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027 | Shiny and Shabby: The Trade-Offs Nobody Warned You About · Spacious Success

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Hi, it's Dr. Christy and welcome back to Spacious Success.
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Today, I'm going somewhere a little bit different.
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There's no research papers, no stats, no tables.
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This one's a bit more personal.
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I want to talk about the trade-offs, the ones that ambitious women make every single day, but the one that nobody talks about or posts about, the ones that have not fully been named even to ourselves.
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Right.
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Because I think there's an enormous amount of private grief around this.
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The grief that gets labeled as guilt or ingratitude or weakness.
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When really, the crux of it, if we're being honest, it's building a significant life.
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I think naming it out loud matters.
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This episode might make you cry a little bit.
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It might make you laugh.
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Both are fine.
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So let's go.
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Hi, I'm Dr. Christy Goodwin, a neuro-performance scientist, speaker and executive coach who learned the hard way that chasing success can come at a cost.
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After burnout landed me in hospital, I made it my mission to help ambitious women who are done trading their health and happiness for high performance.
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On Spacious Success...
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I share science-backed strategies and real stories to help you flourish as a female at work and beyond so you can stop paying the success tax.
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Thank you.
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Something has come up repeatedly in the rooms where I have been speaking this year. I have delivered a number of keynotes, fireside chats, panel discussions with and for women across a range of industries and sectors. I've been working on a lot of work on a lot of work on a lot of work on a lot of work on a lot of work on a lot of work on a lot of work on a lot of work on a lot of work on a lot of work on a lot of work on a lot of work on a lot of work on a lot of work on a lot of work on a lot of work on a lot of work on a lot of work on a lot of work on a lot of work on a lot of work on a lot of work on a lot of work on a lot of work on a lot of work on a lot of work on a lot of work on a lot of work on a lot of work on a lot of work on a lot of work on a lot of work on a lot of work on a lot of work on
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And at almost every single one, the same theme in the Q&A surfaces.
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Accomplished women, leaders, founders, executives, mothers, who are talking openly and honestly about the trade-offs that they have made to achieve success.
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debunking the superwoman myth, stepping out of what I would call the mother martyr mode, and naming with some relief that this idea that we can have it all is a complete misnomer, and that having it all, even if we're not, is not possible, will come at a cost that nobody actually warned us about.
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And when they do, or when I share my trade-offs, there's almost a collective sigh, a look of relief from the women in the room.
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I've had guests on this podcast do the same.
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Tori Archbold talked about building a career as a solo parent.
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Lisa Korda talked about navigating single motherhood, perimenopause, and an ADHD autism diagnosis.
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Amelia Phillips talked about what she actually does or sees in the bodies of high-performing women who think that they're managing.
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These women did not perform their success.
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They actively described it.
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The shiny parts and the shabby parts.
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And every time we share this, I watch and listen to audiences exhale.
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One of the most powerful voices on this subject is someone I admire enormously.
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Shonda Rhimes.
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If you do not know her work, Shonda is the writer and producer behind that television series Grey's Anatomy.
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Who remembers that?
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She's written Scandal, Bridgerton, and How to Get Away with Murder.
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She built an empire called Shondaland.
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And in 2014, she gave a commencement speech at Dartmouth College and she said something that every ambitious woman needs to hear at least once.
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I'm going to let you listen to it now.
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As a very successful woman, a single mother of three, who constantly gets asked the question, how do you do it all?
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For once, I'm going to answer that question with 100% honesty here for you now.
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The answer is this.
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I don't.
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Whenever you see me somewhere succeeding in one area of my life...
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that almost certainly means I am failing in another area of my life.
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If I am killing it on a scandal script for work, I am probably missing bath and story time at home.
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If I am at home sewing my kids Halloween costumes, I'm probably blowing off a rewrite I was supposed to turn in.
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If I'm accepting a prestigious award, I'm missing my baby's first swim lesson.
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If I'm at my daughter's debut in her school musical,
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I am missing Sandra Oh's last scene ever being filmed at Grey's Anatomy.
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If I am succeeding at one, I am inevitably failing at the other.
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That is the trade off.
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That is the Faustian bargain one makes with the devil that comes with being a powerful working woman who is also a powerful mother.
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Shonda was asked, as she constantly is, and as I am often asked, how do you do it all?
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And she said she doesn't do it all.
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Whenever you see her succeeding in one area of her life, that almost certainly means that she's failing in another.
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If she's killing it on a script, she's probably missing the bath and the story time at home.
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If she's at her daughter's school musical, she's missing an important scene being rewritten.
