If you've ever quietly asked yourself have I done enough? — this one's for you.

Stacey Lindsay is an award-winning journalist and the author of Being 40: The Decade of Letting Go and Embracing Who We Are, and in this conversation she does something I've rarely seen done so precisely: she names the thing. The invisible measuring stick. The "shoulds" that become brick walls. The manufactured timeline that has women at every age asking whether they're behind, broken, or somehow not quite enough—when the timeline itself was never real to begin with.

We talk about what Stacey calls "delayering"—the ongoing, never-finished work of taking off inherited stories, other people's expectations, and judgments you've been carrying so long they feel like your own skin. We get into how your body already knows the difference between the stress of genuine challenge and the stress of a life path that isn't yours. And we talk about outsourcing self-worth—the quiet, slow erosion that Stacey says is far more damaging than burnout, and far more common.

And then, near the end, she introduces the concept I haven't been able to stop thinking about since we recorded: the Autumn Queen. A different archetype for women in midlife. Not decline. Not "aging gracefully." Renaissance.

This episode drops on the week of Stacey's book launch, which feels exactly right—because what she has to say about this chapter of life deserves to land in your ears at full volume.

00:48 — The made-up timeline: Stacey introduces the "shoulds" as brick walls and the question that never gets answered—have I done enough?

 02:47 — The brick wall that hurt most: on choosing not to have children, the grief that comes with it, and the exhausting expectation that women justify their choices

05:20 — What "delayering" means: taking off the inherited stories, judgments, and expectations you've carried so long they feel like your own skin — and why you're never really done 

8:41 — The two kinds of stress: how to tell the difference between excited butterflies and the anxious, hot energy of a life that's going against your soul

12:03 — Outsourcing your self-worth: why letting situations chip away at your dignity and values is more damaging than burnout—and far more common

15:17 — Practical starting points for the uber-busy human who can't write a whole book about it

24:50 — Stacey's reframe of ambition, achievement, and what work is actually for

28:51 — How to let it rip: on finally stopping the habit of managing other people's comfort at the expense of your own values

39:43 — Beauty ideals—reframing beauty as a feeling, not a performance: including an epic story of a wedding that made Stacey question herself, and why sexuality and vitality are things you carry—not things you earn

46:36 — The Autumn Queen: the archetype for women in midlife that nobody's giving us vocabulary for — and why that's not an accident

Stacey Lindsay is an award-winning journalist, author, and wellness advocate whose work explores identity, womanhood, and what it means to truly know yourself. Her book Being 40: The Decade of Letting Go and Embracing Who We Are is available now wherever books are sold.

Find her at StaceyLindsay.com and on Instagram @StaceyLindsay.

Meghan French Dunbar (00:00): Stacey. Kindred soul, I swear. Alright, we're gonna just get right into this.

Stacey Lindsay (00:08): Can you hear my smile? You can see it. Can you hear it?

Meghan French Dunbar (00:11): I mean, that is — that is like who you are. You are a human smile.

Okay, so we have the book coming out. I haven't gotten to read it yet, but I will as soon as it's in my hands. But one of the things that I imagine is in there is a lot about the shoulds in life. And I'm curious for you — as the process of writing the book, as this uncovering of a new perspective — what are some of the most harmful shoulds that you're seeing consistently of women at a middle age?

Stacey Lindsay (00:48): It's this timeline. And I think we're always up against it, whether we realize it or not. But it really became evident to me when I reached my 40s, turned 40. And I've talked about this, how I didn't have some existential dread leading up to my 40th birthday. And I know some people do, and I understand that totally. What was interesting is after I turned 40, I started really paying attention to things feeling different.

And it was the shoulds — all these markers that I felt they became almost like brick walls. And I kept running up against them and hurting myself and running up against this wall and hurting myself even more. And so, again, these things that we think we should do in our career lives, our work lives, whether it comes to motherhood, having and not having children, when it comes to how we look — all these things, there's countless shoulds. But the biggest thing is this timeline, I feel like.

That we need to do these things. And then we feel like we need to do these things according to this made-up calendar, which is totally manufactured — but still. And so I know I'm not alone. I've heard this from so many other women and I have experienced this. My gosh, I am now a 40-year-old woman, or I'm a 45-year-old woman, or I'm a 52-year-old woman, or a 28-year-old woman. Have I done enough? I still haven't done this. What does society think about me that I haven't fill in the blank?

It's all against this made-up timeline. And I get excited because I do think the timeline is slowly disintegrating when we have these conversations, but it's still real. It's still there. So there's a collection of shoulds that are just endless, but they're all up against the "when" — and it can really hurt us.

Meghan French Dunbar (02:37): When you talk about running into the brick wall, is there any specific brick wall that you ran into that was particularly painful?

Stacey Lindsay (02:47): This desire that I didn't want to feel like I had to keep justifying my decisions. And so I think that is the brick wall — it's kind of that metaphor for feeling like I have to justify. One thing for me is I'm a woman without children and I have actively made that choice in my life. And at the same time it has actively caused me a lot of grief, a lot of angst, a lot of feeling like I have to prove that I'm enough without having kids.

Also having to prove that this is not a very neat, easy decision. For some women it may be, but for me it hasn't been. It is something that I actively really reevaluate all the time and I have a lot of grief around, even though I have the immense privilege of being able to have made that decision — where a lot of women don't have children because it's not their choice. And so that was a big one for me, and work too. Like all the questions around work. And I know you and I can dig into this for hours and hours and hours, right?

The "have I done enough in my work?" Have I done things in my quote-unquote career? And I say quote-unquote career because I think career can be a little bit of a stagnant word. I think we need to stretch it out a little bit and really talk about what that means. But have I done enough — and enough according to whose standards? But I'm always asking myself this. So work and kids conversation. And then also the partnership conversation is a huge one as well — by which I think we feel very, very judged and we have to kind of explain why we're not in a partnership, or why we're leaving a partnership, or why we're entering a new one or changing all these things. We don't have to explain to anyone, but we still need to unlearn that. Did I answer your question? I get so passionate about this and I feel like it's all spidery.

Meghan French Dunbar (04:33): Don't question yourself. Don't question whether or not you answered the question. One thing that came up for me just listening to that is — it's a source of grief, it's a source of pain, but then it is almost multiplied by the fact that we feel judged and have to justify it. So the process of writing this book and understanding that dynamic — has it changed the way that you respond? If someone asks you about one of those sticky topics of children or partnership or career, do you still feel like you have to justify it, or do you have a new way of explaining yourself, or do you not feel like you have to explain yourself at the same time?

Stacey Lindsay (05:20): I'm feeling that less and less and less, I have to say. And that has been one of the gifts of writing this book. Writing this book was incredibly hard because writing a book is incredibly hard. You know this, Meghan. That's another aspect of this I think we need to talk about more — just whether it's writing a book, whether it's sharing our story on a podcast, whether it's sharing our story on social media. It's hard to do that, right? If we really go there, it can be hard because we feel like we're going to get, again, a whole other layer of judgment.

But writing this book was really hard because I was really delayering — which is a word Carrie Hammer gifted me. She's somebody I interviewed for the book. And she looks at this as a delayering. We're taking off these layers of stories and expectations and judgments that we've been carrying for so long. So it was hard because I was actively going through the process of delayering. And I still am. I don't think we're ever done. I am not a one and done. I've learned all these things and I am still messy and actively in it.

But that was hard and also incredibly freeing. And it has gifted me this new perspective — I don't feel like I need to, I'm more responsive than reactive to these things. Again, of justifying, of thinking, my gosh, is something wrong with me? And this actually touches all aspects of my life too. I think beauty is such an interesting example and kind of a lens through which we can view a lot of these things. If we see a new wrinkle pop up on her face, instantly we might think, I need to fix that. What's wrong with me? I did something wrong. I didn't wear enough sunscreen. I didn't get the retinol cream, whatever it is. There's nothing wrong. If you want to quote-unquote fix it, that's your right. But first and foremost, there's nothing wrong. And so that's what this process has helped me see — to not react and think, my gosh, these stories are right. I'm the one who's broken. It's not. These are manufactured stories.

And how I respond to it is up to me. And I want to say this — it is not easy, but it is also probably the most worthwhile thing we can put our hearts toward for ourselves, our fellow women in our lives, for women we don't know. And of course, for our daughters and nieces and everyone else. So it has changed me.

Meghan French Dunbar (07:36): This process of delayering — what a great word.

Stacey Lindsay (07:42): Good word, right? So good. A good visual.

Meghan French Dunbar (07:45): My experience of delayering in the last, let's call it ten years, has regularly uncovered this feeling as though I didn't choose the way that my life has turned out as freely as I had imagined. That a lot of it had been shaped by external forces of judgment, expectation, all of societal pressure. And I'm curious for women as they're going through a process like this — is there any way that you were able to identify what are the first signs that you are living through a manufactured script that has been externally imposed upon you versus your own internal truth? What is the difference between those two? And how can people start divorcing those two concepts?

Stacey Lindsay (08:41): I really pay attention to how it shows up in my body. And later in the book, I worked with a somatic practitioner — this woman who does therapy through dance, and actually specifically erotic dance. But it's by yourself too. And I've learned that one thing I've taken from that practice is to move my body in a way that feels good every day. And I do that to take care of myself, but I also do that to really check in — to see where I physically feel like I'm holding some of this angst and stress. And again, it's every day, right? There's mortgages and there's rent and there's food to buy. There's all the things. The stress isn't going away. So there's always going to be that stress.

But I found that when it's the stress that I carry in my body that goes against my soul — just this stress that I need to perform — I physically feel that very clearly. I feel it in my upper back. I feel it in my chest. I feel this tightening, this kind of anxious, hot energy. And when I just check in, I check in. And when I feel that, it's different from like right before you and I started talking.

I got excited. Kind of felt like an excitement-butterfly nerves too. And I don't want that to ever go away. That's a totally different feeling than when I was honestly in a meeting last week and it felt really bad and it felt really expectational. And I was feeling that I was carrying that physically in my body. So it's a somatic practice — it really is first and foremost for me. And I invite that to be a practice for anybody too, because it's accessible. This is not very expensive wellness culture stuff. This is genuine, just checking in and seeing where you're carrying the stress.

And the other thing too is I just check in on what we talked about a couple of minutes ago. Okay, is this something I'm reacting to because I feel like I'm less than, or broken, or should have done something differently? Or is this something that is maybe a challenge or a hurdle I have to overcome — and can I pause and respond to it rather than react to it?

But when I have that instant feeling like I have to react, and I come up against it all the time, I know something's deeper, something's going on. That's a manufactured societal thing that I can take my time and reevaluate how I want to respond to. And it's just this lovely hug you give yourself — because the other thing about these patriarchal stories and these expectations, and so much about what you write about in your book, Meghan — it pulls us far away from ourselves. It makes us feel completely disconnected. And when it comes to patriarchy, that's really the point, right? They want us to feel destabilized. So that's a deeper, whole other conversation, but it's all related. This practice is just — I feel so much closer to myself when I just take a minute and go, okay, I'm feeling this angst and stress. I'm feeling like I need to prove myself against this. And I don't have to. I don't have to.

Meghan French Dunbar (11:42): I'm curious — either from your own personal experience or interviews that you've done — what are some of the most common and harmful ways that women typically abandon themselves in their 20s or 30s that they then start to reclaim after the big 40?

Stacey Lindsay (12:03): Thank you for this question because it's a fun one too, because I think back on my 20s and 30s and I have so much compassion for her, right? That woman was hustling. My gosh, in her 20s she was running around, she was having fun too. She was having some fun in her 30s as well, but in her 20s she was just doing all the things. And I like this question too because it's important to underscore the hard work. There are these times in our lives that we do have to try a bunch of things and fail, right? And I argue that happens through all our lives — we have to keep, if we're taking risks and stretching ourselves. And so I talk to women in their twenties and thirties often, and I don't want them to be afraid if they're trying new things and they're failing and they're working hard. I just don't want them to feel like there's something broken or wrong with themselves. I don't want them to outsource their self-worth. And that is the biggest thing that I see in women in their twenties and thirties — and I have to say, in their forties and fifties too.

But the nice thing about our forties is we start to gain this incredible wisdom that is so hard to describe sometimes. We get this upgrade of just genuine knowing ourselves. And again, delayering and all the things — but it's the self-worth component that is critical. If I could go back to my twenties and my thirties, there's so many things that I would still do the same. I would have taken the hard road. But I lacked self — I let certain situations chip away at my self-worth and my own dignity and sometimes my values. That really gets me emotional. That is the biggest. It's not a mistake, because again, we're all living under this really hard system — but it's something that I think happens to so many women. And if we can just take these moments to pause and to know we are worthy of peace, we are worthy of joy, we are worthy of emotional safety — because so much of this chips away at our emotional safety. So number one, it's the self-worth. And I've been there too, but I work on that every single day, just knowing again that I'm worthy of these very, very basic things.

Meghan French Dunbar (14:23): One thing that is common to both of us is that the experience of writing a book is hard, but it also is a forced pause and a forced examination of an issue where we get to go super deep and delayer — where our work is to actually explore things and delayer them for ourselves. But not everyone has the gift of getting to write a book about the issues that are on their heart. And so I'm curious — what does the process look like for the person who is so busy and is like, cool, Stacey, you got to write an entire book on this thing. I am doing my nine to five. I am going to soccer practice. I'm so busy that finding a way to cultivate and nurture my sense of self-worth feels completely out of bounds. How do they start?

Stacey Lindsay (15:17): The uber busy human, right? I love that you say that, because we can talk about all these amazing things about evolving the self and finding ourselves and reclaiming our voices and declaring ourselves. And sometimes it can still be too macro for that. I pictured this woman when I was writing — she was a single mom. I just felt like she was right next to me. And there were pieces of her that were so evident in me too. And if you don't have the $200 to put down on a weekend escape, or the thousand dollars for the retreats — those are wonderful, but they're not accessible to everyone.

There are several practices. The first one is to make it a priority to nourish yourself during the day. Even if that means putting one extra healthy thing on your plate — literally an extra serving of berries. I know this might seem so banal and almost too simple, but it's actually really emboldening. Just that one extra step to taking better care of yourself actually begets more movement toward taking better care of yourself.

Another thing is to move every day if you can — and I want to make this really accessible, this does not mean you have to do some major workout. It is literally just to get things flowing. If you're able to walk, walk for five minutes, even if it's literally around your apartment complex or around your block. Five minutes — everybody can do five minutes. And then you'll find that you want to do more.

I love the practice of just getting your thoughts out. We call it journaling, and I think sometimes that can be a little bit of a turnoff for somebody who doesn't want to sit down and physically write — but journaling means just getting your thoughts out. You get to know yourself a little bit more by doing that. When you're thinking of anything, send yourself a voice note. No one else is going to hear it. Jot down something on a notepad. No one else is going to read it. Just that whole act too is a start to all this process.

And lastly — there's something about going outside and looking up at the sky. I can't say it enough. I get emotional talking about this because it is a reminder that we can be so in it, in our stress, in our self-doubt, in our lack of self-worth, in our questioning. And we need that reminder sometimes to go outside and to know there is something bigger at play. This beautiful universal energy that's connecting all of us. And whenever I do that too, it makes me actually feel less alone because I know there's another woman out there feeling what I'm feeling.

Meghan French Dunbar (18:55): I just adore you.

Stacey Lindsay (19:00): Letting me go down that rabbit hole because it's a good one, right? A lot of this stuff is — how can I feel better or more at peace, right now? That's what I want for people to know.

Meghan French Dunbar (19:18): I walk most mornings and I talk into notes and then I throw it up into AI. I have like a little chat channel that is just my stream of consciousness. The stuff that comes up on walks — without a doubt, the best stuff. I half-wrote my book, walking and talking. It's where your brain actually calms down.

Stacey Lindsay (19:40): It is. And it's also empowering, because sometimes you feel like nothing maybe connects. How am I going to write this book? And then you actually, when you start chipping away at it, you start to see these themes and you start to see how things do connect. I love picturing you doing that.

Meghan French Dunbar (20:05): Always the lady talking to myself in the park. So my experience is that you write about turning 40 as a sense of self-discovery rather than a decline. And I still remember putting up the decorations for my mom's 40th birthday at New Shanghai Chinese restaurant in Evergreen, Colorado — all the "over the hill" messages, like, well, had a good run, you're done from here. So as we imagine this as a sense of self-discovery, what do women — or humans — need to let go of and grieve in order to discover this new way of being, the new expanded version of themselves?

Stacey Lindsay (20:52): I call the 40s an intersection, because it is a time where so many things collide for a woman. And with that, one of those things coming into this intersection is this awareness that we've been talking about. I sort of chafe at the term midlife and middle age because I think it's quite privileged sometimes — because we never know when we're at that midpoint. I think of my father who passed in his 50s. Middle age for him was in his 20s. And with that said, considering the average lifespan for a woman in the Western world is around 80 — there is no denying that we are at this quote-unquote middle point. And so that is so incredibly clarifying. It also forces us to let go of taking time for granted.

But still, it really whips you into the present to realize I don't want to take any of this for granted — and I really want to start doubling down on the stuff that matters. This book is focused on the forties, but there are some things that are extremely specific to the forties — how our bodies are changing, perimenopause, the stigmas around this age. But there's also so many things that I hope speak to a woman in her twenties and thirties and also speak to a woman on the other side of her forties in her fifties and sixties. It's really about being a woman, right?

But there is something about that awareness that helped me realize — and I know a lot of women I talk to feel this — I don't want to mess around anymore with how I'm spending my days and my weeks. And ultimately that adds up to years. I want to take better care of myself, however that means. I want to really, really start looking at how does my self-worth show up in my world of work? What are my relationships? How are they feeling in my life? It's just this big time of doubling down — I'm not messing around anymore. And again, I wasn't really messing around before, but this is serious. And it's kind of scary. But we got to look at it.

Meghan French Dunbar (23:51): That question of worthiness at work — my experience, and a lot of people I've talked to, is that they outsource their sense of worthiness to accomplishment. However successful you are in your career — you're a high achiever, look at all of my awards and accolades and titles and all the things that prove my worthiness to others. And they reach pinnacles of whatever their career looks like and they still feel that sense of emptiness. They're not fulfilled. They're looking around like, is there something that I'm missing? And it's so often it comes down to a sense of self-worth. For you, how has that process looked? The relationship between worth and achievement and success — how has that looked for you?

Stacey Lindsay (24:50): I'm re-evaluating it every day for myself too. Being really serious about that — because that arrival fallacy, when you think, when I just get this title, when I just make this salary, then fill in the blank, all these things will fall into place. And we know, and science shows that too, that that kind of puts us in the cycle of purgatory. But again, it's no one's fault. If not most of us have experienced that, and we're starting to have this collective conversation of — wait a second, no.

You've got to do the inner work and you've got to really look at these things. A big change for me — and this has come with writing the book and looking at my career — is one, I'm realizing I work to live. I work to make money. I am so grateful that I get to, I love my work, but still at the end of the day, this is not a path. I'm doing this to put food on my table. I'm doing this to be able to pay my bills to live. And I think sometimes we can forget that. And so when I realized that first and foremost, I think, okay, I'm actually really going to be smart about where I'm putting my energy within my work world. Because I am not afraid of hard work — like you, Meghan, I will work to the end, put an extra day on the calendar. But am I working efficiently to really take care of myself?

I'm realizing that I have been kind of spinning my wheels a lot in a way that a lot of my work has taken more than it's given me. We put in this energy and this time because we want to get something in return — payment, right? But when we really look at it, women particularly are putting in so much more. And so with that said, I have put some really strong boundaries in ways that I'm able to right now. I realize this isn't accessible for everyone, but I am putting boundaries on emails, I'm putting boundaries on even when I look at social media related to work — because I'm really putting a marker on those parameters around my work. So then outside of those parameters, I can actually give more to the things that really fill me up creatively right now. Other side projects that I'm really looking to diversify into. Because we can put all of our eggs into this one thing because that's what's feeding us. And we miss out on things sometimes. Really looking at the brass tacks — I'm doing this and I'm one of the lucky ones that I enjoy it, but I'm doing this to feed myself. So is this working for me still, and what are some things I can do to take better care of myself and my job? That's been a big one for me. And I think it's an important conversation to have.

Meghan French Dunbar (27:51): It's reminding me — I wrote about this concept of essentializing, of in order to show up with your cup more than empty or to show up as your best quality of self. There's a sense, especially as you get older, you get more comfortable doing it — essentializing what you spend your time on, what the relationships are in your life, the inputs that you allow in from social media, whatever it is. And the practice of doing that, the more we dial that in, the better we're able to show up. And a lot of the things that I used to say yes to were because I felt some obligation. I was worried about judgment or I was worried about disappointing people. I was worried about making someone uncomfortable. I'm curious — the stories specifically about womanhood and how women should be, which ones of them have you found become kind of less believable and you turn the volume down on them as you get older, and which ones become louder?

Stacey Lindsay (28:51): My gosh. I love this. You said something a minute ago — you don't want to make somebody uncomfortable or inconvenience someone, right? That's a huge thing. So that has become quieter in a sense — louder and more obvious, but now it's quieter too.

This idea of outsourcing our self-worth — outsourcing just all the things, so many things that I have done in my life. And again, I know this is the case for so many other women too. So much of what I've done has been because I don't want to inconvenience somebody. If somebody asked me, do you have kids? Do you want kids? — which is a fine question, it can sting, and it's stung — because I feel like it always warrants this very neat response: nope, don't have kids, nope, don't want them. When it's a constellation of things, you know? I've been just really quick in answering it because I don't want to make somebody uncomfortable. I'm leaning into it now. I'm totally letting it rip. So that's the biggest thing for all these things. I don't want to worry about my beliefs and my values and how that's going to inconvenience somebody else and make somebody else uncomfortable. And women tend to do that. And we need to stop doing that. This is the same thing in work too. We need to speak up when something doesn't align with our values. We need to honor our integrity. We don't need to justify all these things, especially where we're working so hard. But so much of it is in the service of others — and in negative ways, in ways that arrest us.

I find that that is getting quieter. I've been seeing that so much. A beautiful energy that I've experienced too — I talk about the having and not having children a lot, because it's something I'm really passionate about — is this world we live in right now, this time in our lives, it calls for that divine feminine energy that lives in all of us. It lives in men too. It's not gendered, but it's very robust in women. And I'm seeing that that is becoming louder for me. And I love that we can channel that and use that in so many different ways in our life too. We put that toward our children if we have them, but we also put that toward our friendships. We put that toward our creative endeavors. We put that toward our relationships. And I think we can put that toward ourselves more too. Really turning that mothering energy — which is ultimately such juicy compassion — toward ourselves.

