Spacious Success

A podcast for high-achieving women who want to thrive at work without burning out their lives. You’re smart. You’re driven. You love what you do. But you’re also… exhausted. Welcome to Spacious Success, a podcast for women who are ready to redefine what it means to “have it all” in a world that rarely slows down. Hosted by Dr Kristy Goodwin, one of Australia’s leading neuro-performance experts, this show unpacks the science, strategies and stories that help ambitious women perform at their best, without sacrificing their wellbeing, relationships, or sanity. Because let’s be honest: the systems we work in weren’t built for women. The digital demands never stop. And burnout isn’t a vibe , it’s a physiological SOS. Each episode explores how we can create sustainable success from the inside out, at work, in leadership, in motherhood, and in our own minds and bodies. Expect practical tools, honest conversations, and brain-based strategies that move beyond hustle culture and toxic productivity. Whether you’re a leader, executive, founder, educator, or changemaker, Spacious Success is here to remind you: ✨ You don’t have to choose between ambition and alignment. ✨ You can be excellent without being always-on. ✨ You can lead and live without losing yourself. We’ll explore topics like: • How to thrive in a digitally-demanding world • The nervous system science behind burnout and performance • Redefining success in leadership, motherhood, and midlife • Navigating the invisible load at home and work • Creating boundaries that actually serve you • Women’s health and hormones in high-pressure roles • Recovery, rest and resilience in real life Plus, you’ll hear from inspiring guests, thought leaders, experts, creatives and high-performing women, who are rewriting the rules and reclaiming what success looks and feels like. 🎧 Hit follow and join the movement toward a more spacious, sustainable, and human way to work and live. Because you weren’t meant to do it all. You were meant to do what matters, with more ease, energy and spaciousness.

Spacious Success is a business podcast hosted by Unknown Host, with 31 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80. PitchCentric scores this show on Booking Probability, Listen Score, and live audience signals refreshed every 24 hours.

Unknown Host hosts Spacious Success, a business show with 31 episodes published.

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  Episode #30

  030 | Credits in the Health Bank with Amanda Stevens

  Sep 3, 20261h 2m

  What if your health was never meant to be the reward for the work, but the infrastructure it runs on? Amanda Stevens met Kristy in a Zoom room in the middle of 2020, when the speaking industry had just collapsed overnight and Amanda was one of the few people showing up for other speakers instead of disappearing into the panic. That generosity turned into a friendship, and eventually into this conversation. Amanda has delivered 1700 keynotes over 17 years, written five books, and built a career on the idea of radical customer obsession, consulting to brands like Microsoft, Lend Lease and Procter & Gamble along the way. She built most of that career as a single mother, travelling with a baby, a cot and a car seat through business lounges that were not built with her in mind. In November 2021, what Amanda thought was a bad bout of gastro turned into eight days in ICU with septicaemia. This conversation traces what that experience taught her about health as a performance strategy rather than a reward, and what she has changed about how she works, rests and asks for help since. In this episode Amanda shares Why Amanda opened up Zoom rooms for other speakers in the exact week her own livelihood evaporated The 48 keynote cancellations in three days that ended Amanda's record year before it started Why women are biologically wired to notice the gaps other people miss, and what that has to do with radical customer obsession The conversation with Sir Richard Branson at Necker Island that reshaped how Amanda thinks about curiosity and frustration as the engine of great brands What imposter syndrome sounded like on the boat ride in, and the internal argument that got her off it The real trade-offs of building a speaking business as a single mother with no family safety net The business-lounge moment Amanda thought was a triumph, and the very different reason every man in the room was staring at her The Friday night in November 2021 that turned from a bad night's sleep into a fight for her life "The credits you have in that health bank are everything" Why Amanda no longer waits for the calm to arrive before she books the holiday The household manager decision Amanda calls one of her biggest flexes, and what it actually freed up Kristy's read on why highly capable women underestimate their own mental load What spacious success actually looks like for Amanda this week, not the aspirational version Key Quotes "The credits you have in that health bank are everything." "Drink the wine. Buy the shoes. Send the flowers. Book the holiday." "Outsource, outsource, outsource, because we can't do it all." Timestamps (00:53) How a Zoom room in 2020 changed everything (03:32) Welcome, Amanda (04:11) Friday the 13th: watching 48 keynotes disappear in three days (07:01) Choosing generosity over panic (11:16) Why women are biologically wired for radical customer obsession (15:41) Necker Island, imposter syndrome, and the conversation with Richard Branson that changed how she builds brands (23:38) The shiny highlight reel versus the shabby 3am wake-ups (24:31) Building a speaking business with a newborn in tow (31:03) The business-lounge story nobody warned her about (34:47) The night a bad bout of gastro turned into eight days in ICU (41:48) Credits in the health bank (49:19) Turning hard things into fertilizer (55:14) What spacious success actually looks like this week (59:12) The capability curse (01:01:27) Book the holiday: Amanda's closing advice Amanda Stevens Website: https://amandastevens.com.au/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marketingamanda LinkedIn- https://www.linkedin.com/in/marketingamanda Website: drkristygoodwin.com LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/dr-kristy-goodwin Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/drkristy/ Speaking enquiries (for both Amanda and Kristy): emma@tieronemanagement.com.au References Macquarie Dictionary. (2024). Word of the year 2024: Enshittification. https://www.macquariedictionary.com.au/word-of-the-year/word-of-the-year-2024/ Roy Morgan. (2026, March). Bunnings is Australia's most trusted brand; OpenAI enters the top 20 most distrusted brands for the first time [Risk Monitor quarterly update]. https://www.roymorgan.com/findings/10247-risk-monitor-quartely-update-march-2026 Running for Premature Babies. (n.d.). Our story. Retrieved August 2026, from https://www.runningforprematurebabies.com/about/our-story Other episodes you may be interested in EP002, The Stress Superstorm: Why Women Are Burning Out Faster Than Ever (the biology of chronic stress this episode's sepsis story makes physical)

