Balance & Beyond Podcast

Ever wonder why a tiny choice - how you part your hair, whether you eat a doughnut - can spark a wave of judgement in your head?

We pull back the curtain on the quiet scripts that turn neutral moments into moral verdicts and show how those stories hardwire your nervous system, shape your identity, and dictate whether rest feels safe or forbidden. From the myth of “I’ll rest when things calm down” to the efficiency trap of “it’s quicker if I do it myself,” we unpack four powerful narratives many women inherit and unknowingly rehearse for decades.

You’ll hear how attention in childhood became a proxy for love and safety, why being rewarded for usefulness cements hypervigilance, and how value gets fused to output until slowing down feels like failure. We explore the cost: chronic over-functioning, comparison that stings, and a body that whispers “enough” while the mind says “more.” Along the way, we bring in somatic insights and a simple focus exercise—the red and yellow scan—that proves how your brain filters reality based on what you ask it to find. When you shift focus, you change the evidence your mind serves up, and that’s where new choices become possible.

This conversation is a gentle, practical guide to rewriting your inner script. Label thoughts as stories, not facts. Pair new language with breath, grounding, and micro-rest so the body learns that slower can be safe. Delegate one task fully, leave one email for the morning, and build proof that reliability and rest can co-exist. Change doesn’t arrive in a single revelation; it accrues one word, one response, one boundary at a time. Subscribe for more conversations on redefining success, share this with a woman who needs a softer script, and leave a review to help the show reach the people it’s meant for.

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)

I had a funny moment this week when I went to do a center part with my hair and caught myself thinking, ah, I can't pull that off. And it hit me. It's actually nothing to do with my hair on my head. That moment was a perfect reminder of how powerful the stories in our heads really are. That's right. As humans, we are meaning-making machines.

One of the most powerful sentences I learned very, very early on in my personal development journey, courtesy of the great Tony Robbins. The way our brain likes to make meaning of things, the way that it tends to stick is with these magical things called stories that we've been telling ourselves and each other since the dawn of time.

Now, when we look at our life, most events in themselves are neutral. Where I part my hair, how I park my car, the food that I eat, whether I eat a donut, okay, I ate a donut, I part my hair on the side, I part my hair on the side. It's the meaning that I attach to that donut, the way I drive, the way I part my hair, that makes it good or bad.

And chances are we tend to make a lot of the meanings in our lives bad or negative. And everything has this added layer of interpretation. What this means about me, what this means about people in my life, what this means about my insides, my outsides. And it drives us crazy.

This is why you can see two people go through the exact same technically external experience and have a completely different reaction because they've made completely different meaning out of what happened to them.

What happens is we tend to repeat these same stories often enough, and then they feel as true as facts, like the sky is blue, this is how my hair is, this is how I am. Now, to put this into context, I've done a lot of reflection on the stories that I've been telling myself over the years, and I'm curious if any of these relate to you as well.

One of my big ones has been: if I don't stay on top of things, everything will fall apart. This story formed pretty early for me where being reliable was rewarded. I had to be on top of everything, I had to be organized. But what this created in me and in many women is hypervigilance.

I always need to see what is there to stay on top of. And spoiler alert, when you have a family and a job and a life, there's a lot. It never ends. You can't switch off because there's always something to take care of. And you live with this hideous fear that falling apart is bad. Your nervous system deeply hardwires, rest is risky.

So the belief that sits under all of this is stability depends on me. No surprise. We hold it all, we carry it all. And that's all from that story that we've been telling ourselves on repeat since childhood. Another of my favorites and long terms is it's quicker if I just do it myself.

This one has masqueraded for a really long time with me as efficiency. Well, it's just faster if I do it myself. And when my life is all about speed, when my life is about trying to fit more in, because remember, if I don't do it all, then everything's gonna fall apart.

It just creates this chronic pattern of over-functioning, of doing everything, of micromanaging things, of white knuckling, of holding on to them and trying to shove everything, which means you live by the clock and constantly feel behind because you've got to do everything, you've got to care everything, you've got to hold everything.