And another thing that's getting really louder when it comes to the shoulds is I'm feeling proud. I'm feeling proud of what I've done. I'm feeling proud of the messiness of the mistakes I've made because it means at least that I was doing things and I was going after it. And I want to really tap into that pride for myself even more. And I want other women to feel that too.

When I talk about this in the context of work — the idea of a career, I think sometimes can be a little limiting in a way because we feel like we need to build this perfect career. What about that woman who is juggling several jobs and maybe they aren't vocations that society valorizes? I want her to look at her body of work and to go, I am working hard. I am putting some good energy out there collectively. I'm proud of myself. And that's how I'm feeling too in work. Some of the things don't always make sense. I don't know what I'm building next. But I'm looking at this body of work and I'm proud. I am just as proud of my time being a cocktail waitress and bartending as I am being a journalist — on camera, behind the camera, for digital, for all of it. Every single thing I'm proud of. And that's like, we can start as women really tapping into being proud.

And you gave this great visual of how we're doing all these incredible things, but it's like we're dragging this backpack — we're carrying such a heavier load and we're still killing it. So if we can take the time to actually really look at, holy moly, I'm proud of what I've done — look at our capabilities. Because society is not reminding us of that. They're just saying, you're not doing enough, you're looking older — and it's like, hell no. Look at what I'm doing. I'm proud. That can be such a reframe. Maybe we should have a party about telling each other what we're proud of.

Meghan French Dunbar (34:11): That's our next gathering. The linear progression of the career — that's another narrative that so many of us are told. And my career has not been linear. It has been extraordinarily messy. And my experience of that is that each thing, whether or not it felt like a success or a failure, gave me a tool or a skill or an experience or a connection to put in my little skill toolbox — so that later in the journey, sometimes immediately, sometimes ten years later, I'd be like, now I understood why I did that thing. That seemed like an abject failure. And I've started imagining my career as a collection of experiences, a collection of intellectual curiosity. And it's been a really helpful way for me to not feel like I have to impose some belief about where I should be now. All getting to — how have the insights from your book, or your process, or this entire thing impacted how you think about success in your career? And I'll also add — and ambition.

Stacey Lindsay (35:16): Ambition's a good word. I'm holding onto that one for the next few seconds because I was saying a couple of minutes ago — I'm not messing around. I'm really doubling down on this. The reality of time does show us this, and it can be that big birthday with the zero behind it that can kind of reawaken — my gosh, I can't mess around. My ambition is so much more holistic now.

So it used to be so focused on checking all those boxes specifically when it comes to work — building my title, I'm a journalist, making sure I'm an editor, making sure I'm a senior editor, making sure I'm an executive editor, all these things. I'm much more holistically ambitious now. What are the experiences? What are the things I can learn? How is this feeling? How am I taking care of myself? And when it comes to money — because I can't say it enough, this is something that I have fought and faced and am still actively facing. I spend my time and energy to take care of myself. And we want us to be talking about money more, because it helps me too. I haven't figured it all out, but it helps when I talk about money. It helps me and vice versa. The ambition is so much more holistic. I'm just so much more holistically ambitious about my life. Where does career fit into my life? Where does work fit into my life? What is that satisfying? What role is that playing? And is that adding to my health, is it adding to my creativity, is it helping my relationships?

I also talk about taking risks and I think about the idea of making myself proud. Writing this book has helped me evolve my thinking around taking risks. What is a risk I can do for myself? Ideally every day, but if that's not even realistic, once a week — and it can be small. But what is something I can do that gets me closer to myself, gets me closer to my joy, gets me closer to taking better care of myself, gets me closer to who I really am? That's a big theme in our 40s. When we realize, I don't want to do this anymore. I don't want to be in this relationship anymore. I do want to be in this relationship. I don't like men. I like women. I don't like this kind of work. I like that kind of work. We do have this declaration of self — but what is a small risk that I can take, that other women can take for themselves, that gets them a little bit closer to that fire inside?

In the world of work, a risk for me was I'm going to be stricter on emails — so I can reallocate that energy toward things that really matter for me. A risk for another woman could be opening up a bank account and putting even five bucks a month toward something you really want to do. It can mean calling an old friend you haven't talked to in a while to reignite that — it can be anything. But what's a risk we can do for ourselves? And in the world of work, I'm taking the big risk of just reaching out to people cold because I want to make new connections and friends and I want to expand what's possible.

Meghan French Dunbar (38:52): When I turned 40, one of the most insidious stories that I had was around physical appearance and sexuality. There's this externalized narrative that we're all given around what we are allowed to show up as, especially when it comes to physical appearance. And I remember when I turned 40, feeling the sense of, no one will ever look at me again. I am not allowed to dress certain ways. I need to be more modest. I just had this whole narrative. So I'm curious around the insights that came up around that topic, and if you're seeing a trend in the way that people are starting to reimagine their 40s, 50s, 60s and what it means to sexuality.

Stacey Lindsay (39:43): My gosh, yeah, because it really is a conversation about feeling this vitality in our bodies. When I wrote the beauty chapter — I don't want to play favorites, but I think I had some of the deepest insights actually around that, because beauty and our appearance is our currency, unfortunately, in many ways. I wish it weren't the case. There's a lovely aspect to it because we want to take care of ourselves. We want to be proud of this body. We want to be proud of our faces, right? But then the tipping point is these manufactured societal ideals — it needs to look a certain way and it needs to stay a certain way. And these beauty ideals are so damaging, because of them beauty moves from a place of where every single person is worthy of it to something that we have to perform.

And then we only have a short amount of time to be able to perform. We don't even want to have to feel like we have to perform. And then when we hit the marker of 40, it's like — you're over the hill, it's too late. And again, this calendarized idea, this total made-up fallacy, but it is so damaging. And I remember I was at a wedding and I had just turned 40 and I was having a great time. It was one of those times where you're just surrounded by incredible people and you're feeling sexy and you're feeling vibrant. And then some random dude — I still don't know who this guy was, he was a friend of a friend, and I talk about this comment in my book actually — he just comes over and, talking to somebody else in our circle, goes, do you see all those 40-year-old women over there dancing? And I literally remember feeling so vibrant two and a half seconds before. I had to remind myself to take a breath. I was so upset. And that's going to be, unfortunately, all around us. He is just symptomatic of so many things that are wrong with beauty culture and all of that.

A beautiful awakening I had around this though is the realization that beauty and eroticism and sexuality — all these feelings — they're all a feeling. It's not something to perform. It's not something to buy. It's not something to justify. And it is by no means something to earn. Every woman is worthy of this and has this inside of them. So just knowing that first and foremost — and I don't care if you are 21 or 61 or 81, forever. So this is part of being compassionate and taking care of ourselves. We want to keep that feeling. We want to stoke that feeling. And sometimes we can be robbed of it. We can get that aliveness back.

And in doing that, I have completely done this audit of practices, the rituals, the products, the things I spend my time and money on, the narratives around beauty. I've really paid attention to — what genuinely makes me feel alive? What genuinely makes me feel sexy? And I'm not talking about looks, because that's totally subjective. What makes me feel in my core, sexy and vibrant and alive? And I'm leaning toward those things and I'm letting go of the other things too.

Those deep patriarchal stories of putting a woman in the position of being a mother, always meant to procreate, and then after that she's done — that's a story. And it's a story that's really impacted us for a long time and it's impacted our mothers and grandmothers. And I think we're starting to really unlearn that story. That sexuality and vibrance — that's alive in us all the time. And we can dress how we want to dress. I just invite women — because I've done this for myself — consider the things that make you feel alive and beautiful and sexy, and keep going toward those situations. If it's a dance class, if it's being around a certain person, if it's being in the company of a certain novel or a book, if it's using certain products that really do make your skin feel vibrant and bright — whatever it is, go toward that. And start to let go of the other things.

Meghan French Dunbar (44:20): Many people have probably had this insight — right as we're beginning to stop outsourcing our self-worth and begin feeling our confidence, and we stop normalizing prioritizing other people's comfort over our own and putting up with everyone's garbage — it's like right at this moment where that happens, the societal narrative reverses it and says, oh, you're 40 now. You need to turn that down. Because that's not allowed. I'm imagining you dancing at this wedding as this wild, joyful act of rebellion — a societal expression of reimagining what it looks like to be a woman at any age.

Stacey Lindsay (45:09): And dance by yourself too. If you don't want to dance around people, I get it. Dance by yourself or move your body by yourself. Put on something that makes you feel good. This is similar to the voice note, right? No one's going to see you. If you can find five minutes to put on some song that just opens you up — that's how you get closer to yourself. And that's again, you remind yourself: I am so sexy. I am vital. I am worthy of this feeling.

And it's the work of our lives, Meghan, to remind ourselves of this every day — that there are larger systems at play created to suppress us. And it hurts all of us, but it really hurts women. And so we have to just connect with ourselves and talk about it more to remind ourselves this is set up to keep us pushed down, because they know that we just get stronger and stronger and sexier and sexier and more beautiful and more capable of doing incredible things with every year we get older. And so that's really scary for these systems at play. But I'm not worried about the systems at play. I want us to let it rip.

Meghan French Dunbar (46:20): This is why your book is so damn important. The book coming out May 5th — everyone go get it. Last question pertaining to the book. What is one insight from the book that you still wish we had talked about that you're just excited to share?

Stacey Lindsay (46:36): That we're always, always, always learning. And I'll share this nugget too. I don't talk a lot about the mythological in the book, but there is a thread weaved throughout the pages. We have these three archetypes that for a long time have been used to describe women — very loosely, sort of energies and traits that correlate to a woman's age. Basically maiden, mother, and crone — and they can be gorgeous and amazing. And technically we can be in our crone era, but also feel maiden energy, right? So it's all loose. I love them. I also think that they can be very limited — because what happens when we look at our forties?

We're actually pushed into crone a little early. As gorgeous as crone is, we're not crone yet in our forties. We are this other archetype. And Steph Jagger, who's this incredible women's coach, introduced this to me. She said, we're the Autumn Queen. And Danae Logan, another therapist I interviewed for the book, she calls it our enchantress phase. But it's this understanding that the forties are this electric time of new power. Again, a closeness to ourselves, capabilities, desires, fire, all of this. And we need to start giving it new vocabulary too, because this is a personal renaissance. So I love the idea of the Autumn Queen. And Steph Jagger actually said — the reason why there isn't archetypal storytelling around this age is because it's our most powerful. It's when we start to really get powerful. So they don't want to give us a word, right?

I love that. I envision my Autumn Queen. She's just this embodied, powerful, magical, beautiful self. And I bring her with me all the time. I bring her with me to meetings. I bring her with me to doctor's appointments. She's here with me right now. She's next to me. And so I pull from her energy when I'm still in the trenches of self-doubt and feeling unworthy. I'll be like, what's my Autumn Queen? How's she responding to this? It's pretty fun.

Meghan French Dunbar (48:49): Autumn Queen. Being 40 is the book. How else can people find you?

Stacey Lindsay (48:56): This has been such a joy. I don't want this to end, Meghan. Find me on Instagram at Stacey Lindsay. I'm here and there on social media. I have a Substack newsletter. Or at StaceyLindsay.com.

Meghan French Dunbar (49:00): All right. You're the best. Thank you.

Stacey Lindsay (49:14): Thank you, Meghan.

Transcript edited for clarity. Minor transcription artifacts removed; speaker voices and meaning preserved throughout.

You've done everything right. You work harder than most people around you, you deliver, and you're still exhausted — and somewhere underneath it, you've quietly decided that means something is wrong with you.

Amina AlTai said something early in this conversation that I had to stop and sit with: there is no outworking a broken system.

Amina is the best-selling author of The Ambition Trap, and she draws a line I haven't been able to unsee — between painful ambition, the kind that grinds you down chasing the next thing that will finally make you feel like enough, and purposeful ambition, the kind that actually sustains you. Both are demanding. Only one fills you up.

There's also a moment involving a dance party that might rearrange your entire definition of quality of life.

If you've ever felt like you're sprinting on a treadmill somebody else plugged in, this one's for you.

Amina AlTai is a holistic business and mindset coach, speaker, and author of The Ambition Trap. She works with high-achieving leaders and entrepreneurs who are ready to stop running on painful ambition and start building lives that actually feel like theirs. Her work sits at the intersection of performance, purpose, and the kind of self-knowledge that actually changes behavior — not just mindset.

"There is no outworking a broken system — especially one that was never designed with you in mind."

"Ambition goes in cycles, like a perennial. The resting isn't a malfunction."

"Identity is a prism — we overdevelop the work facet at the expense of everything else."

"The shiny objects never fill the inside hole. The work is internal, not external."

Meghan French Dunbar (00:00): What are the key elements that you would change if you were completely rewriting how we think about ambition and success, starting from scratch? What is the old paradigm? What is the new paradigm that you're proposing?

Amina AlTai (00:11): I love this. The evolution of the paradigm, honestly, is a conversation of unconscious bias — because ambition is one of those culturally complex, politically loaded words that either highlights our benefits or our drawbacks, depending on who we're talking about. Ambitious women are often seen as too much, while ambitious men — that's sort of table stakes. And if you're a person of color, or a person with a disability, or a queer person, we have all types of ideas about what ambition gets to look like and for whom.

So I'd start by saying, and this is what I say in the book, that ambition is neutral and natural. It is for everyone. I define it simply as a desire for growth — a desire for more life, specifically, which I love because I'm always like, I'm here for the aliveness, you know? It's literally just this desire to unfold. So it can't be right for some people and wrong for others.

And though I think ambition is neutral and natural, I think we have two orientations of it. I call one "painful ambition," which is driven by our core wounds. And then there's "purposeful ambition," which is connected to our truth and comes from a place of wholeness. So if I'm rewriting things — we're all skipping over those core wounds and going straight to the purposeful ambition piece.

Meghan (01:21): What are the top two to three core wounds that are most common that you see expressed?

Amina (01:28): There are five core wounds. This is a body of work from a Canadian psychologist named Lise Bourbeau: rejection, abandonment, humiliation, betrayal, and injustice.

Let me back up for a second, because for people who haven't heard the phrase "core wound" — I'm sure most people have spent time in therapy like I have and we're like, we got it, but for those who don't know: a core wound is an initial injury of the psyche. They happen in our formative years, and it's just a very human rite of passage. You could literally have the most gorgeous parents on the planet and you will still have a core wound — at least one — just because we all get them. Even if it doesn't happen in your family system, it could happen on the playground or even vicariously, from watching somebody else have an experience.

So there are these five wounds. And here's the rub: for each wound, we wear a corresponding mask. If you have an abandonment wound, the mask you wear is dependence — you're overly emotionally reliant on the people closest to you. For the high achiever, it doesn't show up in the work context so much, but more in our relationships outside of work.

If you have a rejection wound — which is one of mine — one of the masks is avoidance or withdrawal. You'll avoid conflict, or you'll avoid throwing your hat in the ring because you don't want to be rejected again. (You and I were talking about a cute little rejection I got this morning right before we hit record.)

Betrayal is another one of mine. That's when you felt like your caregivers didn't live up to expectations. The mask you wear there is control.

Humiliation is when we felt like our caregivers were embarrassed of us in some way. The mask is masochism or martyrdom.

And the last one is injustice — when we felt like our individuality in childhood was restrained in some way. The mask there is rigidity or perfectionism — this intolerance for living in an imperfect world.

Meghan (03:19): I'm curious about the connection between those five core wounds and enoughness — like, using success and ambition and achievement as a general mask for stuffing the holes we feel in ourselves. How does that manifest? What does it look like?

Amina (03:39): Exactly what you're alluding to. When we have a hole on the inside — whether that's rejection, abandonment, humiliation, betrayal, or injustice — we often seek the thing on the outside, thinking, that's the way I'll fill the hole. But it never works that way. You can have all the shiny objects on the outside — and this is my story, and I'm sure it's the story of a lot of people listening — you can have all the titles, accolades, achievements. But if you don't do the work on the inside, you're just going to keep chasing. It's an insatiable desire, because the work isn't outside of us. It's inside of us.

Meghan (04:11): I'm going to read a whole bunch of things from your book, because I probably highlighted more words in your book than are un-highlighted at this point. Like every single sentence I was just like, yes. Here we go:

"Late-stage capitalism taught me to derive my value, my self-worth and identity from perpetually competing through jobs and by gathering achievements. I felt like my work wasn't just a job, but my whole personality."

Deep breath. I felt that in my bones. If someone has built their entire identity around their work, how do you begin to divorce that? And where do people derive their self-worth from, if not from their work?

Amina (04:57): I feel like you've got some wisdom for us on this too, so I want to hear what you think. This is some of the foundational work I do with clients. Identity is a prism — like a crystal, right? It has many points and many facets. What we do, especially in the culture we live in here in the West, is over-emphasize what we produce, what we achieve, our titles, our jobs. We over-identify with that piece. We over-develop that identity and under-develop the other parts of ourselves.

So first and foremost, I ask my clients: what are the other aspects of your true self, your wise self? I'm a sister. I'm a mother. I'm an artist. I'm a peacekeeper. I'm a leader. I'm a truth-teller. What are these other aspects of yourself? And then we look at: how deeply are you on the court with those aspects? For most people it's, "I'm not on the court with those other pieces at all. A part of me identifies as a creative, and that's such an untapped part."

There can be a moment of shame — it can feel existential in lots of ways. And then bit by bit we see how we could turn the volume up on those other areas. It requires that we borrow some time from the places we've over-identified — namely, work. That's a negotiation in and of itself. But it's really important work to do, because inevitably we're going to experience identity loss around work. We're going to reach the top of the mountain and it's not going to feel good. We're going to lose our job. Our business will fall. Something will happen. You and I have stories like that. And then — who are we after that?

Meghan (06:29): So we co-hosted a dinner in New York with a bunch of delightfully ambitious, wonderful humans. One of the conversations we had was: as you tiptoe into more purposeful ambition and really leverage your full self, a lot of us talked about the need to slow down a bit. There's this tension — I want to do good work in the world and it feels important. Can I scale and grow? There's constant tension between the old paradigm (going, going, going) and the fact that the work feels important. How do you navigate the need to slow down and rest and repair and nurture and cultivate with the need to continually make progress on the things you want to bring to life in the world?

Amina (07:22): Love this question. First of all, I think ambition goes in cycles. We live in a world that tells us ambition is more for more's sake, all the time. Always move the goalpost. Always get the next thing. Meghan, you launched a book this year — where's the next book? Right? Without you taking a beat. I'm sure you have gotten a lot of that question, as have I. And I'm looking at people cross-eyed being like, are you kidding? I just birthed this.

So I think ambition actually goes in cycles like a perennial flower — that's the analogy I've been using. You drop a seed in the ground, you have this desire to grow, you water it, you nurture the inner and outer environment, and then you have this beautiful peak moment. Your book comes out, my book comes out — what a top-of-the-mountain moment. And then the seasons change and the petals fall off, and we wind down and go back underground. Maybe that ground is fallow — which is partly where I feel like I am right now — before we're nourished enough to rise again. We're always in that relationship throughout our life, and in different areas. This could be a peak moment for motherhood, but an underground moment for work. We're in these cycles in lots of places.

The other thing I think about is resting in micro-waves and macro-waves. A lot of times on social media, we glamorize, "I quit my job and took three months off and traveled Southeast Asia." That's just not available to most people. I haven't had one of those moments yet, but I would love to.

Meghan (08:48): (laughs)

Amina (08:49): So I think about the micro ways. Today, can I go sit in the park and look at the leaves? That's so nourishing to my nervous system. First thing in the morning, can I get sun on my face for circadian rhythm? Can I actually take my weekends? Can I actually shut down at six o'clock? What are the small ways, in addition to the big ways, that we can take care of ourselves?

Meghan (09:11): When you're attempting to evolve into a new way of being — I have some beliefs when it comes to rest. I've gotten really good at boundaries. I don't work nights and weekends. But then I have these moments on the weekend where I'm sitting down reading a book for 15 minutes, and I'm like, should I do the laundry? I need to take care of something. I still have a lot of guilt. I've been so frustrated, but also trying to honor the process of some of these beliefs that just stick in us and we carry forward into a new way of being. I'm curious — what are some of the sticky beliefs you've had a really hard time shedding?

Amina (09:55): We live in a world that equates our worth with our productivity. If I'm resting, I'm not producing. If I'm not producing, I'm not valuable. And I think that's something we really need to culturally rewrite, because — what if we just came to planet Earth to be weird and wonderful? And why can't that be enough? You and I are entrepreneurs, and there's so much conversation in the entrepreneurial space of, "well, build another thing, and then more." I'm just like, I'm so tired just watching you do that. I can't do it myself.

Some beliefs I'm still rewiring — I always hesitate to use the word "heal." Like, "I've healed this thing." Because what I've noticed in my own life and with my clients is that at every next level of becoming, every step we take on the staircase, the wounds tap us on the shoulder — just in slightly different ways. Maybe not as loud or dramatic or painful, but still there.

I've done so much work to reform my performance perfectionism. And with the book coming out and there being more eyeballs on my work, I just felt it come up so huge for me. I went down this whole rabbit hole of exploring my attachment trauma and doing more parts work and all the things — seeing why it was there and why it was getting so loud.

That's something I'm constantly rumbling with, especially as a woman of color. The stakes are different. The standards are different. We're told to fail fast and often in entrepreneurship, but we see certain identities held to different standards. I've internalized a lot of that narrative about how I have to show up.

My first job — I have curly hair — I went in one day with my hair curly and my manager was like, "no, you cannot come in with your hair like that." And then I watched them shame somebody else who came in with their hair natural. I was just like, my God, you're not even allowed to have a hair "out of place" — that's not even the right word. Nowadays I blow out my hair just because I've had a whole journey with hair loss — that's another story. But from the beginning I was kind of conditioned that you have to show up this way. And what we know, both from my book and just from being women in the world, is there's so much bias in these standards of professionalism, and then we weaponize them against ourselves. It's a whole thing. What about you?

Meghan (12:18): What's the question?

Amina (12:24): What are the sticky beliefs you're still unwinding?

Meghan (12:29): Yeah, I still have the "rest is not available to me" one. I'll apologize to my husband, who's like, "stop apologizing for just sitting on the deck and enjoying the sunshine for a bit on the weekends." The constant productivity thing.

I also still have some identity wrapped up in my career. Like, this goes into our next question — you asked us on the author's call last week, "how are you all feeling about your career?" And I believe all of us hysterically burst into laughter.

The reason I was in New York, where we had the dinner, was because I was speaking at Fordham University. They asked me to put my title on the name tag, and I didn't — I'm not the CEO of something right now. I'm just, quote, "just an author." And I was like, I feel like people aren't going to take me as seriously in this room. So I still have some identity issues around how my current status is viewed and what it means about how people are going to receive me. It's insane.

