About Sally

About Sally

Sally is the founder of Mind Capacity and the creator of the Capacity Model. She has spent the past five years coaching in the burnout space with people from diverse backgrounds and professions. Her focus is now on supporting helping professionals who are exhausted, overwhelmed, and drained. Through her coaching experience, she learned that burnout is not a personal failure. It happens when the constant demands of caring work consistently exceed the resources available to recover.

Her approach is compassionate, evidence based, and rooted in the belief that when helping professionals shift from a deficits model to a capacity model, the outcome of their work changes dramatically.

The Origin of the Capacity Model

Sally developed the Capacity Model because she saw that generic resilience training and surface level self-care were not enough. Helping professionals were being told they needed to be stronger and more resilient. But the real problem was deeper. The demands of caring work were consistently exceeding their capacity to recover, with not enough replenishment to restore their resources.

Drawing on research from Christina Maslach, Dr Aimee Apigian, Dr Sarah, and many others, Sally created a framework that addresses both personal and environmental factors. The Capacity Model identifies six core resources that fuel us. When these resources are depleted, exhaustion follows. When replenished, vitality becomes possible.

Sally expanded upon the person-environment mismatch theory to include a broader range of environmental pressures that can constrain contribution and drain energy. Her framework asks what determines whether people, teams, organisations, and communities have enough capacity to adapt, recover, and contribute sustainably.

Experience and Expertise

Sally has extensive experience coaching in the burnout space with people from diverse backgrounds. She has worked with individuals across various sectors and has also supported unpaid caregivers within government funded programs, deepening her understanding of burnout, compassion fatigue, and change fatigue.

Her approach integrates concepts from burnout, compassion fatigue, change fatigue, positive psychology, wellbeing coaching, organisational psychology, and trauma understanding. The concepts themselves are not new. But the way they have been linked is Sally’s point of difference.