Balance & Beyond Podcast

What if the smartest move for 2026 isn't more control, but more responsiveness?

Before you blink and 2026 is already underway, join this January workshop to uncover the unconscious rules shaping your work and redesign how you lead, respond, and create space in your career: balanceinstitute.com/rules

After stepping out of routine during a trip to Vietnam and Cambodia, we saw how thousands of scooters glide through “organised chaos” without aggression. No one clings to a rigid lane. Everyone scans, anticipates, and adjusts in real time. That street-level wisdom exposes why so many driven women feel tense and boxed in: the old success rules reward force and overplanning, while the world now rewards awareness and timing.
 

We unpack the nervous system relief that comes when you drop the micro-management of everyday life, even for a moment. You don’t need a holiday to feel free; you need space. Ten minutes of unscheduled choice can soften reactivity, restore creativity, and invite curiosity back into your day. We share simple, practical ways to weave novelty and movement into a structured life without burning it down—new routes, flexible meals, micro-walks, and tiny experiments that make room for aliveness.
 

History also offers a powerful reframe. Meeting people who carry deep collective trauma yet choose presence and gratitude raised a brave question: what weight are we still dragging? Holding on to old slights keeps us anchored to past versions of ourselves. Letting go doesn’t erase the past; it releases our energy for what matters now. We land on three guiding shifts for the year ahead: flow needs responsiveness not control, freedom needs space not escape, and forward movement needs release not rumination.
 

If you’re successful but quietly frustrated, this conversation is a reset. We outline a January workshop designed to help you examine the rules you’ve been living by and decide what genuinely deserves to come with you into 2026. Subscribe, share with a woman who needs this, and leave a review to help the message reach more ears. Then tell us: what rule are you ready to rewrite?

Episode Transcript

INTRO: Welcome to Balance and Beyond, the podcast for women who've outgrown the old model of success. The ones who look fine on the outside but know the way they've been living no longer fits. If you're standing in the space between who you were and who you're becoming, this is for you. I honour the space you've created today. Let's dive in!

Jo (00:19.982)

You might notice things sound a little different around here. This episode, our first regular one in 2026 after our summer sessions, felt like the right place to begin. There's something that happens when you step out of your normal life long enough to actually notice how both you and the world around you operate.

People, the history, the hustle and bustle of everyday life in Vietnam and Cambodia on a recent trip taught me lessons better than any personal development book or course could. And it exposed some patterns about how so many of us are living and working as we head into 2026 that simply aren't sustainable.

If you've ever been to a country like Vietnam, you will know that the word traffic and chaos go together. Almost organized chaos. It's been 22 years since I was in this wonderful country, and that part hasn't changed. Sure, a few more cars here and there, but more scooters than you can ever, ever imagine.

But what I find fascinating with this huge force of trucks and cars and scooters and constant beeping is there's no aggression. There's no panic. It seems to work. And the reason it works is because they are not using the systems that we do in places like Australia.

Everyone there is riding with full awareness of what's going on. In places like Hanoi to cross the road, there's no such thing as a pedestrian crossing. And red traffic lights are more like guidelines. So everyone still goes through them. You have to literally start walking. You start walking in a line if there's more than one of you and you don't stop.

What happens is the cars go around you because they're anticipating what is coming. They adjust in real time to what is in front of them. Where in more Western cultures, we have this: "This is my lane, get out of my effing way." "I deserve to be here." "I'm gonna grip harder, I'm gonna go faster, I'm gonna plan more, I'm gonna control all the variables." "And if you get in my way, it's your fault!:

That just does not work. It's not how it is in Asia, especially. And there is so much that we can learn from this, especially as we head into 2026. Because our old success was very much that this is my lane, this is what I do. It rewards focus and force and endurance and pushing through and grit and determination, doing more than anyone.

It's like saying, "This is my lane, I'm gonna do it." "Okay, I'll pop into your lane and help you occasionally, but then I've got to come back to mine." Whereas moving forward, what is going to be rewarded are new skills that they have in space on the road in Vietnam is situation awareness and timing.

So I can see something coming and I'm adapting in real time. I'm not saying, "No, I have to do it this way. It's gonna happen on my color-coded Gant Chart with times!" No, something's gonna change and you're gonna have to pivot and you are going to have to adapt. Because in our world, control feels safe.

But if our roads are going more from Australian and American roads to those of places like Vietnam and Cambodia, the control is gonna create friction. If we are not aware, moving with the flow, we are going to be knocked over.

Once I noticed how or the beauty of flowing with what is going on around us, it made me see in plain sight how much my life was controlled and structured. And this is something that I'm doing something about in 2026.

One thing when you go on holidays is the relief my nervous system felt at not having to make lunches, about not really having a schedule of no planning, of no mental load. It was just, "What should we do today?" "Okay, well, let's go here, great!" "Where do you want to eat?" "Don't know, we'll find something." "What time are we gonna eat?" "Dunno, let's find something." I didn't get asked for 14 days, "What's for dinner?" which is my most hated question in the entire world. There was this freedom that I didn't realize how much my body needed.

