#38 The Third Space: Why Work Gets Your Best and Home Gets What’s Left, with Dr Adam Fraser

What if the hardest part of your day is not the work, but the walk from your car to your front door?

One CEO caught a glimpse of his children running from the room when they heard him come home. A surgeon now pauses with his hand on a door handle before every patient. A single mum who arrived at child care as "the hurricane" every afternoon printed three words on a card and stuck it to her dashboard.

Dr Adam Fraser, human performance researcher and author of The Third Space and Strive, has spent decades studying these moments with soldiers, surgeons, executives and school leaders, much of it in partnership with Deakin University. He is also Spacious Success’s first male guest, and he brings a perspective on guilt that many women will find quietly confronting.

Together we trace the gap between roles, the guilt that keeps women from recovering, the case for micro-recovery over the annual holiday, and why the things that grow us most are the things we would rather not do.

In this episode Adam shares

What the Third Space is: the transitional gap between what you have just done and what you are about to do
Why soldiers told him coming home is "brutal", and the CEO who built a new entrance to his house
The surgeon’s five-second reset at the door handle
Reflect, Rest, Reset: the three-step transition, and why reflecting on what went well is not "Pollyanna" thinking
How a single mum went from "the hurricane" at child care pick-up to a calmer arrival, with three words on her dashboard
Why the Third Space is about how you show up, even when you walk into a second shift you resent
How he and his daughters turned the dinner-time chore into kitchen karaoke
Why audiences tell him "work gets the best of me", and the people who matter most get the worst version
His view, as a man looking at the research, of how deeply guilt is embedded for women
Why the women who rest well still feel guilty, and how they do it anyway
What his burnout research found when it compared men and women in the same role
His days at the Institute of Sport, and why recovery became part of training rather than a response to collapse
Why growth comes from discomfort, and what his singing teacher told him after a lesson he hated
How he builds his own spacious life: daily recovery practice, singing, a weekly ocean swim and a monthly day at the racetrack

Key Quotes

"It was this capacity to sit with the discomfort of guilt but still do the behaviour."
"What we discovered is the key to preventing burnout was short, regular, consistent bursts of recovery."
"I think what’s happening is our inability to be uncomfortable is holding us back in so many aspects of our life."

Timestamps

(00:41) Welcome, and why Adam is on the show

(01:48) What the Third Space is

(03:19) Soldiers, a CEO and a surgeon: the theme in the research

(06:00) Role Ricochet: from leader to parent with no transition

(06:59) Reflect, Rest, Reset

(11:49) The single mum who stopped being the hurricane

(16:25) "Work gets the best of me"

(18:29) 4,000 Sundays and the Superwoman myth

(22:36) The gender wellbeing gap, and what actually helps

(23:39) How deep the guilt goes

(28:32) Fantasising about being sick: common, but not normal