Latest / Spacious Success / 01 | From Code Red to High-Res – My Wake-Up Call from the Success Trap

Transcript

01 | From Code Red to High-Res – My Wake-Up Call from the Success Trap · Spacious Success

• 0:00
  Hi, it's Christy here and welcome back to Spacious Success.
• 0:11
  In today's episode, I'm taking you behind the scenes of a really personal moment in
• 0:16
  my life.
• 0:17
  It's what I call my code red moment.
• 0:20
  The day I pulled, more my body pulled more or less, the emergency break on my so-called
• 0:25
  success.
• 0:27
  If you've ever pushed yourself to the brink, or maybe you're on the precipice of
• 0:31
  burnout right now, then this one's for you.
• 0:34
  By the end of this episode, you'll walk away with the tools to spot the early warning signs,
• 0:40
  the exact red flags, the stress signals that I wish I'd recognised sooner, and I'm
• 0:45
  going to share the strategies to reset before you hit burnout.
• 0:49
  Alright, let's dive in.
• 0:51
  Hi, I'm Dr. Christy Goodwin, a neuro-performance scientist, speaker and executive coach who
• 0:56
  learned the hard way that chasing success can come at a cost.
• 1:01
  After burnout landed me in hospital, I made it my mission to help ambitious women who
• 1:07
  are done trading their health and happiness for high performance.
• 1:12
  On Spacious Success, I share science-backed strategies and real stories to help you flourish
• 1:20
  as a female at work and beyond, so you can stop paying the success tax.
• 1:27
  It was early 2020, remember those weeks at the beginning of the pandemic when people
• 1:31
  were literally fighting over toilet paper in the supermarket aisles?
• 1:35
  Do you remember you would disinfect your groceries when they were delivered to your door before
• 1:39
  you put them away?
• 1:41
  Crazy those times.
• 1:42
  Well, back then, my husband had conveniently been deemed an essential worker.
• 1:47
  He proudly trot off to work each day, declaring that he was keeping the economy going, meanwhile,
• 1:54
  I was stuck at home with three boys in tow.
• 1:58
  I was not only trying to resurrect a speaking career that had been, if I'm honest, completely
• 2:03
  decimated overnight with lockdowns and restrictions, I was also attempting, and I used that word
• 2:08
  very loosely, I was attempting to homeschool our three sons, well two of them anyway one
• 2:13
  was just a toddler.
• 2:15
  One else still twitch at the thought of homeschooling, and it wasn't just the schoolwork or the
• 2:20
  week's locked inside the four walls, I was doing what I now call the digital pirouette,
• 2:25
  I didn't like the word pivot, spinning my whole business model on its axis.
• 2:30
  I was delivering virtual keynotes from my kitchen table, often with the kids on the other
• 2:35
  side, supposedly doing their school homework.
• 2:38
  I was feeding kids endless snacks.
• 2:41
  I was trying to stop them from climbing the curtains, all I remember is that it was chaos.
• 2:47
  To illustrate how chaotic it was one day I was about to present a webinar to one of Australia's
• 2:52
  biggest bags.
• 2:53
  Big stakes moment, huge visibility, a real hold it together moment Christie, except
• 3:00
  my middle son Billy had discovered Zoom filters on his online lesson, and so I got on
• 3:06
  to deliver this webinar, and not only did I appear on the screen as Elsa from Frozen,
• 3:12
  he'd also thought it'd be funny to change my name, and I delivered the entire webinar
• 3:18
  a stinky bum bum.
• 3:20
  Delivering a high stakes webinar as Elsa, aka stinky bum bum, well it was funny, people
• 3:25
  laughed, the very forgiving banking people said it was a great equalizer, but underneath
• 3:31
  it was stressful.
• 3:32
  You see, this wasn't my breaking point, but it was just another layer of stress, stacked
• 3:37
  on years and years of porcelain and chronic stress.
• 3:42
  It was stacked onto an already frazzled nervous system, on top of all the whispers that I'd
• 3:47
  heard for years from my body to slow down, but the whispers that I kept ignoring.
• 3:53
  You see my body, it had been keeping score.
• 3:57
  Not long after this Elsa banking moment, I woke up in a hospital code red emergency
• 4:03
  ward, cooked up to machines, including a ventilator.