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If she's succeeding at one thing, she's inevitably not succeeding at another.
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She said it.
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She named the trade-off.
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She called it with charismatic honesty.
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And this is the bargaining that powerful, accomplished women have to do.
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And she said, you never feel completely okay.
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Something's always lost.
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Something's perhaps missing.
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And I find this extraordinary and refreshing, not because it's bleak, because it's honest.
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There's so little honesty in public conversation about this.
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We're surrounded by curated feeds of success, the award, the announcements, the photo shoot, the shiny.
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And almost no one shows the shabby side of what building a life as an ambitious, accomplished woman looks like.
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This is why I talk about women sharing the shiny and the shabby.
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The shiny side is the version that makes it onto your LinkedIn profile.
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It's in your keynote, it's in your bio, it's in your Christmas card write-up.
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The career wins, the proud parent photos, the holiday that finally happened.
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The shabby side is everything else.
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It's a school concert that you missed.
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The friendship that quietly dissolves because neither of you had the time.
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It's the book you started to read three years ago and you've not picked up since.
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It's the body that's been running on cortisol and caffeine for so long that you've forgotten what it feels like to wake up and not be already behind.
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I want to tell you about a specific shabby moment of mine.
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At the time, my son was about five years old.
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He'd just been given a major part in his preschool end-of-year concert.
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He was so proud because he was a timid soul.
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Maggie Dent would describe him as a lamb.
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He's very different to his brothers who were roosters.
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He had rehearsed his lines for weeks.
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He told every adult that he encountered that he was the narrator.
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He even told the checkout lady at Woolworths.
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He told our neighbours.
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He told everybody.
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Every time his grandparents visited, he'd rehearse his lines.
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But I missed the performance.
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I had a keynote in the afternoon in Perth, and I had confirmed that booking months before the concert date was set.
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And by the time I knew about the clash, changing it would have cost a client relationship.
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Now, my son was fine.
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My husband was there.
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My parents were there.
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He barely seemed to notice.
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But I noticed.
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And I noticed for months.
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And what I know now that I didn't fully understand at the time is that the feeling I was carrying wasn't actually guilt.
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It was grief.
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Something real was lost.
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A small thing, but it was real.
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And I think the language there matters enormously.
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Let me take this in a different direction.
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Let me ground this in biology because that is always where I come back to.
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You see, every decision that you make, every trade-off, every prioritization, every no and every yes draws on your finite cognitive resources.
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This is not metaphorical.
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It's neurobiological.
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Your prefrontal cortex, which governs your decision-making, your impulse control, it's your values-based reasoning, it operates on glucose.
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And it doesn't have an infinite supply.
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So the more decisions that you're processing across the day, particularly decisions that involve competing values,
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emotional decisions, which is exactly what trade-offs require, the more depleted that resource becomes.
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And this is what researchers call decision fatigue.
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The research is clear.
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The quality of our decisions degrades measurably across the course of a day as our cognitive resources are depleted.
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Judges give worse parole decisions in the afternoon.
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Doctors prescribe more inappropriate antibiotics in the last hour of the clinic.
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It is reported.
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And ambitious women have been making these value-laden trade-off decisions since 6 a.m. And they're making their worst choices often at 9 p.m. And here's the layer that is specific to women.
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The cognitive load research consistently shows that women carry a disproportionate share of what is called the mental load.
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The invisible organizational labor of running a household, managing relationships, tracking what everyone needs, anticipating who needs new shoes or an appointment and adjusting accordingly.
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This isn't a values judgment about men.
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It's a structural observation backed up by data.
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the labor that is cognitively expensive.
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It's not experienced as rest.
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It doesn't restore us.
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It draws on the same finite resources as our paid work, our strategic thinking, our output.
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So when we talk about trade-offs,
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We're not just talking about time.
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We're talking about our cognitive bandwidth.
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Every role that you carry, parent, mother, professional, carer, friend, daughter, is a cognitive tab that remains open.
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And the more tabs you have, the lower processing power you have as an individual.
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This is why the exhaustion that so many ambitious women describe is not fixed by sleep or a bubble bath.
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It is the accumulated cost of running multiple cognitively expensive roles all at the same time in a culture that does not name that cost and does not support you in managing it.
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The trade-offs are not a flaw.
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They're a consequence of us carrying more than the system, our biological system, was ever supposed to hold.
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Now, I'm going to offer you three things in this particular episode, not because they solve the trade-offs.
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Nothing does, but because making the negotiation more honest, more transparent, is much more sustainable for us.
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The first is what I call the visible load audit.
