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Work feels like it is speeding up while the ground keeps shifting underneath us. One minute we are told to move faster, take more risks, and “fail forward”; the next minute we are trapped in red tape, risk aversion, and a culture that rewards visibility over real value. I unpack what I am seeing across workplaces right now: low-growth pressure, restructures and acquisitions, return-to-office mandates, and the growing uncertainty of AI and automation, especially for white-collar roles in middle to senior management.

When that pressure hits, it does not just change workloads, it wakes up old patterns. We talk about the urge to overdeliver so you feel indispensable, the way perfectionism spikes when stakes feel higher, and how boundaries collapse through after-hours emails, constant notifications, and never truly switching off. I also name the “invisible work” so many women carry: picking up what falls through the cracks, holding team emotions, and absorbing the impact of company decisions as if they are personal responsibilities.

You will leave with language to recognise what is happening in your body and behaviour, plus a clearer lens for sorting strategic effort from survival mode. If you are noticing people pleasing, micromanaging, procrastination, shame spirals, or decision paralysis creeping back, you are not broken, the rules have changed and you can adapt without burning out again. 

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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. 

Something has been shifting quietly at work over the last few years, but lately it's become much louder. And whether you realize it or not, it's turning the volume up on patterns that many of us have been carrying for decades. Post-COVID, work became a whole lot about flexibility, well-being, burnout because of what so many of us went through in that time, particularly those that were subjected to long extended lockdown periods. We entered this talent short market where it's all about wooing candidates and what do we need to offer them and chucking things at people. Now we are in a low-growth economy. Almost every business I speak to is struggling, struggling to grow, struggling to hit targets. I'm seeing loads of repeated restructures, acquisitions, and a focus on transformation, which could also be considered as cost-cutting, as a way to stay ahead and as a way to find the funds for the huge investment decisions many companies need to make in tech just to even stay competitive. Now you overlay all of this with the return to office mandates that many places have. And we see all of these marinating together as symptoms of something bigger that is impacting particularly high achievers in ways that I hadn't even imagined. What we're seeing in this world of work is a shift away from this focus on well-being and it now becoming so much more about productivity, about performance, about visibility, often busy just for busy's sake. So many women now are living in this soup of really afraid of becoming expendable because they're seeing things happen all around them. Not to mention the looming tsunami of what does AI mean for my industry, for my role, for my future. And things have shifted so much that there was recently a high-profile recruiter saying they have had it from employers, despite supposed talent short markets, that if they have hear somebody asking about work-life balance as part of the interview process, to exclude them from the interview process. The current environment with AI, with transformation, with restructures, with skill gaps, what we're seeing is this greater need for speed, for faster decisions made usually with less information and with a whole lot less certainty. But when you're in an organization that is often risk-adverse and has lots of red tape and bureaucracy, then you find yourself operating in this system of go faster, but wait, wait, make sure you assess the risk and do this and let's fail, but make any mistakes. And this pressure is something that so many women are feeling really, really acutely. It's in fact been a constant conversation topic, even on weekends in different places.

