Work is louder than ever, and plenty of us are calling that “progress” while quietly wondering why we’re exhausted.

I sit down with Dr Kat Page, organisational psychologist, leadership adviser and author of Good Work: Transforming Your Work from the Inside Out, to name what’s actually broken and what we can redesign so women don’t have to keep paying the price with their health, time and identity.

We talk about the modern intensity trap: constant interruptions, longer days, and the very real second and third shifts many women carry. Kat unpacks why “be more resilient” is the wrong default, how Australia’s psychosocial safety focus can help shift responsibility back to workplaces, and why we need to stop measuring productivity as hours. With AI changing what work looks like, the new benchmark is value: judgement, creativity, learning, problem solving and the quality of conversations, even when that doesn’t deliver the dopamine hit of ticking a task off a list.

We also go deep on the inner work. How do you hear your own voice when the collective definition of success is so loud? What does it take to build boundaries in a boundaryless world, tolerate the discomfort of disappointing people, and make brave career choices like moving to a purpose-led role or building a portfolio career? If you’ve been asking “Do I even want to be here anymore?”, you’re not alone.

Subscribe for more honest conversations, share this with a woman who needs it, and leave a review to help the Ripple Effect reach the people it’s meant for.

Want to learn more about how to redesign your relationship with work?
Connect with Dr. Kat Page here: https://www.drkatpage.com/

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. Honour the space you've created today. Let's dive in. I want to tell you about two versions of me. There's the version that explains everything three

Welcome And Setting The Scene
Jo Stone (Host) 0:04
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. Honor the space you've created today. Let's dive in.

Why Modern Work Feels Broken
Jo Stone (Host) 0:25
If you've ever felt like work is broken, then today's episode is for you. I'm joined by Dr. Kat Page, who's an organizational psychologist, leadership advisor, and author of the brand new book Good Work: Transforming Your Work from the Inside Out. She's going to talk us through why work is broken, how we fix it, and most importantly, what women need to do to thrive in the current era. So tell me, Kat, what is wrong with work?

SPEAKER_01 0:57
So there are some things that are wrong with work, but also some things I think that could be redesigned about work. So maybe if I start with what's wrong with work, as you've said. So for many, many decades, like maybe even hundreds of years in some ways, we've designed work really around efficiency, output, growth. You know, it's all about we're there to do a job and perform and get paid, essentially. And of course, those things all matter. But I think somewhere along the way, we've confused productivity with just working really, really intensely. So even last year, for example, Microsoft put out a report showing this increase in the intensity of work. And I think we all feel it, even without seeing the numbers, but sometimes it's nice to see the numbers. On average, most of us get interrupted every two minutes. Particularly during the mid-morning period, work is becoming longer as well. Women in particular are often doing a second and a third shift after their first shift of work. Work is intense and they're having a lot less time to recover. But I think a lot of this comes back to sort of more industrial era of work where we've confused productivity with counting hours and input. We know that's not really what productivity looks like these days, particularly in an age of AI. I would argue one of the issues we have with work is that we try and make people be more resilient. And actually we need to fix work. Even though we know work is becoming more intense, we know work is becoming more stressful in many ways. I don't want to shy away from the fact that work actually can be good for us as well. So there is lots of ways in which we've designed and the ways that we're leading work now that's not good for us. And I think in some ways we're at risk of scaring people because we've got in Australia at least new regulations around psychosocial risks and psychosocial safety, which are important and much needed, to start to get workplaces to change for the better and to focus particularly on fixing work, not people. But what we have to be careful of not doing is sending a message that all work is bad. Because at its core, work for many people, I imagine you would fall in this bucket, Joe. Work can be a sense of contribution. So we work for money, of course, but for most of us, we're working to feel a sense of purpose, we're working to build community, to be connected with people. It's so fundamentally part of our identity. It gives it structure, meaning. I've seen many people who've retired, and that's something many people look forward to. All the things I'll do when I'm retired, and then they just lose themselves sometimes by not having anything to do. So I think it's both sides. I think there are some things that are wrong with work, but I also think work is in itself not bad as a concept. It's just the way we've designed it is problematic.