• 4:08
  You see, I'd suffered from repeated uncontrollable seizures, and here's how it happened.
• 4:14
  I contracted COVID early in the pandemic, back when people were still hoarding the toilet
• 4:19
  paper kind of days.
• 4:21
  As a fit, vaccinated woman with no underlying healthy shoes in her early 40s, if I'm
• 4:26
  honest with you, I thought COVID would be a blip on the radar, it would be a minor mild
• 4:31
  health incident.
• 4:32
  Honestly, I was secretly hoping to binge watch Netflix in bed and have my husband deliver
• 4:38
  me chicken soup, neither of which took place, but a girlfriend dream.
• 4:43
  Instead, our great-dane Tommy found me convulsing on the floor early one Wednesday morning
• 4:49
  around 3am.
• 4:50
  He barked so loudly until my husband woke up and found me and called an ambulance.
• 4:56
  The doctors ran every test imaginable, and after extensive testing, the only reason that
• 5:02
  they could come up with this to why I was so sick with COVID was that I was burnt out.
• 5:08
  They told me this took hold because your system was completely depleted, completely stripped.
• 5:13
  You see, years of chronic stress had caught up with me.
• 5:18
  It wasn't just COVID, it was burnout, burnout wearing a mask.
• 5:23
  My body had finally pulled the emergency brake, because as I often tell my clients, your
• 5:31
  body is always keeping score and your body never lies.
• 5:36
  I have learned that there's a truth about a success trap.
• 5:40
  I wasn't just stressed, I was paying what I now call the success tax.
• 5:46
  An ambition simply just outruns your biology.
• 5:50
  When you sacrifice your sleep, your health, your relationships in your relentless pursuit
• 5:55
  of doing it all.
• 5:57
  When success costs more than you ever meant for it to pay, and the worst part, I arrogantly
• 6:05
  maybe even ignorantly thought that I could outrun depletion with discipline.
• 6:09
  I believed that I could just keep going, I could push on.
• 6:13
  Even though I deliver keynotes and write about how we can't outperform our biological blueprint,
• 6:20
  if I'm really honest with you, the uncomfortable truth is, I wasn't walking my talk.
• 6:26
  I thought I could do what so many of us have been conditioned to do.
• 6:32
  And I adopted the cultural advice of the 1980s, and I soldier on.
• 6:37
  Do you remember this song?
• 6:39
  You ever caught the flu, you should be back in bed, but you had to soldier on.
• 6:47
  Soldier on, when caught will soldier on.
• 6:51
  This taxed my body.
• 6:52
  I was living off a cocktail of caffeine and cortisol most days, but our biological, it
• 6:59
  always collects, and I'm not alone.
• 7:02
  Deloitte research shows that 53% of women in senior roles feel burned out.
• 7:07
  43% of women say that they're always on.
• 7:12
  And they're half admit that they don't feel safe disclosing how much they're struggling.
• 7:19
  It's no longer quite quitting, it's quite cracking, and that's not performance.
• 7:24
  That's just survival with a salary.
• 7:26
  You see, I ignored the early warning signs that I was burnt out.
• 7:30
  And here's the tricky thing about burnout.
• 7:33
  It doesn't just hit all at once.
• 7:35
  It creeps in, little by little.
• 7:38
  And if you know what to look for, you can catch it early before your body shuts down,
• 7:44
  and does what mine did and pulls the emergency brakes.
• 7:49
  Some of the early red flags that I experienced and that my clients see as well, it can be
• 7:55
  things including trouble falling or staying asleep, or just full blown insomniar, sleep
• 8:01
  difficulties full stop.
• 8:02
  It's irritability, snapping at the people that you love, often over the most trivial,
• 8:07
  ridiculous things.
• 8:09
  It's digestive issues that come out of nowhere.
• 8:14
  They're the top three that I usually see.
• 8:17
  It's constant muscle tension, shoulders up around your ears, bone, deep fatigue, all of
• 8:23
  the time, even if you're lucky enough to have slept.
• 8:26
  It is emotional and physical exhaustion that no coffee can fix.
• 8:32
  It's becoming more cynical or detached from your work.
• 8:35
  Feeling like, well, what's the point?
• 8:38
  It's forgetfulness, it's losing track of really simple things.