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  Episode #29

  029 | The Bandwidth Gap: Why Your Brain, Not Your Tech Stack, Is the Real AI Constraint

  Aug 27, 202615 min

  What if the real bottleneck in your AI rollout isn't the technology at all? Somewhere in your organisation this week, someone signed off on another piece of AI software. Another platform. Another promise that everything is about to get faster. And in the room, almost nobody asked the question that actually determines whether any of it pays off. Dr Kristy Goodwin, neuro-performance scientist and executive coach, has been sitting in those rooms, and coaching the women trying to keep up inside them. In this episode she names what she is seeing: a widening gap between how fast AI capability is climbing and how slowly human cognitive capacity moves, because our brains are still running on roughly the same biological hardware they have run on for 100,000 years. She traces where that gap gets paid, why it is quietly heavier for women, and what to actually do about it before the next tool rollout. In this episode Kristy shares Why “do the humans using it have the capacity to leverage it” is the one question missing from most AI rollout conversations The bandwidth gap: two lines on a graph, and why the space between them is where the cost lands Why she calls that gap the success tax, and who actually pays it New research from the World Economic Forum and the McKinsey Health Institute naming brain capital as the constraint on AI value, not the technology itself Why more than one in five employees globally are already reporting burnout symptoms, at the exact moment organisations are racing to scale AI Why AI often removes the easy tasks and leaves the cognitively expensive judgment calls, a heavier load, not a lighter one How this connects to the stress superstorm and the invisible load she has unpacked in earlier episodes Why she believes this shift is widening the gender wellbeing gap specifically Five levers, translated into her human operating system language, for protecting your brain capital: calibrating cognitive load, protecting cognitive capacity, enabling your Focus Quotient, building adaptive brain skills, and creating a brain-positive environment The car metaphor for why investing in digital capital without investing in human capital is “buying a fancy high performance car and never checking the engine or the person driving it” This week's Power-Up: protecting one hour of recovery before you roll out the next AI tool Key Quotes “Your biology, not your skill, not your effort, is the real constraint on how much value your organisation gets from every tool that you adopt.” “You've bought yourself a very expensive and large leak.” “Your brain health isn't the bottleneck because something's wrong with you. It's the bottleneck because it was never designed to compound the way your tech stack is currently compounding.” Timestamps (00:09) Welcome back and the question nobody's asking (02:14) The belief driving most AI adoption (02:33) The strange cocktail of excitement and anxiety (03:14) Introducing the bandwidth gap (04:21) Why the gap is the success tax (04:47) The WHO's 12 billion lost working days (05:15) Brain capital, named by the WEF and McKinsey Health Institute (05:32) One in five employees already reporting burnout (05:47) Why AI value is constrained by human capacity, not technology (06:47) The “expensive and large leak” metaphor (06:50) Running it through the lens of your hOS (07:30) Why judgment is cognitively expensive (08:16) Why the gap is wider for women (08:56) The five levers for protecting your brain capital (11:53) The high-performance car metaphor (12:08) This week's Power-Up Spacious Success with Dr Kristy Goodwin Website: drkristygoodwin.com LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/dr-kristy-goodwin Instagram: instagram.com/drkristy/ Speaking enquiries: drkristygoodwin.com/speaking References World Economic Forum & McKinsey Health Institute. (2026, January). The human advantage: Stronger brains in the age of AI. World Economic Forum. https://www.mckinsey.com/mhi/our-insights/the-human-advantage-stronger-brains-in-the-age-of-ai World Health Organization. (2024). Mental health at work [Fact sheet]. https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/mental-health-at-work Other episodes you may be interested in EP002 | The Stress Superstorm: Why Women Are Burning Out Faster Than Ever EP015 | The AI Addiction Problem: Why AI Tools Are So Hard to Put Down EP019 | The Invisible Tax: What the Messy Room Research Reveals About Women's Hidden Load