You whack it fast and hard and be ready for it to fly back at you from any direction. We are all very familiar with working fast and at speed. Let's be honest. Most of us have been running for decades, off and on fumes, but this environment is really different. The pressure cooker, the speed, the fear is waking up old habits and making them feel like the sensible thing to do. I'm seeing some of these old patterns that many women had started to eradicate and now coming back in droves. This desire to overdeliver, to become indispensable, is fueled by this fear that, well, if I'm really, really valuable, then you can't get rid of me. But as so many women who have given up their lives for their jobs have seen that when there's an acquisition or there's a merger, you are just employee number four, five, six when you're a cost center. And regardless of how indispensable you are and how important you think the projects you're working on are, with a red pen, that's it. You are gone. And so all of these behaviors around staying late, trying to stay on top of emails and notifications and feeling like they have to know all the information means over-responsibility really is ramping up. Perfectionism is ramping up. I'm seeing women who were really good delegators and who were letting empowering their teams and letting them go and do their thing and now living in fear of their teams making a mistake or not knowing what happens because every decision or every output feels higher stakes when so many organizations are in a Hunger Games style survival of the fittest. Almost every day feels like performance day. Every day is the day that you're being assessed. Do we keep them or them? And so this is causing so much angst, so many extra hours, and so much mental gymnastics, which is just sucking the life from women. The irony is that this speed that we're in now, this environment, actually demands failure. Because you, if you have to make a decision fast, you're not going to have all the information. You're going to be taking more risks. You're also going to be making more mistakes. But so many women's perfectionistic tendencies are really elevating right now. Because while they're hearing the rhetoric of fail fast, fail forward, we're just experimenting, we're agile, chuck in whatever corporate vernacular you want to put in here. They are still taking it personally. They are still terrified of making a mistake. And so trying to move at speed while taking everything personally is like this bunny hopping. It's like, I gotta go to go. Oh my god, oh my god, I gotta go, I gotta go, oh my god. So you double down on dotting every I, crossing every T, which is just blowing out all the hours, which is blowing out all the bleeding from work into home and never being able to switch off. All these boundaries, many women have really worked to hold and build and maintain around their standards, around when they're available, they become really easy to compromise when all that fear creeps in. What I'm also seeing is when you move at speed and you're working through lots of uncertainty and restructures, there are so many things that fall for the cracks. It's just inevitable. But we are often the ones that can see what's falling. And so our over-responsibility tentacles lean in to picking that up and nobody sees it and doing that thing that no one knows needs to be done because our minds gone. If I don't do A and B, then there's gonna be C and D and X and Y, and I don't want to have to deal with double A. So I'm gonna go and do that thing. We don't tell anyone we're doing it. There's often no visibility if we're doing it. Like all the emotional holding the women are offer doing of their teams, how upset they get when they have to make organizational changes.

And I get it. I've had to make people redundant, I've had to fire people. It is not nice. Telling someone they've lost their job in this market is really hard. But also, it's a company decision, not your decision. You need to learn to be able to take your emotion, process it, and not vomit on everybody or hold on to it for weeks and weeks. I've got so many clients right now that are paralyzed by this fear of letting their teams down, this worry that they're not able to really understand or even back perhaps some decisions that the organization is making, and yet they're the ones that have to put this into place and deal with the consequences. And then there's a survival guilt of this is who's left, and now we're gonna have to try to duct tape together how we deliver on the same expectations with half of the staff, and how do we all hold our morale? Meanwhile, there's just been carnage on the battlefield. Learning how to contain those emotions, how to process them, how to let them go, and not pick up and project everyone else's is key to being able to move through whatever is coming in your world over the near term. Because I hate to break it to you. But there is just more bloodshed coming. There is more restructures, redundancies, merges, you name it, especially if you are in white collar, middle to senior management. That is where the greatest impact of whatever's coming with AI and changes is happening. And while often those mass redundancies are not there yet, I am hearing so many stories of hiring freezes. I'm talking about natural consolidation, I'm talking about the joys, words like attrition being thrown around, which are the canary in the coal mine for what is coming.

So if you recognize yourself in any of this, I want you to be aware of how much this market change is likely to be amplifying some of the old patterns that you had. We don't shame the old patterns. I'm a recovering perfectionist, I've been a control freak, I can be a micromanager, I can be all of those things. This is us recognizing that the rules of the game have changed. If you want to succeed in this world, which is as slow as it is ever going to be, you need to learn how to operate in these new rules. You need to see which responses you're having are strategic and which ones are actually old survival patterns that are quietly putting that uniform back on. Stay alert for your perfectionism, for your over-responsibility, for your people pleasing, for your boundaries to start collapsing. These are some of the biggest patterns. Your procrastination's going to go through the roof. This is going to also then result in a lot of shame spiraling, a lot of self-doubt, a lot of proving. And so the cycle continues. I don't want you down that rabbit hole of getting back to burnout again or having your confidence so torn to shreds that you're paralyzed with indecision and overthinking. You deserve better than that. So I want you to really reflect on as the world speeds up, which parts of yourself are becoming even more important to protect. There is a better way. And I want you to find it.