• 8:42
  It's just a state of fogginess.
• 8:46
  It's a decline in your motivation, or perhaps even socially withdrawing, not going out with
• 8:51
  your friends and declining dinner dates.
• 8:53
  It's neglecting your own self-care.
• 8:56
  It's feeling like you're achieving less, no matter how hard you work.
• 9:01
  It can often be difficulties with focus.
• 9:04
  It can be emotional blunting, feeling just blah, that really good scientific description.
• 9:12
  If you're nodding along to a few of these, well, that's your system, your HOS, your human
• 9:18
  operating system, potentially waving a red flag.
• 9:21
  That's not weakness, I want you to know it's not laziness, it's biology and when you
• 9:26
  catch it early, you can reset before you crash.
• 9:30
  You see, in that Code Red ward, I decided to rebuild my life.
• 9:35
  Coming out of that hospital, I made a pledge, I made a decision, no more high performance
• 9:41
  with a human cost.
• 9:42
  So here's some of the things that I started doing and what I now teach my coaching clients
• 9:48
  and the people that want results but without burnout and exhaustion.
• 9:53
  I started to see recovery as a ritual.
• 9:56
  Rest became something that I scheduled, it wasn't a reward.
• 10:00
  I started to use NSDR non-sleep deep rest, I took breaks in my day.
• 10:06
  Not huge ones, it wasn't an hour of doing the downward dog, five to ten minutes here
• 10:10
  and there.
• 10:11
  I started to delay my morning coffee, don't worry, I still had my coffee but I just delayed
• 10:16
  it by an hour or so.
• 10:17
  I use simple breathing and sighing practices, yes, we're going to unpack the science of
• 10:22
  science to regulate my stress in real time because sometimes three size before a stressful
• 10:30
  meeting or before you pick your kids up from school can be enough to make a significant
• 10:35
  difference to your stress.
• 10:38
  I treated recovery as fuel not fluff and for the first time I saw recovery as my right
• 10:44
  and my responsibility, it wasn't a reward.
• 10:47
  The second thing I did is I started tracking my biometric data.
• 10:52
  Use the hard truth, you can't outrun your biology with ambition or caffeine.
• 10:58
  White knuckling your way to the top will leave you exhausted and depleted and we know that.
• 11:04
  You can't build what I call a high res life on a low battery body and you absolutely
• 11:11
  can't redefine success if you're too tired to even think clearly and here's something
• 11:17
  that I've never shared publicly.
• 11:20
  I had the data before I got sick.
• 11:22
  I'd been wearing a whoop strap which is a wearable device I'd also tried an aura ring and
• 11:28
  I'd worn the whoop device for several months before I landed in the COVID red ward.
• 11:32
  It had been warning me that I was powered down.
• 11:37
  I felt like a low res version of myself and my data certainly corroborated that but I
• 11:42
  ignored it because the truth it showed me wasn't convenient.
• 11:46
  They told me that I was under recovered, that my HIV, my heart rate variability was tanking,
• 11:52
  that my sleep was dismal both the quality and quantity and my system was simply stretched.
• 11:58
  But I ignored it, I brushed it off because I didn't want to slow down.
• 12:02
  It was an inconvenient truth.
• 12:05
  The data didn't match the version of success that I was performing at and wanting to perform
• 12:09
  it so I ignored it.
• 12:11
  I literally had the red flags on the app on my phone telling me I was powered down.
• 12:17
  But now that same data is one of the most powerful tools in my performance toolkit and
• 12:22
  that of my clients.
• 12:23
  These days I use my biometric data from my whoop strap to make informed, intentional
• 12:28
  decisions about how I run my days and nights.
• 12:32
  It tells me when I need more rest to release the stress valve.
• 12:36
  It shows me the invisible impact of some of my habits like saunas, physical exercise,
• 12:41
  non-sleep deep rest.
• 12:43
  It reinforces what's working, instead of just highlighting what's not working.
• 12:49
  I no longer see it as a guilt trip but I see it as my dashboard, a way to partner with
• 12:54
  my body instead of just simply powering and pushing past it.
• 12:58
  Here's the truth.
• 13:01
  Your body is always listening and it's not failure.
