If you've ever Googled "Am I burnt out?" at 3 a.m. but felt like none of the answers really fit, this is for you. Because personal growth and professional development for high-achieving women can actually become the most sophisticated form of self-sabotage. Today, I'm joined by the wonderful Sabina—and Sabina, juicy topic, isn't it?
Sabina (Guest)
Oh, isn't it just? I know this pattern very well—both within myself, my own journey, and with so many of the clients that I get to work with. It's... yeah, it's fascinating.
Jo (Host)
And so, let's really name this pattern. What is the pattern that we see when people are spending a lot of—investing a lot of time, energy, and money—in continual learning?
Sabina (Guest)
Yes. Well, I would like to zoom out and put this into the context of women in education over the last 100 years. If you think back to, say, 100 years ago—I'm talking about industrialised, you know, Western society—we didn’t really have access to the same opportunities as men in terms of education, in terms of having your own bank account.
But when we're talking about education and self-help, we've made so much progress, and I think I've read somewhere that over—I think it's over—60% of postgrad master's degrees are now taken by women, and I think women are actually overtaking men in undergrads as well. This is in the Western world, so it's phenomenal that women are now having these opportunities and seizing it by the reins.
However, what we're talking about in the context here in this episode is: where does it become a hindrance? Where does it become a self-sabotage mechanism to stop you from actually achieving what it is that you want to do, by perhaps hiding behind another qualification or thinking that you have to get another certification or some more letters after your name? And it's this fine balance, isn't it? Yeah?
Jo (Host)
Yeah, absolutely. If I had a dollar for every woman that said, "If I just had an MBA, then I'll be more confident…" And we know that it's not the MBA that actually gives you the confidence—it's the person or the identity that you now believe you have, and the worth you now believe you have because of some letters after your name.
So I think what's, I guess, an important caveat here is that we're not saying that education is bad. As you said, education has been a really important part of that—for pretty much all of our team. We are constantly looking to educate ourselves and grow. And what can we learn? We've got this insatiable curiosity.
However, what we see is that women hide behind more qualifications, more doing—and what they're missing is the actual implementation of whatever they've learned, because that's a whole different skill set, isn't it, Sabina? It's not just the learning. We can learn things, we can absorb them, but putting them into practice can actually be harder.
Sabina (Guest)
That's right. So there's a difference between information gathering, stockpiling and consuming information and credentials, and actually putting them into action—because it's not the qualification or the certificate that matters, it's: what does that allow me to do?
And the reality is, nowadays we are moving at such a fast pace that you might spend three years studying something, and then in another two years, it's been superseded by something else. Again, I'm not saying we should not be studying, but if we're hanging our hat—and our worth, our value, and our contribution—on our scholarly achievements or leaning so heavily on them, you're sort of missing a trick.
Knowledge without action is really just information, information. And so the key is, you want to act on the information that you are learning, but you also want to combine it with your own life experience, and that's what's wisdom.
People can tell when you are showing up and sharing your expertise from a place of academic, conceptual expertise, or when it's actually embodied lived experience. And I think that's a trick that women are sometimes missing though—those women who, let's call them, self-help junkies or qualification junkies.
Jo (Host)
Yeah, I still remember a very defining moment at university. I was doing my master’s—in marketing—and the teacher, who had only ever been an academic, was telling us how to run a campaign.
I had been working in the field, and I said to him, “No, no, no, no, no, that’s not how it works.” And he said, “Yes, it is.” I said, “I’m working in a big global insurance company. I would never get any of this past risk, and that’s not actually going to work.”
He couldn’t actually answer the question because he was talking from the theory. I’d tried to get the theory, got it, but I’d put it into real-life application—and it actually doesn’t work in theory. You have to do this to it, you have to do that, and you have to do that.
And because I was the only one in the class who had a proper job—at least, you would say—in the field we were doing the master’s in, I ended up taking over the class and teaching everybody. I said, “Yep, here are the concepts, great concepts. But here is my experience of how that translates in real life.” Then it turned out there was one other person who became a good friend.
She was also working in a different sector, and she said, “Yeah, yep, that’s how it works in Jo’s world; this is how it works in mine.” So, to your point, this is where we can take the knowledge.
But when we only keep thinking the answer is more knowledge, more knowledge, more knowledge—learn more, learn more—and don’t actually take the time to put it in and get that beautiful sense of wisdom, we are completely missing a competitive advantage.
Sabina (Guest)