Amina (13:54): So wild. They are very sticky. And everyone's beliefs are so different, right? There are people who are like, my god, author is the highest level of achievement.

Meghan (14:03): I did a book talk at the Boulder Bookstore — the only bookstore book talk I did. But Boulder Bookstore is an institution. I got there early, my family was going to come after me, so I was by myself when I arrived. My book was in the window. A couple was coming out, and I asked, "can you take a picture of me with my book?" The guy was from Germany, and he just started crying. He said, "you're living a dream that I have aspired to my entire life, but I know I will never achieve."

And I was totally like, "can you take a little picture?" No big deal, heading into the bookstore. This feels like small potatoes to me. And to remember — your story, whatever it is, is someone else's just-beyond-their-imagination.

Amina (14:42): So cool. I'm so glad you had that moment. It is unbelievably special.

Meghan (15:03): Yeah, it was rad. I started my book talk crying because I was like, I'm living a dream.

So — you ask about our careers, and all of us burst into laughter, because I'll speak for myself: there's some (let's call it) ambiguity. I'm figuring things out. I piecemeal things together. I've got speaking and consulting and this thing and that thing, but I wouldn't call it steady at this point. It makes me laugh when people ask me about it, because sometimes it feels very hard and crunchy, and sometimes I'm like, this is fabulous. The question being: when you are working toward a new way of being in the world, it is not easy and it is not particularly comfortable. How do you hold yourself accountable to this new place you want to go and this new way you want to be in the moments when you don't particularly feel comfortable?

Amina (16:04): That's such a great question. I know what I would say to my clients, and I doubt I've navigated these moments with as much grace. The messy middle is called the messy middle for a reason — we're figuring it out. We're trialing and erroring. We're having a hard time with the discomfort of not having the shiny wrapped bow and label. Speaking for myself, I do not thrive in ambiguity. I like to have it neat and tidy — recovering perfectionist.

I think it's really important to say the thing and take the shame out of it. Scientists actually have a way of measuring the vibration of certain emotions, and shame is the lowest vibration. So it gets in our way and intercepts what we actually want. If we're carrying shame about our work or our identity, people will read it. They won't know why. Something will feel off, they won't be able to put their finger on it. So I'm a big proponent of, when I'm feeling shame — how can I out myself on this? It's not a fun thing to do, but I'm going to do it. I'll tell my friends. I'll tell my sisters. I'll put it on social. I encourage my clients to really say the thing.

For example, someone with a nonlinear career path might say, "I'm not the typical hire for this role. I've been an entrepreneur my whole life and now I'm going into corporate. They're going to have pushback." I'm like — say the thing from the beginning. Tell them: "Hey, you're probably expecting a more traditional hire for this role. Let me tell you exactly why my experience is a standout here." Saying the thing is so powerful, because we take the shame out of it and we get to own the narrative. That's one of the most important parts.

Meghan (17:44): This goes to one of my questions. Another quote from you:

"The more we clap into our authentic reason for being, the more chance we have of transforming the systems and structures that repress us and limit our potential."

Say more. Talk about this.

Amina (18:01): Going back to scientists measuring the vibration of emotions — the highest vibration isn't love, which is what a lot of people think. It's actually authenticity. So if we are unabashedly ourselves, then the opportunities at that same level will be able to find us. If we've watered ourselves down, we're complicit in a system, and the opportunities we really desire aren't going to find us.

I was telling you before we hit record about how I was asked to interview at the 11th hour about an executive coaching opportunity. I was like, cool, let me go explore. But the requirement was to not be myself. They literally said, "we're not interested in people who want to dismantle the system. We want people who will work with the quote-unquote 'nuance' of the system." I exited stage left.

Meghan (18:55): Yep. Peace.

Amina (18:57): Exactly. I was very honest about who I am, what I value, what I stand for. There was definitely a small part of me that wanted to be chosen. But if I had chosen something like that, I would miss everything that is meant for me. It's a form of hiding.

Meghan (19:13): How do we particularly think about authenticity? There's a lot of conflating it with just, like, showing up wearing whatever you want. What is your definition of authenticity?

Amina (19:29): Having gone down the rabbit hole around my perfectionism, particularly in the last year, I've done a lot of Internal Family Systems work, and it's kind of changed my life. I feel like before, I saw the world in 2D. Now I see it in 3D. Have you ever done Internal Family Systems?

Meghan (19:46): No — say more, tell me all about it.

Amina (19:48): Check out this book called No Bad Parts. It's a great starting point. In a lot of ways, we think that people have one mind — "I am this way in totality." But in Internal Family Systems, they talk about how we have many parts, and sometimes these parts collude and work together to protect us. And then we also have our true self, our wise self — the unabashed, unadulterated, non-wounded part of us.

I have a controlling part. I have a perfectionistic part. I have a judgmental part. And then I have true and wise self in the midst of all that. So when I think of authenticity, I think of true wise self. Peeling off all the layers of programming, all the wounding. And once we've done that — what are we left with? The true essence.

It's so cool to do this work, because you can see all the parts. And it's interesting — sometimes we have these parts where we're like, "no no, that's the real me. I have this spiritual part." But the spiritual part is actually just a righteous part pretending to be real you. So it's really fun to pull off the layers and see the different masks and personas, and what we're left with when we take them away.

Meghan (20:58): Another quote from you — about systems of oppression. Right at the beginning of the book, you talk about "attempting to outwork the systems of oppression working against us." I was like — this is so powerful. What does this mean?

Amina (21:20): So many of us think we can outwork a broken system. If I'm just smart enough, hardworking enough, the most model minority — I will shine. I'll outwork this broken system. But there is no outworking a broken system — especially one that wasn't designed with you in mind. It's literally a fool's errand that keeps us in a trap. This is the essence of the ambition trap. The more we're aware of that, and the more we find other ways of contributing and bringing forth our sacred contribution, the healthier we will be.

Meghan (21:52): Sacred contribution. Something we discussed at the dinner that I can't stop thinking about — when we're talking about purposeful ambition, a lot of us think about our "one true purpose." There's this concept of the North Star. There's a lot of shame about, "if you don't know your purpose, you're going to feel lost."

You discussed a concept of moving from a North Star to a constellation. This broke my brain, because I've always really identified my purpose with my work. But when we were talking about it as a constellation — the different parts of us, recognizing the big and small and multifaceted and multi-dimensional ways purpose can manifest through us as a mom, or a community member, or a friend — talk about the North Star to the constellation and how it's shown up for you as you've been teasing this out in your own life.

Amina (23:11): I love it. I can't take credit for this — the constellation of purpose comes from my friend Michael Ventura. I thought it was so brilliant I had to quote him and include him in the book.

So many of us think we have this one North Star we have to work toward. I want to be XYZ. I want to be this author. I want to be this CEO. But it's so rigid. And we have no idea, because it's a thousand steps away from us. My friend Meaghan Hellerer, who's also a coach, talks about living directionally versus destinationally. If you live directionally, we're basing it on the North Star — "I want to be the CEO." I don't know why. I just want to. But if we live destinationally, we take one step at a time. And every step clarifies the next.

If we couple that with a constellation of purpose — I'm not aiming for this one star. I've got a couple of brightly burning stars in my universe that together make up a whole ecosystem, and I'm operating inside the ecosystem. Which is a lot more agile, a lot more flowy than the rigidity of this one North Star.

I love this because I'm always changing, always evolving, and I've really struggled with doing this one thing. I'm such a millennial — elder millennial, such a multi-hyphenate. This idea of constellation really suited me, because I could never fit myself in the box and I never wanted to.

For me, I really do think that my work on planet Earth right now is helping people come home to themselves. Peeling off the layers of programming, whether that's the core wounds or the stories we told ourselves about our careers, and coming back to the essence of who we are — and then asking, well, what do I want to contribute from that essence? And I don't just do that in my career. I do that with my friendships. I sit with my sisters and do it. I talk to somebody on the bus and I'm doing it. Every question is an invitation to come home to ourselves. That's a way cooler way to be in the experience — versus, "it's just in my nine-to-five." It's woven. These grand threads of our fate are woven through all parts of our lives.

But can I ask that question of you?

Meghan (25:13): I'm like, what was the question? I'm so good at asking people questions and then listening so intently I forget what was the question.

Amina (25:21): The constellation of purpose, and how it shows up in your life.

Meghan (25:43): For me, I've been really focused on purpose, passion, quality of life. Passion being — where's my curiosity taking me? Constant learning, constant growing, different experiences. Those two things have really driven me. But the quality of life aspect — I didn't quite understand how that fit in until it all blew up and I fell apart.

When I started thinking about quality of life as a way to manifest my purpose as my highest and best self — because it allows me to show up intentionally — all of a sudden the quality of life aspects of cultivating my own joy, having deep and profound, meaningful social connections with people I love, my mental and physical health, the things that feel like nice-to-do, not have-to-do (which are, in fact, the most important things to do) — it helped me be like, that is, in fact, purposeful. Being able to show up.

This morning I woke up in a great mood and I was having a dance party with my two kids before school. I was just imagining — this feels intentional. This is a purposeful moment. I'm showing up as my highest and best right now. I'm showing them a different way that a mom can be, and I'm starting their day off well. It comes down to micro moments. That constellation visualization really helped me be like, it can all be purposeful. It isn't just the one thing. And that was really helpful.

Amina (27:07): So beautifully said. And how wonderful that your kids get to see that role-modeled — a happy, purposeful mom.

Meghan (27:14): Oh my god. Dude, I tell you — I'm so happy I had kids late, because I would have destroyed them had I had them before. Whoa. Anyway. Maturing, getting all things. My god.

Alright. This was a good one. What does ambition look like when it's rooted in self-trust rather than self-correction?

Amina (27:22): You would have left them on a bus somewhere. (laughs)

I mean, I think that's purposeful ambition. Purposeful ambition — I talk about how it's not black-and-white either/or thinking. It's growth mindset. It's not instrumentalizing our bodies to get to the goal, which was my story. It's actually being really kind to our bodies and to everybody else's. Working in a generative way versus an exploitative way. It's collaborative. It's not about shining as an individual. It's not about my need to win. It's about my desire to contribute to a better world. You can see, in the contrast, how much more generative and nourishing that way is.

Meghan (28:21): Marrying that answer with your previous answer — the day-to-day interactions. This is a half-baked question, but so often the first thing we ask someone is, "what do you do?" In terms of the day-to-day practices we can even begin tiptoeing into — to transform the system — what are some conversation starters, or little day-to-day things you do with your language or questions you ask when you're getting to know people, that help people come home to themselves?

Amina (28:55): Oh my gosh. I was at this workshop a couple months ago, and they invited us to introduce ourselves as the descendants of our grandparents and our parents. So I introduced myself: "Hi, I'm the daughter of Ingrid and Bakir. I am the granddaughter of Muhammad Ali and Naima, and Olive and Walter." And that in and of itself cracked people. People were bawling. Like — I am the descendant of these beautiful humans. I have a complicated relationship with some of my relatives too, but that's also true. That's part of my truth, part of my experience, part of who I am. It was a really powerful thing to do, and I loved it so much.

Meghan (29:38): Is that something you have brought — do you ask strangers this?

Amina (29:43): I haven't yet, but I'm leading a workshop in a couple of months, and that was literally — I was like, we're going to open with this. It's so good. Right? Isn't that special? Can you introduce yourself that way? I want to see how you feel.

Meghan (29:50): Yes. Oh gosh. So it's the daughter of, and then the granddaughter of. I'm the descendant of Cindy and Larry French, and the descendant of my grandparents, Joe and Viola, and Jack and Josephine. When I think about it — what comes up for me is perseverance. When you presence those names, there is war, there's immigration, there's so many things people have had to go through. And then great-grandparents, I'm like — Zora, I think. And it puts into perspective the just — the impermanence of it. We're just this little flash in the pan. We're here for a little bit, and we may not be remembered multiple generations down the line. It helps me stay present in a way. What does it bring up for you?

Amina (30:57): It's kind of wild. I love what you're saying — yes, it's a flash. Everybody is a universe. Every life is a universe. And also it's a flash in the pan. It is both things. And it's so wild to think of it that way. Each of these people was a universe. Each of these people was a world. And we are sort of the descendants of those worlds. It's really so massive to think about that — and all the lives they had to live and what they had to overcome for us to be here. It really makes me forget about what I do for a living.

Meghan (31:33): So — we have two more things here. One question I have: a lot of high-achievers I know are so busy on the hamster wheel of success and achievement and all the things that taking the time to actually pause and slow down and consider the questions you invite people to look at — it feels really hard. What are the first little steps people can do when they're feeling overwhelmed?

Amina (32:10): One of my friends is a nervous system teacher, and we volley back and forth on this. Sometimes clarity comes on the meditation cushion. But a lot of the time, clarity comes in motion. You don't have to backpack through Southeast Asia or completely pause. A lot of the time, clarity comes from taking an action.

We just have to go one step at a time. What I've noticed about a lot of the people I'm working with these days is that we're actually in a state of freeze. Taking any kind of action feels really hard. So I try to break it down to the minimum viable. What is the smallest decision and action we could take today that is going to clarify one single thing for us? Not everything — because if we try to clarify the whole purpose of the whole universe, we'll just stop before we get started. What is the smallest thing I could do today, or in the next five minutes, that will just clear one thing up for me?

Meghan (33:07): I love that. So — I'm curious. You've been thinking about ambition for quite some time now. What's exciting you right now? Are you still real lit up by the material you've been working with for so long, or are there additional things catching your curiosity?

Amina (33:28): To be honest — I worked really hard on the book, as I know you did too, and I feel proud of it. I had a podcast recording earlier this morning, and I was rereading some parts and I was like, this is pretty good. You take yourself out of it after a while. First of all, you read it so many times you have it memorized and you can't see the forest for the trees. And then I haven't read it in a year, and I'm like, this ain't bad.

Every astrology reading I've had — from Western astrology to Vedic astrology — ambition is exalted. It's very big in my chart. When I would tell them I was writing a book on ambition, they'd say, "perfect person to write a book on ambition." So I think I'll be a student of it for a long time. I always think there's more to learn.

But I did allude to one thing that was really interesting when we had our dinner. I've been very interested in what ethical entrepreneurship looks like — because I've seen such a lack of ethics in the space, and I've seen a lot of harm replicated. I'm kind of proud of how I haven't had meteoric success, because I'm like — I didn't use those harmful tactics I was looking at and being like, is that all right to do? I'm not saying I want to stay small — it's not one or the other for me. I want to figure out a way to grow that is generative. It's connected to ambition, but it takes the conversation a little further into: how can we grow in a way that brings everybody along, doesn't hurt people or the planet, and is kind?

Meghan (35:14): Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. That's the best place to start. I'm curious — is there anything you wish I had asked you about?

Amina (35:16): I want to know what you're thinking about too. I know it's a tricky question, but I know there's stuff.

Meghan (35:34): I had the same experience — a woman read me a part of my book the other day. Two things: one, I didn't realize I wrote it. Two, she said it out loud and I was like, "that's good." She was like, "this is from your book," and I was like — that's hilariously awkward, and congratulations to me. I felt great about it.

But I could talk about this stuff until the sun comes home. I'm still real jazzed up about these concepts. And just recently, I've been working deep in one company and letting my geeky business brain go really deep into codifying their operating systems that are, in fact, doing what you were just talking about on the ethical entrepreneurship side of things. Like — the best business case we can come up with that proves the case for improving work for all and uplifting humans through the power of business. I'm finding some of them recently, and my brain is on fire. I love it so much.

Amina (36:49): That makes me so hopeful. And also — I'm coming to you for case studies.

Meghan (36:53): God, I got you. My gosh — Torani Syrups. I feel like I should be their spokesperson at this point.

Anything else? Did I have anything wonderful on my list of questions I kind of abandoned? No, this is so good. You're so good. I know you do this so much, but you're so freaking good at this.

Amina (37:17): As are you, my friend. It's always so lovely to sit with a journalist too, because I feel like you ask the best questions. It's so weird — we've spent so much time together now, I'm like, didn't we do this already? You're so familiar. It's lovely.

Meghan (37:23): Oh god, I just love it. Well — I should ask. Besides going out and buying the incredible book that I've read twice now — where do people find you? How can people support you, work with you, all the things?

Amina (37:46): Thank you so much for asking. You can get the book — The Ambition Trap: How to Stop Chasing and Start Living — everywhere you buy books, whether that's your favorite indie bookstore or a national chain. You can learn more about me on my website, aminaaltai.com, or on Instagram at @aminaaltai. I'm sure the spelling will be in the show notes. If you're interested in coaching or inviting me to speak, please drop me a message.

Meghan (38:04): Yes, yes, yes. Alright. Thank you. We're going to stop.

Amina (38:16): Thank you.

If you’re constantly overextended, feel guilty when you rest, or exhausted by the pace of life — this is for you — the one to send anyone who looks fine on the outside but is frantically pedaling underneath.

Unbehaved* host Meghan French Dunbar opens with the story of Michelle — a woman who walked into a leadership workshop already having done a run, sent a stack of emails, coached her kid's baseball team, and prepped for a multi-million dollar contract by 8 AM. She made the whole room feel deficient on contact. By day three, Michelle broke down at the table and said: "I look like a swan. From above I look fine. Underneath I'm frantically pedaling. And I'm so tired of holding it all."

That sentence is the whole episode.

Meghan lays out why so many women are drowning in busy — from Gabor Maté's research on the top predictors of disease (self-sacrifice, suppression of anger, excessive concern about social acceptability), to Katherine Goldstein's "modern motherhood is a Ponzi scheme" framing on guilt as social control, to the research showing you need to be resting 42% of your life to function at your healthiest. Almost none of us are close.

Then she walks through the four essentializing practices — a framework she coined for reclaiming your time, relationships, inputs, and behaviors — including her own Impact Energy Matrix for saying no, Vicki Saunders's "relentlessly cleaning your closet of relationships," and the question she and her husband ask before consuming any content: "Is this feeding my soul in a good way?"

* [Editor's note: This episode originally aired under the show's former name, "Better Than This." The show is now "Unbehaved."]

"I have this perfect life and this perfect marriage and this perfect job, but I feel like a swan, barely afloat..." — Michelle

"I feel like modern society and motherhood is some form of Ponzi scheme. You feel so overwhelmed by what's being asked of you that you don't have the bandwidth, community, or wherewithal to demand change. The expectations we put on women manifest for a lot of us as guilt, which is a form of social control. Guilt makes you quiet. It makes you shrink. It makes you not want to talk about things." — Katherine Goldstein

"Not listening to self in order to prioritize others' needs is a significant source of the health-impairing roles women assume." — Dr. Gabor Maté + Daniel Maté, The Myth of Normal

"Who you choose as your friends decides your future." — Julie Van Ness, CEO of Real Leaders Magazine

"The number-one predictor of long-term behavior change is who you surround yourself with." — Parneet Pal, physician educator

"Instead of FOMO — JOMO. The joy of missing out. Actually using the time when you say no to rest, to restore, to fill your cup back up."

"When we look at how much rest our bodies need, they predict it's somewhere around 42% of our life. We should be resting in order to be able to be the healthiest, most intentional version of ourself."

"Is this feeding my soul in a good way?" — the question that changed how Meghan consumes content

People + companies referenced:

Books + frameworks referenced:

[Editor's note: Lightly cleaned for readability. Preserves original voice + delivery.]

Meghan French Dunbar (00:58): Hello, friend.

Today we're going to talk about something that will both improve your mental health AND improve your leadership and how you show up — inside the workplace and outside of it. Dealing with overwhelm. How do we actually get to a place where you can reduce the volume on the chronic stress that comes from feeling overly busy, overextended — pretty much having way too much on your plate at all times?

We're going to get into the key practices I've seen extraordinary business leaders bring into their own lives — because this is 100% impacting your quality of life. And we're going to talk about why so many of us are feeling this way, specifically as working women.

Why are we drowning?

Even if we're working, we're expected to do the vast majority of things outside the workplace. Eve Rodsky's research in Fair Play found that even in the most equitable heterosexual households, women still take on a disproportionate amount of domestic and emotional labor. Kids. Caretaking for friends and family. Social obligations. Birthday parties. All of it.

Inside the workplace, we're under a microscope of judgment. Our work is doubted. We're judged as having less leadership capability. Judged for our appearance, our children's appearance, our personality — more than men. Constant microaggressions. Being mistaken for junior employees.

Both inside AND outside the workplace, we're constantly being judged.

Meghan French Dunbar (~03:30): From The Myth of Normal — Gabor and Daniel Maté identify three characteristics that predispose us to disease more than anything else:

They go on: "Not listening to self in order to prioritize others' needs is a significant source of the health-impairing roles women assume. It is among the medically overlooked but pernicious ways in which our society's 'normal' imposes a major health cost on women."

We've normalized this. Women taking on everything. Saying yes to everything. Putting our needs last. It has a 100% correlation with the fact that women are contending with increased mental health disorders compared to men.

I was talking with Katherine Goldstein — journalist who covers modern motherhood — and she said something that blew my mind:

"I feel like modern society and motherhood is some form of Ponzi scheme. The expectations we put on women manifest for a lot of us as guilt — which is a form of social control. You feel so overwhelmed by what's being asked of you that you don't have the bandwidth, community, or wherewithal to demand change. Guilt makes you quiet. It makes you shrink. It makes you not want to talk about things."

I was trying not to cry as she said this. Because this has been my experience. And so many women I know. Constant guilt. Take time for yourself → guilty. Miss a kid's birthday → guilty. Someone's coming over and your laundry is all over the place → guilty.

Her point: when we're feeling that guilt, we're too overwhelmed to even talk to each other about it.

So here we are. Talking about it.

Meghan French Dunbar (~07:00): Which brings me back to one person I met a few years ago at a women's leadership workshop.

We started at 8 AM. This woman Michelle walked in — already in her running gear. Grabbed fruit and nuts from the breakfast bar. Sitting down at the table, mile-a-minute, telling us she'd already been on her run, already sent a stack of emails, already coached her kid's baseball team, already on the phone with a multi-million dollar prospect.

She made the rest of us feel deficient on contact. I was legitimately sitting there thinking — my god, I brushed my teeth and made it here on time.

Three full days. Big intensive workshop. And by day three — after we'd actually started talking about the judgment and guilt we were carrying — Michelle broke down at the table.

She said: "I can't do this anymore. It seems like I have this perfect life, this perfect marriage, this perfect job — but I feel like a swan. Barely afloat. It looks so nice up on top of the water. But underneath I'm just frantically pedaling my feet. And I'm so tired of holding it all."