• 13:05
  Honoring your human operating system isn't something indulgent, it's not a luxury and
• 13:10
  using data to protect and optimize your performance, that's power.
• 13:15
  The third thing I started doing was to seek support rather than being solo.
• 13:20
  I had to ask and accept more help.
• 13:23
  I stopped trying to do it all and do it all alone.
• 13:25
  I outsourced, I asked for help, I created systems, I began to delegate.
• 13:31
  Because sustainable success I've realized doesn't require suffering.
• 13:37
  It requires support.
• 13:39
  Re-enforcing the belief that you have to grind and hustle your way to the top, you simply
• 13:44
  don't.
• 13:45
  The most confronting moment that came for me was that code red ward.
• 13:50
  Don't wait until your health suffers.
• 13:53
  Don't wait until your relationship breaks down.
• 13:55
  Don't wait for your code red moment to reset.
• 13:59
  You can choose to lead from your biology, not in spite of it.
• 14:04
  In that code red ward there was a thin paper petition curtain between me and another
• 14:09
  patient.
• 14:10
  I could hear her gasping for air calling out for her daughters.
• 14:14
  And then I heard her take the final breath of her life.
• 14:19
  The doctor pronounced her time of death.
• 14:22
  Her daughters didn't arrive in time to say goodbye.
• 14:24
  It was a devastating moment and one that I will never forget.
• 14:28
  It was terrifying because I thought, what if that happens to me?
• 14:31
  What if my boys grow up without their mom?
• 14:35
  What if my husband never figures out the password to the lunch order app?
• 14:40
  Or worse the Netflix login.
• 14:42
  It's really strange the random thoughts that you have in those moments.
• 14:48
  But here's what hit me the hardest.
• 14:51
  We don't have unlimited time, energy and attention.
• 14:54
  I had to confront the harsh reality that I had almost paid the absolute ultimate success
• 15:00
  tax by compromising my health and wellbeing in the pursuit of my goals.
• 15:06
  If we're lucky, we get about 4,000 weeks.
• 15:09
  That means we have 4,000 Sundays in our entire lifetime.
• 15:13
  That's it.
• 15:14
  And that moment forced me to examine a truth.
• 15:17
  I wasn't really living.
• 15:19
  I was just grinding it out, hoping to catch my breath later.
• 15:23
  And later, well, it almost didn't come.
• 15:27
  You don't have to pay a success tax when you learn to work in harmony with what I call
• 15:32
  your human operating system, your HOS.
• 15:36
  This is what I share in my keynotes and with my coaching clients.
• 15:41
  Because I have learned that you were designed and you deserve to flourish, not flounder.
• 15:49
  You get a choice.
• 15:51
  You can choose to lead from your biology, not in spite of it.
• 15:55
  You don't have to pay a success tax.
• 15:57
  I'm living proof of that now.
• 16:00
  So what's next?
• 16:02
  In the next episode, we're talking about the stress super storm.
• 16:07
  Yes, I see so many women experiencing this.
• 16:10
  It's the hidden trafficker of biology, beliefs and bias that are burning out brilliant women
• 16:16
  just like you.
• 16:18
  I'm going to share with you why you're not weak, you're not lazy and you're certainly
• 16:21
  not broken.
• 16:23
  You're just living in a system that was never designed for your brilliance?
• 16:27
  Was it designed for your biology?
• 16:30
  Until then, remember this.
• 16:33
  Success should never ever require a hospital bed or an illness to get your attention.
• 16:39
  And if you're tired of paying a success tax, I want to assure you there is another way.
• 16:45
  You deserve sustainable, spacious, high performance success.
• 16:50
  And this podcast, well, it's here to show you just how to do it.
• 16:55
  Thank you for listening.
• 16:56
  I'm Dr. Christie Goodwin, a neuroperformance scientist, speaker, author and executive coach.
• 17:01
  Thank you for listening to spacious success.
• 17:04
  If my story resonated, please subscribe so you never miss an episode.
• 17:10
  And if you know a friend, a girlfriend, a colleague, a neighbour, someone on the edge
• 17:16
  of their own code red moment, please share this episode with them.
• 17:20
  Because success without sacrifice, I want to tell you that it's not only possible.
• 17:26
  I actually think it's your birthright and it's baked into your biology.
• 17:31
  Thanks for listening.