If you feel like you’re holding a dozen competing problems and somehow still making no real progress, you’re not broken, you’re overloaded. Jo Stone speaks straight to high-achieving women who look fine on the outside but privately know the old model of success no longer fits. The cultural conversation used to centre on burnout and pushing through. Now it’s fractured into a “soup” of questions about career change, perimenopause and hormones, neurodiversity, parenting pressures, ageing parents, and even how AI is reshaping work.

We talk about the quiet grief that can hit when you finally “arrive” and realise it doesn’t feel the way you expected. That emotional clash often sends us searching for certainty through more books, more specialists, more podcasts, more hacks. The twist is that knowledge isn’t the main problem anymore. The real challenge is deciding what applies to you, first, and resisting the temptation to outsource your judgement to the loudest expert voice, the most convincing algorithm, or the latest trend in women’s health and wellbeing.

Jo unpacks how decision fatigue shows up as productivity, how perfectionism keeps you gathering information instead of making change, and why “fixing” your hormones or routines won’t automatically solve a toxic workplace or missing boundaries. The goal is to find the one question that will move the needle most in your life right now, then take small, deliberate steps that rebuild trust in your inner knowing.

If this resonates, listen through, then tap “send a message to Jo” and tell us what question is on repeat for you. Subscribe, share with a woman who needs it, and leave a review to help the Ripple Effect 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. Honour the space you've created today. Let's dive in. 

Burnout Splinters Into Bigger Questions
Jo Stone (Host) 0:26
In all my years of coaching, I found there's usually one dominant question occupying women's minds. Five years ago, it was all about burnout. But today, I think that question has fractured into five or six different ones. The problem is they all feel important. They all feel connected. And that's exactly why so many women are drowning in information and still don't know how to answer them or what to do next. Burnout dominated conversations for years. How do I keep going? How do I cope? Oh my God, Joe, I'm exhausted. I need to keep going. And I built an entire business around this. It was everywhere. Even one of the most Googled questions in the first period of COVID was what is burnout? So we didn't even know what it was. But now, the question on our mind has completely changed. We're no longer asking about how do I keep going or how do I cope. We're asking five or six or seven separate questions that believe it or not are all intertwined. And they can completely change our world depending on how we answer them. So questions I am now seeing again and again are: should I stay in this role or should I leave? If I leave, do I go somewhere else or do I start my own thing? Do I actually still want to climb? Do I even want this career anymore? Is it my job? Is it my hormones? How have I changed? Can you see how this crazy concoction of career, health, personal, existential questions are in this crazy soup, which ultimately it comes down to the bigger question of what do I actually want? And sitting under

The Grief Of Arriving
Jo Stone (Host) 2:27
that is, who am I anymore? These are really confronting questions to answer because we have spent so many decades, huge amounts of energy, blood, sweat, and tears, to get where we are, because we thought it's what we wanted. We followed the plan, we worked hard, head down, bum up, strived, achieved, got the gold stars. But when you realize that even though you've on paper arrived, and in theory you've made it, and maybe 23-year-old you'd be like, oh my God, yes, good girl, like well done. I'm so proud of us. There's a certain amount of grief and anger that comes with the fact that why doesn't it feel like I thought it should? I meant to feel good, I meant to be happy, this was fulfillment, this is what I wanted, this is why I've been working so damn hard. It's made more confronting because it's not just one thing we're dealing with anymore. It's not just burnout or work. The conversation has expanded

Hormones Neurodiversity And Longevity Collide
Jo Stone (Host) 3:35
exponentially. The last few years, one to two in particular, we've seen this explosion of perimenopause, women's health, hormones, protein strength training, a whole new field of information that we didn't know that we needed. I didn't know I was meant to jump 20 times a day to make sure I don't break my hip when I get old. We've now got a whole other field around neurodiversity, whether it's through our children, ourselves, the amount of women in my world getting diagnosed with different things that they now understand that maybe they didn't, they've always thought they're a little bit different from everyone else. Now they're starting to understand why their brain just works differently. Explosion of kids with special needs, with allergies, looking at this intersection of psychology and longevity, and how do we make sure that now in our 40s and 50s, we're putting down the grounding, the building blocks to be healthy at 1780? Women are now asking, oh my God, is it my job, my body, who I am? Is it my kids? Is it my brain? Like, what the hell? How what is it? How how do I how do I what do I do from here? And parents have always aged. Teenagers have definitely always teenaged, and our careers have always had these ups and downs. But what has changed in the last few years is the explosion in the amount of awareness and information we now have about every one of these areas. Whether it's books and podcasts, going to doctors, different specialists, friends. We can ask our friend Claude or our friend chat. We've got so many answers, so much information. And for the most part, that's brilliant. We understand our bodies now in a way that we never did 10 years ago. We've had this permission to have conversations about how we're feeling and our doubts and our fears that generations before us, even five years ago, didn't know because the information wasn't accessible.

