Balance & Beyond Podcast

The ground rules of work have changed, and running last year's playbook harder won't save you.

If you don’t want to start the year on autopilot, the New Rules for Career Success workshop is for you. Learn how to stop equating speed with value, create space for real perspective, and upgrade the rules that are quietly burning you out. Register here for Day 1 which kicks off Friday 23rd January: www.balanceinstitute.com/rules
 

We open the door on a different path: moving from busyness and rescue mode to the rarer skills that now define value — judgment, perspective and discernment. With AI making speed and responsiveness cheap, we explore how to step above the work, stop proving worth through output, and create the space required to lead.

We dig into the hidden beliefs that keep high performers stuck: the comfort of a back‑to‑back calendar, the pull of over‑responsibility, and the secret addiction to urgency that makes deadlines feel safer than white space. You’ll hear how accelerated pace and shrinking resources trained us to be firefighters, why that credibility now anchors you in execution, and what shifts help you be seen as direction rather than delivery. We talk practical changes too — protecting thinking time, tightening meeting purpose, delegating execution, and using AI to clear the runway so you can focus on the decisions only you can make.

Most importantly, we offer three questions to reset your year before it locks in: what work truly requires your judgment, what tasks you’re holding because busy feels safer than being seen, and how you’d prove value if speed stopped being rewarded tomorrow. If you’re standing between who you were and who you’re becoming, this is your cue to upgrade the operating system of your success. Subscribe, share this with a woman who needs it, and leave a review to help the message reach those ready to lead with space and clarity.

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 Stone (Host)

What if the way you've been working isn't wrong? It's just outdated. And what if continuing this year the same way is actually the risk? It's a big trend I'm seeing amongst women in the end of 2025 and especially now already in 2026. And this is that the rules that we played last year by are no longer working.

This isn't because you've got it wrong or you've done anything wrong. This is because the environment has changed faster than the strategies that built you in the first place. You've been capable, you've been flexible, you've been productive, efficient, all the things. And those qualities worked for a while.

But what built your success is now quietly working against you. In today's episode, I'm going to share biggest mistakes I see people making where they're following the old rules and more importantly, what you need to do to unlock more effective ways of working and being successful.

Busyness is still being mistaken for value, even at the most senior levels. If you're anything like me, your calendar is probably still back to back. You are still running from one thing to another, and all you feel is busy, like you're on this treadmill. In the past, and especially early on in our careers, busyness is seen as commitment. It's seen as being important.

But unfortunately, we never shift that internal belief that busy equals important. And being feeling like you're needed everywhere, you're needed in every meeting, everyone wants your input, unfortunately, can still feel like being relevant.

This year, what is happening is if you are still busy, it signals one thing. You're operating inside the work, not above it. Constant interruptions leave you no time to decide what actually matters and no room to make those key decisions about what it's important means you're not going to have the influence that you know you're capable of.

In an AI world where everything is speeding up, if you don't have the space to think, you are not going to have the space to lead. So this is the first old rule that you have to break, and that is that busy equals important and put a new value on what space looks like for you.

Over-responsibility is a big thread in my life, in my client's life, and likely in yours too. And for much of our career, that over-responsibility has been rewarded. We learned early that stepping in worked, rescuing people, saving them, being the firefighter, fixing things meant that everything kept going, things kept moving. And when you value outputs and you value productivity, that's important. You don't want things to stall.

So you carried what was not yours. And this built you trust, credibility. People would come to you to solve their problems. You would worry about your team. You'd worry about letting people down. So you would stay up so that your team didn't burn out.

A lot of this over-responsibility comes from having a really, really big heart. However, right now, that behavior is no longer strategic. Carrying everyone, fixing everyone, that default setting that you have is impeding your judgment and it's impeding your visibility. So when you're holding everyone and everything, you become execution.

You're not "direction" anymore. You're not strategic. You're not influential. You're needed, but you're not considered in the spaces that perhaps you could add the most value because you're too busy worrying and thinking about everyone else and probably not yourself.

To compound this, I mentioned the word busyness before, but a big trend in 2025 was the pace accelerated. More demands, fewer resources, shorter time frames. And so everybody felt like the dial just went up a lot. And what happens when you operate in that type of environment that is only meant for short-term periods for a long time, we become addicted to the adrenaline that comes with a deadline.

That pressure that we have to get things done, to churn through things because it's due tomorrow, can actually help us cut through the overthinking and the self-doubt because urgency can sharpen our focus. It's like if you've ever been in a crisis, you know that you can make really fast decisions that in other times you would agonize over.