I feel like any woman around the world would feel that sentiment in her bones. Even the women who look like they have it all together are just frantically trying to stay afloat. We're comparing our busyness. Wearing our stress as a badge of honor.

Let's make a little agreement — we're not going to do that anymore.

We're going to turn that dial DOWN.

Why? One of the top predictors of chronic stress AND one of the top six causes of burnout is overwhelm and overwork. Too much on your plate.

Meghan French Dunbar (~09:30): Fortunately, I got to talk to a lot of women leaders who are pushing back against the narrative that we have to say yes to everything and hold everything on our own. They gave me practices that have changed my life.

The less overwhelmed you are, the more you're able to show up present, engaged, intentional. As I ran my first organization, I was a workaholic — nights, weekends, travel — with zero attention to my mental or physical health. Blinders on. Chronic depression. Chronic stress. I couldn't show up in a good way.

Think about someone you love when they're overwhelmed, stressed, and exhausted. Very few people can be depleted and still show up authentic, grounded, present. But that's what we need to be as leaders. It requires being grounded and healthy. When you're exhausted, you can't access that.

I had a profound realization: I was not making the best decisions. I was not effective with my team. I was not happy. Not showing up as a good friend, spouse, or community member. If I'm going to be the best version of myself, I'm going to need to make changes.

I've couched these practices under one term — essentializing. It's a word I basically made up, but it gets to the heart of it. Like pruning. Get all the dead stuff off so you can flourish. Support only the most essential elements of your life.

Meghan French Dunbar (~11:30): Practice 1: Essentialize your time.

This might just be my experience, but I imagine it'll resonate. I feel pressure to say yes to so many things — speaking engagements, volunteering at my kids' school, dinner invites, fundraisers, kids' birthday parties, helping my parents. Every invitation, I feel like I need to say yes. That if I don't, I'll be disappointing someone.

I'm a people pleaser. I do NOT like to disappoint.

So I built myself a little framework I call the Impact Energy Matrix. Two variables on a 2x2:

Renews + Meaningful = HELL YES. Sweet spot. Absolute yes.

Renews + Not particularly meaningful (concert, girls' night out) = YES. It fills my cup.

Depletes + Meaningful (sitting with my dad through chemo) = YES. Not renewing, but deeply meaningful.

Depletes + Image-driven (saying yes because I'm worried someone will judge me) = NO. This is the no I've had to practice.

Two things that helped me get over the guilt of saying no:

And one research beat that blew my mind: your body needs to be resting roughly 42% of your life to function at your healthiest. Not sleeping. Resting. Most of us are nowhere close.

When I actually say no now, it's from a place of intention, using the matrix. And I don't feel guilt — because people aren't as disappointed as I imagined, AND it's so I can be the best version of myself for everything I care about.

Practice saying no. Even one little no this month you would have traditionally said yes to. Protect your energy.

Meghan French Dunbar (~17:00): Practice 2: Essentialize your relationships.

This is a tough one. Vicki Saunders told me she "relentlessly cleans her closet of relationships that don't serve her."

That moment I saw the connection — Vicki is one of the most optimized leaders I've ever met. She shows up intentional. Impactful. Grounded. Impressive every time. I used to think she was some sub-species of human. She's not. She just intentionally essentializes. Distills relationships down to who supports her being her highest and best self.

So many of us fall into the trap of staying in relationships out of obligation — even though there are people who consistently take more energy than they give. Energy vampires. People who don't reciprocate. Are there relationships in your life like that?

I used to have a handful. I felt loyal — "I can't not have them, they're my friend" — even though every conversation left me miserable.

The people you allow in your life are a huge predictor of the quality of your life and your mental health.

Julie Van Ness (CEO of Real Leaders Magazine): "Who you choose as your friends decides your future."

Parneet Pal (physician educator): "The number-one predictor of long-term behavior change is who you surround yourself with."

So — relentlessly clean your closet. AND actively seek out and spend more time with people who lift you up. I have people in my life where every time we hang out, my heart feels like it's going to explode. I optimize how much of my life I spend around those people.

Releasing depleting relationships doesn't have to be dramatic. It can be a gradual moving away. Increasingly declining invitations. Constantly re-assessing: is this relationship loving me back? Is it bringing me energy or depleting me?

This is also true in your work life. Clients who consistently drag you down. Coworkers who deplete you. Is there a way to insulate yourself from them a little more?

Don't feel an outsized sense of loyalty to people who are bringing you down.

Meghan French Dunbar (~22:00): Practice 3: Essentialize your inputs.

A few years ago I got back from a trip, took a COVID test, tested positive. My mother-in-law was in town so I went straight to a hotel to quarantine. Three days in bed feeling terrible.

I made the brilliant decision to start the Apple TV Super Models documentary — Cindy Crawford, Naomi Campbell, all the 90s icons. Two episodes in, I went to the bathroom and looked in the mirror.

The juxtaposition — my reflection with what those supermodels looked like in real life — was stark. A bleak contrast. I already felt terrible from COVID. Now I started spiraling. Everything on my face was the worst. Everything was too big.

Fortunately, I had the wherewithal to catch it. And I came back to a question my husband and I have been asking each other since COVID isolation. Any time we're consuming any content — show, podcast, social media, whatever's going into our eyeballs:

"Is this feeding my soul in a good way?"

We have abandoned entire TV series two or three episodes in. "Wait — is this feeding our soul in a good way?" Many times the answer is "no. This is making me terrified" or "this is all about a serial killer and I don't want to watch this."

That simple question has 100% reframed how I think about the information I let in.

Other women I've talked to have similar practices. Libby Rodney (Harris Poll) talked to me about only posting positive stories on her social media. Another woman only follows positive social media accounts.

The average person consumes 2 hours of content per day. That's a LOT coming in. You are entirely allowed to put a strainer on what gets in. Only allow in things that are positive. Educational. Informative. Things that are actually improving how you think and feel.

Simple practice. Profound impact over time.

Meghan French Dunbar (~28:00): Practice 4: Essentialize your healthy behaviors.

Context-dependent for everyone. But most of us have — let's call it an unhealthy behavior or two — that we engage in especially when we feel overwhelmed and stressed.

Here's how Michelle Pusateri talked to me about her relationship with alcohol.

Michelle Pusateri (30:57): [Michelle, on her journey from bartending to pastry chef] When I was in the service industry, I got caught up in the lifestyle — the parties, the staying up all night, the drinking, drugs. I didn't realize how much of a toll it was taking until I started looking at going to culinary school.

I got a job at the Fairmont Hotel in pastry with someone from culinary school. I moved to a new house. I was like — something has to change. If I really want this career in pastry, I need to do something different. I said: I need to stop drinking.

From that day forward, I went to my first AA meeting. I stopped drinking. Started working at hotels. And I literally have not done a drug, smoked a cigarette, or had a drink since that moment — because I knew I had to change my life. If I wanted a career and to do something meaningful, I had to look at my behaviors and grow up a little.

Meghan French Dunbar (32:55): For Michelle, she just couldn't drink anymore. So she got essential about it. Took the behavior out of her life entirely.

There are all kinds of unhealthy behaviors: staying up late playing video games, skipping sleep. For me — I can have a cocktail occasionally. But if I drink more than two nights in a row, I start feeling sluggish AND depressed. My mental and physical health slowly degrade.

So I put boundaries on myself. Two drinks max in a week. My little healthy guardrails.

A lot of this comes down to paying attention to your body. Once I acknowledged that if I don't get physical activity every day I feel bad, exercise became an entirely new thing for me. Up until a few years ago, I only exercised because of body image. When I started to realize the impact physical activity has on my mental AND physical health, there was a deeper WHY. Skipping a workout — fine. Skipping a week of workouts — not good.

Notice: when are you feeling your healthiest, and what behaviors support that? When do you consistently feel unhealthy, and what behaviors led there?

What are boundaries or guidelines you can give yourself to minimize the behaviors that don't serve you?

Meghan French Dunbar (~35:30): Recap.

Time. Say no more often. Essentialize your time. Relationships. Distill down to the ones that re-energize you. Inputs. Be more intentional about the content you consume. Behaviors. Notice unhealthy patterns; put gentle guardrails around them.

Four things. Practice, not perfection. The more you dial these up, the less overwhelmed, busy, stressed, and anxious you feel. And it helps you show up better with everyone around you AND with yourself. The more I nurture and cultivate my wellbeing, the better I feel about myself.

I invite you to bring these practices into your life as much as possible.

Love to hear about it if anything strikes a nerve or you're putting practices into play.

And — this is the last episode of Season 1 of Better Than This.

We're wrapping up. Taking a little break. Please know how grateful I am that you've spent this time with me. It means more than I can express.

More soon. Until next season — be well.

I'll talk to you soon. Bye.

Have you ever ignored a gut feeling and then wished you hadn't? Nearly every extraordinary woman leader Meghan French Dunbar has interviewed cites intuition as central to their success — yet most of us have been trained to override it.

Intuition has been dismissed as a "soft skill" for so long that we've forgotten it's actually one of the sharpest tools any leader has. In this episode, host Meghan French Dunbar makes the case for why intuition is integral to leadership — and lays out how to actually develop it.

She opens with a story that women listening will feel in their bodies before they can name it: a 2017 encounter at Wisdom 2.0 where she suppressed her intuition to protect a grant opportunity — and ended up alone in her car with a stranger on the wrong side of the Golden Gate Bridge. Then she brings in the research (Malcolm Gladwell's rapid cognition, Gavin de Becker's work on how the body predicts danger), the voices of leaders like Stephanie Nadi Olson, Vicki Saunders, Susie Batiz, and Diana Propper de Callejon, and the specific practices for tapping into your intuition every day.

The episode closes with the story of the World Changing Women's Summit — an entire conference blueprint that arrived, whole, as an intuitive download while Meghan was petting her dog. Because when you get quiet enough to hear your gut, sometimes it hands you an entire venture in one sitting.

* [Editor's note: This episode originally aired under the show's former name, "Better Than This." The show is now "Unbehaved."]

Why the same intuitive signal that keeps you safe is also the one that finds you your best ideas The World Changing Women's Summit story: how the entire blueprint downloaded to Meghan while she was petting her dog on the floor of her condo Why ignoring intuition creates dissonance in your body — and why honoring it puts you in flow

"What you want to dismiss as coincidence or a gut feeling is in fact a cognitive process faster than we recognize — and far different from the familiar step-by-step thinking we rely on so willingly." — Gavin de Becker

"Nobody knows what you're capable of better than you. And if our goal is to change systems, to make them more equitable or to make our personal dreams come true, you've got to follow your own intuition on that." — Stephanie Nadi Olson, founder of We Are Rosie

"When you have to make a hard decision, think about the decisions that are in front of you and what's the one that gives you the most relief?" — Stephanie Nadi Olson

"Does this feel resonant? Does this feel easeful? If it feels crunchy, we pull back." — Susie Batiz, founder of Poo-Pourri

"My body's speaking to me. An inner wisdom, little red flag goes up. But I pushed through that because this is a huge opportunity. I'm not going to just base some random feeling I have and worry about pissing this guy off and potentially losing this grant."

"That has been the work I have been doing for so long as just speaking up and telling other people that they are impacting me in a negative way. It has been so hard and it is so rewarding."

"Your body is sending you intuitive messages all the time that it wants you to listen to."

"The entire blueprint for the conference just plunked into my brain. Here's the name. Here are the speakers. Here's exactly what we're going to do. I got up in the middle of a conversation with my husband, ran to the guest room, ripped out a piece of paper, and sketched it all down."

"Intuition isn't opposed to logic. It's a cognitive process. It's data. It belongs in the business world."

People + companies referenced:

Books + frameworks referenced:

[Editor's note: Lightly cleaned for readability. Preserves original voice + delivery.]

Meghan French Dunbar (00:58): All right, friend.

Today we're going to talk about one particular "feminine trait" that often gets overlooked or relegated to a soft skill or dismissed entirely as not appropriate in the business world:

Intuition.

Yeah, for some of you, you might have cringed there. It has some woo-woo-esque associations. And it's a fantastic leadership skill. Quite literally, the vast majority of women leaders I've spoken to — who've had hugely successful careers and are thriving in their lives — nearly every single one of them mentioned the role intuition plays in their leadership.

So today: the role of intuition in leadership. What it means. How to develop it. Why you should begin paying attention to your own.

Meghan French Dunbar (~02:30): We'll start with a story of a time I did NOT do the thing I'm now telling us to do.

I attend Wisdom 2.0 in San Francisco. I have my little booth. One of my business partners finds out that a head of the foundation is at the conference — tracks him down, brings him over. I get some face time. Very nice. I try to razzle-dazzle. Hand him a magazine. Tell him about what we do. He's like "I've got another meeting — maybe I'll see you at the end of the conference."

Later that day, we're wrapping up. Conference is ending. I'm cleaning up my booth. This guy comes over and says "can I help you clean up?"

I'm like — wow, that's very kind. I say — "Hey, I'm going to go meet my business partner around the corner at this bar, want to come grab drinks with us?"

He says yes. I'm like — okay, this is going very well. Business development, crushing it.

I'm packing up. He says: "I'll just hop in the car with you."

Right there, my body speaks to me. Little red flag goes up. That's okay. I'm uncomfortable.

But I pushed through. This is a huge opportunity. I'm not going to base some random feeling on saying no — I don't want to piss this guy off and potentially lose this grant.

So I said — okay, hop in.

He helps me pack. We're in this little Subaru. Driving out of the parking lot. I say — "Hey, could you navigate us to the bar? I don't know where we're going."

He says: "Actually, I have a better idea. There's a place I want to show you."

Warning, warning. My intuition is escalating. He tells me to take a specific exit. If you're familiar with San Francisco — when you come out of the Presidio onto the highway, there are no more exits until you get to the other side of the Golden Gate Bridge.

All of a sudden we're on the Golden Gate Bridge heading OUT of the city. I'm starting to get panicky. I start talking about my husband. How much I love him. How VERY married I am.

We get across the bridge. He says — "Let's take this exit." We're in no-man's land. I'm thinking — "is he about to harm me?" I am quite literally at the point where I'm considering pulling the emergency brake and jumping out.

I don't do the tuck-and-roll. We end up in Sausalito. He says we're going to a bar at Cavallo Point. Gorgeous view of the city. That's what he wanted to show me.

I'm like — okay. Maybe I'm overreacting.

If you identify as a woman, you know what happened next. I began gaslighting myself. Convincing myself I'd misread the situation. That he was just a little socially awkward. That I needed to be kind and not make him uncomfortable — because that would jeopardize the grant.

At the bar I say — "I told my business partner we'd meet him. Let's see the view and then I need to head back."

He says: "No, I really want to get a drink and enjoy this."

Oh my god.

I reluctantly get him back in my car. Say — "Okay. I'll drop you at the bar. I'm going to my hotel to drop off my stuff."

He says: "No, I don't want you to be unsafe walking around. I'll come to your hotel with you."

We're in the middle of the Golden Gate Bridge again. Can't tuck-and-roll off a bridge. I drive to my hotel. Pull in.

He gets out. I say — "I'm here. I'm fine. Can you sit on that bench? I'll take this stuff up."

He walks over. Pulls my glasses off my face. Says: "I think I would like to kiss you."

I'm like — NOPE. Here we're done. Hard line. It took THAT for me to finally say no.

He leaves.

Lo and behold — we don't get the grant.

Meghan French Dunbar (~09:00): This is one of many examples of when I ignored my intuition — especially in professional contexts, especially when power dynamics were at play.

That's the basis of what we're going to talk about. Why listening to your intuition matters. How to tap into it. How to use it as a leadership skill.

Meghan French Dunbar (~11:00): Some people find intuition a little woo-woo. There's a lot of research on how important it is.

Your intuition isn't based on logic. It uses unconscious signals from your brain and your body. Malcolm Gladwell describes it as rapid cognition.

Gavin de Becker — a world-renowned expert on predicting danger — explains it this way: "What you want to dismiss as coincidence or a gut feeling is in fact a cognitive process faster than we recognize — and far different from the familiar step-by-step thinking we rely on so willingly."

Those gut feelings — the ones trying to warn you, protect you, guide you toward better decision-making, help you find inspiration — are a cognitive process. We need to start paying attention to them instead of dismissing them as illogical and inappropriate for the business world.

Many women I know ignore their intuition — especially when it comes to making someone else uncomfortable. We've been conditioned since we were young girls to be nice. Not rock the boat. Prioritize others' feelings over ours. Be seen and not heard. Gentle and quiet.

So we grow up as adults where when something inside us is screaming that something's wrong — if it might make someone in power uncomfortable, we ignore it.

Especially hard in professional contexts, when there are power dynamics, revenue, sales, or career progression on the line. We don't want to blow a sale because we had a bad feeling.

Has this happened in your life? Some inner knowing you ignored. Later, something bad happens. You beat yourself up. "Why didn't I listen? Why didn't I pay attention?"

We don't need to keep doing that.

Meghan French Dunbar (~14:30): For a lot of us, our intuition is speaking up like mine was with the foundation guy — to protect us. It is our work to divorce ourselves from the idea that our comfort isn't worth as much as someone else's.

That has been the work I have been doing for so long. Speaking up. Telling other people they're impacting me negatively. So hard. So rewarding.

Meghan French Dunbar (~15:30): Beyond protection — intuition is a proven way to make better decisions.

Research shows intuition benefits complex decision-making. It helps people perceive deception more accurately. De Becker: it enables us to make quicker AND often more accurate decisions.

Many leaders I know lean on intuition to make MAJOR business decisions.

Stephanie Nadi Olson (16:47): [Stephanie, founder of We Are Rosie] Once I ripped the band-aid off and said — I'm going to do this bat-shit-crazy thing nobody expects — a couple things happened. People rallied around me. I attracted the ones who believed in the vision. I kept them close. And I just kept my head down and did the next thing that felt really good.

When you have to make a hard decision — think about the options in front of you and ask which one gives you the most relief. Which one makes you feel the best AFTER you make it? "If I do this, I will feel relief. If I do this, I'll feel anxious."

I kept choosing ease and relief and the things that felt natural. The frictionless path. And the road kept unfolding.

Nobody knows what you're capable of better than you. If our goal is to change systems or to make our personal dreams come true — you've got to follow your own intuition. There were times I defaulted to someone else's opinion — "well, they know better than me" — and it would feel icky. Wrong. I had to find my own voice. Get used to disappointing people. Be willing to defend something unusual that others didn't understand.

Meghan French Dunbar (18:56): As Stephanie talked about — feeling that sense of relief.

I was at a women's leadership retreat a while back and heard Susie Batiz — founder of Poo-Pourri — talk about the same thing. She calls it resonance vs. dissonance.

If you know sound waves: when they're resonant, they come together into a gorgeous wave. When they're dissonant, they contradict each other. She pays attention to decisions that feel resonant. Her entire team asks: "Does this feel resonant? Does this feel easeful?"

If it feels dissonant — hard, crunchy, forced — they pull back. She uses resonance/dissonance to make team-wide decisions for a multi-multi-million dollar organization.

You can bring this into your work too. Does this feel right? Easeful? Resonant? When you feel like you're forcing it — can you step back? What would feel easeful?

Meghan French Dunbar (~20:00): Intuition doesn't just protect us. It guides us to the best decision possible. The way to tap into it is to pay attention and value your intuitive wisdom.

Practice 1: Build quiet time into your day. Walk. Meditate. 10 minutes. Any time you don't have inputs going into your brain to just listen for what's coming up. What feelings. What ideas. What thoughts. Quiet space is one of the best ways to actually notice your intuition.

Practice 2: Pay attention to your body. Diana Propper de Callejon talked about learning to listen to her body earlier in her career.

One of the best practices I've come across is the 5-senses grounding practice. Sit down, get quiet, even five minutes. Ask yourself: What do I hear? What do I smell? What do I see? What can I feel physically? What can I taste? These questions get you quiet and help you listen. Your body sends you intuitive messages all the time.

Practice 3: Reflection. Daily, weekly, whatever works. Gratitude journaling for compassion and joy. And an intuitive journaling practice — just paying attention. What came up this week? Who came to mind? What experiences? What ideas?

For me it's almost like following the breadcrumbs. Not always about making a decision or avoiding harm. Sometimes about finding inspiration. If someone's name or work comes up two or three times in a week or two — I pay attention. That means I'm supposed to reach out. If someone comes to mind on my morning walk — I text them right away. "Hey, thinking of you. What's going on?"

Following your intuitive interests will inevitably lead to some of the coolest things.

Meghan French Dunbar (~27:00): One of the most incredible intuitive downloads I ever had:

I'd been paying attention — women, ideas, all the things — for about a year. 2017. I'm sitting on the floor of our condo. Petting our dog. Thinking about how I really wish I felt a deeper sense of connection with the women entrepreneurs I know.

And the entire blueprint for a conference just plunked into my brain.

The name. World Changing Women's Summit. The speakers. Exactly what we would do. What it would look like. Handed to me.

I got up mid-conversation with my husband. Ran to the guest room. Ripped out a piece of paper. Sketched it all down.

I've talked to other people who describe these downloads or lightning strikes as extraordinary things that happen the more they pay attention.

We brought the conference to life in 2018. For three years running, we brought hundreds of women together for extraordinarily powerful conferences. To this day I still meet people who say "I was at World Changing Women 2019 or 2020 — I made THIS connection, I met my business partner, I had this insight..." — because I got quiet, paid attention, and didn't immediately dismiss the intuitive download as "not realistic."

Has this happened to you? A fantastic idea handed to you — and you convinced yourself it wasn't possible? Your rational brain telling you your intuitive wisdom didn't count?

We are conditioned in business to value the rational, analytical brain. As women, we're conditioned to think our intuitive feelings should be ignored.

Meghan French Dunbar (~30:00): Quick recap.

Intuition helps you make better decisions. What feels right, good, easeful, resonant. It protects you when something is wrong — and you can value your own comfort as much as anyone else's. You tap into it by getting quiet, listening to your body, reflecting, following the breadcrumbs.

When you actively ignore your intuition, you feel dissonance. Something feels wrong. When you honor it — you feel like you're in flow.

Hopefully intuition becomes something you pay a little more attention to. Bring it into your professional life. Your personal life. Find it as valuable as all the other leadership skills we've put on a pedestal for so long.

For today, that's all we've got. See you next time.

The Harris Poll recently found that 70% of people say the traditional leadership style has contributed to the societal problems we're currently facing. Unbehaved* host Meghan French Dunbar unpacks why — and what actually works instead.

