Trailer: Spacious Success Podcast

An invitation into a different kind of success. Kristy previews what’s to come on Spacious Success, why traditional high-performance models are broken, and how a bio-aligned, science-backed approach helps ambitious women thrive.

Episode 0: Everyone Needs a Karen

This short intro explains the inspiration behind Spacious Success and who it’s for. Kristy shares the story behind the name and how every high-performing woman needs someone in her corner (like "Karen") to validate, support, and remind her of her power.

Episode 1: From Code Red to High-Res – My Wake-Up Call from the Success Trap

Kristy shares a raw story about ending up in emergency after years of burnout. She reveals the cost of traditional success and introduces the idea of "high-res" living — a richer, aligned model of performance.

Episode 2: The Stress Superstorm – Why Women Are Burning Out Faster Than Ever

Women experience stress differently. Kristy explores the female stress response, hormonal impacts, and why generic stress advice fails high-achieving women.

Episode 3: Why Women Can’t Do Life Alone – The Biological Power of Connection

Connection isn’t a luxury. It’s essential for women. Kristy unpacks the “tend-and-befriend” stress response, the power of female friendships, and how micro-connections build resilience.

Episode 4: Maggie Dent - The Mother Load: Why Mums Deserve to Exhale

Why does modern motherhood feel so overwhelming? In this episode, Dr Kristy Goodwin is joined by Maggie Dent to explore the biological, hormonal and cultural forces intensifying women’s mental load. A powerful conversation about matrescence, boundaries, lost villages, and why women aren’t failing, they’re carrying too much. 

Episode 5: The Superwoman Myth – Why Doing It All Is Breaking Us

The Superwoman Myth promises women they can “have it all.” In this episode, I explain why that belief fuels guilt, chronic stress and overextension. Exploring the biology and psychology behind high-achieving women’s burnout, she offers a powerful reframe: success without the cape.

Episode 6: The Performance Paradox – How to Stay Sharp Without Burning Out

High performance doesn’t mean pushing harder. Kristy explains her Flourishing Formula and why success depends on stress adaptability, recovery, and alignment with your biology.

Episode 7: Productivity Hijackers – Why Working Harder Isn’t Working

We’re surrounded by distraction. Kristy names the biggest productivity traps (context switching, attention residue, and more) and shares tactical tools to reclaim your time and focus.

Episode 8: Your Brain Isn’t Broken: The Truth About “Baby Brain”, "Brain Fog" & the Female Brain

In this episode, I’m joined by neuroscientist Dr Sarah McKay to explore how the female brain evolves across life stages. We unpack baby brain, the mental load and perimenopause through an evidence-based lens, challenging the deficit narrative many women have internalised. This is a powerful reframe for any woman who has questioned her capacity or wondered what’s really happening in her brain.

Episode 9: Wide Awake at 2:22am? Why Women Are Struggling With Sleep (and What to Do About It)

Struggling with sleep, especially waking at 2:00 to 3:00 a.m.? In this episode, I unpack why sleep becomes disrupted for high-performing women, particularly during midlife. From hormonal shifts to cortisol overload, we explore the science behind poor sleep and share practical, evidence-based strategies you can use both during the night and the following day to restore energy, focus, and performance.

Episode 10: Cold Plunges for Women – What No One’s Telling You

Cold therapy is trending — but much of the research is based on men. Kristy dives into how female physiology responds differently to cold exposure, what to watch for, and how women can safely benefit without stress backlash. 

Episode 11: Your FQ Matters More Than IQ – Mastering the New Currency of Success

I explore why your attention is being hijacked in today’s digital world and how it is impacting your peak-performance. I explain why your FQ is now more important than your IQ or EQ. Sharing a personal story that changed everything for me, I unpack the science behind distraction and why it is not your fault. You will learn practical ways to reclaim your focus and operate more intentionally in a world designed to pull you off track.

Episode 12: Peak-Performance Without Burnout: What Corporate Women Need to Know with Andrea Culligan

In this episode, I sit down with a senior corporate leader, Andrea, to explore burnout, panic disorder and the hidden cost of high-performance. We unpack the gap between capability and capacity, redefining success across life seasons and how to sustain peak-performance without sacrificing well-being, relationships and energy.