Redefining Productivity Around Value
Jo Stone (Host) 3:36
What do you think then needs to change about how we look at productivity or progress? What do we need to revisit?

SPEAKER_01 3:46
The productivity conversation is a really important one because often when we're thinking about productivity, we're thinking about the economic output and economic strength of an economy, a country, an organization. So it is important, but I think we are thinking about productivity at the moment in terms of hours often. So I think productivity historically was quite easy to measure in that it's about counting units, sales, hours worked, how many transactions, but increasingly, particularly now with AI, it's more about value than it is about how many hours you do. And many of the things actually that are most valuable, if you think about it in a workplace, give the illusion of not being productive. So what I mean by that is say you have a really useful conversation with someone that helps them to make progress in their thinking or to stop work. Like when do we ever reward people for stopping work? How incredible would that be? We reward people for adding more and more and laying more and more things on, but that's not actually productivity. In the short term, that creates what Carl Newport in his book Slow Productivity called pseudo-productivity. It's not actually real productivity, it's not actually making progress. So we need to think more around value. It's a value that comes from our thinking, the quality of our thinking, the quality of learning, creativity, judgment, collaborating, problem solving. And a lot of that comes from the quality of the conversations we're having with people. A lot of the leaders that I work with now, because I work with really quite senior leaders, they sometimes don't feel productive because they're in a lot of meetings all day. So they spend like 90% of their time in meetings, but really what they're doing, if they're doing it well, is they're spending 90% of their time in conversation with people. And when we're in conversation with people, the quality of that conversation really matters because that's how we create value today, not by ticking things off. So sometimes I have to work with leaders to help them to redefine what productivity actually means for them or what achievement means to them. And maybe at the end of the day, it's feeling proud of ourselves because we had a conversation that had a really important impact for someone, or we made connections between things that people hadn't connected, or we refined the problem statement for something. We spent time aligning stakeholders around something. It doesn't feel, it doesn't give you that same dopamine hit.

The Dopamine Trap Of Doing
Jo Stone (Host) 6:01
But actually it's what we need in workplaces, especially now when AI is going to start doing the work faster than anybody. But do you find, especially in your work with women, most women in my world are lured by what I call being a get shit done person. And if you're trying to redefine productivity as being there to hear someone out, there's no dopamine hit from that. And if you're a get shit done person, that's going to challenge you at your very core because you think you take on more so that you can get more shit done, which just reinforces the loop.

SPEAKER_01 6:34
I think we've trained our brains to find that rewarding, you know, that we actually do tick things off our list. We actually literally do get a dopamine hit when we get shit done, so to speak. So I think in some ways it's about rewiring our brain because our brains get really good at what we practice. So if we practice that kind of way of working, we get addicted to it. And because we don't have time or space as women often to think, well, this doesn't make sense. Like who has time to just sit around and be re-evaluating sometimes the way that they work? We just don't have time or we feel like we don't actually have time. I can see that, but I think that's where we need to slow down to think about our own standards for performance and hear ourselves think, which is something I lost somewhere along the way, especially when I was in a large corporate environment. Because in large corporate environments, they're designed often a really strong culture in place in organizations, which there needs to be because that's how you get people to adopt certain flocking rules so that they're aligning to a particular ethos or way of working. But what then sometimes happens when you work in these large corporates is the voice that you hear in your head about what you should do is actually not your voice. It's like the collective voice. And often there, um, when I unpack this with leaders, they're often assumptions about what it means to be successful or how we get stuff done in this place. It's not actually your own thoughts. So you're not listening to your own internal wisdom. And that actually takes time to relearn that, I've found.

Jo Stone (Host) 8:00
This is how we are successful around here, whether it's buy the new handbag or get the Botox or get this thing done, or you know, get get this right thing said by this person, that group think the collective flocking is very alluring and very hard to resist.