She opens with the story of a boss she once worked for who was such a Tyrannosaurus Rex that her survival strategy became "do not make sudden movements, do not make eye contact, maybe he won't notice I'm here." Five months in, she gave notice. His response: "Your last day is today. Hand in your computer."

That story is the whole diagnosis in one scene.

Meghan walks through three failures of the traditional leadership model — and the new playbook that's replacing it, backed by data from MIT, Google's Project Aristotle, LinkedIn, and the 100+ leaders interviewed for her book This Isn't Working:

Meghan tells two stories that illustrate the alternative. The first: how she chose to tell her team about her pregnancy loss on the flight home from Amsterdam — instead of the boilerplate "family emergency" email — and how that turning point transformed a high-performing team into an extraordinary one. The second: how a workshop with women leaders at a $5B Midwest manufacturing company ended with them commissioning matching jackets after two days of sticky-note vulnerability.

Plus one provocative side note that will piss some people off: women aren't better leaders than men. Women are just more fluent at expressing both healthy masculine AND healthy feminine traits — because they were socialized to do both. Men were only taught to do one.

** [Editor's note: This episode originally aired under the show's former name, "Better Than This." The show is now "Unbehaved."]

"70% of people say that the traditional leadership style has contributed to the societal problems we're currently facing." — Harris Poll

"I took a bit of the Jurassic Park approach. He was the Tyrannosaurus Rex, and I was like — do not make a sudden movement, do not make eye contact. Maybe he won't notice I'm here."

"70% of people say that their manager has as much or more of an impact on their mental well-being as their spouse does."

"Employees who regularly witness their leader being vulnerable are 5.3 times more likely to trust their leader. And yet only 24% of leaders say they feel comfortable being vulnerable at work."

"Please, let's just retire the name 'soft skills.' These are incredible leadership skills to have."

"I don't think women actually make better leaders than men. What I think has happened is that women have been conditioned to express both — the healthy feminine AND, in order to succeed, the healthy masculine. Men have only been taught one."

"The more traits you have, the more tools you have in your toolbelt."

"Care and compassion in the workplace is the number one driver of employee engagement right now." — LinkedIn research

"My whole team just stood around me like a baby elephant in the middle of one of those elephant rings. They protected my time. They managed my inbox. They protected my privacy. I felt so supported by my team — and I didn't even realize how much I needed that."

Research + data:

Full lists (worth bookmarking):

Book referenced:

[Editor's note: Lightly cleaned for readability. Preserves original voice + delivery.]

Meghan French Dunbar (00:00): I don't know about you, but the societal stress we're all living in right now — it's a little dumpster-fire-ish. There was a recent statistic that came out from the Harris Poll that found that 70% of people say the traditional leadership style has contributed to the societal problems we're currently facing. And I was like — yes, it does. Sure does.

That's what we're going to talk about today. Traditional leadership. What is it? Why is it failing us? And what can we do about it? What's the alternative? I promise we're going to get there. We're going to go into an entire new approach of what we can do in place of the traditional leadership model.

So to illustrate the traditional leadership model, I'm going to take us way back — more than a decade back. I've just started a new job and it's one I'm very excited about. I'm working with a founder who I've idolized. He's a thought leader. He's someone I've always wanted to know and now I get to work for. So I'm coming onto his leadership team and I'm very damn excited about this new job. And I show up on day one, I go in to meet him, and he's on his phone. I hear him: "Just get it done. I don't know what could be taking you so long." And then he hangs up.

And I'm like — woo. This guy is firecracker. I don't want to be on the receiving end of this guy. He is a dominant dude.

I come to find out later that day that he was in fact talking to one of my colleagues. That was how he spoke to his employees. And this wasn't a one-time thing and it wasn't just a one-person target. It was in fact everyone. This was how he communicated. Very harsh. Very abrasive. A very dominant, aggressive, competitive person.

Within the first few weeks, I was terrified. Just absolutely scared of the man. I took a bit of the Jurassic Park approach. He was the Tyrannosaurus Rex, and I was like — do not make a sudden movement, do not make eye contact. Maybe he won't notice I'm here.

Others took a different approach. Some of my colleagues took more of a peacock approach where they really wanted to impress him. He was like one of those fathers who never loves their child, and the child is just constantly looking for their approval. There were a lot of people in there who were just like, just say something nice to me. Look at all the good work I did. And he would still just be gruff. There was always something wrong. He was always nitpicking. He had exceedingly high expectations that he, of course, came up with in his brain, didn't really communicate to anyone, and then would yell at us if we didn't hit them. He'd interrupt people mid-sentence. Shut people down. Super defensive. Highly critical of everyone around him.

I'll give him the benefit of the doubt. He was kind of old-school. Worked for a long time in Manhattan. I truly believe he thought this was the best way to lead — that you use fear and aggression and intimidation, it's my way or the highway, he's the thought leader here and we just need to execute his vision. I'm sure someone led him like this at one point.

I lasted five months. Something happened, I won't get into it. I was just like — F this, I'm out. I walked out the door and it turns out this was pretty much what every single employee did there. Most people didn't last more than a year.

When I called to tell him that I was leaving, I said, "I can give you four to six weeks. I know I'm in a leadership role, I have a lot of things to do, I don't want to leave you guys in a bind, but I'm going to be heading out for greener pastures shortly."

And he said: "Your last day is today. Hand in your computer. You're done."

He hung up on me. Cut off access to my email. Had a colleague drive to my house and pick up my computer within 90 minutes of my resigning. That's traditional leadership style.

Meghan French Dunbar (~04:00): When I say "traditional leadership style," it might not be this person — but as a thought exercise, if I ask you: think of a leader or a manager. What's the first thing that comes to mind?

When I first did this exercise, it was a 40-year-old white man sitting on a desk in a corner office in Manhattan. He had this — I don't even know why it's a pinstripe suit, but this chintzy pinstripe suit and a cheesy grin. That was my first mental image of a leader. And I was like — my god.

Did any of you think of a woman? If you did, you're in the significant minority of the global population.

This traditional leadership approach was first established by Dr. Virginia Shine in 1973. She asked managers in the United States to think of a manager or a leader and describe what came up. The vast majority thought of a man, or someone expressing masculine traits. This was replicated in 1996 and has been replicated in numerous contemporary studies which continue to show, to this day, that leadership has become synonymous with men and masculinity — or what are considered "masculine" traits.

If you listened to the episode where we talked about all the barriers women contend with in the workplace and just casually the history of business and patriarchy and toxic masculinity and all my favorite subjects combined, this will come as no surprise. If you didn't, here's the super-duper quick recap:

Business has been around for about 3,000-5,000 years, depending on what you count. Currency came around 5,000 years ago. The first organizations that could enter into contracts are about 3,000 years old. But let's just say — for thousands of years, business has been a thing. And as it became a globalized thing that impacts nearly every living species on planet Earth, the entire time it has evolved, it has done so in patriarchal societies. Patriarchy being the common belief that men are superior to women, that women's roles are relegated to domestic work, childrearing, homemaking.

As part of these patriarchal beliefs, we took our human traits — which everyone has access to — and decided these are the traits that will make women good caretakers and homemakers, and these are the traits that are powerful and dominant and what leaders need. Those are the "masculine" traits. We condition young boys to embody masculine — strong, competitive, ambitious, confident, courageous, bold. And young girls: docile, meek, quiet, subservient, agreeable, gentle, kind. All the things that will make you a fantastic, delightful wife and mother someday. If you somehow escaped your childhood without these being forced on you based on your gender identity, congratulations. Most of us didn't.

Since patriarchy became a thing about 10,000 years ago, many of the men were not just conditioned to embody masculine traits — they were belittled or made fun of if they expressed anything feminine. This is what toxic masculine beliefs are: a lot of anti-femininity. Anything that's an expression of "feminine" traits is a weakness. So men are not encouraged to be kind or compassionate or thoughtful or collaborative or any of the things. And these are the same men who, because of patriarchy, have been in the driver's seat of business since its inception. Unsurprisingly, we now equate effective leadership with purely masculine traits and with men.

Bink bink bomp. There it is in two minutes.

Meghan French Dunbar (~08:00): But the issue is — that is not the most effective way to lead.

It's just the leadership style that's been available to most leaders because they've never learned to express anything else. Then, because it's just what we see in leader after leader after leader, leadership becomes synonymous with masculinity without anyone taking the time to ask — wait a second, is that right?

Because it's not. Contemporary research continues to show that the very best leaders have a healthy blend of masculine AND feminine. We're going to get into that.

This is also why the traditional leadership model has been failing us. Three particular reasons.

When I say the traditional leadership model is failing us, I am not saying that masculine traits don't belong in leadership. There's a distinction between healthy masculine traits that improve your leadership, and toxic masculine traits that degrade it.

The issue is that many leaders don't make the distinction. They think leadership IS any masculine trait. So they bring a ton of toxic masculine traits to the table and it degrades their leadership.

Some of the most common toxic masculine traits: abusive, aggressive, angry, arrogant, authoritative, cutthroat, controlling, exploitative, harsh, hyper-competitive, hyper-independent, prideful, rigid, risky, unemotional, vindictive, and violent. (Full list in the show notes.)

When you look at what these toxic traits do in the workplace, they degrade leadership and destroy culture. This is what I experienced with the T-Rex leader I worked with. None of us wanted to collaborate. I was sitting in the corner trying not to make eye contact, 100% terrified. I was definitely not offering any of my opinions or suggestions because I was literally scared of being yelled at. People were fighting all the time. People were crying in the office. It was an abusive, toxic place to work.

MIT's most recent research around the Great Resignation — which everyone continues to blame on the "entitled millennial and Gen Z workers who are asking for too much" — in fact identified that the Great Resignation has been driven by toxic, abusive workplaces. The key elements they identified: workplaces that are biased, cutthroat, dishonest, disrespectful, and abusive. Cue: toxic masculine traits create these workplaces.

Other research shows:

When leaders are aggressive, dominant, cutthroat, and fear-based, they decrease psychological safety — which decreases collaboration, innovation, and creativity. All of it.

And when employees aren't leaving, they're feeling disengaged, disrespected. They bring it home. There's a statistic that 70% of people say their manager has as much or more of an impact on their mental well-being as their spouse. That blows my mind. That is the responsibility managers and leaders have — and that so many are abusing because they don't understand the difference between toxic traits and healthy ones.

End scene. Off the soapbox.

What they're most often referred to now is "soft skills," right? They're given some attention. There's some soft skills training for collaboration and communication. But of course, they're soft skills. Inferior to the hard skills, the real leadership skills. They have to be downgraded because they have something to do with the feminine. And of course, the feminine — well, we'll kind of accept it in the workplace, but we don't really want to. So we'll give it this degrading name and maybe do some training around it and pat ourselves on the back and feel good.

Please. Let's just retire the name "soft skills." These are incredible leadership skills. Communication, relationship-building, collaboration, vulnerability, adaptability, the ability to listen. All of these make leaders extraordinary and create unbelievable workplace cultures.

To illustrate — I'm going to tell a personal story from when I was CEO. This is one of the times I'm going to talk about something I did right, instead of using all the ways I've messed up. Trigger warning: pregnancy loss. Skip ahead if that's not something you feel like having in your brain today.

Backstory: I started a magazine in 2014 with a co-founder. Our first issue got picked up by every Whole Foods in the world. Then Target, Barnes & Noble, Books-a-Million. All of a sudden at 30 years old I was at the helm of a nationally distributed print magazine called Conscious Company Magazine. It turned into a media company — investment round, building the team, live events, podcasts, membership community, the whole thing. We got acquired in late 2017. I stayed on as CEO of a wholly-owned subsidiary under our new parent company.

Throughout this whole time — about four years — I don't think I took a vacation. Working nights and weekends. I had this entire story that the success of the company was resting on my shoulders and I couldn't take one single effing break.

2019 comes around and I'm like — I've been at this for five years. Maybe I should take a few days off. My husband and I decide to go to Europe. Amsterdam and Belgium. I've been looking at the canals in Bruges and imagining this gorgeous vacation.

Multiple weeks before this trip, I find out I'm pregnant. We had been trying. I was excited. Big deal. As soon as I found out, I was daydreaming about walking around the canals with my beautiful husband, talking about baby names, all the romantic ideas.

We fly to Amsterdam. Having a great vacation. Feeling good. We get to Bruges on day three — canals, cute romantic vision. We check into our bed and breakfast. And it turns out that I realize I'm losing the pregnancy.

There's so many emotions. This is the first time I've been on vacation. I've needed this time. And suddenly I'm dealing with an extraordinarily traumatic, stressful situation. I'm feeling guilty like — oh my god, I don't want to ruin the rest of our trip. We spend the next day in the hospital. Instead of the romantic vacation with my husband, the next week we're just trying to keep myself together. I'm just destroyed. I'm so sad. I'm grieving.

We get on the airplane home. Flying out of Brussels. The very first thing I do is pull out my computer and start drafting an email to my team to tell them I've had a family emergency. Right — a family emergency. I'm not going to tell them what's going on because leaders definitely aren't vulnerable in front of their team. We keep our personal and professional lives separate. I need to be stoic. Unemotional. This pillar of strength. All these ideas around leadership that are rooted in masculinity, in embodying masculine traits as a leader. A big part of that is: you do not show weakness, and you definitely don't show people when you're struggling.

So I'm writing this email. Boilerplate. I've had a family emergency, I am a robot, there is no emotion, I'm not going to tell anyone what's going on, but I'm going to be gone for a few days after I get home. This is an eight-hour flight.

And I'm looking at it and I start thinking — I spend the majority of my waking hours with these people. These are people I trust. My team, they work every day under my leadership and my guidance to bring all sorts of bonkers visions of mine to life. I would be so sad if one of them felt like they couldn't talk to me. If someone on my team was going through something as awful as I'm going through right now and I had no idea, I would be so sad that they didn't feel like they could talk to me about it.

I don't know what came over me, but I just was like — no. I'm not doing it the old way. I'm throwing the traditional playbook out the window.

So I write a different email. I say — everyone, I would love to have an all-hands meeting on Monday.

We had a co-working space. I got us a conference room. My whole team showed up on Monday. I came in and I told them what happened, and I cried openly in front of them. I told them how much grief I was feeling and I let them know I needed to take the week off to be with my family and heal. Some of them cried with me. It wasn't like any professional meeting I've ever seen.

I would say it was a turning point for my organization.

I was vulnerable with everyone, showed them how much of a human I am. And not only did I watch my entire team step up — holy moly, they went into full lock-up. I felt like a baby elephant in the middle of one of those elephant rings. My whole team just stood around me. They protected my time. They managed my inbox. They protected my privacy. They were extraordinary. I felt so supported by my team, and I didn't even realize how much I needed that.

But then — my team started to talk to me about things happening in their lives. Things I was very glad that I knew about as their leader. And the way we started to gel and trust each other as a team — it took us from what I would say was a high-performing team before, to an extraordinary team after.

I experienced firsthand the power of vulnerability at work. Research shows employees who regularly witness their leader being vulnerable are 5.3 times more likely to trust their leader — which leads to increased innovation, creativity, and the growth of team members themselves. And yet only 24% of leaders say they feel comfortable being vulnerable at work.

We kind of know the impact — but because traditional leadership tells us we're not really supposed to use these feminine traits at work, we don't really know how to step into them. But they are absolutely mission-critical for effective leadership.

Another vulnerability story. My friend Jocelyn and I were leading a women's leadership workshop at a large manufacturing company in the Midwest — a $5 billion company. Because they're in manufacturing, they were having a hard time getting women into leadership roles, and when they did have women in leadership, they were often at different plants and didn't know each other. The CEO brought us in to help the women who were in leadership build connections.

We're going in feeling a little nervous, honestly — like, these are Midwest manufacturing leaders, our work is really rooted in helping people connect through vulnerability. Are they going to be into it?

One of the very first exercises: we put up a big piece of butcher paper marked 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023. We asked them to anonymously write on sticky notes the major things that had happened in their personal or professional lives over the last three years. (This was 2023 — so there was COVID, so much.) They wrote and posted all their sticky notes based on the timeline.

Then we asked everyone to go up and look at everything their colleagues had gone through.

You see up there everything that everyone is going through at work that nobody is talking about. People's parents had passed away. Their children were contending with major mental health issues. They had financial issues. There was so much up on that board that immediately the very first thing you feel is a profound sense of compassion.

Then I said — who of you had something happen that was hard enough that you didn't even put it up on a sticky note? Many of the women raised their hand. And I said — this is the thing. Not only do the people you work with have things going on you don't know about, but there's an iceberg effect. Even the things they might show you, there's a ton of other things under the water.

Over two days, these women started opening up to each other. They started talking about common issues. And by the end — I kid you not — they left the workshop and had matching jackets made with nicknames on the back for all of them, because they felt such a profound sense of teamwork, collaboration, and camaraderie.

That is how vulnerability brings people together. It is a superpower in the workplace that we often overlook and disregard as a "soft skill."

There are numerous healthy feminine characteristics that improve leadership and are critical to building thriving cultures: care and compassion, listening, adaptability, communication, intuition, collaboration and teamwork. So many of these. Just a few statistics:

That's Failure #2 — overlooking the healthy feminine traits that make or break leadership.

Contemporary research continues to show the best leaders have a healthy blend of feminine AND masculine, plus a wide range of skills. They don't rely on 2-3 skills to get them through. Their ability to discern which skill or trait to rely on based on the situation is what makes them extraordinary.

I experienced this with my very first big-kid-job manager at the Environmental Defense Fund. My manager Whitney — hot damn, this woman. She could show up in a room with the confidence of a lioness AND was one of the most caring and thoughtful people I've ever met. She was bold, strategic, ambitious, confident, adaptable. She listened to my concerns, collaborated with me, acknowledged me.

All of the traits she held — the more traits you have, the more tools you have in your toolbelt. Traditional leadership relies on a few go-to things and that's all it does. The new playbook — healthy, holistic leaders bring feminine AND masculine AND have a wide range of skills.

Some of the research I reviewed while writing This Isn't Working:

And as I interviewed leader after leader for the book, I asked all of them: what are the key characteristics you find to be the most effective leadership traits? Here's the list I aggregated:

Accountable, adaptable, ambitious, appreciative, attentive, authentic, caring/compassionate, collaborative, communicative, competent, decisive, emotionally intelligent, empowering, generous, grounded, honest, humble, innovative, inspiring, intentional, intuitive, relational, resilient, strategic, supportive, transparent, and vulnerable.

As you can see — it is not a handful of leadership traits that builds extraordinary leadership. It's a wide range. A vast spectrum. Healthy feminine PLUS healthy masculine, brought together, with leaders who can discern which trait to rely on when.

Meghan French Dunbar (~33:00): Side story. This is one of those where I'm like — this is going to get taken out of context, but who cares, I just have to say the thing.

We were hosting a CEO workshop a year and a half ago. Someone brought up conventional research showing that women make better leaders than men. And I was like — I'm gonna have to say it, aren't I?

I'm going to push back. I don't think women actually make better leaders than men.

I think what has happened is that the women who are in leadership roles have, since they were young, been conditioned to express all of the feminine traits — the healthy ones. (And yes, there are toxic feminine traits — we'll talk about that later.) So they know how to be kind and caring and nurturing and compassionate.

And in order to succeed in the business world — and probably before that in academia and other patriarchal spaces where masculine traits are seen as what you have to be to be an effective leader — they've also learned how to healthily express masculine traits.

So many women, especially in the business world, can express both healthy masculine and healthy feminine — making them extraordinary leaders. Whereas men have been conditioned since they were young to only express masculine, belittled if they express anything feminine, and they've gotten into the business world where they're still told to do the masculine thing. Maybe they've done some soft skills training, but they're very rarely encouraged to learn how to express these feminine traits — even though they're totally available to them.

There are many men who have figured out how to effectively express care, compassion, empathy, emotional intelligence, and vulnerability. Some of the best leaders I've ever met. So when people say women are better leaders than men, what I actually see is that women are more fluent at expressing both — and men aren't encouraged to, so they're not as effective because they can't do the feminine thing.

Sorry, not sorry. Hope I don't get too much shit for that one.

Meghan French Dunbar (~35:00): Alright, three key takeaways from today.

One: Stop feeling like you can only express masculine traits in the workplace. If many people only feel comfortable expressing masculine, then it's the only thing that will be accepted. Just stop right there. Understand the difference between healthy and toxic masculine. And expand.

Two: Let go of the myth of soft skills. There are healthy feminine traits that are just as valuable — if not more valuable — than many of the masculine traits. Lean into them, value them equally, and work on expressing them.

Three: The more the merrier. The wider the range of healthy skills you can develop, express, and know when to reach for based on the situation — the more dynamic, the more multifaceted your leadership will be.

That's it for today. It was a lot. But thanks for hanging in with me.

Hopefully I'll see you next time.

Adios.

Are you stuck in a “should” career — one that looks good on paper but leaves you unfulfilled? Or maybe you’ve even settled for work that makes you miserable but feel like it’s too late to change?   

Then this episode is for you — or to send to anyone who's ever said "it's too late to change what I do."

Meghan French Dunbar opens with the story of Allison Bailey Vercruysse who made it to the upper echelons of investment banking at a young age, and then walked away from all of it to start 18 Rabbits Granola. It's an extreme version of a story most high achievers face at some point: you climbed the ladder, you did the "should" career, and now you're stuck at the top of a wall you don't want to be standing on.

In this episode, Meghan lays out three concrete practices for building a career you actually love — whether you're going to leap like Allison did, or dial the practices up inside the work you're already doing. Featuring one of the most-shared clips in the season: her coaching conversation with a former CEO friend who told her the next step was a bigger CEO role — and the question Meghan asked her that ended with, "I think I'd just try to be a consultant."

"When it comes to change, people either hate change — or they really f*cking hate change." — Paul Saginaw, co-founder of Zingerman's Deli

"But my ego was like, I have to go top 10. My heart, my passion, what actually lit me up was Presidio. And I actually, for one of the first times in my life, listened to my passion."

"70% of workers now tie their purpose in life to their work. So if you don't have much purpose beyond your salary or title or revenue goals, it can start to feel really shallow."

"When we look at the top five regrets of dying: I wish I hadn't worked so hard. I wish I'd had the courage to be and do what I actually wanted to do. I wish I'd kept in touch with my friends. I wish I'd had more time with the people that I loved. You do not have to wait until you are on your deathbed in order to make those decisions You can make them now."

"Dialing those three little dials up as much as possible — passion, purpose, quality of life — not only helps you build a career that you love but it helps you build an entire life that you love."

People + companies referenced:

Books + frameworks referenced:

Harvard's Human Flourishing Program — 5 markers revisited from Episode 3 Daniel Pink's three intrinsic motivators (revisited from Ep 3)

[Editor's note: Lightly cleaned for readability. Preserves original voice + delivery.]

