Balance & Beyond Podcast

What if the missing piece of your success story isn't another strategy, but a safer nervous system?

We explore three potent trends shaping ambitious women: rebuilding worth at the body level, reframing perimenopause as a gateway to power, and ending the silent burnout of over-responsibility. With coaches Jaclyn and Sabina, we dig into how fight, flight, freeze, and fawn show up at work and home, why grit can’t replace regulation, and the simple, repeatable practices that build real capacity under pressure.

We get honest about midlife: not a cliff, a calibration. Perimenopause is more than hormones; it’s an identity and priority audit. You’ll hear how to align energy with what actually matters, choose support without guilt, and use boundaries as performance tools. We tackle the fawn response and people pleasing head on, treating resentment as data and approval as a metric worth reclaiming. Expect practical scripts, micro-habits, and a mindset shift that swaps control for congruence.

This conversation is for women who lead hard things and want to stop paying for it with their health and joy. Learn to ask clearly for what you want, hold steady when others feel discomfort, and build a life that scales with your ambition. If you’re ready to stop managing everyone else’s feelings and start tracking for your own approval, press play. Subscribe, share with a friend who needs this, and leave a review to help more women create balance and beyond.

Episode Transcript

INTRO: Welcome to Balance and Beyond, the podcast for ambitious women who refuse to accept burnout as the price of success. Here, we’re committed to empowering you with the tools and strategies you need to achieve true balance, where your career, relationships and health all thrive, and where you have the power to define success on your own terms. I honour the space you’ve created for yourself today, so take a breath, and let's dive right in…

Jo Stone (Host): 0:03

Welcome to Balance and Beyond. My high achieving popular episodes every year. Today we are talking the top trends we are seeing in high achieving women, and I am joined by Coach Jaclyn and Coach Sabina. Hi, ladies!

Jaclyn (Guest)

Hello!

Sabina (Guest): 0:47

Hi Jo! Hi, Jaclyn!

Jo Stone (Host): 0:50

We are going to dive right in. We're gonna start with Jaclyn. Jaclyn, this is a trend that we are seeing emerge and it's a pesky one that people may not realize they're being impacted by. What are we seeing here?

Jaclyn (Guest): 1:04

Basically, we're seeing that women are coming in to work with us with a fundamental lack of safety in their nervous systems. And it starts with knowing what they want. What do they want for themselves professionally? What do they want for themselves personally and their relationships? It's a question that they really haven't necessarily been asking themselves: what do I want?

Because they haven't felt safe enough to ask that question, usually because of some kind of feeling of unworthiness, which directly correlates with a lack of safety in your nervous system, right? If you don't feel worthy, your nervous system is going to feel hyper-vigilant and looking for validation everywhere. And it's interesting as women journey with us and they build their sense of worthiness and they start to ask themselves, "Oh, what do I want?" I am worthy of asking myself that question.

And then they get to the next hurdle where they confront the nervous system safety piece again, and the question is at that point, now that I know what I want, I'm starting to identify and ask myself this question: "What do I want?" "I know what it is now." "Can I ask for it?" "What happens if I ask for it?" "What if I get rejected?" "What if they don't like me if I ask for what I want?" "What if it rocks the boat in my relationship?" And all of a sudden they freeze, right? Because the nervous system's like, "I don't know if I have enough safety to meet that potential rejection."

The beautiful thing is, though, we can cultivate that. Women realize, okay, I've created some fundamental safety in myself by reclaiming my sense of worthiness. I can ask myself what I want. Now I'm going to do the work to build enough safety in my nervous system to ask for what I want and be met with whatever response comes my way. And whatever that response is, I have the capacity to be with it.

And that's a practice. None of these things really happen overnight. At first, it's a realisation, and then it's a practice, and that's how it becomes embodied. And so, we embody this nervous system safety as a practice, and that's what we walk beside women in their journey with us.

Jo Stone (Host): 2:58

Sabina, can you expand a little bit? When we talk about nervous system safety, people might not have heard that word before. So what does that actually mean? We use it every day here and we forget you're like: nervous system safety? Everyone's heard about the nervous system, but what is nervous system safety?