Information Overload Creates Decision Paralysis
Jo Stone (Host) 5:45
So knowledge is not the challenge anymore. My feed is full of brilliant hacks that I can apply to my hormones, brain, longevity, work, da-da-da-da-da, in five minutes a day. The big challenge is becoming which of these apply to me? Oh my God, like which is it? They're all really, really convincing and they all sound really important and they all need to be done. And the consequences of not doing them feel really big. If I don't look at the types of hormones I need, well, then I'm not gonna be able to focus. And if I can't focus, I'm not gonna be able to get that promotion at work. And but then if I don't have boundaries, I'm not present at home, and oh my God, oh my god, like it's not one decision anymore. It's not one thing. It's 20 decisions, all competing for your attention. They all feel urgent, and the consequences feel massive. What makes it even harder is the doctor gives you doctor advice, and then you might see a career coach or they give you that advice. A counselor helps you maybe process trauma or your childhood, and then a friend gives you friend advice. AI sounds really convincing until you push back and go, you sure? And it goes, oh yeah, you're right. Actually, I've changed my mind. Everyone explains one little piece of the puzzle, but how the hell do you sit there and know which question actually deserves your attention first? When every answer opens up three more questions, it's really easy to just keep consuming information. So many women I talk to have almost become allergic to make a decision about something because their brain says, Well, I just need a bit more information. Let me just go and get the workout and I'll go and do the thing. I'll listen to another podcast. Let me get another book, I'll book another specialist. You speak to a friend who's seen this expert, and you go, oh my God, I absolutely need to do that. I need to add that to my list of things to do. And it can feel really productive. It lures into this false sense of security that we're making progress, but it quietly and ever so alluringly delays the uncomfortable work of deciding what actually matters, what's actually going to move the needle for you. Because most women don't know so much information, but in that soup of so much knowledge, they've actually lost access to the parts of them that helps them go, yes, that's the thing.

Stop Outsourcing Your Inner Knowing
Jo Stone (Host) 8:36
Because when it's all so important and it's all so convincing, we start outsourcing our judgment to the outside world, to the expert, to the AI, to the whatever. Because when you're trying to make sense of this world, an AI can't give you the answer to the question is this the life that I've actually built? Do I want it? Why is my Instagram full of Tuscan villas and escape fantasies? It can't answer that because that is a question that is uniquely yours. And yes, get the information as fuel, as inputs. But if you've lost access to that deep inner knowing, that sense of wisdom, that guidance system that says, I sh this is the direction, this is what I want to follow. Because you are just almost chasing data and gold stars, then you are stuck on this crazy treadmill of information gathering and never actually making little change. Sorry, I like you. We'll put on some band-aids. I've kots of women. They're like, guess what, Joe? I've got my 80 grams of protein done. Like, that's awesome. Do the things they work. But are they the things that are really gonna matter? Are they the things that are really going to help you answer these deeper questions about is this the life that I want to be living for the next 20 years? And the answer is often no. I've got some clients who are sitting there with spreadsheets that automatically update with how many days they have to go until retirement. And these are women who have loved work. It's such an important part of who they are. They thought, and I assume, that they'd be working until the day they died, or for a very, very long time in some capacity because they loved it. But they're now even questioning: do I even want this? How much money do I actually need? How do I make all this work for me? Oh my God, what do I do? Because when your hormones matter, if AI is changing work, I need to be across that. Success doesn't feel the way I thought it would. If I want to be hiking volcanoes at 75, all of these questions that once upon a time felt very contained and very, my health is over here, and I'll deal with that question. And this is my career, and I'll deal with that question. They're now all wrapped up together. And it's impossible to know where to start. And so we fall back into the very familiar place of more knowledge, more stuff. I don't know about you, but my intellectual curiosity is just on overdrive. The amount of brilliant things that I've learned about my brain and my body, it's like crack for my intelligence. It's like, oh, this is awesome. And the conversations you can have and you hear from people, like, oh my God, did you hear this podcast where I learned the blah, blah, blah? Like, awesome.

Make The Call That Moves You
Jo Stone (Host) 11:55
What have you done about that? And more often than not, the answer is, oh, well, I've I've I've done a little bit of it. But I I've read that there's a study that I'm gonna get some more information on.

unknown 12:07
Oh, come on, women.

Jo Stone (Host) 12:08
Come on, people. We have to stop gathering information. And at some point, you are going to have to put your perfectionistic tendencies down, which is what is raging, and start actually making changes. Is start little by little making a decision, deciding what matters and you deciding, not letting somebody else decide for you, you not letting the doctor say that this is the most important thing, because of course they're going to say that. Not in the career code, say posting on LinkedIn is the most important thing for you. What if you go and spend 12 months fixing your hormones, fixing your health? I'm saying that's awesome. But then in 12 months' time, you still feel exactly the same about work. And it turns out it wasn't the hormones. And maybe it wasn't the HRT that's going to solve your toxic work environment or solve the fact that you don't have any boundaries. That is not the problem, perhaps, that you need to be fixing. Fix it, sure. But wouldn't you want to make sure that when you are spending headspace and time and money and energy fixing things, working on yourself, that you're working on the thing that's going to move the needle the most? This is what matters. It's not that the questions are becoming any easier. So many women are like, yep, Joe, I need to focus on my health. I'm going to focus on my career. I'm thinking of starting my own thing. You're asking yourself all these questions, but they're becoming harder to answer, harder to decide. And what many women are missing is that these surface-level questions that you're asking yourself about your hormones, about should I stay or should I go, what should I do, they're not usually the questions that you really need to be asking. So I beg of you, if your questions have changed, if you are listening to this episode and going, oh my God, Joe, I am asking all of these questions. And actually, I'm not just asking six, I'm asking 25. Well, then maybe it's time to stop assuming the old answers still fit and start looking to find what is the one question that's going to help you solve what really matters for you.

Message Jo And Share The Ripple
Jo Stone (Host) 14:28
If this episode resonated, I would love to hear from you. What questions are you asking yourself? What is in the soup of your six or seven or twenty five? There is a button in the show notes of this episode called send a message to Joe. Let me know. What are you ruminating on? What are you marinating on? I would love to know. See you next time. 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.