Meghan French Dunbar (00:58): Hello, wonderful human. Welcome to Better Than This.

Today we're going to talk about one of my very favorite topics: building a career you actually love.

Is it possible to do work that you absolutely enjoy — that brings you to life, that sparks that fire inside of you, that pays you well, AND allows you to actually enjoy your life?

Yes. I propose that it is. I've seen people do it. I've built a career myself that follows along these lines. And there are practices that can help anyone on their journey to build a career they love.

We're going to start today with a story — not my own for once. This is from Allison Bailey Vercruysse — founder and former CEO of 18 Rabbits Granola. Creator, wonderful human. This is her story of her career unfolding.

[Allison shares her story of leaving the upper echelons of investment banking at a young age to build 18 Rabbits Granola from scratch — walking away from a prestigious career her parents were proud of.]

Maybe like Allison, you've found yourself in one of these "should" careers. Stable. What you've been told you're supposed to do. Practical. Pays well enough. Because you know — we're not supposed to LOVE our work, right? That's the story we've been told. Maybe it's parental pressure, financial pressure, societal pressure — whatever it is, you've found yourself in a role you're not particularly happy in. Either it doesn't fully light you up, or it's actively making you miserable.

What I've seen from so many people: they get stuck. You've climbed the ladder. You've put in the time. And the idea of changing it is "it's too late at this point." You give yourself excuses about why you can't leave the role, the career, or the industry to start over.

That's what blew me away about Allison's story. She had made it — at a young age — to the upper echelons of banking. Prestigious. Fancy. And she walked away and started from scratch.

Yes, that's an extreme example. I started with it for a reason. Her story illustrates so much of the societal narrative that keeps us trapped in things we don't love.

Judgment. Allison had parental expectations from her father — worry about disappointing him, letting him down. Worry about what her boss would think. So much concern about what other people would think of her career decision.

Fear of change. One of the first interviews I did for the magazine back in 2015 was with Paul Saginaw — co-founder of Zingerman's Deli in Michigan. He said something I have never forgotten:

"When it comes to change, people either hate change — or they really f*cking hate change."

It's stuck with me my entire career. Whether it's changing a workplace policy or leaving your career to take a leap — it's really hard for people, especially as we get older.

The linear-path story. The idea that a career is entry level → associate → mid-level → manager → all the way up. And that you have to stay on the linear path at the same level or above at every step. This keeps so many people trapped. You make it to VP. You don't like what you're doing. But to do something new, you feel like you have to start over at the bottom. So you convince yourself you can't step off the ladder.

These stories keep us stuck in roles we don't like. And when you think about your work — for most of us, it's where we spend the majority of our waking hours as adults. It's a primary source of stress. It's also a primary source of purpose and joy. It impacts your life in untold ways. It's one of the most important decisions you'll ever make.

I'll also acknowledge: sometimes there are financial situations where you can't just quit and change your work. Fortunately, all three practices we're going to talk about today can be incorporated INTO the work you're already doing. You don't have to stand up and quit tomorrow. It's possible to slowly turn the dial up on these practices in your current role and see if it can ever get to a point where it feels good enough.

You can also follow in Allison's footsteps and completely change what you're doing.

There's a broad spectrum here.

Meghan French Dunbar (~08:00): Practice 1: Follow your passion — not your should.

Follow what you love. That spark that lights you up. See what would happen or what the possibilities would be when you think about something you really, really love to do. Is there any way you could get paid to do it? Fantastic exercise.

[Jane Wurwand of Dermalogica speaks about getting paid to do what you love and the beauty of building a career around passion.]

You can also follow your passion in terms of what your next best step is. Following your passion instead of your should. Here's my story.

I was working at the Environmental Defense Fund and had fallen in love with their corporate partnerships program. EDF worked with McDonald's, KKR, Walmart — helping them become more sustainable. I fell in love with the marriage of business and sustainability. How do we incentivize businesses to act responsibly?

I wanted to study this in graduate school. My little high-achiever brain said: "Must attend top 10 MBA program." So I was looking at Harvard, Oxford, Booth, Berkeley, all the things.

At the same time — I found this teeny tiny niche program in San Francisco called Presidio Graduate School. At the time, it was the only MBA program in the country where I could study an entirely holistic, sustainable MBA. All of my sustainability heroes had either founded or were teaching at this tiny school. But nobody had ever heard of it.

My other option: get into a Top 10 MBA and also do a master's in environmental policy on the side — the popular path at the time. Extra year. I'd have to make the connections between environmental studies and my MBA on my own.

Whereas at Presidio, every single class was already taught through the lens of sustainability. Exactly what I wanted.

But my ego was like: "I have to go Top 10."

My heart, my passion, what actually lit me up — was Presidio.

And for one of the first times in my life, I listened to my passion.

I went to that teeny tiny little school and I loved it. Fantastic education. Met peers who were total business wonks like me but who really cared about sustainability. They're now leading sustainability at some of the biggest companies in the world. It was the best choice I could have made for myself.

I offer this story and Jane's approach as ways to move through societal judgment. What would your next best step be if you were letting what you LOVE lead the way — instead of external voices?

I grew up thinking there was an exact right script for how my career would unfold. My career has unfolded in the strangest possible ways I ever could have imagined. Not linear at all. It was a gorgeous progression of me following my passion and being brave enough to leave roles when the passion faded or the workplace became toxic. Each of those steps became a stepping stone that got me somewhere I never would have imagined — but it was the right place for me.

When you're thinking about your next step: what would it look like to follow what inspires you?

Meghan French Dunbar (~15:00): Practice 2: Tap into purpose and meaning.

70% of workers now tie their purpose in life to their work. So if you don't have much purpose beyond your salary or title or revenue goals, it can start to feel really shallow. It's a lot of the reason people can be at the highest echelons of their career and still feel like something is missing.

[Gayle Jennings-O'Byrne shares her story — the significant wake-up call that made her leave a corporate role she'd worked hard to get to. It was a good job. But it wasn't what brought her genuine meaning. She left. Took the leap. Started her own organization. And now lives her purpose every day.]

The research is clear. When people have a deep and profound sense of purpose:

Purpose is one of our three primary intrinsic motivators.

You don't have to quit and go start the organization of your dreams (although — call me if you want to, because I will 100% talk you into it). You can also tap into purpose in your current role.

Working for a purpose-driven organization. Volunteering. Small acts weekly or monthly that bring more purpose into your life. That's also a way to tap into purpose without quitting tomorrow.

Meghan French Dunbar (~21:30): Practice 3: Prioritize quality of life over extrinsic validation.

Extrinsic validation: title, status, awards, salary. The external stuff that makes us feel successful but doesn't actually make us happy.

Quality of life — going back to Harvard's Human Flourishing Program — is about the other three markers besides purpose:

So many of us sacrifice time with the people we love, our mental health, our physical health — in order to make more money, get the next promotion, take on more responsibility, or have the fancy title. We sacrifice the things that actually make us happiest in the name of external validation.

Here's an example.

Last year I was talking to a friend of mine. She had just left her role as CEO of a pretty big-name organization. We were talking through why she left. So much of it came down to how stressed and overwhelmed she was:

"I was constantly on the road. I have three young kids and I felt like I was missing their life. I had so much financial pressure from the board. I felt like I was never enough. Could never turn off. Constantly working nights and weekends. My mental health was suffering. Exhausted, overwhelmed. Right on the precipice of burnout. No time for physical health. Wasn't exercising. Everything was about my work."

At a certain point, she realized she just needed to step away.

I said: "Okay. Let's talk about what's next. What are you looking for?"

She said: "Well — I'm looking for a CEO role at a bigger organization."

I was like — "Friend. You just told me the CEO role is what made you miserable. So why do you think you need ANOTHER CEO role at a BIGGER organization?"

She said: "Well — that's the next step. If I don't take a CEO role, or if I take one at a smaller organization, people will think I've taken a step down."

I said: "No, no, no, no. We can't do this. What would it look like in this moment if you prioritized your wellbeing and your quality of life — the things that truly matter to you — over the extrinsic validation of title and salary and scale?"

She sat with it. And said:

"If I was prioritizing my quality of life — I think I'd just try to be a consultant and work for myself."

I said: "I think that's the answer."

So much of what looks like ambition is actually inertia. The next step on a script we never asked for.

The title, the status, all the societal garbage that makes us feel we have to do something bigger and better and more impressive — it doesn't matter. What matters is doing work you love, having time with the people you love, treating yourself well, being healthy. At the end of your days — THOSE are the things you'll be glad you prioritized.

When we look at the top 5 regrets of the dying:

You do not have to wait until you're on your deathbed to make those decisions. You can make them now.

What does it look like to prioritize quality of life over extrinsic validation? Instead of gunning for the next promotion — maybe you ask your employer to work four days a week. Or shorter days so you can be with your kids at 3. Maybe your next decision is about what would DECREASE your stress instead of what would INCREASE your salary.

When you ask those questions, everything shifts.

Meghan French Dunbar (~29:00): These three elements can get out of balance.

You can pursue something you love that lights you up but has no purpose and zero quality of life because you're a total workaholic. You can have purpose but sacrifice yourself because you care so much. You can be doing work with meaning that used to light you up but doesn't anymore.

You can change. Your purpose can change. Your passion can change. Your quality of life elements can change.

Dial all three up. Consistently. That's where the magic happens.

What you choose to do with your work and career is one of the most consequential decisions you'll make. Instead of just being about money and title and awards and climbing the ladder — what does it look like to optimize for what brings you to life, brings you purpose, and optimizes your quality of life?

Dialing those three dials up as much as possible doesn't just help you build a career you love. It helps you build an entire life you love.

Hopefully it means you get to the end of your days feeling this was a life well lived — and you're thrilled with the choices you made.

Until next time.

Ever feel like you have to change yourself to succeed at work? Then this episode's for you.

And it's a "do as I say, not as I do" episode of Unbehaved*, because host Meghan French Dunbar opens by confessing that she just spent six months trying to jam her personal website into someone else's mold and got exactly nowhere. Then she uses that miss to unpack why so many of us — especially women — struggle to lead from who we actually are, and what to do about it.

At the center of the episode is the story of Jocelyn McDougall — a facilitator who arrived at a business conference in a silk dress, Birkenstocks, and gold earrings, belting out Nina Simone's "Feeling Good."

Meghan's first thought was "this poor woman is going to get eaten alive." But by day three, every single person at the conference had fallen in love with her, and Jocelyn had become the most in-demand facilitator in the room. That moment cracked open Meghan's understanding of what authentic leadership actually is — and why it's a competitive advantage, not a professional liability.

In this episode, we cover the research showing authentic leaders create more positive emotions, better retention, and higher trust in their orgs. The Gabor Maté framework of two competing human needs (belonging vs. authenticity) that puts women in a perpetual lose-lose. Three concrete mindset shifts for cultivating authentic leadership — including the values exercise Meghan keeps taped to her desk, Alfa Demmellash's "What is uniquely mine to say right now?" question, and the Melanie Dulbecco story of running Torani Syrups on a foundation of questioning the status quo.

If you’ve ever felt like you have to act a certain way to be taken seriously at work — more polished, more professional, more together— this episode is for you. It’s about reclaiming yourself at work, in life, and in every room you walk into.

*[Editor's note: This episode originally aired under the show's former name, "Better Than This." The show is now "Unbehaved."]

- The website confession: how Meghan spent 6 months trying to make her site look like "big-name author" websites and produced 100 versions she hated

- The Jocelyn McDougall arrival: silk dress, mohawk, Birkenstocks, Nina Simone — and how the woman Meghan thought would get "eaten alive" became the most sought-after facilitator at the conference

- What authentic leadership actually is (beyond the buzzword) — and why it can be dialed up gradually rather than flipped as a switch

- Why women disproportionately struggle with authentic leadership: entering a dominant business culture as minority participants and being expected to assimilate

- The Marshall's power suit — Meghan's peplum "sausage casing" purchase before her first CEO conference

- Gabor Maté's framework of two competing human needs: belonging vs. authenticity — and why they're in constant contradiction in most workplaces

- The research: authentic leaders create more positive emotions in the people around them, inspire creativity, and increase retention and trust

- Mindset shift 1: Look to your values, not to others, to inform how you show up

- The windsock/sandbag metaphor for why values matter

- The 6 men at the conference table — and the question ("what was your most joyful moment this year?") that cracked the whole table open

- Mindset shift 2: Honor your truth regardless of who's in the room

- Alfa Demmellash's question: "What is uniquely mine to say right now?"

- Mindset shift 3: Regularly question the status quo — and why it's the foundation of innovation

- Melanie Dulbecco of Torani Syrups — 34 years, 20%+ year-over-year growth, and a leader who refuses to accept "the way it's always been done"

— "I 100% just took the old playbook and tried to force myself into it, even though it didn't feel right. That, in fact, didn't work. Surprising probably nobody."

— "Oh my gosh. This poor woman. Doesn't she know this is a business conference? Look at all of us professional humans out here. Why is she singing? Birkenstocks? Earrings? She's going to get eaten alive because she's so different."

~ Meghan's first thought about Jocelyn McDougall

— "Every single human being at that conference fell madly in love with Jocelyn McDougall. She was the best facilitator I had ever seen in my life."

— "Gabor and Daniel Maté describe two inherent human needs. Belonging — our hunter-gatherer survival instinct. Don't get kicked out of the tribe or you'll die. We need to feel included. Authenticity — expressing our individuality. Being our real self." ~ on Gabor and Daniel Maté, The Myth of Normal

— "One of the core predictors of disease on Earth is excessive concern about social acceptability."

— "Your values are the sandbags tied to the bottom of your windsock. They hold you to the ground. They keep the prevailing winds — which are often fierce — from whipping you around to the point where you can't function."

— "What is uniquely mine to say right now?" ~ Alfa Demmellash, co-founder of Rising Tide Capital

— "The odds you exist as a human being are staggering. You are the only you that will ever exist. You have a unique perspective in your brain that no other human alive has."

— "Meg. Deep breath. Do we change who we are based on the room we're walking into?" ~Jocelyn, before a fashion company meeting in New York

- 00:58 — The website confession: 100 versions and none of them right

- 02:30 — The realization: I abandoned my own playbook to try to fit someone else's

- 04:00 — 2017, Cortez Island, Hollyhock Leadership Institute: the Jocelyn McDougall arrival

- 08:00 — Meeting Jocelyn, super-friending her, and how the friendship became eight years of shared work

- 10:07 — What authentic leadership actually is (not just wearing what you want to the office)

- 11:30 — Why authenticity can be dialed up gradually — the 2% rule

- 13:00 — Real talk: if your workplace isn't safe for you to be fully yourself, that's real and valid

- 14:23 — Who is YOUR Jocelyn? And why is it so much harder for women to be one?

- 16:00 — The historical context: business grew up under patriarchy; women came in as a minority population

- 17:30 — The Marshall's power suit ("sausage casing with peplum")

- 19:00 — The Gabor Maté framework: belonging vs. authenticity as competing human needs

- 21:00 — Why concern about social acceptability is a top predictor of disease

- 22:00 — The research: why authentic leadership is more effective (more positive emotions, more retention, more trust)

- 24:00 — Mindset shift 1: Look to your values, not to others

- 26:00 — Nathan Havey's values exercise; Meghan's values (impact, exploration, love, joy, authenticity)

- 27:30 — The windsock/sandbag metaphor

- 29:00 — The 6 men at the conference table — and the "most joyful moment" question

- 31:00 — Where to keep your values: phone, spreadsheet, sticky note by the desk

- 32:00 — Mindset shift 2: Honor your truth regardless of the room

- 33:00 — Alfa Demmellash: "What is uniquely mine to say right now?"

- 34:30 — Jocelyn's hotel-room reminder before the New York fashion meeting

- 36:00 — Mindset shift 3: Question the status quo

- 37:00 — Melanie Dulbecco at Torani Syrups: 34 years, 20%+ YoY growth, and a refusal to accept the way it's always been done

- 39:00 — Recap: values → truth → questioning the norm

- 40:00 — Sign-off

People + companies referenced:

- Jocelyn McDougall — facilitator, Meghan's business partner and best friend; the Hollyhock arrival

- Alfa Demmellash — co-founder of Rising Tide Capital; source of the "What is uniquely mine to say right now?" question

- Melanie Dulbecco — CEO of Torani Syrups; 35 years at the helm, 20%+ YoY growth

- Nathan Havey — the values exercise that changed how Meghan operates

- Dr. Gabor Maté + Daniel Maté — The Myth of Normal; the belonging vs. authenticity framework

- Kathy Bolhous — CEO of Charter Next Generation; keeps her values on her phone

- Ayla Schlosser — Meghan's friend; keeps her values in a Friday-check spreadsheet

- Stephanie Nadi Olson — founder + former CEO of We Are Rosie; referenced for her assimilation story

- Coach + Kate Spade — Women's ERG workshops Meghan does with Jocelyn

- Hollyhock Leadership Institute — Cortez Island, BC; site of the Jocelyn arrival

- Social Venture Institute — the conference where it all started

Books + frameworks referenced:

- The Myth of Normal by Gabor + Daniel Maté

- This Isn't Working by Meghan French Dunbar (Hachette, 2025)

- Nathan Havey's values-identification exercise

- The 2% rule — dial up authenticity incrementally

- Research on authentic leadership + retention + positive emotional response

CONNECT WITH MEGHAN

- Book: This Isn't Working (https://meghanfrenchdunbar.com/book) &  available wherever you buy books

- Website: meghanfrenchdunbar.com

- Substack: https://meghanfrenchdunbar.substack.com

---

[Editor's note: Lightly cleaned for readability. Preserves original voice + delivery.]

Meghan French Dunbar (00:58): Today's episode is a whole do as I say, not as I do situation — because it's inspired by me making a big old mistake based on something I regularly talk about: authentic leadership.

Many months ago, I had a professional consultant come in, audit my online persona, and tell me: "You need to drastically update your personal website. It's not professional enough. Here's a whole bunch of examples of fancy big-name authors you should try to emulate."

I was like — okay, I'll do this. I want to be a big fancy name. So I'm going to DIY it. I'm going to come up with my brand promises and my taglines and my buzzwords, try to design it and put it on the backend, and jam my personal website into exactly the mold I've been told I need to fit.

I have — for the last six months — conservatively gone through 100 versions of my website. Changing out the taglines. They never feel right. I settle on something at night and wake up the next day and I hate it. It's awful. It's garbage.

Last week it finally dawned on me. I had completely abandoned my own authentic viewpoint.

I'm not a marketing person. I'm not a website person. And I felt uncomfortable doing this entire professionalization — instead of looking inward and asking "what would I want to say? What is uniquely mine to say here? What is the authentic version of this for me?" — I 100% just took the old playbook and tried to force myself into it, even though it didn't feel right.

That, in fact, didn't work. Surprising probably nobody.

So — today we're going into authentic leadership. Because it's not just about wasting hours trying to make a website cool. It's about how you show up every day at work — which impacts everyone around you AND your own mental health.

What is authentic leadership? Why does it work? Three mindset shifts to cultivate it. Let's go.

Meghan French Dunbar (~04:00): 2017. I'm invited to speak on an island off the coast of Canada.

I fly to Vancouver. Get on a float plane. Fly to Cortez Island. Middle of effing nowhere. Get off my little float plane onto this adorable island — gorgeous mountains, ocean — at Hollyhock Leadership Institute. I'm there for the Social Venture Institute.

I arrive. I don't know a single soul. Probably 100 people at this conference. We're all outside on a gorgeous lawn under gorgeous trees. I feel like a middle school person at lunch with no one to sit with. Just sitting at my table, looking around, hoping I'll see a friendly face. I don't know what to do with my arms.

Out of nowhere, I hear someone singing Nina Simone's Feeling Good.

I would sing it right now but it would be the worst.

This gorgeous voice — singing about birds flying high and you know how I feel. I look up. This woman walks down the path. Flowy silk dress. Pompadour-esque mohawk hairdo. Big gold earrings. Birkenstocks. She is BELTING out this song.

I'm like — who is this queen? I'm obsessed immediately.

She stops singing. Introduces herself. "I'm Jocelyn McDougall and I will be your host and facilitator for the conference over the next three days."

And a part of me is looking around like — "oh my gosh. This poor woman. Doesn't she know this is a business conference? Look at all of us professional humans out here. Why is she singing? Birkenstocks? Earrings? She's going to get eaten alive because she's so different."

That was the old-playbook, very buttoned-up, insecure version of me having those thoughts.

I watch over the next three days. And I mean it when I say every single human being at that conference fell madly in love with Jocelyn McDougall. She was the best facilitator I had ever seen in my life. She held challenging conversations with grace and levity. There was so much humor in the space. Everyone felt encouraged to be a braver, brighter version of themselves as a result of her.

On the last day, I was so inspired I did what she now describes as "super friending." At lunch, I walked up to her, introduced myself, and said:

"I think we're supposed to be friends for the rest of our lives."

Playing it cool. Nailed it.

She very gracefully did not immediately reject me. Later that year we Skype-called. Later still, I had an idea for a big women's conference and she popped into my head — I called her, invited her to come co-host, she did, and thus began an eight-year lifelong friendship and working partnership. We've done conferences around the country. Workshops. I'm literally leaving next week to do one at Coach and Kate Spade with her.

I was not wrong when I told her we were meant to be best friends for the rest of our lives.

And it all started at Hollyhock, where I watched her show up as her full authentic self.

That, for me, is the embodiment of why authentic leadership works. Why showing up as gorgeous and as large as you want to in your own skin — speaking from your own truth, being yourself — absolutely sets you apart. Jocelyn endeared herself to the entire community and got booked again and again. It became a huge professional opportunity for her because she just showed up as herself.

Meghan French Dunbar (10:07): Let's kick this off by talking about what authentic leadership actually is.

I used to have a shallow version of it in my head — someone brave enough to wear whatever they want and say whatever they want. That can be a PART of it. But authentic leadership really means leading from a place that is true to who you are — as your highest and best self. Going down into your deeper values, your deeper truth, your inner wisdom. Challenging the status quo. Having emotional regulation. There are lots of components that pull together to make someone a genuinely authentic leader.

The thing I didn't understand: this can be honed over time. It can be stepped into gradually.

When I talked to Jocelyn about her own journey — you'd meet her now and imagine she came out of the womb like this. She said no. In her early twenties, she wore kitten heels and a power suit. She showed up as a very polished version of herself, conforming so she'd be accepted.

She noticed later in her twenties and early thirties: the more she dialed up her authentic leadership — spoke her truth, showed up as truer to herself — the more positive response she got. It was setting her apart. So she just took the dial and kept gradually turning it up.

