Latest / Spacious Success / 031 | Fine, Thanks: What This Week’s Women’s Health Data Says About the Cost of Performing Okay

Transcript

031 | Fine, Thanks: What This Week’s Women’s Health Data Says About the Cost of Performing Okay · Spacious Success

• 0:05
  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.
• 0:16
  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.
• 0:27
  On Spacious Success, 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.
• 0:45
  Hi, it's Dr. Christy, and today's episode is short and sharp because the point does not need 20 minutes.
• 0:52
  It needs one message sent to one specific person before the day is out.
• 0:58
  This week has been Women's Health Week and RUOK Day in Australia, and I want to talk to you today about the friend or the colleague who never seems to need checking in on –
• 1:10
  The one who looks like she's got it handled.
• 1:13
  The one who everyone else leans on.
• 1:16
  New research out this month says that she might be exactly the person that you should be calling and checking in on.
• 1:25
  Let me describe someone to you.
• 1:26
  This person appears incredibly strong, not just physically, but the way they carry themselves.
• 1:31
  They're confident, capable, disciplined.
• 1:34
  And if you met them briefly, as I often have, you might imagine they were somebody they they seem to move through the world without any difficulty.
• 1:44
  They look like they've got it all together.
• 1:46
  But of course, that's a story that we all create from the information that we've got, whether it's the handshake, the good eye contact, the heel she might be wearing, the way she carried her folder like she had done this a thousand times before, like nothing in the room could rattle her.
• 2:03
  That was it.
• 2:04
  I formed that information and that opinion from those scraps of information that I had, and I turned them into a whole narrative about the woman who must be absolutely fine.
• 2:14
  She's successful.
• 2:16
  She's sorted.
• 2:17
  She doesn't need notes.
• 2:18
  And I wonder whether appearing strong can sometimes make it harder for us to be seen.
• 2:24
  When the world has decided that you are the person who can handle everything, you know, if you want something done, ask a busy person, where do you put the things that you cannot?
• 2:33
  Maybe this is part of the burden of being perceived as strong or capable, the capability curse.
• 2:40
  People might admire your resilience, but they forget to ask you what it costs.
• 2:44
  They rely on your capacity and your capability, but they rarely consider what happens when it runs low.
• 2:52
  Not long after, in a different setting altogether, I did get the chance to speak to this person properly.
• 2:58
  And the person I spoke to wasn't weak, but their willingness to speak honestly, candidly did not contradict the strength I saw in them.
• 3:07
  If anything, when she unraveled in front of me, I started to get a better understanding of what strength can look like.
• 3:14
  It reminded me that every single person we encounter is living a life we often know nothing about.
• 3:20
  Behind the competent exterior, the polished photograph, the impressive LinkedIn post, the successful career or the smile, there's often something more tender, painful, unresolved, a trauma that we're carrying quietly.
• 3:35
  And we often don't know what someone else is holding.
• 3:39
  I do this constantly.
• 3:40
  So do you.
• 3:41
  We do it to the women who are running the meeting, the one who always remembers everybody's coffee order, the one who also manages to coach netball on Saturdays.
• 3:50
  You see, we take a handful of visible signals, competence, composure –
• 3:55
  And we write an entire chapter underneath it that says she's fine.
• 4:01
  She does not need checking in on.
• 4:02
  And here's what makes me really question that story now.
• 4:07
  It is almost word for word the conversation I keep having on coaching calls or with prospective coaching clients.
• 4:15
  It's in the coffee queue after a keynote.
• 4:18
  Once the notebook's away and the formal questions are done,
• 4:21
  Some women, often the most polished ones in the room, the people who were quietly a little bit nervous an hour earlier, pull me aside and they say some sort of version of, I know I actually need to deal with my health.
• 4:35
  They say it quietly.
• 4:37
  They say it in an embarrassed tone, almost like they're apologetic, like she's confessing something that she should have already had sorted.
• 4:45
  That is not one woman having an off week.
• 4:48
  This is a consistent pattern that I'm seeing.
• 4:51
  And this week, it turns out that there's also a data set behind why we might be seeing this.