Episode 13: We Don't Have an Ambition Gap. We Have a Wellbeing Gap

The data is not showing a retreat from ambition in high-performing women. It is showing a retreat from a model of success that is biologically incompatible with the way women are wired. In this episode, I unpack the trad wife trend, the gender wellbeing gap, and the neuroscience of why sustained overload degrades performance at a biological level. We look at what the research from McKinsey, GLWS, and Deloitte is actually telling us, why organisations are misreading the ambition gap, and what needs to change. Closes with a Power-Up to help you name your own Success Tax.

Episode 14: Your Story Is the Strategy — A Conversation with Tory Archbold

Tory Archbold built one of Australia's most successful PR agencies while secretly fighting a twelve-year legal battle that nobody knew about. Then her appendix burst, she spent five days on life support, and everything changed. In this conversation, Tory and Kristy explore what near-death experiences reveal about the lives we have been constructing, why sharing the shabby alongside the shiny is the most powerful leadership move you can make, and why your story is not a liability: it is your strategy. Covers Tory's coffee-date connection framework, how to lead from the heart rather than the ego, and what Spacious Success looks like when you finally get out of your own way.

Episode 15: The AI Addiction Problem: Why ChatGPT Is So Hard to Put Down

AI is not just a productivity tool. It is neurologically compelling by design, and understanding why is the first step to using it with intention. In this episode, I break down the five mechanisms that make AI so hard to put down, from dopamine loops and intermittent rewards to cognitive offloading and psychological need satisfaction. Research from ActivTrak tracking 164,000 workers found that deep, focused work dropped by 9% following widespread AI adoption, even as output measures increased. We are working faster. We may be thinking less deeply. I close with three strategies to stay in control of your Focus Quotient in an AI-saturated world. Includes the this week's Power-Up: the prompt limit protocol.

Episode 16: Why You Feel Exhausted Even When You're Doing Everything Right, with Amelia Phillips

Sports scientist and nutritionist Amelia Phillips joins Dr Kristy Goodwin to unpack the data behind why ambitious women in midlife are running on empty, and what the science actually says to do about it. Cortisol testing, micronutrient deficiencies, sleep strategies, and the energy capital framework, this is precision performance for women who are done with generic advice.

Episode 17: Women Fantasise About Being Sick: What It Signals About Modern Work

When high-performing women quietly fantasise about getting sick just to get a break, that is not a personal failing. It is a system signal. In this episode, Dr Kristy Goodwin explains the neuroscience and biology behind the illness fantasy, why modern work has removed women's permission to rest without justification, and three ways to start rebuilding that permission. Rest is not a reward. It is performance infrastructure.

Episode 18: Back Yourself: Body Confidence, Big Courage and Showing Up Anyway with Taryn Brumfitt

What happens when one mouse click becomes a global movement? In this episode I am joined by Taryn Brumfitt, 2023 Australian of the Year and founder of the Embrace Movement, for a conversation about body confidence, courage and the hidden cost of staying small. We cover the compare-and-despair trap social media feeds, how to build courage as a practice rather than a personality trait, why the superwoman identity is one we need to stop celebrating, and what Taryn has learned standing in the fire of public scrutiny as a high-profile woman with a big message. One of the most honest and energising conversations I have had on this podcast.

Episode 19: The Invisible Tax: What the Messy Room Research Reveals About Women’s Hidden Load

My husband has never understood why I panic-clean before guests arrive. Turns out, there is research on this. In this episode I explore the messy room study, the science of kinkeeping and why the cognitive and emotional load so many women carry at home and at work is not perfectionism or imagination. It is neurologically real, and it is costing us our cognitive bandwidth.
I share what happened when I asked a room full of senior women and men the same questions about invisible labour, and the three strategies I use to make this load visible, redistribute it and protect the hours where my brain works best.

Episode 20: The Art of Going First: Confidence, Courage and the Visibility Tax

We keep telling women to be more confident. The data keeps telling us confidence was never the problem. Dr Kristy Goodwin and First Movers founder Yasmin London explore why high-performing women hold back, why burnout is structural rather than personal, and the rising cost of being a visible woman online. A warm, evidence-led conversation about courage, capacity and what it really takes to back women, at home and at work.

