Spacious Success

What if you were never supposed to bounce back at all? Amanda Delosa built her career telling other people's stories. She has shaped public narratives inside the Federal Government's media team, built one of Australia's leading boutique PR agencies, and coached founders on how to lead with clarity. Then she became a mother, and for the first time, she could not find the words for what was happening to her own identity. In this raw, unscripted conversation, Amanda tells Kristy what it actually felt like: waking up feeling possessed by someone else, sobbing for hours with no explanation, and slowly realising that the version of herself built for a pre-motherhood life, the one wired for praise, recognition and constant momentum, simply stopped working. Together they name what the science calls matrescence: a developmental transition every bit as significant as adolescence, and one almost nobody prepares women for. This conversation traces what it actually takes to stop chasing your old self and start building your next one, on your own terms. In this episode Amanda shares What it felt like when motherhood "cracked her open," emotionally, physically and professionally Why she describes her old identity as "a complete collapse of every identity I'd ever built" over 38 years The moment she realised she was bringing an outdated "operating system" into her marriage and motherhood How an addiction to external validation, the same "intermittent reinforcement" wiring behind gambling addiction, was quietly running her life Why a 38-hour week of solo parenting is a full-time job that nobody clocks in or out of The advice from women a decade ahead of her: treat this season as research and development, not a setback Why "bouncing back" is the wrong metaphor, and her own reframe: "let's look at it as a slingshot" The real story behind her viral Instagram post about stepping into a more supportive role in her marriage Why she believes codependency and interdependence have been confused, and what that costs ambitious women How she is redefining success season by season, instead of inheriting someone else's metrics What she does, in practice, to experience her own version of Spacious Success Key Quotes "It was a complete collapse of every identity I'd ever built up throughout 38 years of my life." "You will never bounce back to your previous version. You are physiologically, psychologically a different person after you have become a mother." "Let's look at it as a slingshot. You come back into that next best version of you." Timestamps (02:40) Cracked open: the identity collapse of new motherhood begins (02:54) The post that started it: choosing to lead, not compete (06:22) The old operating system: wiring built before motherhood (10:18) The addiction to being needed: validation and invisible labour (11:17) Intermittent reinforcement: why the highs and crashes feel like withdrawal (15:03) The 38-hour week nobody counts (17:15) What does success in this season actually look like (18:33) Sudden or gradual: how the unravelling actually happens (21:31) Matrescence: the adolescence nobody names (28:39) Why you will never bounce back, and why that is the point (35:08) The slingshot, not the bounce back (35:32) The trad wife conversation: choice versus fear (40:03) Has extreme feminism failed ambitious women (41:04) Success without paying the success tax Amanda Delosa 🟩 Instagram: instagram.com/amandapandadelosa  🟩 Podcast, NXT SZN: podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/nxt-szn/id1812812144 Spacious Success with Dr Kristy Goodwin 🟩 Website: drkristygoodwin.com  🟩 LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/dr-kristy-goodwin  🟩 Instagram: instagram.com/drkristy  🟩 Speaking enquiries: https://www.drkristygoodwin.com/speaking  References Athan, A. M. (2024). A critical need for the concept of matrescence in perinatal psychiatry. Frontiers in Psychiatry, 15, Article 1364845. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2024.1364845 Clark, L., & Zack, M. (2023). Engineered highs: Reward variability and frequency as potential prerequisites of behavioural addiction. Addictive Behaviors, 140, Article 107626. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.addbeh.2023.107626 Dai, H., Milkman, K. L., & Riis, J. (2014). The fresh start effect: Temporal landmarks motivate aspirational behavior. Management Science, 60(10), 2563–2582. https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2014.1901 Gallup. (2026, March 12). Women show stronger employee engagement amid higher burnout. https://www.gallup.com/workplace/702881/women-show-stronger-employee-engagement-amid-higher-burnout.aspx Yoo, S. S., Gujar, N., Hu, P., Jolesz, F. A., & Walker, M. P. (2007). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2007.08.007