SPEAKER_01 8:19
Yeah, because the more evolutionary way of thinking about it is how we survived as species was by being part of a community. A lot of people falsely assume that we are driven by our own desires primarily, especially in really individualistic countries like the Western world, but we are far more influenced by what people around us are

Hearing Your Own Voice Again
SPEAKER_01 8:39
doing.

Jo Stone (Host) 8:39
Um, what's the anecdote then to if people are noticing that they're caught up in that collective definition of success or achievement? What's your experience of finding the time or headspace to actually re-evaluate that amongst running children to activities and getting shit done off your list?

SPEAKER_01 9:00
I think just being aware that we do this, that we as humans are story creators and that's how we create meaning of our lives. So a lot of us don't realize that. It's not something that we're taught, but we are unreliable narrators of our own life. And what I mean by that is like many of the things that we think are not things that we actually really think. So I think noticing that our brain creates stories and to be mindful of that, then you are more likely to catch those stories when they do happen. But if you have caught that story and you are seeing that, when you're actually still in that environment, I think it's really hard to separate and diffuse yourself from that. For a lot of women, I think there's a forced disruption that happens that forces them to think, whether it be an illness or a death or a separation or a redundancy, as was my experience, because you want to keep proving that you can do it. A lot of women, I find, they just want to prove that they can do it, and so they commit to things for longer than they should have, or than they actually really wanted to, just to be able to show themselves or show others that they can. And then when you're forced to stop, sometimes that's when you in the space that's created by not having so much to do is sometimes really uncomfortable. But if you sit in that discomfort, you start to hear more about your own innate desires, yearnings, purpose.

AI, COVID And The Corporate Rethink
Jo Stone (Host) 10:21
Do you feel like there's a lot of women out there starting to see perhaps that forced reckoning with AI, with restructures, with hiring freezes coming down the pipeline? Are you seeing there's an appetite or are these conversations being had amongst women at the moment? Because I'm seeing them happen in my world and they weren't happening five years ago. Five years ago, the conversation was all about how do I be more productive? I'm burning out. Whereas now there's almost this question around, do I actually even want to be here anymore? Do I even want to be in corporate? Is this my path? Am I gonna have a role in five years? What does my pathway to retirement, whether that's 10 or 20 years away? It's just how the pace of change at the moment. I'm seeing these questions emerge. Are you seeing the same thing?

SPEAKER_01 11:07
Yeah, I think I started seeing that after COVID, actually, when people started feeling like, oh, it's quite nice to work from home, or there were some consequences of COVID that were positive. I think that's one of them where people realize that there's more to life than your job. And they weren't just mindlessly getting up and going into the office without thinking about it. AI is an interesting one because I still think Australia is not quite where it needs to be in really fully thinking about the extent to which AI is going to disrupt and force a new way of working. So I think someone probably are thinking along those lines, but more so in my network, what I'm finding is that a lot of my female friends now are not people, they've opted out of large corporates and they're more tending to work for themselves or join smaller organizations. I'm seeing ex-consultants joining smaller boutique, community-based organizations, which is what I've done, left large corporate jobs and deliberately moved into a smaller community purpose-led organization where I feel like I have more agency and it's more in line with my purpose.

Jo Stone (Host) 12:13
Do you feel like this mass exodus away from big corporate is going to be a defining trend of the next couple of years, particularly amongst women who are looking for flexibility, as you said, purpose, meaning, and finding they can't get it at the big end of town?

SPEAKER_01 12:30
I think so. I do think a lot of people are moving into smaller organizations. I haven't seen statistics on it, but I think a lot of women are moving more towards portfolio type careers. Having multiple jobs that either together make up what their career is or changing careers as well, quite often, is something else you see, particularly in women in their 40s. I read somewhere that on average women are in their early to mid-40s when they start a business or when they write a book. And I hate to be one of those statistics, but I literally did that. Because I think you actually just get to that point where you're like, I can't sustain this anymore. I see now other options, and I'm starting to see more women making career pivots that are counterintuitive. Like there's new pathways that you're seeing open up, and you go, Oh, so you can actually make that work financially and be home to spend time with your kids. Like, that sounds too good to be true. I want some of that. How did you do that? And these sorts of conversations. Lots of groups like Future Women, Business Chicks, Even Careers, uh, all platforms that have now popped up supporting women to make good career choices, supporting each other through that. So women supporting each other to find their journeys. So I think that is one of the shifts.