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  Episode #28

  028 | The Unspoken Load: Perimenopause, Grief & Permission to Be Fully Human, with Lisa Corduff

  Aug 20, 20261h 3m

  What if the rest you keep waiting to earn is actually something your biology is owed right now? Lisa Corduff met Kristy back in 2012, in the early days of online business school, back when Lisa was building a company around nap times while quietly supporting a husband whose mental health struggles she did not yet have words for. In this conversation, Lisa and Kristy talk about what Lisa calls the female facade, the performance of coping that keeps women cracking quietly instead of asking for what they actually need. They talk about rest as a biological right, not a reward, about the hormonal honesty perimenopause eventually demands, and about a late autism and ADHD diagnosis that gave Lisa language for a duality she had always felt but never understood. This is a conversation about permission. Permission to rest before you are sick. Permission to be hormonally honest. Permission to grieve without a deadline. In this episode Lisa shares Why she calls the pressure to always appear fine the female facade, and what it costs Findings from a 2022 survey of her own community on how tired women really feel Why she now treats rest as “a right and a responsibility,” never a reward What her Substack piece about losing her voice revealed about perimenopause symptoms that do not match the highlight-reel version How a persistent low mood she had put down to grief and personal failure turned out to be something else entirely once she began hormone treatment Why she resisted that treatment for years, in her words, as “a researcher who wanted to do this naturally” What a late autism and ADHD diagnosis explained about a lifelong duality between craving novelty and needing routine The one question she asks herself every morning: “what do I need to feel good today” The reframe she uses instead of chasing an endless to-do list, treating her own 80-year-old self as her north star Why she believes “we don’t move on from grief, we move forward with it” What it means to let her children see her cry, and how that has changed how they process loss Her closing definition of spacious success in this specific season of solo parenting three children Key Quotes “Rest is a right and a responsibility. It’s not a reward.” “We don’t move on from grief. We move forward with it.” “I am not just a white linen shirt. I am this patchwork. I am this tapestry.” Timestamps (00:41) Kristy introduces Lisa and the story of how they met in business school (02:43) Lisa’s emotional reaction to the introduction (03:15) Building a business and a marriage through addiction, before either of them had the words for it (9:15) Why a lack of honesty about struggle is a disservice to women (09:26) Lisa’s 2022 community survey and the female facade (26:03) Rest is a right and a responsibility, not a reward (27:09) The performance pit stop, recovery as a performance mechanism (28:32) The 80-year-old self walk story (30:01) Introducing the gift of perimenopause (38:03) The autistic ADHDer diagnosis and the duality it explained (46:58) We don’t move on from grief, we move forward with it (52:04) The white linen shirt and the tapestry (59:41) What Karen would say about success in this season (1:01:47) Where to find Lisa and Harvest Lisa Corduff Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lisacorduff/ Website: https://lisacorduff.com/ Harvest: https://lisacorduff.com/hvt/ Spacious Success with Dr Kristy Goodwin Website: drkristygoodwin.com LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/dr-kristy-goodwin Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/drkristy/ Speaking enquiries: https://drkristygoodwin.mykajabi.com/speaking References Confino, P. (2023, June 15). ‘Proactive rest’ is the latest workplace trend to avoid employee burnout and increase productivity. Fortune. Reporting Gartner (2022) workforce research. Other episodes you may be interested in Episode 0, Everyone Needs a Karen (Karen is the reason this podcast exists, and is referenced directly in this conversation, around 58:53) Episode 1, From Code Red to High-Res (Kristy’s own burnout hospitalisation, the same cost of ignoring the body’s warning signs this conversation returns to) Episode 2, The Stress Superstorm (the hOS and stress framing this conversation builds on) Episode 7, Wide Awake at 2:22am (a companion listen on perimenopause and hormonal honesty)

