030 | Credits in the Health Bank with Amanda Stevens

What if the edge you are looking for is the basic you keep skipping? A senior leader came to a coaching call wanting one thing: the single move that would fix her fractured focus. She had heard about the cold plunge, the nootropic stack, the productivity technique everyone in her circle was suddenly using. Her wearable told a different story. She was sleeping well under five hours a night, and had been for six weeks. In this solo episode, Kristy makes the case for majoring in the majors. Ambitious women are trained to believe that more effort, more output and more optimisation is what sets them apart, so when something stops working, we add. This episode traces why that instinct backfires, what deep sleep is actually doing for your brain while you are not there to manage it, and how to tell the difference between a lever and a distraction. In this episode Kristy shares Why a brilliant senior leader's request for "the one thing" to fix her focus led straight back to sleep The everyday symptoms of chronic short sleep: rereading the same paragraph three times, snapping at colleagues, irritation at home Why a protocol with a name and a start date feels more satisfying than "sleep more", even when it is not the answer How ambitious women are trained to add rather than subtract, and why that drive is understandable, not foolish Why "nobody posts a carousel about eight hours of quality sleep" Kristy's own cupboard of supplements sampled once and forgotten What happens in deep (slow-wave) sleep: growth hormone release, immune recalibration and the brain's overnight clearance processes Why the prefrontal cortex, the seat of judgement and impulse control, is hit hardest by sleep loss, and why that makes sleep a leadership issue The five fundamentals Kristy always comes back to: sleep, stress adaptability, movement, nutrition and human connection Why knowing the basics is not the gap; living them consistently is The novelty bias: why a new supplement feels like progress and week four of good sleep feels like nothing The hidden cost of stacking: "five supplements, three apps on top of five hours of sleep isn't optimisation" Why your body does not bank partial credit, and why "embedded is the whole game" Two tools to use this week: the weakest link audit (and finding your ignition habit) and the gate question Key Quotes "You cannot outperform your biological blueprint, and your biology needs sleep." "Sleep does not impact your performance and wellbeing. It dictates your performance and wellbeing." "Sophistication was never the thing that was missing." Timestamps (00:49) Stop majoring in the minors (01:09) A senior leader asks for the one thing that will fix her focus (01:49) What her wearable revealed (02:50) Every symptom pointed back to sleep (03:42) Why a protocol feels better than "sleep more" (04:43) The drive to add rather than subtract (05:57) "What am I skipping? What could I add?" (06:45) Majoring in the minors isn't stupid (07:17) Kristy's cupboard of forgotten supplements (07:57) The basics work if you work the basics (08:34) Deep sleep: the body's maintenance window (10:48) Sleep debt, the prefrontal cortex and leadership (11:45) The five fundamentals (13:34) Knowing isn't the gap (14:02) Why novelty wins our attention (14:38) The hidden cost of stacking (16:06) Power-Up 1: the weakest link audit and ignition habits (17:32) Power-Up 2: the gate question (19:24) This week's Power-Up Spacious Success with Dr Kristy Goodwin Website: https://drkristygoodwin.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-kristy-goodwin Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/drkristy/ Speaking enquiries: https://www.drkristygoodwin.com/speaking Coaching enquiries: https://www.drkristygoodwin.com/coaching References Other episodes you may be interested in EP2, The Stress Superstorm (referenced at 12:20): https://www.drkristygoodwin.com/podcasts/spacious-success/episodes/2149200666 EP3, Why Women Can't Do Life Alone: The Biological Power of Connectionhttp