But the good news is this freedom that I had was more of a nervous system concept rather than just being a plane ticket. Because I was away, we were two families traveling together. I still had responsibility, I still had children to feed, I still had to make sure everybody was safe, we still had to get transfers and flights, and we had to do all the things. But the structure that I have had, particularly at the back end of 2025, I hadn't realized had gradually crowded out any feeling of choice, any variety, or even any spontaneity because my life was so ruled by school, end-of-year activities and dancing and rehearsals.

I didn't feel like I had any agency over my entire life. Now, I acknowledge that we can't all live as a backpacker abroad or even a flash packer. We have kids, we have school, we have work. These commitments aren't going anywhere.

But freedom, if you take my reframe that I've brought back with me, is doesn't have to be a holiday, although take all those that you can. It's not about blowing up your life and trying to get rid of all the systems and structure. It's designing space in your day, even if it's as little as 10 minutes, where not everything is decided in advance.

What do I mean by this? I mean weaving novelty, more movement and choice back into a structured life. If all you do is wake up and drive the same route to the station or the bus stop, and you come back and you have the same thing for breakfast, and you do the same thing at this time, and then you do this thing, you do this thing, you begin to feel like a robot and there's no aliveness in there.

There's no adventure, there's no chance for it because it's strangled by structure. And the irony is we put structure and meal plans and routines in place to try to make us feel in control with a busy life and a million balls to juggle. And I get it.

But I ask you the question: "Have you strangled joy with your meal schedules and your shopping lists and your plans?" "Have you strangled any sense of freedom?" Because I speak from personal experience when I say that as that freedom gets snuffed out, you don't realize what that feeling of being trapped and on the treadmill is doing to your nervous system. What it's doing to your creativity, your sense of aliveness.

And so I really encourage you to take a look at your life and see what's the possibility for pockets of freedom. No matter how busy our lives are, we have the odd 10 minutes here or there. And you're probably looking for that freedom in your phone. And I promise you, there are way better ways to access it than doing that.

This trip also helped me really see the bigger question about what we carry forward and what we keep dragging behind us. When you go to a country like Vietnam and Cambodia, you are very humbled by the brutality of their very recent history.

In the Vietnam War, there was between two and three and a half million people killed, and almost every single person was impacted by the war in some way. In Cambodia, the Kumai Rouge essentially starved or beat or through war. 25% of their population died. And our guide, when we visit the temples, was telling us how he was eight and was sent to a child labor camp where he picked up cow manure for years every single day under a brutal regime.

So we're talking here enormous collective trauma and very real reasons to be bitter, angry, resentful, and I'm not suggesting everybody feels that there's rainbows and lollipops, and there are many collective traumas that have been passed down through generations.

But as a whole, their people have this deep gratitude for peace and just the simplicity of everyday life. This man who had been through so much, he lost his parents, he was separated from his siblings. It took him years to find all his family and put them back together.

But he was still talking about today with optimism and presence. And he said, that was the past, I've dealt with it, but now we are so happy to have peace. We are so happy. So there is this joy and ability to actually live in the present. I want to reiterate, I'm not suggesting that we bury or forget about what has happened to us, but if they can release the past, if they can learn to put it down and be present in the joy or the beauty of a sunrise or the beauty of a tree root growing out an old temple, what am I still holding that are far less severe that I can actually put down, whether it's old slights, disappointments, moments of unfairness, whether it's from my childhood or last month.

Because holding on to all of this crap from our past really has a huge emotional effect on us. It's like a continual sieve of emotions. It drains our focus, it drains our creativity, it drains our ability to be present and find joy in what is here. And the biggest piece is when we hold on to the past, it keeps us anchored to old versions of ourselves that experience that hurt or unfairness or wound instead of being able to evolve and move on to the women that we are becoming today.

So this begs the question: "What could move if I stopped rehearsing old stories and took a leaf out of these people's book in terms of finding the joy in the moment, really being able to appreciate a sunrise and not worry too much about tomorrow?" Because you never know what this is going to bring.

So ultimately, if we step right back, we can see here that flow requires responsiveness, not control. Freedom requires space, not escape. And forward movement, which everyone tells me they want, requires release, not rumination.

And particularly over this time, I've realized that so many women are not struggling because they're doing something wrong. They're struggling because they're playing by rules that don't match the environment. They're focused on control, they're focused on escape and rumination, which keeps them trapped in a past life, a past situation, a past version of themselves that is not what they want.

And this discomfort that so many women are feeling is not a personal shortcoming. It's a signal that the operating system has changed. And you need to find one that is going to help you unlock responsiveness, space, release, amongst so many other things.

This is why I'm running a workshop starting the 23rd of January. It's specifically designed to help you see which rules you've been unconsciously living by and decide which ones actually deserve to come with you into 2026. If you are successful but feeling tense, if you're feeling boxed in, quietly frustrated, this workshop is going to help you recalibrate your career in January before the year takes you over.

I don't want you to wait until May or August to say, "Whoa, hang a second, blink!" "Where did this come from?" Because I don't know about you, but 2025 went by in the blink of an eye. And when everything is speeding up, thanks to AI, we have to learn to play by the new rules.

Otherwise, we'll be stuck in the past, we'll be left behind, and none of these beautiful traits and experiences like freedom, joy, peace, presence, gratitude, they'll become unavailable to you.

Details are in the show notes, or you can find them at balanceinstitute.com/rules. I look forward to seeing you there.