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  Episode #27

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

  Aug 13, 202617 min

  What if the exhaustion you keep trying to fix with sleep is not a flaw, but the honest cost of a life you chose? There are no research papers stacked up in this one. No tables. Just the thing that keeps surfacing in the rooms Kristy has been speaking in all year: accomplished women, quietly naming the trade-offs they have made, and exhaling when someone finally says it out loud. Kristy tells the story of the preschool concert she missed for a keynote in Perth, the part her son had rehearsed for weeks, and the feeling she carried for months afterwards. What she understands now is that the feeling was not guilt. It was grief. Something small was lost, and it was real. From there she does what she always does, grounds it in biology. Decision fatigue, the glucose-hungry prefrontal cortex, the mental load that keeps a dozen cognitive tabs open at once. The conversation traces why the trade-offs are a consequence of carrying more than any nervous system was built to hold, and what changes when you name them honestly. In this episode Kristy shares Why she opens with no stats and no tables, and what she wanted to say instead The collective exhale she keeps witnessing when women name their trade-offs in a room Shonda Rhimes' honest answer to "how do you do it all", and why "I don't" was the most useful thing she could have said The difference between the shiny side that reaches your LinkedIn profile and the shabby side that never does The preschool concert she missed, and the months she carried it Why the feeling was grief, not guilt, and why that distinction matters How decision fatigue degrades the quality of choices across a day, from parole boards to doctors' clinics Why your prefrontal cortex runs on glucose, and what that means for every values-laden yes and no The mental load research, and why women carry a disproportionate share of the invisible organising "Every role you carry is a cognitive tab that remains open", and why more tabs means less processing power Why the exhaustion is not fixed by sleep or a bubble bath The visible load audit: how to make the invisible visible once a quarter The seasonal question her late friend Karen used to ask her Emma Isaacs on guilt as a wasted emotion, and Kristy's reframe: guilt says I did something wrong, grief says something was lost Key Quotes "You are shiny. You're also shabby. Both are true. Both are yours." "Guilt says I did something wrong. Grief says maybe something was lost." "The trade-offs are not a flaw. They're a consequence of carrying more than your biological system was ever supposed to hold." Timestamps (00:06) A different kind of episode (01:36) What keeps surfacing in the rooms (03:16) Shonda Rhimes names the trade-off (05:57) Shiny and shabby (06:41) The concert I missed (07:50) The biology of trade-offs (08:35) Decision fatigue (09:13) The mental load (10:08) Why sleep does not fix it (10:52) The visible load audit (11:42) The seasonal question (12:36) Guilt versus grief (14:40) Proximity to your values (15:52) You are shiny, you are shabby (15:56) This week's Power-Up Spacious Success with Dr Kristy Goodwin Website: https://drkristygoodwin.com LinkedIn: [VA to insert handle] Instagram: [VA to insert handle] Speaking enquiries: Emma Chase, Tier One Management, emma@tieronemanagement.com.au References Daminger, A. (2019). The cognitive dimension of household labor. American Sociological Review, 84(4), 609–633. Danziger, S., Levav, J., & Avnaim-Pesso, L. (2011). Extraneous factors in judicial decisions. PNAS, 108(17), 6889–6892. Isaacs, E. (2018). Winging it. Allen & Unwin. Linder, J. A., et al. (2014). Time of day and the decision to prescribe antibiotics. JAMA Internal Medicine, 174(12), 2029–2031. Rhimes, S. (2014). Commencement address. Dartmouth College. Other episodes you may be interested in EP0 Everyone Needs a Karen (where the seasonal question comes from; called back at ~11:35) EP4 The Superwoman Myth (the cape, and the maths and biology of doing it all; called back at ~16:52, "take your cape off") EP19 The Invisible Tax (the mental load and women's hidden load) EP16 Amelia Phillips (what shows up in the bodies of high-performing women; named at ~2:47)