• 4:57
  Here's the reframe first.
• 4:59
  Let me tell you the numbers.
• 5:01
  This isn't a personal failing.
• 5:03
  This is a mismatch.
• 5:04
  I often say it's a mismatch between what your human operating system, your HOS, can actually hold and what modern life is asking you to carry.
• 5:12
  The newest research called the Beyond the Surface 2026 report surveyed 9,000 Australian women.
• 5:20
  56% of women, more than one in two, are currently experiencing a mental health issue, a
• 5:27
  A quarter of those are experiencing a severe one.
• 5:31
  That rate has not moved since 2022, despite everything we now say out loud about mental health, the mental health programs and initiatives.
• 5:39
  It's not evenly spread either.
• 5:41
  Women who are in their 40s and 50s report the highest levels of anxiety rates amongst any age group, higher than women in their 20s.
• 5:50
  And they have the highest financial stress load of any age group too.
• 5:55
  That is often the exact life stage when we assume that she looks like she's got it all together.
• 6:00
  She's got the career established.
• 6:02
  The kids are a little bit more independent and she's got some breathing room.
• 6:06
  But underneath the data, something opposite, something different is happening.
• 6:11
  There's a clear line between physical and mental health.
• 6:14
  Distress scores climb in a straight, often unmistakable step from women with no physical health condition to women with a condition that affects everyone to a woman with female-specific conditions like endometriosis or PCOS.
• 6:30
  It echoes something that the McKinsey Health Institute has found globally, and this is data beyond Australia, women spend around 25% more of their lives in poor mental health than men do, roughly around nine extra years.
• 6:46
  Different data, but a similar pattern.
• 6:50
  Here's the part that matters for today.
• 6:52
  Of everything the researchers measured, GP visits, taking medication, speaking to a psychologist, believe it or not, talking to a friend came back rating on par with seeing a psychologist for how helpful it actually felt to the woman on the receiving end.
• 7:10
  And yet fewer women did this than last year.
• 7:14
  This is a real biological pull behind this.
• 7:17
  Researchers call it tending and befriending.
• 7:20
  Under chronic stress, women are wired toward connection, to chatting, to caregiving as a way of regulating our nervous system.
• 7:28
  Oxytocin is the antidote to cortisol.
• 7:31
  We know that for women, reaching out, chatting it out, going for a walk and a talk is as helpful as getting professional help.
• 7:41
  Now, it's not a compensation strategy completely.
• 7:44
  So we need to make sure that we are investing in our relationships.
• 7:48
  So here's the thing for today.
• 7:50
  The real question I want to invite you to think about is who's the one woman in your life who looks like she's crushing it?
• 7:57
  She's ambitious.
• 7:58
  She's capable.
• 7:59
  She's got it together.
• 8:00
  The one that you would never think to check on first.
• 8:05
  I want you to open your phone and I want you to message her.
• 8:07
  And I want you to ask a real question, not how are you, because you'll get the automatic reply and we both know it.
• 8:14
  What about if you try how are you actually doing this week and then do the harder part?
• 8:21
  Stay quiet enough to actually hear the real answer land.
• 8:26
  Give her time to fill that silence.
• 8:29
  Okay.
• 8:31
  Looking capable and being okay are not the same thing.
• 8:35
  And the data now backs this up.
• 8:37
  We've got black and white data that tells us this.
• 8:40
  So today I want you to send the message, call the friend, really check in with the woman that you think is the most competent and capable and give her the space.
• 8:51
  to answer it honestly.
• 8:53
  Because we know that there are significant shifts happening to women.
• 8:58
  We know that biology, the demands of modern life, the pressures that hormonal disruptions cause women are having a profound impact on their well-being.
• 9:11
  I'm Dr. Christy Goodwin, a neuroperformance scientist, speaker, author, and executive coach.
• 9:17
  Thank you for listening to Spacious Success.
• 9:20
  If you want to bring this work to your organization, you can inquire about my Powered Up Women keynote or other keynotes I have for male and female audiences at drchristygoodwin.com.
• 9:32
  And if this made you think of a highly successful, accomplished, competent, and capable woman, I want you to forward this to her too.
• 9:41
  I want us to have cascading conversations and I want us to meaningfully check in on women who perhaps are not okay.