Sabina (Guest): 3:12

Yeah, essentially, you know, it can be a bit of a buzzword. You know, everyone's talking about the nervous system, but essentially our nervous systems are designed to respond to stress, right? We're designed to respond to stress and we can lean into stressful situations, but then we need to be able to regulate down again.

And essentially, we're talking about the fight response, the flight response, the freeze response, or there's also something called the fawn response, which is around people pleasing. And what a lot of the women that we speak to experience is that they're predominantly stuck in one of these modes, and it's become their norm rather than leaning in and accessing different parts of their sympathetic nervous system—without getting too technical—and then coming back to homeostasis, to a baseline.

Because we need to be able to have a catalyst to rise to stress or rise to a presentation, but then we need to be able to calm down and go into more of a rest-and-digest state. So what Jaclyn's talking about is when you're coming off autopilot and perhaps you know you're coming out through burnout, or you're coming through a very stressful period of your life, or you're going through an identity change and something feels off, there's often a direct correlation to the nervous system.

Have you become stuck in fight mode where you feel like you're having to defend yourself or fight or advocate for yourself more than you have to? Or are you being really avoidant? Or are you going into a freeze analysis-paralysis response, right? So different states of your nervous system then reflect how you're behaving, and that may not match who you actually want to be or where you're going in your life—what you want to be creating.

So, the work that Jaclyn's referring to is that we help women to become aware of "What's going on in my body." "How's my nervous system responding?" "I say I want one thing, but actually I'm feeling something else." So it's about creating more understanding, awareness, and congruence between, "Well, if I want to step up or I want more or I want to claim this, I have to create the capacity in my body and in my nervous system to be able to feel okay with that expansion."

And so the work that we do, it's not a cookie cutter, excuse me, for every woman that we work with. That looks slightly different. So we meet women where they're at, to understand their nervous system, their capacity, and what's needed to go to the next level.

Jo Stone (Host): 5:52
Jacqueline, why can't we muscle our way there? Women are intelligent, they've got good brains. If they want to step up, talk to me about how is this nervous system is blocking them from doing that when they're like: "Mind over matter!" "I can push, I can make this happen!"

Jaclyn (Guest): 6:08

Well, I think a lot of women do push. It's just not sustainable. That's why the women are coming to me, coming to us in burnout, right? Their nervous systems, their adrenals, are actually exhausted because of the force, the level of force that they're requiring to position themselves in leadership, to control their households. And so you can try, but it's not sustainable.

So, eventually you do need to recognize that you have a nervous system talking really loudly to you. I mean, they're pretty accessible, these skills that we teach, to learn how to hold intensity, and regulate that intensity, versus getting blown out by the intensity, or suppressing it - which are all compensating strategies when the overriding nervous system behavior—like Sabina was just talking about—if you're really stuck in overdrive with fight or flight, freeze or fawn, it's going to prevent you from being able to really regulate yourself.

And so we want to teach you those skills to come out, lower the dial on those mechanisms, those behaviors, and turn up the volume on what it feels like to be regulated. To stay with your body and your breath, to stay present and to choose not to project, or not to appease - or people please. So start making conscious choices - bit by bit, choice by choice. That's the slow building, the titrating we call it—titrating or slow building of capacity. One choice at a time.

Jo Stone (Host): 7:47
Sabina, if we come back to another—the second trend that we've seen this year—it's one that has become a lot more mainstream. It's having a lot more conversation, which is great! But it can also be dangerous. Sabina, what's the second trend we're seeing amongst our high-achieving clients?

Sabina (Guest): 8:05

Yes, it's the perimenopause-menopause conversation. And I'm personally so glad that this fact of life is coming into mainstream conversation. It's about time. However, it's really important that women understand that it's an opportunity. So becoming aware that you're going through perimenopause, it can be a bit of a revelation because we're not educated about it. But once you realize that this is what's happening for you, it's important to not then absent yourself from being in the driver's seat.

