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Welcome to the Unapologetic Edge podcast So I just got back from vacation for women leaders ready to lead on their terms. and they say you are at your most productive. No apologies, just real talk, strength, and bold moves. 72 hours after vacation. I'm Dr. And I don't know if that's true or not, Shannan Simms, founder of Athena's Ally. but we're just going to start here. If you're here to own your leadership Some days I'm not really sure what's with confidence, you're in the right place, so let's dive in.
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the bigger career risk, a bad boss being overlooked, burning out on your ambition, or. Or just simple brain fog. You know the kind I'm talking about. You're mid sentence in a meeting and your mind just goes blank, right?
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It drops out or it's 3am and you're wide awake. You're replaying that one email like it's that cursed song you can't shut off and now you want to strangle lamb chop. Or you're in a strategy session and you're staring down simple choices that suddenly feel impossibly heavy, and you catch yourself thinking, why is this so hard?
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I've handled harder in the past. That's not a personality flaw. That, my friend, is your brain health waving a red flag, not in some far off future land called aging with a label on it.
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No, it is right now. It's at work. It's in real time. And here is our reality. Stress does not discriminate. Men and women both feel it. It's science. But burnout. Burnout is just what we call it when stress stops asking and starts taking.
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Stress works like a circuit breaker. You give it too many demands, too much input, and snap. The system trips. You reset it once. Okay, fine, you know, all right, so I had to go, you know, reset the circuit breaker, right? I have this, new kitchen.
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It's beautiful. I put in a coffee bar. It's gorgeous. There's a water cooler, right? Have some hot water, make my tea. Got a coffee pot. I learned quickly, I cannot run the coffee pot, and have the water cooler on at the same time because, trips the circuit breaker.
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Okay? The first time it happened, I was like, that's a. That's inconvenient. And the second time it happened, I was like, okay, so what is happening? And the third time it happened, I was like, okay, you know what? I was standing in the kitchen whispering, we are going to be doing something.
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I was whisper, swearing at the coffee maker, but I wasn't sure it was the coffee maker or if it was the water cooler, but I really, really wanted that cup of coffee, right? Because I was like, suddenly now everything feels really way harder than it needs to to be right now.
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Because my entire kitchen now is offline, right? And then you have to Reset the, you know, the refrigerator, because now that's going to beep and now all the clocks have to be reset. And it's five o' clock in the morning and I just want my coffee, right? That's overload, right? It's overload.
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And eventually you either are, going to upgrade the wiring, you're going to move the coffee maker, or you're just going to keep living with the blowouts, right? You're going to come up with a new workflow, or, you know, and then you're just going to keep living with the blowouts and just keep complaining about it, right?
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Same goes for us, right? But here's the part that no one seems to say out loud, women's wiring blows differently. And it's not just the job on the calendar, right? It's all the untracked weight, it's our caregiving, it's the managing your home.
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It's the navigating, oh, the systemic bias. That's the things that you may not even be conscious about, right? It's the things in the back of the brain. It's the doing twice the work to be seen half as clearly. It's doing twice the work or doing the work the second time. And it's not just tasks, it's the mental load, the endless what if scenario planning that we just seem to do oh, so well, running like 47 tabs open in the background that you can't seem to shut down.
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And the data backs what you already know in your bones. Women leaders report more stress, more forgetfulness, more decision fatigue than men. The American Psychological association reported that in 2023, neuroscience explains why chronic stress floods the brain with cortisol.
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I shared that in, one of my previous podcasts about the amygdala hijack, right? It gets hijacked, that decision making, right? It gets hijacked and then it shrinks our hippocampus, right?
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That's the part of our brain that does all the learning. It's the learning and memory center. And just, just when we've gotten to that role that we wanted, our biology throws us another twist. Estrogen.
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Estrogen, which supports our memory, it sharpens our learning, and it helps regulate our mood and motivation. It starts dialing down. No memo, no warning, doesn't say, hey, you know, on Thursday, in 2025, on the fourth Thursday of the month, I'm going to start to, like, wind it down.
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Nope, it just goes. And when it goes, the mental fog rubbles in. But no one tells you that's what's going to happen. They tell you about, like, you know, it's going to get really hot in here, but they don't mean you might lose your hair a little bit. Like, they talk about those things, but no one tells you about the mental fog.
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No one tells you about how it's going to feel when you write things down, on a sticky note and then put that sticky note on your laptop and then proceed to forget that you even wrote it down, even though you're looking at it, right? Your focus slips and you start to wonder if you're losing your edge or your mind.