Good point for me to understand: this doesn't have to be an overnight flip. Even eight years in, I'm still contending with it.

The other critical piece — I'm not shaming anyone who cannot show up in their full authentic leadership right now. Especially if you're at a workplace where you don't feel safe. Where you don't feel included. Where your job security might be on the line. Where a manager doesn't accept you for who you are. This is tied to your livelihood, your financial stability, your sense of self-worth. If you're feeling "I can't do this," that fear is very real and 100% valid.

One leader I talked to called it the 2% rule — try to get 2% better at something every week or every month. Gradual progression. Not a switch.

Not all workspaces are safe. That is heavy. Acknowledge it. And if you can't step into your full authentic leadership right now, there is no shame. There is zero shame.

Meghan French Dunbar (14:23): Who is YOUR Jocelyn? Have you ever been around someone in a professional setting who shows up wholly authentically — no matter the room they're in — who doesn't deviate, doesn't change, isn't wearing a mask? How do you feel when you're around those people? What do they make you feel about yourself?

For me, Jocelyn inspired me to lean into my own authentic leadership. It became more of the norm than the exception in the vast majority of spaces I show up in now. Still working on it — because it's really effing hard. Especially for women.

Here's why. Going back to episode 2: business as a social construct has been around for thousands of years. Only in the last 50 has women started entering the workforce in earnest. Meaning men have shaped the business world for nearly the entire time it's existed. When women started entering in the 1970s, we were a minority population entering a dominant culture — white, straight, male, able-bodied. That's still the dominant culture in business.

When you have a minority identity entering a dominant culture — like immigrants — you try to adopt the norms in hopes of being accepted. The same is true for women and other people with marginalized identities. We feel we have to dress more masculinely. Have masculine traits coming out of the wazoo. Can't show emotion. Anti-femininity everywhere.

This was especially true for the older generations — women now in their 60s and 70s who were the first in their offices, under microscopes, forced to over-assimilate.

We are still doing this today. My first CEO conference in 2016 — 80% male CEOs. I ran to Marshall's the day before to get a freaking power suit. Found one in the JUNIOR SECTION. Chintzy — I can still feel the fabric — like a sausage casing with peplum. Wore high heels even though I've had three knee surgeries. In my brain: "if I have any chance of succeeding here, I have to show up like that. Not like me."

I have to become someone else to be included.

Meghan French Dunbar (~19:00): Here's the really hard part. Belonging is one of our core human needs.

From The Myth of Normal, Gabor and Daniel Maté describe two inherent human needs:

Belonging. Our hunter-gatherer survival instinct — don't get kicked out of the tribe or you'll die. We need to feel included.

Authenticity. Expressing our individuality. Being our real self.

When you head into a workplace with established cultural norms, you feel like you have to suck it up and become the picture of what everyone else is doing so you can belong. Which is the core need. Also how you feel you'll succeed. Stakes are high — your livelihood, career, success.

So you convince yourself you have to be a certain way.

But your other core human need is to be authentic. They're in direct contradiction. Butting heads constantly. Damned if you do. Damned if you don't. One of them is going to have to suffer — and we almost always err toward belonging.

So we suppress our authenticity.

Feeling out of alignment with your values is one of the six key predictors of burnout. It stresses us to constantly wear a mask. And the Matés also found: one of the core predictors of disease on Earth is excessive concern about social acceptability. Which is what women are constantly navigating.

And here's the more effed-up part: so many times, even after we've bent and molded and changed ourselves to fit in — we're still not accepted. The good old boys club still isn't opening up. And in the cases where you ARE included, they're not actually including the real you. They're including a faux version of you that isn't a real entity.

Meghan French Dunbar (~22:00): The answer: authentic leadership. Much easier said than done. I've studied this for years, written about it, and I STILL got sucked into the comparison vortex six months ago and popped out having assimilated right on in.

The practice is: begin again. Be compassionate. Re-step into authenticity as soon as you realize you've fallen off.

The research keeps showing authentic leadership is more effective. Authentic leaders inspire more positive emotional response in the people around them. Those positive emotions inspire creativity and inspire people to be a better version of themselves. Authentic leadership also reinforces workers' emotional connection to their organization — improving trust, loyalty, retention.

And the impact on YOURSELF is incredible. Think about the people in your life you get to be your entire full self with — friends, family. Those are the moments you light up. Feel aligned. Feel accepted. That doesn't have to be relegated to a few people on an occasional trip. It can be an everyday occurrence — at work — where you're accepted for your full self.

Three mindset shifts.

Meghan French Dunbar (~24:00): Mindset shift 1: Look to your values, not to others.

The old playbook tells us to look to others to cue us in on how to behave. Take social cues. Norms and behaviors of people around us tell us how to show up.

The new playbook: look to YOUR VALUES to inform how you show up.

Used to be, if you'd asked me "what are your values?" I'd have said "family?" I didn't really know them. Then my friend Nathan Havey walked us through a values exercise for my company — and told us to take it home and do our personal values too.

I went home. Identified my values. I still keep mine right here by my desk, inside a beautiful little flower my son Jack drew for me: Impact. Exploration. Love. Joy. Authenticity. Five values. I recommend five for everyone.

Here's a visual I use to explain why this matters. Each of us is like one of those flailing windsock people outside a used-car lot — going all over the place. The wind is all the pressure and social expectations and challenges of life constantly blowing us around.

Your values are the sandbags tied to the bottom of your windsock. They hold you to the ground. They keep the prevailing winds — which are often fierce — from whipping you around to the point where you can't function.

Here's an example. I was at a conference a couple years ago. Sat down at a table where there were six men — all in their 60s and 70s, all knew each other, all on a board together. Insecurities all over the place. I almost picked up my plate and left. I was starting to think — I'll just eat my veggie burger in silence for an hour.

Deep breath. Reviewed my values. What could my values inspire here? Thinking about joy and love and curiosity — I lobbed a question in.

"Could each of you tell me about a moment in the last year that was just your most joyful moment?"

A few seconds later, one of them answered — his daughter's wedding. Another jumped in about a trip with his wife. All of a sudden, all of them were sharing the most beautiful and meaningful moments of the last year of their lives. It cracked us all open. Instead of being silent for an hour, I inspired us all to have a really gorgeous conversation — and connected with those men in a different way.

Where do you keep your values? Kathy Bullhouse (CEO of Charter Next Generation) keeps hers on her phone. My friend Ayla Schlosser keeps hers on a Friday-check-in spreadsheet. Spreadsheet, phone, sticky note — however works for you. Come back to them regularly.

One good way to think about your values: how do you want people to talk about you when you're not in the room? When you leave this earth, how do you hope people remember you? What character traits are non-negotiable for you?

Meghan French Dunbar (~32:00): Mindset shift 2: Honor your truth regardless of the room.

The old playbook tells us our opinion, perspective, and truth vary in value based on who's in the room. There are rooms where you feel open to speak your truth because you have the title. There are rooms where you withhold your truth because there are people of "higher status" and you feel less-than.

The new playbook: honor your truth regardless of the room.

This is hard, especially for women trained to be docile, sweet, not make people uncomfortable, be quiet. Speaking your truth and believing it's as valuable as everyone else's — regardless of their title — is a key element of authentic leadership.

Full pep talk, buckle up: the odds you exist as a human being are staggering. Of all the planets. Of all the conditions that had to be right for life. Of all the hundreds of thousands of years humans have existed. Of all the ancestors who survived disease and war so that eventually YOU could be born in this moment in time.

You are the only you that will ever exist. No other human has your specific mix of experiences, education, generational trauma, generational wisdom. You have a unique perspective in your brain that no other human alive has.

So when I invite you to offer your truth, it's from that inner knowing: what you have to say is valuable regardless of your title, age, or any identifier.

Alfa Demmellash — co-founder of Rising Tide Capital, one of the most authentic leaders I've ever known — offered me a nugget of gold. Before she walks into big meetings, or if she's in an uncomfortable room, she asks herself one question:

"What is uniquely mine to say right now?"

Not what other people want her to say. What is UNIQUELY hers to say.

Try it before your next hard room.

I had a big gig last year in New York. I live in Boulder — I'm not a fashion person, I live in athleisure. We were going into a fashion company. Night before, I was in Jocelyn's hotel room trying on outfits, freaking out. She takes me and says: "Meg. Deep breath. Do we change who we are based on the room we're walking into?"

I was like — "yes. No. No, we don't, Jocelyn. We don't."

So I didn't.

Meghan French Dunbar (~36:00): Mindset shift 3: Question the norm.

The old playbook: don't question the status quo. People came before us and set it there for a reason. To succeed, play by the rule book. Never question.

The new playbook: regularly question the status quo — especially when it contradicts your values or your truth.

Rather than talk this one through — let me give you one of my favorite CEOs in the country as the example. Melanie Dulbecco — CEO of Torani Syrups. For 34 years at the helm, they have grown 20%+ year over year. Staggering. So much of that comes down to the fact that she does not accept the status quo as the way she's supposed to do things. She takes the given playbook into consideration and then questions it from a place of curiosity: "Is this the right way to do it?"

She's one of the most authentic leaders I've ever met. And the proof is in the pudding. Or the syrup. Sorry, bad joke. It's a more effective way to lead.

Meghan French Dunbar (~39:00): Recap.

Values. Look to your values, not to others, to inform your behavior.

Truth. Honor your truth, remember it's a gift, value it as much as anyone else's — regardless of who's in the room.

Norm. Regularly question the status quo. Stay curious.

These three practices will help you on your journey toward becoming a more authentic leader. Which is better for you, better for the people around you, and better for the business community at large. The more of us who step into our wholeness and bring our entire selves to the workplace, the more we inspire others to do the same. The more we do this, the better the workplace becomes.

That's all for today. Thanks so much.

Has perfectionism ever kept you from applying for the job, launching the thing, saying the thought out loud, or making the leap you know you want to make? This episode is going to change how you think about failure.

Unbehaved* host Meghan French Dunbar opens with the story of her failed Kickstarter campaign to launch Conscious Company Magazine — how she watched a public countdown clock tick to zero on a very public failure, cried in her co-founder's living room, went home to sob with her husband, then dusted herself off, launched a second crowdfunding campaign, and ended up in every Whole Foods in the country by January 1st.

In this episode, she breaks down why perfectionism is a trap that specifically holds high-achieving women back (spoiler: it's not a personal flaw — it's socialized) and lays out three concrete mindset shifts + practices for putting yourself out there anyway. Including Erin Wade's story of walking away from a corporate law career to open Homeroom Restaurant, Carol Dweck's research on performance goals vs. learning goals, and Meghan's own coined framework — EFWO: "Everything Fcking Works Out."

* [Editor's note: This episode originally aired under the show's former name, "Better Than This." The show is now "Unbehaved."]

- The failed Kickstarter that started everything: watching a $50K crowdfunding campaign tick down to zero in front of family, friends, and the whole internet — and what happened next

- Why high-achieving women disproportionately struggle with perfectionism: socialization + performance pressure + being held to higher standards at work

- The research: women have higher rates of perfectionism, lower self-esteem, and higher stress about performance

- The famous stat you've heard: women don't apply for roles unless they're 100% qualified; men apply at 50%

- How perfectionism keeps you playing small: the friend who wouldn't launch her business idea because "I don't have any risk tolerance" — and the mediocre life that decision built

- Erin Wade's story: getting fired from a corporate law firm, opening Homeroom Restaurant, and the friend who asked her the question that unlocked everything

- Mindset shift 1: Normalize the fear + play it out to worst-case scenario. Neuroscience shows your brain can't tell the difference between social threats and physical threats. Once you know that, you can start noticing when it's your adorable brain trying to "protect" you from something that's not actually dangerous.

- Mindset shift 2: Reframe performance goals as learning goals. Carol Dweck's research on growth mindset — and how one friend put "learning goal" on a Post-it behind her computer and eliminated her MBA-accounting stress overnight

- Mindset shift 3: EFWO — Everything Fcking Works Out. Meghan's coined framework. Every apparent failure is actually a stepping stone. Jane Wurwand's dot-to-dot analogy for why.

- Meghan's book journey as an EFWO case study: the fired-from-a-job moment that produced the magazine idea, the small-publisher rejection that led to the Hachette deal

- The question to sit with: "If you removed the fear of failure from your life, what would you pursue?"

"It's not that I've completely overcome my perfectionism. It's that I have a lot of practice with these things — and I have some tools that have helped me."

"Being a perfectionist and having this incessant fear of failure often gives us the illusion of safety — but we're actually just playing small."

"Every single one of the women I know who are thriving, running businesses they love, writing books, out public speaking, living the life that's setting their soul on fire — there is not one of them who didn't have to put herself out there and risk failing multiple times."

"Well, Erin — what would you do if that happened?"

"Well, I guess I'd just be a lawyer again."

"So then why would you literally settle for what your worst-case scenario is if you failed as an entrepreneur? Why would you immediately go to the worst-case scenario?"

 — Erin Wade on the conversation that unlocked her decision to walk away from law

"It's literally my adorable little brain trying to protect me."

 — on the neuroscience of fear

"Especially if what you find is 'I would be embarrassed' — that's not a good enough reason not to do something."

"Whatever is meant for me won't pass me by."

"In the growth mindset, failure can be a painful experience, but it doesn't define you. It's a problem to be faced, dealt with, and learned from. The other thing exceptional people seem to have is a special talent for converting life's setbacks into future successes."

 — Carol Dweck

"Everything is happening for you, not to you."

 — the foundation of EFWO

"You can't see what that dot-to-dot puzzle is until you start filling in the space between the dots. The dots were all there all the time. But you can't see what the hell it is until you start making the journey."

 — Jane Wurwand, co-founder of Dermalogica

- 00:00 — Cold open: what this show is for

- 00:58 — The conversation with Maddie that sparked the episode

- 02:00 — The Kickstarter story: $50K public goal + a countdown clock ticking to zero

- 06:00 — Dusting off, launching an Indiegogo, and ending up in every Whole Foods in the country

- 08:00 — Why so many high-achieving women struggle with perfectionism

- 10:11 — The research: higher perfectionism, lower self-esteem, more stress about performance

- 12:30 — The friend who wouldn't launch her business because "I don't have any risk tolerance"

- 14:00 — Why the "illusion of safety" that perfectionism gives you is actually shrinking your life

- 15:30 — Erin Wade's story: law firm → getting fired → opening Homeroom Restaurant

- 19:00 — Mindset shift 1: Normalizing fear + playing it out to worst-case scenario

- 21:24 — Erin Wade on the friend who asked her "What would you do if that happened?"

- 24:53 — Mindset shift 2: Performance goals vs. learning goals (Carol Dweck)

- 26:30 — The friend Katie who put "learning goal" on a Post-it and eliminated her MBA-accounting stress

- 30:00 — Meghan's book journey as a learning-goal case study

- 34:13 — Mindset shift 3: EFWO — Everything Fcking Works Out

- 35:11 — Jane Wurwand's dot-to-dot analogy for how life unfolds

- 36:04 — The night she was fired that gave her the idea for the magazine

- 38:00 — The Conscious Company buy-back that fell through — and cleared the space for the book

- 40:00 — The small-publisher rejection that led to the Hachette deal

- 41:30 — The closing question: "If you removed the fear of failure from your life, what would you pursue?"

People + companies referenced:

- Maddie — Meghan's 24-year-old mentee whose question sparked the episode

- Erin Wade — founder of Homeroom Restaurant in Oakland, CA; former corporate lawyer

- Carol Dweck — Stanford psychologist and pioneer of growth-mindset research; performance vs. learning goals

- Katie — Meghan's friend, oncology nurse navigator, MBA student; the accounting-class reframe

- Jane Wurwand — co-founder of Dermalogica; source of the dot-to-dot analogy

- Eileen Fisher — referenced as a "put yourself out there, fail multiple times" example

- Kickstarter, Indiegogo, Conscious Company Magazine, Hachette Book Group — Meghan's own case studies

Books + frameworks referenced:

- Mindset by Carol Dweck (implied)

- This Isn't Working by Meghan French Dunbar (Hachette, 2025)

- EFWO — Meghan's own coined framework: Everything Fcking Works Out

- Growth mindset vs. fixed mindset

- Performance goals vs. learning/mastery goals

- Neuroscience of social vs. physical threats

- Book: This Isn't Working: https://meghanfrenchdunbar.com/book — available wherever you buy books

- Website: meghanfrenchdunbar.com

- Substack: https://meghanfrenchdunbar.substack.com

[Editor's note: Lightly cleaned for readability. Preserves original voice + delivery.]

Meghan French Dunbar (00:58): Today's episode is inspired by a recent conversation I had with my (quote) "mentee." I put "mentee" in quotation marks because she's really just someone I adore who asked me to be her mentor and I was like "I guess we can do that, but really I just adore you and we bring value to each other, so let's meet on a regular basis in a mutual appreciation society where we talk about anything we want to."

One of her questions recently: how did I overcome my fear of failure? Especially doing things like launching a magazine and public speaking — all the things I've put out in a more public-facing way. How did I overcome crippling perfectionism and the need to 100% guarantee success at everything I did?

I was like: "Oh, Maddie. I wish I could say that came easy. It did not. Do I have a story for you."

After that conversation, I thought — this is a great podcast topic. It impacts so many people I talk to. A perfectionist personality that leads to crippling fear of failure, making it so people don't pursue what they actually want.

I grew up as a high achiever. From when I was like eight, I'm winning awards, wanting to be the best in class, captain of the soccer team and basketball team, all of it. As I graduate college, this ambitious personality leads me to a place where I am pretty terrified of failure. I am a perfectionist. Everything I do, I need to be the best at. I need to prove to everyone that everything I touch turns to gold.

It made me essentially terrified of taking risks my entire twenties. I never did anything new because I hated learning something for the first time and not being perfect at it immediately.

This changed at the end of my twenties in a number of ways. One of the key ones: when my co-founder and I had the idea to launch a business magazine about conscious and sustainable business, we had to launch a crowdfunding campaign to get it off the ground.

We literally set up in my backyard. Made our little video. Explained why the world needed this incredible business magazine to celebrate leaders of businesses actually making the world a better place. We put it on Kickstarter. We wanted to raise $50,000 in 30 days.

With Kickstarter at the time, if we didn't raise the full $50,000, we would lose all the money we had raised.

Talk about stress and pressure.

And just to make it more painful — this was a very public thing. I had to send it to every human being I've ever known in the history of my life to ask for money. Social media. Bringing attention to the campaign.

I was terrified. This was one of the bigger risks I'd taken in my life. It was a reputational risk — a social judgment risk — people would see me fail if we didn't accomplish this.

As the 30 days progressed: $10,000. $30,000. More and more coming in. Doing cute random acts of kindness in the community to bring attention. We had about $42,000 on the last day.

Of course, I'm like — there's going to be a Hollywood script here. Some random aunt I've never met is going to throw in the last $8,000 at the final minute. Hail Mary. Over the finish line. Everything perfect.

Final five minutes. No one else has thrown in the money. Last two minutes of the campaign. I'm sitting with my co-founder at her house. It starts counting down by the second — like a bomb about to go off. Five, four, three, two, one — the screen flashes. I don't even remember what it said. But it might as well have said: YOU FAILED. YOU FAILED VERY PUBLICLY AND YOU'RE A TERRIBLE HUMAN BEING.

I was mortified. Family calling me, checking if I was okay. Sobbing. Went home. My husband. My dad came up — cute — brought me a box of little goodies to help me overcome my failure.

And of course, I was going to move on and get a real job now, right?

That is not what happened.

I decided to dust myself off. A few weeks later, my co-founder and I launched another crowdfunding campaign. We went back to the same people who'd backed the Kickstarter. Did it on Indiegogo — chose the option of "we're just going to raise whatever money we get, we'll take it." We raised about $20,000 — just enough to hire a designer, cover the print bill, get all the distribution.

On January 1st, 2015 — because of that crowdfunding campaign — we got picked up by every Whole Foods in the country.

I told Maddie: as my story shows, most of the things we want to do in our life are going to require us to put ourselves out there and risk "failing." It's not that I've completely overcome my perfectionism. It's that I have a lot of practice with these things — and I have some tools that have helped me.

That's what we're going to talk about today. The perfectionism trap. How do we overcome our fear of failure? Three concrete strategies and mindset shifts that have helped many of the people I know pursue extraordinary things and take huge risks.

Meghan French Dunbar (~08:00): Why so many high-achieving women struggle with perfectionism.

This is a generalization — not all women — but many. Growing up in societies with a patriarchal lens, girls are socialized to seek perfection in all things. Unattainable physical perfection. Social perfection — where we don't want to make mistakes or churn the water, we need to make everyone around us comfortable. There's a socialized perfectionism in young girls as we come of age.

And then when you're high-achieving, you also don't want to fail at anything you try. You want to prove you're the best. Extrinsic motivation of rewards and grades and everything we've been indoctrinated with — we can't make any mistakes.

For women specifically in the business world: we're held to higher standards. Our work is doubted. We're ignored, overlooked, judged more harshly. We're kind of proven incompetent until proven otherwise. So we have to avoid mistakes at all costs. Overperform. Go the extra mile. We tie our worth to our performance and our ability to never make a mistake.

Often, ascending the ladder, you're one of the first women who's ever been in this role. You feel this additional pressure that if you make a mistake, it reflects poorly on women everywhere. Our fear of any misstep becomes a form of self-protection. At some point, we just can't accept anything less than perfect.

Meghan French Dunbar (10:11): How perfectionism holds you back.

One research study found that women have higher rates of perfectionism, lower rates of self-esteem, and higher levels of stress about their performance. Surprising nobody.

This is why we hear stats like: women don't apply for roles unless they're 100% qualified. Men apply at 50%. It also shows up as women holding back their voice — the "I don't know if this makes sense, but..." qualifiers that diminish our contributions because we're not 100% confident they're perfect.

A lot of what I'm cultivating as I get older is the ability to have self-compassion. I see that fear and understand why I'm feeling it — a lot of this was conditioned in me. What would it look like to step into that opportunity or say the thing without it being 100% perfect? I've been experimenting with that lately. Even on this podcast — not every single episode is going to be perfect. And that has to be okay.

Beyond not applying for jobs or not speaking up in meetings, persistent fear of failure often holds us back from what we actually want. From taking the risk that could be the difference between a mediocre existence and the existence we want to have.

A friend of mine — we were talking a few years ago. She lives in a small community. She had this business idea. Not a passing thought — she'd detailed the value proposition, the community need, all of it. I was like: "Damn, this seems like something you're really passionate about!" She said: "I really am. I don't know." I asked what was holding her back. She said:

"Just risk intolerance."