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  Episode #26

  026 | The Joy Metric: How a CEO Decides What Success Is Worth, with Philippa Moig

  Aug 6, 202641 min

  What if the exhaustion isn’t a workload problem, but the cost of performing a steadiness you don’t feel? Most leaders can tell you their revenue, their utilisation and their sleep score. Very few can tell you the last time they felt genuinely light. Philippa Moig can, because she treats it as a measurement. Chief Executive Officer of UnLtd, the social purpose organisation connecting Australia’s media, marketing and creative industries with charities supporting young people at risk, Philippa arrived in the role after two decades in senior agency positions and a stint leading media at Google. She also didn’t get the job the first time she went for it. The feedback, when she finally did, was that it was how she showed up after the rejection that won it. In this conversation she is unusually direct about the years before. What it does to a nervous system to stand in front of 70 people and perform a competence you can’t feel. Why she now measures success by how much joy is in her life, and what happened when that metric told her to leave. Dr Kristy traces the science underneath the story, from the contagion effect of a leader’s state to the cortisol cup that empties at 2am, and the structures any leader can borrow this week. In this episode Philippa shares Why not getting her dream job the first time became the reason she eventually got it The Monday she told her leadership team she was a five out of five, and what happened next Vulnerability as the actual unlock of authentic leadership, not a soft skill bolted onto it What a sustained pressure-cooker environment costs, in her own words Measuring success by the amount of joy in your life, and treating a downward trend as data Why she resigned from a role she was performing well, with nothing lined up Sleep as the one non-negotiable, and the arithmetic of the extra hour that costs four the next day The three wearable metrics she actually watches, and the days she lets the data overrule her Delaying the first coffee by 60 minutes, and the adenosine science behind why it works Why work-life balance is the wrong picture, and what peaks and troughs look like instead Putting a time horizon on an intense season so the people around you can absorb it Naming the support out loud, including a husband who is the primary caregiver Ten minutes lying down, guilt free, reframed as a performance decision "Rest means rest": the phone, the sauna, and the confession that follows What organisations could actually do for working parents, starting with permission Why leaders have to walk the talk before flexibility means anything Key Quotes "It was actually how you showed up after you didn’t get the job which got you the job." "That extra hour will actually cost me four hours the next day." "Rest means rest. No phone. Actually just downtime." Timestamps (00:43) Why this conversation exists (02:53) From Google to cause-driven: how she got here (04:05) The job she didn’t get the first time (05:43) What we get wrong about leadership (06:28) The five out of five (07:20) A leader’s state is contagious (07:58) Shiny and shabby (10:37) The superwoman myth and the trade-offs (12:03) What the pressure cooker actually cost (12:53) Joy as a success metric (17:36) Sleep as the ignition habit (19:29) The cortisol cup and the 2am waking (21:18) Delaying the first coffee (26:38) Why balance is the wrong picture (24:29) Putting a time horizon on the hard season (30:44) The three metrics she watches (33:57) Ten minutes lying down, guilt free (35:24) Redesigning work for working parents (37:14) Digital guardrails and the right to disconnect (39:01) Leaders have to walk the talk Philippa Moig LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/philippa-moig-38a02953/ UnLtd: https://unltd.org.au/ Spacious Success with Dr Kristy Goodwin Website: https://drkristygoodwin.com/spacious-success/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/drkristygoodwin/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/drkristy/ Speaking enquiries: https://drkristygoodwin.com/speaking/ References Barnes, C. M., Lucianetti, L., Bhave, D. P., & Christian, M. S. (2015). "You wouldn’t like me when I’m sleepy": Leaders’ sleep, daily abusive supervision, and work unit engagement. Academy of Management Journal, 58(5), 1419–1437. https://doi.org/10.5465/amj.2013.1063 Rhimes, S. (2014, June 8). Commencement address. Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire. https://home.dartmouth.edu/news/2014/06/shonda-rhimes-91-delivers-lesson-packed-commencement-address WorkWell Leaders. (2025). WorkWell Leaders Impact Measure. WorkWell Leaders in partnership with the National University of Singapore. https://www.workwellleaders.org/programmes/workwell-leaders-impact-measure/ Other episodes you may be interested in EP002 The Stress Superstorm (the biology under chronic stress, and why the cup overflows at 2am) https://drkristygoodwin.com/spacious-success-episode-02

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