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

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

Spacious Success with Dr Kristy Goodwin

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)