Episode 21: Born to Overwork: The Hidden Identity Driving High-Achieving Women

When you are not working, when nothing needs your attention, how does that feel? For a lot of accomplished women, the honest answer is uncomfortable, even guilty. In EP21, Kristy makes the case that this discomfort is not about poor boundaries or a packed calendar. It is about identity. 

She walks through landmark 2026 research on the “doer identity”, a sense of self built around the act of doing itself, formed in childhood and quietly running the show decades later. She explains the three profiles the researchers identified, why standard workplace fixes keep missing the mark, and why so many women in leadership are eldest daughters. Then she offers three practical shifts, including the reframe she uses most with her coaching clients: capability as a gift, not a debt. You were not born to overwork. You were trained to. And training can change.

Episode 22: The Big Person: Why Your Family Borrows Your Nervous System with Dr Vanessa Lapointe

Ambitious women spend their days in high-functioning mode: leading, deciding, solving, holding the emotional tone of teams and households alike. Then they walk through the front door with no transition point at all, and the wheels fall off over a home reader or a missing library book. Kristy calls it identity whiplash, and when she shared the term online, her DMs filled with women saying the same thing: this is exactly how I feel.

In this guest episode, Kristy is joined by Dr Vanessa Lapointe, a registered psychologist who practised for nearly 20 years, founder of The North Star Developmental Clinic, bestselling author and international speaker. Vanessa is known globally for her compassionate, science-backed approach to helping parents and other big people become the calm, grounded presence their children borrow regulation from.

Episode 23: The Unmasking: When Perimenopause Strips Away What Was Holding You Together

She built her career on being exceptionally capable and exceptionally composed. Then, over eighteen months, she started losing her thread in conversations she had led dozens of times. Her GP said her bloods were normal. What nobody told her was that oooooooestrogen is one of the most powerful neuromodulators in the human brain, and that when it fluctuates, decades of carefully built compensation can come down at once.

In this solo episode, Dr Kristy Goodwin examines the ADHD and perimenopause collision through the lens of the Human Operating System. New research shows women with ADHD experience severe perimenopausal symptoms at close to twice the rate of women without, that symptom gaps appear as early as 35 to 39, and that difficulties scale with symptom severity, not just formal diagnosis. Which means women who have never been diagnosed, but who carry a significant symptom burden, may be having a harder transition than anyone around them realises.

Episode 24: Design a Life You Don't Want to Escape with Manelle Merhi

From the outside, Manelle Merhi had everything in order. Leading brand, customer experience and enterprise strategy for one of Australia's largest family-owned hire businesses, mentoring emerging female leaders in an industry where women are still the minority, raising twins, and doing it all at what she calls full velocity. Then, on the first night of her holidays, her body pulled the brake.

In this episode of Spacious Success, Manelle joins Dr Kristy for a remarkably honest conversation about what burnout actually looks like in a senior leader, why the body holds on until it is finally safe to collapse, and what the rebuild really involves. This is not a story about slowing down. Manelle has not lost an ounce of ambition. It is a story about re-architecting how she works: budgeting energy like a bank account, protecting no-decision days so high-stakes calls are made by a rested brain, giving her team licence to decline meetings, and using fifteen-minute transitions to close her mental open tabs.

Episode 25: Fragmented Focus: Why Your Attention Is a Design Problem, Not a Discipline Problem

If you open a document and lose the thread within seconds, if you read the same paragraph three times and it still does not stick, if you scroll for forty minutes and somehow feel more depleted than when you started, you are not imagining it and you are not failing.

The 2025 National Women’s Health Survey found that six in ten women aged 18 to 24 have concerns about their attention span, compared with two in ten women aged 65 and over. Four in ten young women report short-term memory concerns, double the rate of older women. The age inversion is the finding. If this were a hormonal problem, the numbers would run the other way.