What if flexibility isn’t something women should have to earn, but something work should have been designed around all along? When Marilla Akkermans returned to work in 2018, she could see that the only thing part-time about her role would be her pay. So she resigned, and built the agency she couldn’t find. Eight years later, Equality Media + Marketing runs a four-day week at full pay, offers 19 additional days of inclusive leave, and recorded 447% year-on-year profit growth in 2025. Marilla is clear that none of this is altruism. It is commercial logic. In this conversation, Kristy and Marilla trace why flexibility so often turns into productivity theatre, what changes when trust is given rather than earned, how a time audit and a handful of meeting rules made a four-day week possible, and why rest is the fuel for revenue, not its enemy. In this episode Marilla shares Why the only thing that was going to be part-time about her role was her wage, and why she built a business instead The pattern she saw again and again: talented women leaving powerful roles and returning from parental leave as “a back of house resource” “Choose your hard”: why the effort of designing a better workplace pays for itself in retention Why judging people by presence instead of output is “lazy leading” Her contract with her team: “It’s not yours to earn, it’s yours to break” Why she designs roles to about 70% and lets people shape the last 30% Why she doesn’t get it right 100% of the time, and why that is not a reason to avoid trying Why work-life balance doesn’t exist, and why the four-day week is “a gift, not a given” Her answer to the claim that working from home is a career killer for women: workplaces were never built for women, and if men took as much flexibility, women wouldn’t need as much The uncomfortable truth few people say out loud: it is often easier to go to work than to care for people What three months of time tracking revealed before the four-day week trial: half the team’s time went on admin and internal tasks The meeting rules that changed everything: around 70% fewer internal meetings, no meeting without an agenda or follow-up notes, and 45 minutes instead of an hour The three mistakes organisations make when they introduce flexibility without structural change: not consulting people, not fixing workload and tools, and not training Why she introduced a personal health budget instead of a “spray and pray” approach, and how she experiences spacious success on her drive home Key Quotes “I’m giving you my trust. It’s not yours to earn, it’s yours to break.” “You give these women what they need, they give you more in return.” “If men took more flexibility so that they could pick their children up from school as many days a week as their partner does... then women wouldn’t need as much flexibility.” Timestamps (00:47) The headline that stopped Kristy mid-scroll (04:28) Why flexibility was built into Equality from day one (06:32) The exodus of talented women from media (08:15) Location flexibility versus schedule flexibility (09:55) When women have to prove they deserve flexibility (12:52) “It’s not yours to earn, it’s yours to break” (14:54) Permission not to get it right every time (18:37) Is working from home a career killer for women? (21:33) “It’s easier to go to work” (25:49) Does a four-day week really work? (28:40) Meeting bloat and the cost of interruptions (29:58) Rest isn’t the enemy of revenue (35:15) When the model fits the women (36:29) The three mistakes organisations make with flexibility (41:48) How Marilla experiences spacious success Marilla Akkermans 🟩 Equality Media + Marketing: https://equalitymedia.co/ 🟩Marilla Akkermans on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marilla-akkermans/ Spacious Success with Dr Kristy Goodwin 🟩 Website: drkristygoodwin.com 🟩 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-kristy-goodwin 🟩 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/drkristy/ 🟩 Speaking enquiries: https://www.drkristygoodwin.com/speak

What if the exhaustion you’ve been hiding isn’t yours to carry alone, but a pattern with a name? For almost two years, Kristy has been having the identical conversation with different women in different rooms. In the queue after a keynote. In the lift down to the lobby. In the DMs that land once everyone has gone home. It almost always starts with the same four words: "I probably shouldn’t be telling you this." Sitting in a Perth hotel room after a keynote, Kristy realised she had been quietly building an archive of women’s exhaustion for years. One story is an anecdote. Fifty is a pattern. In this episode, she names that pattern as the gender wellbeing gap, traces the data and the biology beneath it, explains why it is a leadership pipeline problem rather than a personal one, and makes a direct ask: help her put it on the record. In this episode Kristy shares Why the "lean in" message was never going to work well for women, and what the research suggests happened instead The stories on repeat: the 27 minutes in the office car park, the search history that has become "a graveyard of half-finished questions", the fantasy of a week in bed just to have permission to rest Why she second-guessed herself, and why confirmation bias does not explain what she is hearing Why exhaustion is quietly being written into the job description of an accomplished woman The Success Tax: the sleep, nervous system and sense of self many women pay as the entry price of their ambition Why so many women struggle not despite being capable, but because they have learned to perform competence so convincingly Why Kristy nearly didn’t share any of this publicly, and why she decided she couldn’t expect anyone else to go first What the gender wellbeing gap is, and why it is "not a personal failing or a flaw" The headline data: 60% of senior women versus 50% of senior men reporting frequent burnout, and 72% of Australian women reporting burnout in the past year Why women’s stress response runs on different hormonal architecture, and what allostatic load means when the bad day never stops Why this turns from a health story into a leadership pipeline and retention problem, and why most organisations are still guessing The leader contagion effect: why a manager’s own regulation sets the tone for the team Kristy’s ask: the Gender Wellbeing Gap survey that will shape her white paper and next book The reframe to leave with: "The opposite of burnout isn’t rest. It’s being fully seen." Key Quotes "The opposite of burnout isn’t rest. It’s being fully seen." "We were told that women need to lean in, but they’re leaning out. Honestly, many of them just want to lay down." "The shame only survives when we whisper about it." Timestamps (00:50) Lean in, and what happened instead (01:14) The conversations on repeat (03:15) The common thread (04:17) Was it just confirmation bias? (06:01) It shouldn’t be normal (06:28) The Success Tax (07:22) "I probably shouldn’t be telling you this" (08:35) Why I nearly didn’t share this (09:48) The Perth hotel room and an archive of exhaustion (10:35) Naming the gender wellbeing gap (12:41) The biology underneath: stress hormones and allostatic load (14:26) From health story to leadership pipeline problem (15:23) The leader contagion effect (17:26) The ask: the Gender Wellbeing Gap survey (20:31) The opposite of burnout isn’t rest Spacious Success with Dr Kristy Goodwin 🟩 Website: drkristygoodwin.com 🟩 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-kristy-goodwin 🟩 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/drkristy/ 🟩 Speaking enquiries: https://www.drkristygoodwin.com/speaking 🟩 Take the Gender Capacity Gap survey: https://www.drkristygoodwin.com/gender-capacity-gap-survey 🟩 The Powered-Up Table:https://www.drkristygoodwin.com/the-powered-up-table References Deloitte Global. (2025). Women @ Work 2025: A global outlook. Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited. https://www.deloitte.com/global/en/issues/work/women-at-work-global-outlook.html Gallup. (2015).