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But you're not. So if you've ever been thinking, why is everything harder than it used to be? Here's your answer. It's not weakness. It's not failure. It's biology.
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It's stress. It's the load. And it's real. So here's the shift I want you to think about, right? This is about brain health. Brain, health. I want my healthy brain.
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I want my brain to be healthy. I don't want to think about this, you know, about, like, the Mediterranean diet. I'm not talking about a diet. I just want my brain to be healthy. Because it isn't a bonus. It is my operating system, right?
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When my computer is running slow and sluggish. Oh, my frustration level. It's like, I am not on dial up from 1984. Right? I am today, and I expect it to move fast. So your brain is the operating system of your leadership and of your life.
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And when it starts to slip, it doesn't just drain your energy. It messes with your judgment. It slows your thinking, and it dulls your influence. Years ago, I saw an article in the Washington Post, that people with their butts on fire don't make good decisions.
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And I thought that the, that the, the article title was so catchy, right? Because how funny is that? Like, you, you get that visual. People with your butts on fire don't make good decisions. Yeah, well, when you're in a conic. Chronic state of stress, that's kind of what it's like, right?
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Let's be honest. Influence, right? When we think about, you know, our judgment, how we think, you know, it's. It is about our influence. And our influence, that's our currency in our work environment.
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And it's what moves our careers forward. So we have to protect our brain. It's not about pulling back. It's not about some quiet admission that we can't handle the pressure if anything, it's an acknowledgement that, you know, we are strong, that we know that we have something of value that we have to take care of.
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And it's how you hold the leverage that you've already earned. And it's how you stay in the position, that you want to be in. And it's how you stay in the position to continue to make the decisions that you want to make, not just whether you want a seat at the table, but whether that's the table you even want, want to have a seat at, whether that table is even worth your time.
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So let me tell you about Maya. Maya was, a go to leader in her company. I see so many of these types of leaders, smart, decisive, always on like team, just leaned on her just for everything.
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Senior leadership trusted her. And on paper she was just untouchable, unstoppable. But in her life, if you really looked kind of closely, her days were starting super early, often before the sunrise with her inbox open and often feeling like she was already behind.
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So her day stretched long into the evenings, long after her team had already logged off. And she was always making sure that her team was taken care of. But in the background she was also caring for her aging and elderly, father. So she was juggling doctor's appointments and she was juggling, Medicare, which if anybody's ever had to do that is a real peach of a time, prescriptions and late night phone calls with family members and all, starts to take, its toll.
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And she told herself that if she just pushed through, you know, just finish this one project, right? And then that project became, you know, we're so close to the end of the quarter, you know, I'll be able to catch my breath. Well now, you know, just the start of the new fiscal year.
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But then the project would end and the quarter would end and the new fiscal year would start and she just didn't bounce back. And she felt slower and she felt foggy. She felt like her edge had dulled and she made a bold move. She just quit her job, thinking that rest would solve it all.
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And she pictured herself that she would detox after a couple weeks and that she would, you know, take a month and just kind of allow herself to kind of like pull it together. And that she would wake up refreshed with ideas flowing and ambition fully intact.
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But what actually happened was that she woke up to a brand new kind of exhaustion and she just sit at her laptop staring at a blank Screen, just kind of searching job boards. And she was uninspired.
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And she just kept thinking, what happened to me, right? Did I lose it? And the answer was no, she didn't lose it. She just. Everything had shifted for her. She hadn't lost her ambition, but her brain was just so swimming in cortisol.
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It wasn't psychological. She wasn't depressed, she wasn't sad. She wasn't imagining a problem that wasn't there. She had a true chemical, hormonal, physical, brain imbalance due, to chronic stress that needed to be reset.
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And she started making small changes. A walk without her phone in the morning, steady meals instead of just living off of caffeine, taking actual breaks between, her work and her caregiving time, between her caregiving time and laptop time.
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And within weeks her focus really started to sharpen. And within a couple months she actually had mapped out a consulting practice, an independent consulting practice where she felt like she had more energy than she'd had in years. And her ambition, it had always. It was still there, right?
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Her, just. Her brain needed to be taken care of. Right. So Maya's, story isn't rare. You look at different industry industries, different titles, different family setups. I see the pattern, the same pattern over and over and over again with smart, brilliant, talented, capable women.