So whether you choose to do HRT or not—you know, there are many options available to women, frankly, it's not just a binary choice—but whether you choose to support your endocrine system in certain ways or not, that's only part of what's really important at this stage of life. If it's a yes, I need to look after my well-being, my health in a different way to how I did when I was in my 20s, 30s, postpartum, et cetera, et cetera. That's true.

But you also need to be looking at: "Who am I in this phase of life?" "What are my responsibilities?" And to link back to what Jaclyn said: "What are my desires for this next chapter of life?" So whilst there's a lot of conversation and spotlight on menopause, it's not just an endocrine conversation.

You need to be looking at: "I'm in a different phase where I'm stretched." You've probably got teenagers, possibly aging parents, you're at the height of your career, and your body's not playing ball in the same way. It's not that it's all flushing down the toilet, not at all. I've personally found my perimenopause journey to be really empowering, but it is a significant shift.

But, if I had personally only looked at my physical well-being, I would have missed a huge part of what was becoming available to me at this stage of life. So the women that we speak to, the hundreds of women that we speak to every year, for those that are going through this chapter of their lives, they still need to be looking at: "Am I really showing up in the way that I want to be showing up?" "Am I using my time as effectively as I could be?" "Am I focusing on what's really important at work, at home, in my relationships?" "Am I really anchored to my sense of self-worth and therefore being strategic with my time?"

And it's an opportunity to really do an audit—relationally, physically, emotionally, professionally, right? So, if there's one thing that I could say to these women, it's: I'm so glad you're aware that you need to tend to your body in new ways now, and please do a whole-of-life audit at the same time.

And it doesn't mean that there have to be these wholesale dramatic changes, not at all. But it is an opportunity to get really real and honest about: :Who do I want to be, and how do I want to feel, in this next phase of life?"

Jo Stone (Host): 11:49

These can be quite confronting questions, can't they, Jaclyn? I know we have a lot of clients come to us saying, I'm having a mid-life crisis. I want to blow it all up. What do we say to that? Which is quite an emerging—not an emerging trend—it’s quite a trend, I think, that is becoming more common as more people do sell up and go and buy a French castle and renovate it as they're, you know, all these dreams now thanks to online, are becoming within reach or even in their consideration set.

Jaclyn (Guest): 12:19
Along the lines with this question that Sabina is posing, right? Like: "Who do I want to be in this phase of life?" I think there's also just the relationship we have with this stage called perimenopause and what is the meaning that we're making of it. And I think that's a really important place to look. It's almost like it echoes the sentiments we have around our first menses as women. There can be a lot of negativity around this rite of passage of entering womanhood. And it's the same thing I'm seeing play out in perimenopause. It's like: the dreaded perimenopause kind of conversation. And if you're taking that bait—that it might not be serving you, is what I just wanted to bring forward.

So what meaning are you making out of this stage that you're in? And what beliefs would you like to insert instead? Like Sabina said, hers has been rather empowering. What if this—what if perimenopause—is the next most empowering portal or passage of your life?

And if you choose that that's how it's going to go, it's much more likely than if you choose what the mass consciousness has to say about this word menopause. So yeah, that's what I would just add to that, is that you get to decide your relationship with your body in the seasons that you're in and what it means for you. And let it be empowering, let it be so.

Sabina (Guest): 13:58

And I also want to add to that, what I love about the work that we do at the Balance Institute is that we do do some deep diving with people, and we also balance that out with small, easy, implementable changes so that you don't feel that you have to do everything all at once just to get back on track and feeling like you're heading in the right direction.

So, we're not about band-aids, and you know, this isn't counseling or therapy that we're doing, but it's meeting women in those places where they do want to be met in depth, but also continuing to be high-functioning, high-performing, and not missing a beat in terms of how they're showing up.

Jo Stone (Host): 14:46

Some really juicy trends, and in some ways those two are overlapping because that perimenopause phase is a perfect opportunity to begin asking: "What do I want now?" Nothing like a change of season to bring up the big questions. Which brings us to the big trend that I have seen, and like Sabina mentioned with her perimenopause and Jaclyn with desire and nervous system safety, these are also paths that we're all walking individually as well.