What if it feels impossible not because you are doing it wrong, but because nobody built the road? It rarely arrives as a crisis. It arrives as a calendar change: a gala day moved at the last minute, a sick child, a vacation care booking window that closes before breakfast. And then someone absorbs it, usually by default, usually a woman. Georgie Dent has spent almost two decades arguing that this is not a personal logistics problem. As CEO of The Parenthood, she helped win paid parental leave of 26 weeks with superannuation and a pay rise for early educators, and in September she took the case to the National Press Club. She is also a mother of three who learned, early and painfully, what happens when you treat a structural problem as a personal failing. Together we trace why this is a parenting issue with a disproportionate cost to women, why the first year of a baby’s life sets the pattern for decades, and what workplaces and households can do right now. In this episode Georgie shares Why the viral ABC Lifestyle post got the analysis right and the question wrong "It’s not feeling hard because you’re making the wrong choices": the line The Parenthood says to parents every day Why the answer is never to take women out of the workforce, and what economic security means for women’s independence and safety Why she advocates for parents, not mothers, and how that protects women Why dads need to be "main characters, not cameos in families", and how use-it-or-lose-it leave makes that possible The caregiving patterns that set in a baby’s first year and persist for decades The invisible logistics of care: nappies, wipes, onesies that fit, the right layers for today’s weather Her colleague’s restaurant lesson on swapping front of house and back of house Why lowering the bar is a skill, and why lunchboxes are not a verdict on your parenting How she and her husband use the Fair Play system to take full ownership of tasks, including every school form The school camp phone call that proves who institutions still assume is in charge The acting editor role that judged her on output, not hours, when she had two small children Key Quotes "It’s not feeling hard because you’re making the wrong choices. It is really hard because we have not invested in the infrastructure that you need in order to be able to combine work and care." Georgie Dent "Paid parental leave and early education and care are literally the roads and bridges that parents need in order to be able to move between home and work. But we haven’t built it for them." Georgie Dent (04:38) Welcome, Georgie Dent (10:12) The ABC Lifestyle post that asked mothers for their secrets. (14:27) The Success Tax, and parenting like it’s 1956 (17:14) Why women’s economic security is non-negotiable (19:00) Why men have to be in this conversation (21:07) Main characters, not cameos (26:37) The invisible load and why it sticks to one person (30:27) Lower the bar, and fully owning a task (33:16) Why the school always calls Mum (38:20) What genuine workplace flexibility looks like (43:17) Roads and bridges: care as infrastructure (45:41) A turning point early in Georgie’s career (55:34) What spacious success looks like for Georgie now Georgie Dent 🟩 The Parenthood: https://www.theparenthood.org.au/ 🟩 The Parenthood on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theparenthood/?hl=en 🟩 Georgie on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/georgiedent_/?hl=en 🟩 Georgie on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/georgiedent?originalSubdomain=au Spacious Success with Dr Kristy Goodwin: 🟩 Website:https://www.drkristygoodwin.com/ 🟩 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-kristy-goodwin 🟩 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/drkristy 🟩 Speaking enquiries: https://www.drkristygoodwin.com/speaking

What if the exhaustion you can't explain isn't one problem, but two, and nobody has named them together yet?