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Roughly at once a quarter, write down every role that you currently carry.
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Not just your job title, every role.
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Parent, partner, friend, daughter, carer, household manager, team leader, community volunteer, school committee member.
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And then next to each one, write the single biggest thing that that role is currently asking of you.
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This is not a complaint list.
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It's a ledger.
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You cannot negotiate a trade-off if you have not named it.
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You cannot ask for more support around a load that's often invisible, even to yourself.
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Okay.
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The visible load audit does not fix anything, but it makes the invisible visible.
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And that changes conversations that you're able to have with yourself, with your partner, with your team, with your colleagues.
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The second is to practice what I call a seasonal question.
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I borrowed this from my late EA, Karen.
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who is also a dear friend, and she used to ask me regularly, Christy, what does success in this season of your life look like?
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Not this career, not this lifetime, just in this season, this three months, right now.
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And your answer changes.
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It should change.
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What success looked like when my children were young is very different to what it looks like now that they're older.
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What success looked like when I was building my speaking career is very different from what it looks like now that I'm focused on this podcast, my next book and further speaking opportunities.
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Asking the seasonal question regularly means that the tradeoffs that you're making are genuinely in service of something current, not something that you decided five years ago and have not revisited.
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And the third is to separate guilt from grief.
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This is the one that I want you to come back to with the language that we use.
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Emma Isaacs, who is the founder of Business Chicks and the author of a book called Winging It, said that guilt is a wasted emotion.
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And I love this when I heard her say this.
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Her point is not that you won't ever feel guilty.
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She's clear that she feels it too.
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But her point is that guilt is not productive.
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It doesn't serve you as a mom.
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It does not serve you the child.
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It does not move anything forward.
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And the energy it takes to sustain that guilt is the energy that we could redirect somewhere else, somewhere more productive.
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I take that one a step further and add a distinction that I find genuinely really liberating.
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Guilt says I did something wrong because,
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Grief says maybe something was lost.
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Missing my son's concert wasn't morally wrong.
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I made a considered deliberate decision under difficult circumstances.
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But it was still a loss.
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A small one in the grand scheme of things, but it was real.
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Grief is a response to loss.
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Guilt is what we have been trained to apply when we meet impossible standards that we're offered.
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When you notice that feeling that comes with a trade-off, ask yourself, is this guilt or grief?
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If it's grief, let it land.
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Name it.
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Don't rush into a resolution.
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Grief is genuinely processed and should not accumulate.
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Guilt that is suppressed always does accumulate.
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We need more senior women like Shonda and Emma naming publicly what their trade-offs are.
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We need more open conversations, not because misery loves company, but because the silence around the trade-offs is keeping women locked into a performance of having it all when the honest conversation would be so much more useful and practical and so much less exhausting.
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I'd like to close this personal episode with something a wise friend once said to me.
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She said, Christy, success is living in close proximity to your values.
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That sentence stayed with me.
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Because if it's true, and I believe it is, then the work is not about eliminating trade-offs.
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It's about making sure that the trade-offs that we're making are aligned with what we actually value.
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Not what looks impressive on your bio.
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Not what gets the approval of the people whose approval you've been chasing for years.
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What do you value?
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And that requires excavation.
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It requires some thinking time.
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It requires clarity to genuinely, deliberately sit with a journal, go for a long walk, have a good conversation with a friend to understand what your values actually are in this season of your life.
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Not the values you inherited, not the ones that your culture assigned to you, your values.
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And when you know your values, the trade-offs don't disappear.
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they become clearer, cleaner.
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You know which ones you can make with confidence and which ones signal that something maybe needs to change.
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You stop trading your health for your hustle without ever noticing it.
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You start choosing more deliberately.
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You are shiny.
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You're also shabby and both are true.
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Both are yours.
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And so this week's power up is to do the visible load audit, not the cleaned up version, the honest one.
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Write down every role that you are carrying right now and ask what is that role asking of you?
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Write down your top three values in this season of your life and see if the roles are serving your values.
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See where the gap is.
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And the gap is where your next real conversation begins.
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In the next episode, we're going to have another guest.
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And then in the next solo episode, we're going to talk about what our biometric data is telling us.
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When we start using biometric data to obsess, when we default to using data and dashboards to dictate and dominate our days, we have a problem.
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I'm going to talk about how we can optimize performance by making data-driven decisions.
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Until then, take your cape off and ask yourself...
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What does success in this season of life look like?
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And start talking and getting to know what your trade-offs are.
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Thank you for listening to Spacious Success.
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My name is Dr. Christy Goodwin and I thank you for tuning in.