♀️Swindon & Wiltshire’s Most Inspiring Women 2026 | Becky Richens
To mark International Women’s Day 2026, we’re celebrating Swindon & Wiltshire’s most inspiring women.
Through our website and social media channels, we asked our readers which women in our community inspire them and created a list of 20. The list will be featured in our Spring magazine and every weekday throughout March we are profiling and championing each of these fantastic women online and via our social feeds.
Today we put the spotlight on Mental Health Nurse Becky Richens.
Tell us about you and your work…
I am a mental health nurse at heart, and everything I do comes back to supporting real people. Wonderful, complex, capable people being able to be their full selves and to be their best. My work is about helping them get there, and that looks different every single day.
Sometimes it is delivering talks in schools about neurodiversity, helping staff understand what distress really looks like and how to respond without shame.
Sometimes it is standing in front of a conference audience, speaking about trauma-informed care. Sometimes it is facilitating training for whole organisations or supporting professionals to feel more confident.
And sometimes it is much quieter.
It is walking and talking alongside a young person who finds eye contact overwhelming. It is sitting on the floor playing Uno while gently guiding a family through strategies that will make home feel calmer. It is helping a parent untangle guilt and self-doubt. It is supporting a teenager to understand their own brain with compassion rather than criticism.
I work across neurodivergent and mental health spaces with children, young people, adults and families, as well as the systems around them. I partner with health services, education settings and local authorities to embed neuro-affirming, trauma-informed approaches in ways that are practical and sustainable. I care deeply about culture. How it feels to walk through the door of a service. How people are spoken about in meetings. Whether someone leaves feeling smaller or stronger.
I supervise and mentor professionals too, creating reflective spaces where people can think out loud, build skill and reconnect with why they came into caring professions in the first place. My background in learning and development means I focus on translating theory into everyday action
What are you most proud of?
What am I most proud of? The ripples.
I have been nursing for over twenty years now, and I have come to realise that the most meaningful impact is not always the visible one. It is the quiet ripple effect.
Every time I teach, supervise, sit with a family, speak at a conference or support a professional to think differently, something shifts. They take that learning, that reframing, that moment of feeling understood, and they carry it forward. They share it with a colleague. A friend. A parent. A young person. And then that person shares it again.
The good travels.
What moves me most is when, years later, someone says, “Do you remember that thing you told me? I passed it on to someone else and it helped them too.” In that moment, I feel proud, not just of myself, but of them. Because they became part of the ripple.
I may never see the full impact of my work. I will never know how far some of those conversations have travelled. But I know they travel. I know that compassion, when modelled and taught, spreads. I know that when you help one person feel steadier or more understood, they are more likely to offer that to someone else.
After more than two decades in nursing, that is what I am most proud of. Not a title or a role, but the quiet, expanding circle of good that goes far beyond what I can see.
And I absolutely love that.
How does it feel to be recognised as one of Swindon & Wiltshire’s Most Inspiring Women?
It honestly feels quite emotional.
So much of my work is unseen. It sits in the spaces people do not talk about openly. Shame. Stigma. Vulnerability. A lot of it is confidential and rightly so. Some of the most important moments of my career are conversations that will never be shared publicly.
So, for someone to take the time to nominate me anyway feels huge!!
It means that even though the detail cannot be spoken about, the impact was felt. And that really stays with me.
Which is why this recognition feels bigger than it might look on the surface. It tells me the good did not stop in the room where it started.
I feel proud, of course. But more than that, I feel grateful. Grateful that the quiet private work counts.
What does International Women’s Day mean to you?
International Women’s Day makes me think about strength in all its forms. Not just the visible achievements, but the quiet resilience too. The women holding families together, the women challenging systems, the women starting again, the women speaking up when it would be easier to stay silent.
It also reminds me of the women who are too often misunderstood. Women whose mental health struggles are minimised, misdiagnosed or dismissed. Women who are neurodivergent and have spent years masking, being told they’re ‘difficult’ or ‘overreacting’, whose voices are rarely heard. Their experiences, insights and strengths are often overlooked, and that has a real impact on their wellbeing.
For me, International Women’s Day is a chance to see those women, name their struggles, and celebrate their resilience. It is also about solidarity! Women supporting women, mentoring, opening doors, creating spaces where voices can be heard and taken seriously. I would not be where I am without the women who guided me, challenged me and believed in me, and I feel a responsibility to do the same.
It is both celebration and call to action. A reminder that women’s voices matter, their mental health matters, their neurodivergence matters, and that when we truly listen, support and amplify them, everyone benefits.
This year’s IWD theme asks us to think about how giving benefits everyone. What’s an example from your work or community life where supporting another woman led to something meaningful in return?
There are so many moments like this in my work, but one that really sticks with me involves a young professional I was supervising. She was new to her role, anxious about getting things ‘right’, and carrying a lot of self-doubt. I spent time with her one-to-one, talking things through, reflecting on what was happening in her caseload, and helping her feel more confident in her own judgment.
A few months later, she came back to me and said something I’ll never forget. Because I had taken the time to support her, she was now able to support a family who had been struggling for years to be heard. That family felt understood, seen, and helped in ways they hadn’t before, and the ripple didn’t stop there. That young professional then mentored a colleague in the same approach, who in turn helped another family.
Seeing that chain of impact was so powerful. Supporting one woman didn’t just help her – it directly led to better experiences for families, colleagues and the wider service.
Moments like that make me remember how kindness, compassion, generosity, guidance and belief in someone else can grow into something far bigger than either of you could see at the time.
What piece of advice would you share with your younger self?
If I could speak to my younger self, I would say put compassion above everything else. Compassion for others, yes, but most of all, for yourself. You cannot truly be compassionate to others until you speak to yourself with kindness. You have to be your own cheerleader before you can be anyone else’s.
I spent a long time worrying about getting it ‘right’, proving myself, or meeting everyone else’s expectations. I would tell myself that mistakes are part of learning, that boundaries are not weaknesses, and that showing care doesn’t mean carrying everything alone.
I would also remind myself of the starfish story where a child is throwing stranded starfish back into the sea and someone says, “You can’t save them all,” and the child replies, “I made a difference to that one.”
I can’t fix everything, and sometimes that feels overwhelming. But the difference I can make, even to just one person, matters.
Mental health work has a high burnout rate, but being kind to yourself allows you to hold difficult moments with others, to stay steady when things feel heavy, and to lead in a way that people can trust.
This feature is sponsored by Goughs Solicitors. The team at Goughs believe in championing ambition, celebrating achievement and creating opportunities for women to connect, lead and thrive.