Jo Stone (Host) 13:41
Do you think that's because a lot of women have decided that work is fundamentally broken and we've got to find a way to make it work for us because we've tried for many years for flexibility to hold boundaries, and sometimes the environment just doesn't support it. So we've gone, all right, I'm out, I'm gonna follow my purpose, I'm gonna work out what it is that I want, I'm gonna get that flexibility, whether it's portfolio. Are you seeing that?

SPEAKER_01 14:01
I think it's maybe not just that work is broken, but the whole equation is broken. Because at the end of the day, work isn't your whole life. I think increasingly when you're seeing more dual-income families, there isn't really anyone to pick up the slack. We actually are missing a wife in the equation, someone who actually helps to move things along and pick up all of the stuff that happens to make life work for us. There isn't really anyone to do that anymore. And because women are still holding the cognitive load, even though in many households now the woman is the higher earner, it's something has to give. I think often it still is women, but I think not at the expense of their own income. So I think women are finding ways to match their income in a way that's a bit more creative or flexible. Like that is the alternate.

The Broken Equation At Home
Jo Stone (Host) 14:49
Yeah. What shifts do you see women have to make when we talk about even transforming ourselves and finding a new way of working? What shifts do you see women have to make within themselves in order to find that courage to change careers or take on a different path or walk down the portfolio career route?

SPEAKER_01 15:06
I think we as a gender do tend to see our value in making other people's lives work for them. I think a lot of our identity is around that. But I think it's about coming back to what I was saying earlier, being able to what your own desires are and really hear that because the desires and the view of what women should want is quite a loud voice. It takes up quite a lot of what we hear when we think about what we want to do with our lives. We're often picking that up in terms of social factors. So slowing down enough to hear what your own thinking is really important. And I think also seeing yourself not as an individual but as part of a collective. This is actually not just for women, but one of the shifts we are going to see is away from this hero approach to leadership where it's about individuals and their way to the top and being the ultimate decision maker. I think increasingly it's going to be about what we can achieve as a collective. And women are quite good at creating communities. And they make excellent CEOs, by the way. Like I know some of the best leaders and CEOs that I am seeing at the moment are tending to be women. So I think there is something in that. So I actually do hope that women don't all leave corporates and don't all make that choice. I think you can also make some of those choices and stay within your organization. I think organizations are more receptive to people taking less traditional approaches to how they work. Not all of them, but I think there is still that flexibility, but you have to be able to be comfortable to hold your boundaries. So because work's becoming more boundaryless as women and as people, we're having to get much stricter to manage our boundaries because no one's going to do that for us. That's something that we have to do for ourselves, and that's really uncomfortable for a lot of women. We don't like saying no or letting people down. And so at the end of the day, we're often more comfortable letting ourselves down and disappointing ourselves because that's easier to feel and cope with than disappointing others.

Boundaries, Discomfort And Saying No
Jo Stone (Host) 17:02
If a woman was listening to this podcast today thinking, okay, Dr. Kat, I get this, I'm feeling the same shift. What would you say is something that she can work on? Obviously, boundaries sounds like it's one. What does a woman need to be working on in order to get through this next period or to thrive in where we're going?