In this episode Kristy explains what is actually happening: an attention system built for a stable sensory environment, running inside one engineered to fragment it. She covers attention residue, the real cost of task switching, and why what feels like multitasking is nothing of the kind. She also names the organisational stake, because a workforce operating in constant fragmentation does not deliver its best thinking, it delivers its most persistent thinking, and those are very different things.

Then she gives you the design solutions: how to identify and defend your power-zone hours, how to structure focus around your ultradian rhythms, and how to audit your attention environment without a dramatic overhaul. Your attention system is not broken. It is responding rationally to irrational conditions.

Episode 26: The Joy Metric: How a CEO Decides What Success Is Worth, with Philippa Moig 

Most conversations about ambitious women stop at the trade-offs. This one starts there and keeps going.

Philippa Moig is the Chief Executive Officer of UnLtd, the social purpose organisation that connects Australia’s media, marketing and creative industries with charities supporting young people at risk. She did not 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 cost of the years before. What it does to a nervous system to stand in front of 70 people and perform competence you do not feel. Why she now measures success by how much joy is in her life, and what happened when that metric told her to leave. How she and her husband put a time horizon on the hard seasons instead of pretending they are not coming.

Kristy brings neuroscience alongside it. A leader’s wellbeing is not a personal matter; it is the single most powerful lever on the wellbeing of everyone who reports to them. Sleep does not influence performance, it dictates it. And rest is a responsibility, not a reward.

If you have been holding it together in public and coming apart in private, this one is for you.

Episode 27: Shiny and Shabby: The Trade-Offs Nobody Warned You About

Every ambitious woman makes trade-offs. Almost no one names them out loud. In this personal solo episode, Kristy moves past the curated highlight reel to talk honestly about the shiny and the shabby: the school concert missed, the friendship that quietly dissolved, the body running on cortisol and caffeine. She grounds it in biology, why decision fatigue and the mental load make these choices so cognitively expensive, and why the exhaustion so many women describe is the accumulated cost of running multiple roles at once, not a personal failing. Then she offers three tools: the visible load audit, the seasonal question, and the difference between guilt and grief. You will leave able to name your trade-offs, and to make them in closer proximity to what you actually value.

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

Rest is not a reward you earn once the list is done. It is a biological right, and refusing it is what is quietly breaking high-performing women. In this conversation, Dr Kristy Goodwin sits down with storyteller, speaker and digital entrepreneur Lisa Corduff, a solo mother of three who has spent more than a decade helping women stop performing coping and start living honestly. Lisa and Kristy talk about the difference between the performance of coping and the reality underneath it, why perimenopause symptoms get so often misread as personal failure, what a late autism and ADHD diagnosis opened up for Lisa, and why grief is something you move forward with, never past. You will leave with a new definition of rest, permission to be hormonally honest, and a reframe for whatever you are still trying to outrun.

Episode 29: The Bandwidth Gap: Why Your Brain, Not Your Tech Stack, Is the Real AI Constraint

Somewhere in your organisation this week, someone approved another piece of AI software, another platform, another promise that everything is about to get faster. Almost nobody asked the one question that determines whether any of it will work: do the humans using it have the capacity to leverage it? In this episode, Dr Kristy Goodwin introduces the bandwidth gap, the widening distance between how fast AI capability is compounding and how slowly human cognitive capacity moves, and explains why that gap is quietly becoming a tax individuals pay in energy, focus and health. She unpacks new research on brain capital, why AI often makes work cognitively heavier rather than lighter, why the gap lands hardest on women, and five practical levers for protecting the one asset every AI rollout depends on: your brain.

Episode 30: Credits in the Health Bank, with Amanda Stevens 

Your body is not a bank account you draw down and refill once the achieving is done. It is the account your ambition runs on the entire time. Amanda Stevens has delivered 1700 keynotes over 17 years, built multiple businesses as a single mother, and consulted to some of Australia's biggest brands on radical customer obsession. She has also survived a septic infection that nearly killed her, and credits her fitness with saving her life. In this conversation, Amanda and Kristy trace the line between the customer experience Amanda has spent her career studying and the self experience most ambitious women neglect: the biology behind why we notice the gaps, the real cost of doing it all, and why permission, not more discipline, is what actually creates spacious success.