So when things start to slow down, and this is what AI is starting to do, it is giving people more space because it's taking care of the execution or the output piece, it's leading to quite a lot of discomfort because the space that could emerge for you to think for you to be strategic is going to be full.

You're going to fill it because pressure is often the only operating system that you know how to work within. You don't know how to find clarity in the spaciousness. And so, of course, you always pump the deadline, you always push everything.

And the more senior you become, very often the deadlines, the projects, the things that you're working on are all self-inflicted. You chose the deadline. Sure, you may have communicated it and put it in your KPIs and now you're held accountable to it, but you're the one that knew that this thing had to be done.

So you're the one pushing, striving, wanting to do everything better, faster, more. But that system of just pushing and working under pressure only just amplifies burnout. And with AI completely changing the way everything operates, this is a really important opportunity for you to stop and reflect on: "Do I actually feel safe in space?" "Can I actually think when there is no deadline?" "Or do I procrastinate?" "Do I put it off?" "Do I take loads of time?" "Do I canvass everyone's opinions?" "Whereas under pressure, I'm super sharp."

This is a key distinction that is going to make a big difference in 2026. So, what's actually changed this year when we talk about the rules and the environment changing, needing an operating system upgrade? Well, tools haven't just sped up the work.

And whether you're stuck using Copilot, I'm very sorry, or whether you're using other sophisticated tools or using other pieces in your ecosystem, all these tools are not just changing the speed, but they're changing what's visible and valued. Speed is now cheap. Speed used to be your competitive advantage. You were faster than everyone else. You could do things better than anybody else.

But now that speed is assumed, responsiveness is automated, and people's expectations of responsiveness thanks to AI have completely changed. Your fast of what used to be getting back to people because you sat in your inbox and wanted to be super responsive actually now looks slow when somebody can put in a really detailed prompt about something complicated and get the most amazing answer back in four seconds.

So even our definitions of speed have changed. So effort and output, which used to be your competitive advantages, and now the cost of entry. They're not advantage. They are not why somebody should hire you, promote you, keep you. Things have changed. So when speed stops being the differentiating factor and busyness and output, what's left?

Well, judgment. The ability to discern what matters, the ability to be strategic, to think clearly in the space and to create space to focus on what matters. And so many women have told me that they're so busy with their heads down, bum up, trying to churn through everything on their list, that they forget to look at those important but not urgent matters.

They're too busy fighting fires and then get to the end of the year and go, oh my God, I didn't actually move the needle on what was going to get me the visibility I needed or that was going to grow my career. Being indispensable once protected you, knowing everything, being the go-to person, but now that anchors you into execution.

Your specialist knowledge that you may have about how the organization runs, how things are done around here. Maybe it's about a particular discipline. They used to be hard to come by. And those specifics that you had got you security, we always say around, you know, knowledge is power. So when you know how things work, you retain that power.

But AI is now starting to discern these things. AI has the specifics. AI will get somebody else a technical answer. But what AI can't do is see what matters. So the advantage is now becoming perspective, judgment, discernment, seeing how things work together, deciding where attention belongs, because going faster on something that doesn't matter doesn't matter.

And when you value speed and busyness, you are going to go around and round in circles. So starting the year busy feels responsible, get on top of things, but this is going to lock the old rules in for you much faster than you realize. And once that year starts to fill up, blink, and it will be Easter, it's very, very difficult to reset. And all that's going to happen for so many women is they are going to run last year's strategy, but harder and faster.

I don't want that for you. Things have fundamentally changed. And you must change before it's too late. Space makes you relevant. Perspective, judgment, discernment. These are all characters that you have in spades, but you don't know how to extract them from your busyness and your speed and your output.

Now, before you rush back into your inbox, I want you to pause and ask yourself this. What part of my workload actually requires my judgment? And what part of it am I still doing? Because feeling busier feels safer than being seen. And one last one. If speed stopped being rewarded tomorrow, would I still know how to prove my value?

This is what I am unpacking in my January workshop that starts on Friday, the 23rd. I'm not going to give you a plan. I'm going to give you a clean window to get perspective before the year locks in. I don't want the pattern to run itself. I do not want you to start this year on autopilot, coming back from holidays thinking, right, I'm going to get on top of my list. I'm going to get on top of my inbox, my notifications, I'm going to be all great.

No, let's make sure that you understand the rules that aren't working, that you upgrade your operating system. So 2026 is the year that you find perspective discernment and all of that fulfillment that you're looking for. If this is landing, the link is in the show notes. I'll see you there!