SPEAKER_01 17:19
I think there is something around developing our tolerance for discomfort and disappointment and disappointing people. Even saying, oh, I've disappointed someone that like actually I can feel it in my tummy right now. Just that even the thought of disappointing people bothers me. Often I hear women talking about this fear of getting in trouble, which is weird because no, we're not getting in trouble, we're grown-ups. Or being too blunt and all these sorts of things. So I think just being comfortable that how other people see us or what they think about us is not our business. It's none of our business. We can't change how people see us. How do I want a role model to my kids? Like that's something I think about. If I'm often quite uncomfortable saying no for myself, but if I think about what do I want to see my daughter see me doing, it makes it easier. So boundaries, getting comfortable with disappointment, getting comfortable saying no, getting better at trying to dial down the outside voices and amplify your internal voice, whether that be through journaling or just sitting quietly, making some space, and not immediately, if you feel that voice telling you to do something, not immediately discounting it, because that voice often comes up straight away. I hear what I actually deeply desire, and then oh, but I can't do that because XYZ. So trying to decouple those things and just sit with what do I really desire? Even if your immediate judgment is, oh, less money, too much time, not enough time, whatever it might be, just before you discount it, just sit in it. Sit in it and feel it. Because there might be other ways to address some of those other things. Our assumptions aren't necessarily true. And also surround yourself by people, maybe in particular women, who believe what you believe or have the kind of life that you aspire to because we are social people. If we know that, let's use it to our advantage and use it in ways that help us to make progress towards our goals. One of the things that I have had success with myself is thinking about when I say no to additional work or no to someone else, what am I actually saying yes to? Focusing more on that because the saying no part has never got easier for me. Like I never feel more comfortable with that. So I do one of two things. I think about, okay, what am I saying yes to? So whether it be my kids, myself, my mental health, my hobbies. Also, I at times will delay the no. It's really hard saying no in the moment because a lot of us really want to help people. And we get quite excited by the work, but we're not necessarily very good at estimating how much capacity we have. I think we overestimate our capacity because we're quite positive. So if you delay the no, like, oh, that sounds really interesting. I've just got a few things that I'm working on now. Can I get back to you tomorrow? Sometimes, then, with the benefit of that time, you're like, oh, I definitely can't do that. I don't actually have capacity for that. But it's hard to say it in the moment.

Jo Stone (Host) 20:10
Especially I find a lot of women love opportunities and saying no to something, we're often saying yes to things because we want to do them. But I love the way you use the word capacity. We can't often do them all and look after ourselves and look after our health and everything else that we want to do in our lives. I guess down to decisions, right? And priorities. And yes, absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 20:34
And your values and not put yourself at the back of the queue. Yeah.

Good Work Movement And Closing
Jo Stone (Host) 20:39
Very, very wise words, Kat. And I completely concur with everything you said. Anyone who's listened to this podcast knows we talk about boundaries, we talk about listening to that voice, actually looking at who you are and what you want and what you want from here. You've written an awesome book. If anyone wants to find out more about your philosophies on work and where we're headed, where can they do that?

SPEAKER_01 21:00
Well, I would definitely love for people to check out good work either on Audible, because I love an audiobook in particular. So on Audible, I know Rage It as well, or you can buy it online. And the reason why I would love for people to read this book is because I've written this book for men and women, but I was particularly thinking about women as I wrote this book. And it takes people on a journey from me to we to us. So it starts with some really practical tools around what we can do for ourselves first. And we spend time in that before we start thinking about how we can support teams and support organisations. And I think a lot of women who've been reading this book have really appreciated the practical setup for things they can do for themselves. And then my website is drcatpage.com, or you can also come to buymini.com.au, which is the firm that I work with who's doing a lot of the execution work around leadership, and really actually fundamentally helped to shape the final product of this book in thinking about leadership as being something that's really human, that's more collective, and also being about how do we create better futures? This book for me is about creating movement, like a good work movement. And if we don't know what work could look like, then women will continue to have to do things like manage their boundaries and be more courageous and speaking up. But what if we didn't have to? What if organizations were actually just built in a way that didn't just extract more hours from us, but actually tapped into our value, which is often not about sitting in a desk and creating PowerPoint packs.

Jo Stone (Host) 22:36
Well, from one pitch bitch to another, I see you and wise words. Thank you, Kat, for joining me today. Go check out Kat's book full of practical advice and grounded in a corporate background too. So thanks for joining me, Kat. Thank you, Joe. Thanks for joining me today. If this episode resonated, share it with a woman who needs to hear it. And if you want to be part of the Ripple Effect, leaving a review helps it reach the women it's meant for. I'll see you next time.