What if the friend who never needs checking on is exactly the one who does? Every one of us has met someone who looks like they have it completely together. Capable. Composed. Unshakeable. In this episode, Kristy unpacks how much of that story we actually invent from almost nothing, a handshake, good eye contact, the way someone carries a folder, and how often that invented story turns out to be wrong. It is Women’s Health Week, and R U OK Day landed in the same seven days this year, so Kristy grounds the conversation in brand-new Australian data: the newly released Beyond the Surface 2026 report, and global research from the McKinsey Health Institute on the women’s health gap. What follows is short, sharp, and traces one idea through to one action: why the women who look most capable are statistically some of the least likely to be asked how they are really doing, and what to do about it today. In this episode Kristy shares Why a handshake and good eye contact are often the entire basis for deciding someone is "fine" A real first impression that reshaped how she reads competence Why appearing strong can make it harder to be seen, and who carries the weight of the capability curse The recurring, almost word-for-word confession she hears in coaching calls and after keynotes: "I know I actually need to deal with my health" What the newly released Beyond the Surface 2026 report found across nine thousand Australian women Why 56 per cent of Australian women are currently experiencing a mental health issue, a rate unchanged since 2022 Why women in their forties and fifties report the highest anxiety levels of any age group, not women in their twenties The straight-line relationship between physical health conditions and psychological distress What the McKinsey Health Institute’s global research adds to the Australian picture Why talking to a friend rated on par with seeing a psychologist for how helpful it actually felt, and why fewer women are doing it The biological pull behind tending and befriending under chronic stress The single question to replace "how are you?" with, and why the silence afterwards matters as much as the question This week’s Power-Up: one message, one person, today Key Quotes "Looking capable and being okay are not the same thing, and the data now backs this up." "That’s a story that we all create from the information that we’ve got." "I know I actually need to deal with my health." Timestamps (01:05) The friend who never needs checking on (01:27) Meet the person who "appears incredibly strong" (01:46) The story we invent from almost nothing (02:38) The capability curse, and what it costs (04:07) The recurring coaching-call confession (05:04) The hOS mismatch reframe (05:14) Beyond the Surface 2026: 56% of Australian women (05:41) Highest anxiety in women in their 40s and 50s (06:11) The physical-mental health connection (06:30) The McKinsey Health Institute’s global data (06:59) Talking to a friend, rated on par with a psychologist (08:05) The one question to ask today • • (08:39) This week’s Power-Up 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://drkristygoodwin.mykajabi.com/speaking  References McKinsey Health Institute. (n.d.). Women’s health. McKinsey & Company. Retrieved September 2026, from https://www.mckinsey.com/mhi/focus-areas/womens-health Pestana, J. E., Graham, B. M., & Locandro, K. M. (2026). Beyond the Surface 2026: Investigating the mental health realities for Australian women. Women’s Mental Health Australia. Taylor, S. E., Klein, L. C., Lewis, B. P., Gruenewald, T. L., Gurung, R. A. R., & Updegraff, J. A. (2000). Biobehavioral responses to stress in females: Tend-and-befriend, not fight-or-flight. Psychological Review, 107(3), 411–429. Other episodes you may be interested in EP029, "The Bandwidth Gap: Why Your Brain, Not Your Tech Stack, Is the Real AI Constraint" (https://drkristygoodwin.mykajabi.com/podcasts/spacious-success/episodes/2149248430) EP028, "The Unspoken Load: Perimenopause, Grief & Permission to Be Fully Human, with Lisa Corduff" (https://drkristygoodwin.mykajabi.com/podcasts/spacious-success/episodes/2149245659) EP027, "Shiny and Shabby: The Trade-Offs Nobody Warned You About" (https://drkristygoodwin.mykajabi.com/podcasts/spacious-success/episodes/2149245658)

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): [email protected] 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)

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

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)