One of the biggest trends I've seen, both within myself and within our large client base, has been this curse of over-responsibility that is taken too far too often. And this is where we have this constant belief that we are responsible for everyone around us. We're responsible for their happiness. We've got to take their disappointment away from them. If they're upset with us, then that's all our fault.

And this wreaks havoc on us, on our energy. It causes hypervigilance, and it can be so incredibly exhausting and, to be honest, quite toxic because we don't actually ever step into the truth of who we are because we're so worried about what everybody else might think of that. Ladies, how have you seen this extra dose of personal responsibility play out in our clients, particularly over the past year?

Sabina (Guest): 16:09

Yes, and it's interesting because this "over-responsibility", it can often come from a very well-intentioned place. The women that we work with, they're smart, intelligent, self-aware, and they're heart-centered, so they want to be supportive and to be a guide, but it tends to tip over into over-responsibility.

And what I often see and say to clients is: if you are feeling a level of resentment that is either underneath the surface that you're having to keep a lid on, or it's starting to spill over and you're being really irritable, that is a really good sign.

That's a calling card that there is work to do to pull back on overextending yourself for others and to start turning the spotlight on yourself first. Because it can be very easy to focus on helping everyone else with their needs first, losing yourself in the process. But then are you actually really helping them if there is this energetic spewing of resentment that is just underneath the surface?

Jaclyn (Guest): 17:30

I agree with what you just said too, Sabina, and how this dovetails really well with the conversation around nervous system safety too. Because over-responsibility is one of those examples, actually, of fawning behaviour, I would say.

So, we talked about fawning as being one of the behaviours of the nervous system when it's feeling threatened, essentially. So it could have good intentions, right? We want what's best, we want wellness for everyone - peace, love and harmony for all the people we love.

When it goes into over-responsibility, the thing that is usually driving that behaviour - the caretaking of others and a bit of that martyrdom creeping in - I think, essentially, "If they're not okay, then I'm not okay." And my nervous system can't tolerate someone else who is upset or unhappy with me.

Ultimately it goes back to what I was sharing earlier: "How do I train my nervous system to just be with the sensation of what feels like excruciating powerlessness?"

If I'm witnessing something playing out with my kids, or a colleague, that feels risky and "I might look bad", or "They might get hurt", or "Someone's not gonna like me!" It feels risky and there's a threat: "Can I be with that excruciating sensation in my body, and breathe, and stay here, instead of jumping out of my body, so I don't have to feel that excruciating sensation?"

So that's what we do, right? We jump out of our bodies - we go do, and focus, and distract ourselves over there, trying to make that all better, and managing that - just to avoid feeling that discomfort in our bodies.

Jo Stone (Host): 19:48

I think stacking onto that, it's nervous system safety and it's really being attuned to that because so many women do live in their heads and they do want to control and rescue and make everything organized and make everything okay for everyone because their identity is based on it.

And so then we have this entanglement of nervous system and identity and self-worth and validation, and we've got so much rewards for acting in this way that it can be very tricky to dial that back. And I know—I remember the first time I said to a client: "Are you responsible for your husband's happiness?" And there was this light bulb that went off. It's like, "Oh, actually, I think I have thought that for my entire life!" because we take so much on.

So. this becomes a beautiful opportunity for us to let them, in the wise words of Mel Robbins—and as you said— "Cultivate our safety, work out what we want, take care of ourselves, and then the world starts to get much better from there", doesn't it?

Sabina (Guest): 20:51

It makes me think specifically in relation to the fawn response or people pleasing: whose approval are you tracking for? Is it more important to get other people's approval? Or is perhaps this next chapter of your life—or perhaps 2026—the year that you start tracking for your own sense of approval? "How does this please me?" "How is this serving me?" "How can this be of benefit to me?" And in looking after myself in new ways, "How can that be of benefit to everybody else?"

Jo Stone (Host): 21:31
And there unlocks one of the greatest decisions and choices that you can ever make, Sabina: to focus on you and to put you first. So thank you, ladies.

Three very, very potent trends that we've seen really turn up and play out in 2025. And we'll be tracking these closely and watching to see what emerges in 2026. Thanks for joining me today, ladies.