Sitting under all of this story that we've told ourselves builds a belief that my value is tied to output, not judgment or not who I am. And so, of course, then where my value is now tied to output, and I've built this belief because of the stories I've told myself. "Do you think I'm gonna rest?" "Do you think I'm gonna slow down?" "Am I gonna delegate?" "Am I gonna let other people help me?" "Probably not." And this can be a really hard story to rewire because you've found so much evidence in time that this is true.

One of the most corrosive stories that I have told myself, and this is hard-wired in so many of us, is I should better handle this. It's a well, I I was told as a kid that I can do it all. I can fly to the moon, I can be a doctor, I can be a prime minister or president. So why am I not able to handle what life is throwing in my way? This can become really isolating, even if you're never alone.

There's a difference between being lonely and being alone and not feeling like you can ask for help or receive help because you should be able to handle it. You should be on top of this. You're smart enough, you should have been able to figure this out by now. This for me turned into many decades of self-criticism if I couldn't handle it.

Because I thought that needing support made me weak, that part of my strength was being able to hand it all, being able to hold it all, being able to do it all. And that used to put me in comparison with a lot of people who I thought were handling it better than me.

Well, why does she look so put together? And look where her job is, and look how much she's earning, and look at her house. So you can see how toxic this story that goes on repeat again and again and again can be to how you show up in the world, how you talk to yourself, how you parent, how you take care of your body.

And for me, this is one that took quite a long time to quieten and turn into something more productive. But probably the toughest one for me, and this comes from deep, hard, wired childhood programming, was I'll rest when things calm down, when things are under control, when there's space, when there's time. And this has led to so much depletion.

Because when we let ourselves rest when there's time, but you're also running parallel stories about it's quicker if I do it myself, and if I don't stay on top of things, it will fall apart. Is rest ever going to happen? No. Is there ever going to be space? No, because you're going to constantly fill it.

And I used to use this to delay doing a lot of things, "I will take care of my health when things calm down." "I put off investing in a coach for a long time because I said I needed to get through this busy period." And it was 18 months before I ended up pulling the trigger and told me, oh my God, it's never actually going to calm down.

Even in my life, I've had a lot going on in the past 12 to 18 months. My husband broke his foot and couldn't drive, basically, for 12 weeks or more. My father's been through cancer. He's had strokes recently. And I said to one of my team members, when we just get through this, she turned to me and she said, "Jo, I've been working for you for two years." Things never calm down. There's always something.

It's always a transition. I've got another child starting high school this year. There's always something. And so I have to stop telling myself this story that I will rest when I get through things or when things calm down. What this delay of rest and belief that rest has to be earned has also done for me. And I know so many women I coach is it's disconnected me from my body.

And by that I mean it has constantly made me push through my head and ignore exhaustion, ignore my body's natural functions, because that can even look like, well, I'll go to the bathroom when I finish this email. I'll eat lunch when I'm done with this meeting. And so my body just starts screaming at me, whether it's poor sleep, whether it's waking up tired, whether it's that level of exhaustion that is deep in your bones.

And the part for me that I've got to continue the journey of letting go of is it's so easy to put our life on hold. And I've always been pretty good at being in the moment, but I still have this sliver of when I get through this transition, then blah, blah, blah. And I'll pick my running back up when I blah, blah, blah, happens. Or I'm gonna have so much more time and space when this happens. And the lure is that some of that can be true.

But the overarching story is the piece that we have to learn to identify and see how damaging they are. Because all of these stories that I've shared, the four most prominent ones that are running in my life, at least, and there are a bajillion more that I could share with you, is that they aren't usually supportive. They're not really empowering stories, like I've got myself no matter what.

We can build those stories, and I've done a lot of work to build on those stories in my life. But they're more hard-won. These stories, like I should be able to handle it, I'll rest once things settle down, they are so hardwired that we have to be really careful of the consequences of these stories.

These stories, in as you can see in all the examples I gave, they shape decisions. They have a big impact on your behavior and your nervous system. This is something that having somatic coaches on my team, we've always done a lot of work on.