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I see the same thing over and over again. The conditions, around, the brain and the stress that women are living under. And once you kind of see it, you stop asking what's wrong with me and start asking the better question.
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What needs to shift? So that's where these three shifts that I'm going to offer you kind of come in the first shift shift number one is to stop banking on burnout. Somewhere along the way I think that ambition got tangled up with exhaustion.
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That somehow if you're not exhausted, you are not ambitious. And we were taught, explicitly or not, that the more you could endure, the more serious you were about your career. Late nights, stacked calendars, inboxes cleared at midnight.
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All of it became shorthand for commitment. That's not commitment. That's depletion. Burnout doesn't prove anything except that you've been overdrafting your brain's energy.
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And that bank always collects itself fees. Those fees show up as brain fog. Fatigue, decision, fatigue, decision, drag, low grade self doubt that creeps in when you're too tired to trust yourself.
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So I want you to think back to the last time you pushed through. Even when your body and your brain were telling you to stop. Maybe you got the deck finished, maybe you showed up in that meeting, but what did it really cost you? Did you snap at your kids later?
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Or your significant other? Did you stare at the ceiling at 2:00am? Just feeling foggy? Or already starting to get anxious about what the next day was going to bring you? That's not ambition paying dividends.
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It's ambition that's burning its own foundation. So the leaders who thrive long term aren't the ones with the fullest calendars or the most war stories of sleepless nights. They're the ones who know that focus is equity, not fuel.
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They treat it like an asset that compounds when it's preserved. Not something to burn for temporary applause. So ask yourself, where am I mistaking endurance for effectiveness? And maybe even harder, who benefits when I keep proving myself through exhaustion?
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Because it sure isn't you. Now, shift number two is about break the stress cycle before it breaks you. Stress itself isn't actually bad. In fact, your brain is designed to handle stress.
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Deadlines, high stake moments, even pressure. Those can actually sharpen our performance in the sharp term. You look at, like athletes, like the, like the high performance athletes, like there is an optimal. There's a whole science around it, right? The problem is when stress stops being a moment and becomes the permanent background music of your life.
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That's when it rewires your brain in ways that erode your capacity to think, to decide, and to recover. And you don't need a lab scan to know when it's happening, right? Your body already has that dashboard. The 3:00am, wake ups where you can't shut down.
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The constant tightness in your chest, the quick snap at someone you love even though you didn't mean it. Those aren't quirks. They're signals that your brain is stuck in, on mode with no off ramp. And here's the mistake that most women leaders make.
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We treat recovery like a reward. Something you get to earn after the deal closes, after the presentation lands, after the chaos dies down. But the chaos is never going to die down because it's life, people, right?
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Which means recovery never comes. Recovery has to actually be designed in, not bolted on. One client of mine built what she called micro resets. Just five minutes outside between calls, a single breath.
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Practice before a high stakes conversation, A bedtime routine that signaled her brain. Hey, you're safe. It's safe to power down now, right? None of these erased, the stressors of her life. But they broke the cycle. So the stress didn't become permanent.
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It's why yoga is so effective. It's just, it's like, you know, even short yoga practices, five minute yoga practices, three minute yoga practices, 30 second. Right? That's why it's so effective. Research is extremely blunt about it.
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Consistent, small recovery rituals, they lower our cortisol, they restore our working memory, and they improve our problem solving. Translation, those little pauses are going to make you sharper, not softer, right?
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They're the maintenance your brain requires to keep running at a high level. So ask yourself, what rituals can I make automatic so they stop becoming optional? And if that feels indulgent, then flip it. What's the cost if I don't?
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Because cycles always break. The only question is whether you break them or they break you Shift. Number three, trade your grind for your headspace. Right? Grind is seductive, right? We watch these movies, we watch the media, right?
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They're always really good looking people that, you know, are grinding through. And they always get rewarded, really amazing things. And so it looks so, rewarding on the surface. It's seductive, right? It gets you noticed. But people are gonna clap for the grind.
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Look how dedicated she is. Look how much she takes on grind. Fills the silence when you're not sure what your next big move is. But here's the secret. Grind doesn't buy you progress.
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Headspace does. Headspace is the breathing room your brain needs to connect all the dots to see the patterns and decide what, what really matters. Because without it, you end the day with an empty inbox but no sense of direction.
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You're busy. Okay, good. But did you move anything meaningful forward? Probably not. So think about the last time you were in full grind mode. Maybe you churned through 75 emails. Maybe you sat through 15 meetings, five meetings.
