we are lucky enough to live in an old and very beautiful part of rural Essex, so it's all long bike rides and country walks.
“Last Christmas Jack and I both bought each other a surprise road bike - and we chose exactly the same one for each other - much to the children's hilarity!
“Now that Charlotte, who’s three, has started a couple of mornings of pre-school each week, Jack and I are able to get in some gym time and cycling time together - which feels more romantic than it sounds!”
Becky’s online mindset coaching programme Six Steps to a Life You Love will launch in early December, priced £399. Sign up now for an early bird discount price of £199 at beckymantincoaching.co.uk
I am listening to...
I plough through the most enormous number of audio books when I'm driving; at the moment I'm deep into The Luck Factor by Richard Wiseman - and I alternate it with a frivolous podcast when I need a little light relief - The Wittering Whitehalls is pretty funny!
I am reading...
On the rare occasion that I'm on the train rather than in the car, I mostly read bills and invoices from the builder for our house renovation - not quite so relaxing!
I am watching...
The last great film I watched was Top Gun 2 - I actually think it could be better than the original. And now I frequently say to Jack 'You look GOOD Jack!' for the response 'I AM good Bec!' Ha ha ha!
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