But for me personally, understanding the deeply entrenched role my nervous system has in everything has been a game changer. So the question people always ask when I share about these stories is oh my God, where the hell did these things come from? They've always been part of our lives and we don't realize that they're actually stories.

Well, they've come from childhood, as many of these things were. It was how we were rewarded or given attention as a child. Ultimately, they how we created safety. We felt safe if we were in control, if we were useful, if we were busy, if we were reliable, that got us brownie points.

Knowing that when we're a child, we perceive attention to be love, and love equals safety. So these stories about, well, I better do it myself. Because if your family judges usefulness or productivity as a marker of belonging, well, then of course you you value efficiency above all else.

But at some point, these stories have run so deep. They've gone beyond being now just a survival mechanism, and they take over our identity. These identities of I'm helpful, I'm kind, one of the biggest identities I've had is I am not lazy. Laziness was one of the worst things that you could be in my family. If I was ever sitting down doing nothing, it was "Oi, oi, get up, make yourself useful, what are you doing?"

And I can see now my parents, even in their late age, my dad's 86, he still can't sit still. He still can't sit still because that's part of his identity. And he's fused that into me. So our nervous system becomes addicted to the story, and now we enter into times of uncertainty, which happens all throughout life, but particularly at the moment, we find our comfort back by doubling down on the old stories.

Even if they don't serve us, even if we know that they're not good for us. Well, if I can't control the outside world, if I don't know what's happening economically, politically, with my work, with my role, with technology, with AI, there is so much out there to rock us at the moment.

Well, I'm gonna double down on it. It's just faster to do it myself. I'm gonna double down on I'll rest once I understand the external environment. Hate to break it to you, honey. But doubling down on these stories is not the place that you want to be getting your certainty from right now. Because turning those up becomes more toxic, more draining, more depleted, more resentment. You do not want to go there.

And I know it seems crazy that we do this, but we feel so much control from controlling what goes on in our head when we can't control the external environment. And then the hard part becomes so we double down on these stories, but then we don't want to change the stories because they've become part of who we are.

If you're not helpful, who are you? If you don't have to earn your rest, what does that say about you? You've probably then got a story about you being entitled or you having not worked hard enough. So it's this crazy entangled web of stories and identity that keep you trapped in who you are today.

I want to give you a little exercise to do that's going to show you how these stories change what you see around you. So I want you to look around wherever you are right now. I want you to look for the color red. Just look around. How much red can you see? Where is it? Now close your eyes if you can.

If you're driving, please don't close your eyes. I want you to now, in your mind's eye, notice in the room around you where you are, what was yellow. You might be going, hmm, I don't know if there's much yellow around me. Because I was looking for red. One of Tony Robbins' most famous quotes is where focus goes, energy flows.

If you are looking for red, you will see red everywhere. If you are looking for proof that uh everything will fall apart, then you will find plenty of evidence of that. If you want to find evidence that you should be able to handle it, all you have to do is open up social media and you will see all these fabricated stories of women who are supposedly handling it. It is all designed to make you feel bad.

Your stories tell your brain what to look for. When I fell pregnant, I still remember vividly being just pregnant and turning to my husband and saying, Is it just me? Or have all these pregnant women come out of the woodwork? No, they haven't. They were always there.

My brain, my subconscious mind, your reticular activating system in your brain tells you what to focus on based on what you ask it for. I was obviously very interested in babies and pregnancy. So my brain went, "Oh, you're thinking about this a lot." Let me find you more evidence and point you to other people like you. Our brains filter out around 90% of what we see because we can't possibly absorb it and take it all in.

So there's a part of our brain deliberately that filters out what does not align with your internal narrative. This is where we say you change your story, you change your life. And yes, I know these stories are reinforced over decades, some of them since before you can even remember. And it may take you support of some kind to do this, but it is possible.

So if you take nothing else from this episode, take this. Most of what you say to yourself isn't fact, it's interpretation. And the stories that once kept you safe may now be the very things keeping you exhausted. You don't change them overnight, you change them one word at a time, one response at a time. And when you do, something fundamental shifts. You stop reacting to your life and start responding to it. More on this soon.