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Maybe you knocked out a list of small tasks. Hey, tasks that's impressive to anyone watching. But at the end of the day, you couldn't name a single strategic choice you made. Grind gave you motion, but headspace gives you momentum.
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Science backs it up, right? I love the science. Decision fatigue, the constant depletion from endless small choices. They lead to riskier decisions and lower performance. In contrast, leaders who protect the headspace by limiting our noise and prioritizing fewer, higher impact decisions aren't just more effective.
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They're seen as more authoritative, more strategic and more promotable. One executive I coached, she realized she was confusing visibility with value. She thought that if she was in every single meeting, that that was actually proving her worth.
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Instead, it was just draining the bejesus out of her, right? I was like, do you need to be in that meeting or can somebody go for you? Really? They're talking about, like, what you're stuck in the, the snack room with, right? You can't have somebody else, can't have somebody else go to that. Like, don't you have more important things to do, like some strategy over there?
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So when she cut her meetings in half and then redirected that energy right into kind of a couple high prep, high pro, high impact projects, her influence, like, just quadrupled. People didn't see her less.
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They actually started to see her differently. They didn't see her as busy, they saw her as strategic. So ask yourself, where am I confusing my grind with gray growth? And even more practically, what would shift if I made head space? To benchmark for success instead of busyness.
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Because grind, it's always going to get you applause. But headspace, that's what's going to get you results, respect, and the breathing room to design a career that's going to fit your life. So here's the challenge and the experiment that I want you to run this week.
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Every morning, before you dive into emails, before you start reacting to everyone else's priorities, when you just pause for a minute, ask yourself one question. What is the one thing today that is going to protect my headspace? Notice I didn't say what's the one thing that makes me look productive?
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Or what's the one thing that makes me look indispensable? Because those are easy and those are traps. This is different. Headspace is about protecting the part of you that makes good decisions, that spots patterns, that knows when to say yes, when to say no, what to say yes to.
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Because everything you say yes to, you're saying no to something. And without headspace, you can fill a calendar, but you can't move your career forward. So maybe your answer is blocking 20 minutes to actually think about that proposal instead of rushing through it. Declining a meeting that doesn't need you eating lunch away from your screen so your brain gets an actual reset instead of another dopamine hit from Slack.
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Or even something as simple as deciding, today, I'll let the deck be good enough instead of staying up past Midnight polishing slide 14. Because there is a law of diminishing returns. And 80% is good enough. It doesn't have to be big.
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In fact, it shouldn't be big. It should be doable, daily and non negotiable. Here's the key. Once you've picked it, defend it. Because the world will try to take it from you. Colleagues will want that time. Family will want that time. Your brain will try to convince you it's selfish.
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It's not. It's maintenance and it's for your brain. But your brain's going to try to tell you it's selfish. It's not. It's yours. Protect it. So this week, pick it, protect it. Treat it like equity. Because headspace is the asset that compounds.
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So let's end here. The habits that got you this far, the grained grained, the, grind, the late nights, the I'll just power through mindset. They serve their purpose, but they are not going to take you where you want to go.
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Taking care of your brain isn't a luxury. It's not a sign you're losing your edge. It's a strategic move. And it's one of the smartest career advantages you've got. So think about it. Anyone, can work harder. What separates leaders who last? The ones who stay sharp, influential, and in control of their careers.
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They're the ones who know how to protect the one thing. Everything else depends on their brain. So if this is hitting home, I have built two tools that are going to go a little deeper and will help you out. I have the invisible load relief map. It's real strategies women leaders are using right now to drop the mental overload and protect their brain health without dialing down their ambition.
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And I've got the career fog filter. So if you're stuck in that mental haze where every option feels like it's too much, this is going to help you clear it, Move forward with, focus. So here's what I want you to hear. Your ambition isn't broken. You haven't lost your drive.
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Your edge is still there. Your brain just needs some better conditions to do what it does best. And when you give it that, you don't just get energy back. You get momentum, you get focus, you get influence.
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That's what power looks like. So try the experiment. Ask the question. Guard your headspace. And notice how different your day will feel when your brain's supported, not squeezed dry. Because your ambition isn't the problem, it's the solution.
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Your brain just needs the room to catch up. So this is Dr. Shannon Sims. Glad to have you on the unapologetic edge. I look forward to seeing you, hearing you, being with you on the other side.