I said — I've been there. Let me tell you. She said: "No, I don't have any risk tolerance. I can't do this."

She had already talked herself out of pursuing the thing she actually wants to do. And continues to be at a job she doesn't love as a result.

To pursue the things that will actually make you happy or help you flourish, you have to make a change. Whether it's quitting, launching a business, starting a side gig, going back to school, switching industries. At some point we get an internal story that we're too old to put ourselves out there. The more comfortable we get with staying in the comfort zone, the more we relegate ourselves to a mediocre job we actively dislike.

Being a perfectionist and having this incessant fear of failure often gives us the illusion of safety — but we're actually just playing small.

Eileen Fisher. Jane Wurwand of Dermalogica. Every single one of the women I know who are thriving, running businesses they love, writing books, out public speaking, living the life that's setting their soul on fire — there is not one of them who didn't have to put herself out there and risk failing multiple times.

Becoming comfortable with failure is a key tool for flourishing.

Erin Wade (~15:30): [Erin, on leaving corporate law to open Homeroom Restaurant] I got a job working for a large corporate firm making a shit-load of money, defending America's largest companies from lawsuits. I really hated it. I was miserable. Your time is measured by the minute. It's billed to the client every six minutes. Your success is defined not so much by the outcome for the client as much as how much you bill. Really demoralizing. It felt like being on a hamster wheel to nowhere.

Not surprisingly, I was not great at it. Every time a partner asked me to work late or stay on a weekend, I was like — hell no. Last person to raise my hand. At some point, they were like: "This is a recession. We could hire anyone to be making a lot of money." I got let go.

Real awakening. I'd always been a big overachiever. I'd never failed so spectacularly. I was fired literally because I didn't care. It's a bad feeling to get fired.

I thought about where I wanted to go. I'd never let go of that love of restaurants. I honestly thought I'd just be a lawyer for a decade, make enough money, and open one one day. I was like — what am I doing? I don't have kids. I don't have a house. I don't have anything to lose. Why not open a restaurant that I had dreamed of opening?

Even though I went into business out of a love of food, the thing I actually fell in love with was business itself. A lot of the drive to do good in the world that led me to become an attorney — I felt I could do so much more of that in business than I ever could as a lawyer. By creating the company you want to create, you create the world you want to create. It's a little microcosm of your values. I found tremendous meaning and joy in that.

Meghan French Dunbar (17:42): If Erin had let her fear of failure stand in the way, she'd probably still be toiling as a partner in some corporate law firm with the golden handcuffs on. Fairly miserable.

This is why it's so critical to overcome the incessant need to be perfect. Let's get into three specific mindset shifts and practices for working yourself beyond risk aversion.

Meghan French Dunbar (19:00): Mindset shift 1: Normalize fear + play it out to worst-case scenario.

Neuroscience continues to tell us that our brains perceive social threats and physical threats very similarly. Our brains can't really tell the difference between the fear of being socially rejected or failing publicly (like my crowdfunding campaign) and, say, seeing a car careening at us in a crosswalk. We experience that fear in our body the same way.

Once I understood this, it helped me realize that when I feel fear around failure — it's not a personal failing or a weakness. It's literally my adorable little brain trying to protect me.

Understand the neurological response. Say: this isn't actually scary. This isn't a physical threat. My brain just can't distinguish between the two. Feel the fear, and once you realize "okay, it's just trying to protect me — but it's not a real thing right now" — you can release it. Normalize it as just something that happens.

One tool that helps: play your fear out all the way.

Erin Wade (21:24): [Erin, on the friend who asked the question] I had a really helpful conversation with a friend when I was reflecting on whether to keep working as an attorney or open this restaurant. I was really afraid at the time of losing all my savings and failing.

She was like: "Well, Erin — what would you do if that happened?"

I said: "Well, I guess I'd just be a lawyer again."

She said: "So then why would you literally settle for what your worst-case scenario is if you failed as an entrepreneur? Why would you immediately go to the worst-case scenario?"

I was like — fuck, she's right. I was really questioning whether I should do the worst-case scenario. It was going to be embarrassing. How was I going to explain this to people? I mean, it's cliché, but you do only live once. The day I die, if I looked back on this moment, I'd really regret just staying the course.

Meghan French Dunbar (22:27): This practice of extrapolating your fear all the way to worst-case scenario helps it lose its power. When you ground it into something specific and keep playing it out — "then what would happen? and then what would happen?" — you realize either (1) some of the stories you're making up to rationalize why you're avoiding the risk, or (2) the specific failure you're worried about is really not that big of a deal.

This is the tool I used to launch the crowdfunding campaign. Someone asked me: "What's the worst case?" I said — literally what happened. We raise money publicly, fail, everyone pities me. Okay. So what does that mean? That I'm embarrassed. Yeah — there's no substance to that. You feel embarrassed for a little bit, and then you move on.

People weren't going to take to the internet to shame me. My future employer wasn't going to look at a 2014 failed Kickstarter and refuse to hire me. It had no material consequence — except wasting a few months of my life. And if I hadn't done it, I would have wondered about that idea for the rest of my life.

Play your fear out. Especially if what you find is "I would be embarrassed" — that's not a good enough reason not to do something.

Meghan French Dunbar (24:53): Mindset shift 2: Learning-focused goals over performance goals.

Just praise Carol Dweck. She's a Stanford psychologist and she's done pioneering work on growth mindset. Her research on performance goals vs. mastery/learning goals has completely changed my life.

Performance-based goals: getting the A, the award, the promotion, the bonus. Proving competence to others. Avoiding judgment. External validation. Extrinsic motivation. Most of us were raised on these.

Growth or mastery goals: doing something because it helps you become more competent, learn, improve, grow. Rooted in intrinsic motivation. The deep satisfaction of learning. Dweck's famous example: "I want to get an A in French" vs. "I want to LEARN French." Very different.

While I was writing the book and geeking out about this — my friend Katie calls me. She's in the middle of an MBA. Works full time as an oncology nurse navigator. Two kids under nine. Very stressed. Her accounting class:

"I hate it so much. I've gotten straight A's my entire MBA program, but this damn accounting class — I know I'm not getting an A. I'm studying late into the night, so when I go to work I'm exhausted."

I said: "Katie. Back up. Why do you need an A in accounting?"

She said: "I've gotten straight A's this entire MBA program. I just need it."

I said: "Let me tell you about performance goals vs. mastery goals. What if we reframed this from 'I need an A in accounting' to 'I just need to learn accounting'? It doesn't matter what the grade is. You just need to be competent so that in the future, when you're moving up into a director-of-operations level role at these oncology centers, you know the basics of accounting. Are you going to be an accountant? No. You just need to LEARN this thing."

She literally put "learning goal" on a Post-it behind her computer. She said it took all the stress and pressure off the accounting class.

Dweck's research shows: people with performance-based goals tend to have fixed mindsets. They believe they're not capable of additional growth. Avoid challenging situations. Less resilient in the face of adversity. Greater fear of failure.

People with learning/mastery goals tend to have growth mindsets. They believe they can improve. Interested in continual learning. More resilient. Higher risk tolerance. Not as afraid of failure.

Dweck: "In the growth mindset, failure can be a painful experience, but it doesn't define you. It's a problem to be faced, dealt with, and learned from. The other thing exceptional people seem to have is a special talent for converting life's setbacks into future successes."

The more you put yourself out there, the more you grow. Research on neuroplasticity and resilience shows they're actually strengthened by doing hard things.

Example: writing this book. The statistics are pretty brutal — getting an agent, getting a deal, becoming a best-seller. When I first looked at the performance-based statistics, I started convincing myself I couldn't do it. Then I switched to a learning goal: "I want to have the experience of writing a book. I want the education I'd get from interviewing incredible people. That's cool." All of a sudden it becomes about my own growth. That's what got me over the crippling statistics. I probably would have given up if I'd stayed in performance-goal mode.

Meghan French Dunbar (34:13): Mindset shift 3: EFWO.

This is my own little gem. Developed when I had my previous company, Conscious Company Media.

Apologies in advance for the cuss word: EFWO stands for "Everything Fcking Works Out."

It started as a survival tool. It became something my whole team used. I still use it today.

The foundation of EFWO: everything is happening FOR you, not TO you. So many of the things you perceive as "failure" are actually stepping stones you need to get to something else.

Jane Wurwand (35:11): [Jane, on the dot-to-dot analogy] I love this analogy of joining the dots up. You can't see what that dot-to-dot puzzle is until you start filling in the space between the dots. The dots were all there all the time. But you can't see what the hell it is until you start making the journey. If you could see it was a zebra, you wouldn't join up the dots — no point.

Let's imagine our life is like a dot-to-dot puzzle. It's all laid out. It's all right there. However — you'll never see it if you don't join them up in sequence. You can't just suddenly scribble all over the bloody place. You have to join them up in the order they're written. Otherwise you don't see what it was meant to be. That's how I think of my life.

Meghan French Dunbar (36:04): Whether stepping stones or dot-to-dot — every single thing that happens, even if you didn't want it to, you'll look back at some point and realize it either cleared the space for something, or gave you wisdom, or gave you a connection you needed.

The night I had the idea for launching a business magazine, I went home from that dinner and got fired from my job. Via email. At 1am. The only time I'd ever been fired. I was very unfamiliar with failure — I couldn't even understand why it was happening. But I immediately saw it: "Wait a second. If I'm being fired right now, maybe this is the universe telling me I'm supposed to launch this print magazine." 24-hour turnaround on that one.

Other times it takes longer. During COVID, the parent company that had bought Conscious Company closed the business. About a year later, a handful of investors reached out — "Why don't we try to buy it back?" We put together a deal. It didn't work out. I was bummed for months. Everything felt like it was falling apart.

About a year AFTER that: I realized the door had to close so I would have the space to have the idea for the book proposal. Had I bought my previous company back, I 100% would not have had the time, space, or energy to write a book. And when I wrote it, I was on fire. It felt like the exact right thing.

When I first took the book proposal out, I sent it to a small publisher who I had a friendly intro to. I got rejected. Had I not been rejected there, I wouldn't have taken the steps to get my agent and reframe the proposal. And then I got a much larger book deal at the third-largest publishing group in the world.

The more my team and I leaned into EFWO, the more it took the stress and pressure off. A major advertiser would pull out and we'd be like: "Maybe that's clearing the way for a new revenue line we need." Every time something felt disappointing, we'd sit down and ask: "What could this mean? Why could this be happening for us? What could we learn?"

"Whatever is meant for me won't pass me by."

That quote is the foundation of EFWO.

Meghan French Dunbar (~41:00): As I wrap this up, my question to you: if you removed the fear of failure from your life — if it was no longer an obstacle — what would you pursue? What would change? How much richer or more textured would the quality of your life be if you could move beyond your fear of failure? How much more could you grow and evolve? What new experiences might you have?

All of those things could open up as a result of releasing your fear of failure.

Alright. With that, I'll talk to you next time.

If you can barely remember the last time you felt genuine, unqualified joy — and can't sit through five minutes of a peaceful moment without your nervous system screaming "you should be doing something productive" — this episode is the reset button.

It opens with a moment that had host Meghan French Dunbar questioning everything: one of her close friends, Cari, at dinner one night, quietly telling her "I feel like it's been a few years since I've seen you really happy." That single sentence became the door into a two-year investigation of why so many women — especially working mothers — feel disconnected from joy, and what it takes to reconnect.

In this episode, Meghan lays out the systemic reasons joy has gone missing (Gabor Maté's research linking chronic self-sacrifice to disease; Katherine Goldstein on why guilt is a form of social control), the research on why joy is actually a strategic advantage (Barbara Fredrickson's Broaden and Build theory), and the reframe that changed everything for her: joy isn't selfish. It's a radical act of resistance against the systems that profit from women's depletion.

Then she walks through three concrete practices for reclaiming your joy — including the "joy trip" concept that has now inspired her sister-in-law, her husband, and multiple friends to take one of their own.

- The Cari-at-dinner moment: how one sentence from a close friend cracked open a two-year investigation into joy

- Why working women are disproportionately disconnected from joy: patriarchy tells us to self-sacrifice, workplaces tell us to constantly produce

- Gabor and Daniel Maté's research (The Myth of Normal): pervasive self-sacrifice is one of the top three predictors of disease — and it's chronic in women

- Katherine Goldstein's quote that reframes the whole thing: "Guilt makes you quiet. It makes you shrink. It makes you not want to talk about things." Guilt is a form of social control.

- The mindset shift from Leading with Joy by Akaya Windwood and Rajasvini Banzali: "Joy is dangerous. It's a threat to the systems of control and power-over."

- Dr. Barbara Fredrickson's Broaden and Build theory — how positive emotions like joy actually make you a better leader, a better decision-maker, more creative, more resilient

- Harvard's Human Flourishing Program: happiness and life satisfaction is one of the five core markers of flourishing

- The Leila Janah tribute: the spear-in-the-chest moment sitting with her dad through chemo, remembering a 37-year-old friend who had already died

- The question that reframed everything: If this were my last year, what would I regret?

- Practice 1: Define what actually brings you joy — the exercise for identifying your joy anchors

- Practice 2: Make it a regular practice — Harvard's evidence-backed daily rituals (gratitude journaling, savoring, family check-ins)

- Practice 3: Schedule it, no really, put it on your calendar — Erin Wade of Homeroom Restaurant putting "surfing" openly on her leadership calendar as a model to her team

- The joy trip: Meghan's UK trip, her Prague trip, her husband's New Hampshire lake trip — and how the reciprocity system works for two working parents

- Why joy is not something you have to earn — it's a birthright

"Meghan, it's so nice to see you happy. I feel like it's been a few years since I've seen you really happy."

 — Cari, over dinner

"The expectation we put on mothers manifests for many of us as guilt, and that guilt is a form of social control. Mothers feel so overwhelmed by what's being asked of them that they don't have the bandwidth or the community or the wherewithal to demand change. Guilt makes you quiet. It makes you shrink. It makes you not want to talk about things."

 — Katherine Goldstein

"Joy is dangerous. It's a threat to the systems of control and power-over — and is therefore one of the best tools we have as leaders making change. It allows us to move from extracting from others for our self-centered benefit toward transformation for all society."

 — Akaya Windwood and Rajasvini Banzali, Leading with Joy

"One of the top three predictors of disease in all of life is pervasive self-sacrifice."

 — summarizing Dr. Gabor Maté + Daniel Maté, The Myth of Normal

"What if joy is a beautiful act of resistance against the toxic systems that have made it so women feel like they have to be disconnected from their joy?"

 "When I saw that she and I were the exact same age — it was like a spear-in-the-chest moment of remembering that nothing is guaranteed. Tomorrow is not guaranteed."

 — on losing Leila Janah at 37

"Joy makes you better at everything. Aha."

"The old me — the one who felt joy was very selfish and had to be deserved — would have 100% caved. The new me was like: Yes, Scott. I am in fact serious. Here's why."

"I will be surfing on Tuesday and Thursday morning from these hours to these hours. Do not disturb unless there's an emergency over a certain amount of dollars. I will be on the water being joyful and super happy and surfing."

 — Erin Wade, Homeroom Restaurant

"Joy is not something that has to be earned. It is, in fact, a birthright."

- 00:00 — Cold open: what this show is for

- 00:58 — Cari at dinner: "I feel like it's been a few years since I've seen you really happy"

- 02:00 — The questions: What brings you joy? What's your relationship with those things?

- 03:30 — Systemic reasons working women are disconnected from joy: patriarchy + productivity culture

- 04:30 — Gabor Maté's research: pervasive self-sacrifice as a top-3 predictor of disease

- 05:30 — Mexico with Megan: guilt at the pool on a 40th birthday trip

- 06:30 — Katherine Goldstein on guilt as social control

- 08:00 — The reframe from Leading with Joy: joy as radical resistance

- 09:30 — The research on why joy matters: Harvard flourishing + Dr. Barbara Fredrickson's Broaden and Build theory

- 12:00 — Leila Janah tribute: sitting with her dad through chemo, remembering a friend who had died at 37

- 14:00 — "If this were my last year, what would I regret?"

- 15:30 — Practice 1: Define what brings you joy (Meghan's list + the exercise)

- 17:00 — The joy trip idea: "What's the biggest effing thing I could do to reconnect with my joy?"

- 19:00 — The UK joy trip: London solo → Liverpool with brother → Cardiff with nieces

- 20:00 — The conversation with her husband ("Are you serious?") and the reciprocity model

- 22:00 — The 2025 Prague joy trip and how it changed everything

- 23:30 — Practice 2: Regular joy check-ins (Harvard's gratitude journal + savoring practice + family dinner check-in)

- 26:00 — Practice 3: Schedule joy on your actual calendar

- 26:30 — Erin Wade putting surfing openly on the CEO calendar as a model to her team

- 28:00 — Steph Gripne's weekly partner dancing + Emily & Cesar's reciprocity system

- 30:00 — Reciprocity + the case against "figuring out all the reasons it won't work"

- 31:00 — Joy is not something you earn. It's a birthright.

- 32:15 — Sign-off + subscribe

People + companies referenced:

- Cari + Nathan — Meghan's close friends; source of the dinner moment that opened the episode

- Megan — Meghan's best friend from college; the Mexico 40th birthday trip

- Katherine Goldstein — journalist; source of the guilt-as-social-control quote

- Dr. Gabor Maté + Daniel Maté — authors of The Myth of Normal

- Akaya Windwood + Rajasvini Banzali — authors of Leading with Joy

- Dr. Barbara Fredrickson — pioneer of the Broaden and Build theory of positive emotions

- Leila Janah — founder of Sama Source; cover of Conscious Company Magazine 2017; lost her life to a rare cancer at 37

- Erin Wade — founder of Homeroom Restaurant in Oakland, CA

- Steph Gripne — CEO of the Impact Finance Center in Denver

- Emily + Cesar — Meghan's friends; the Tuesday/Thursday/Friday reciprocity model

- Katie (sister-in-law) — the Cardiff dinner conversation about not knowing what brings her joy anymore

- Katie (college friend) — the 2025 Prague joy trip

Books + frameworks referenced:

- The Myth of Normal by Dr. Gabor Maté + Daniel Maté

- Leading with Joy by Akaya Windwood + Rajasvini Banzali

- This Isn't Working by Meghan French Dunbar (Hachette, 2025)

- Harvard's Human Flourishing Program — 5 markers of flourishing (revisited from Episode 3)

- Dr. Barbara Fredrickson's Broaden and Build theory

- Harvard-backed joy practices: gratitude journaling + savoring

- Book: This Isn't Working: https://meghanfrenchdunbar.com/book — available wherever you buy books

- Website: meghanfrenchdunbar.com

- Substack: https://meghanfrenchdunbar.substack.com

[Editor's note: Lightly cleaned for readability. Preserves original voice + delivery.]

Meghan French Dunbar (00:01): Hello there, and welcome to Better Than This. This is a show for ambitious humans who are tired of the status quo playbook and are looking for something better. My name is Meghan French Dunbar, and I've spent the last decade exploring what it would take to improve work for everyone — to discover whether or not it's possible to succeed in business without being forced to sacrifice ourselves, without the chronic stress, the burnout, guilt, overwhelm, the anxiety.

Good news: it is.

As an author, entrepreneur, journalist, and resident instigator, I've interviewed over a thousand extraordinary business leaders who've achieved success by throwing the old playbook out the window and doing everything differently. What's even better is that this new playbook improves your performance, your workplace, and your life. If you're ready to admit that the way we're working isn't working, and are looking for something better than this — you're in the right place. Let's get started.

Meghan French Dunbar (00:58): A number of years ago, we were having dinner with two of our closest friends, Cari and Nathan.

Let me tell you something about Cari. She is a straight shooter. She tells it like it is. While we were having dinner, I laughed at something Nathan said. And Cari said:

"Meghan, it's so nice to see you happy. I feel like it's been a few years since I've seen you really happy."

I knew I hadn't been particularly happy. I'd had a baby, then COVID, then another baby. There'd been a lot of years of things changing. But having a friend point it out for me — that was a critical moment. It pressed the pause button and helped me start exploring my relationship with joy and happiness.

I would offer the same questions to you.

Right now — at this moment in your life — if I ask you, what are the things that make you the most joyful? Does that answer come easily? Is that something you can access? Are you connected with what makes you feel joyful?

Second question: what is your relationship with those things — if you even know what they are? When you access those things that bring you immense joy, how do you feel? Is there any part of you that feels guilty, or selfish, or like it's a luxury?

Because that's what I started noticing. Once I identified what brought me joy — when I actually participated in those activities — there was always background noise in my head. Guilt that I wasn't taking care of something. Guilt that I wasn't working. Guilt that I wasn't deserving the moment of joy I was having.

The more I explored this and talked to other women about it, I realized I wasn't alone. If this is something you feel too — you are not alone. And there are specific reasons why.

Meghan French Dunbar (~03:30): So — why are so many of us disconnected from our joy?

Two things are working against working women specifically. One is the pesky patriarchy situation. Women are conditioned as we get older to believe that our role at home is to take care of everything and everyone. If you have children, take care of your children. Take care of your spouse. Your social life. Your home. Your family and friends. Everything is about giving of yourself.

In their book The Myth of Normal, Dr. Gabor Maté and Daniel Maté found that one of the top three predictors of disease in all of life is pervasive self-sacrifice. And they said this is chronic in women — the way we've been brought up, we sacrifice ourselves for the good of everyone else around us. Including sacrificing our own joy and happiness.

On the other hand, working women get into the workforce and are put into high-stress workplaces where we have to prove ourselves over and over. We go above and beyond. We work extra hours. We have to be productive at all times to prove our worth.

Either we have to be giving. Or we have to be producing at all times.

Overwork, unsurprisingly, is one of the top predictors of burnout. So we're getting to this place where we're overworking, chronically self-sacrificing — and then wondering why we're not particularly happy or joyful. Joy gets put on the back burner, something we can only do once we've checked everything off the to-do list. We constantly feel guilty if we're doing anything that's not giving or producing.

Two years ago in Mexico, I was with one of my best friends, Megan. Her 40th birthday. Just the two of us. She has a young child, I have two young children. We're sitting at the damn pool having a margarita. I said: "I'm really just struggling. I keep just having crippling guilt while I'm sitting here."

She looked at me and said: "You don't always feel that way?"

My God. It is so ingrained in our psyche that we can't even take a few days off to just be happy and be with our friends.

Journalist Katherine Goldstein said something to me that rocked me to the core:

"The expectation we put on mothers manifests for many of us as guilt, and that guilt is a form of social control. Mothers feel so overwhelmed by what's being asked of them that they don't have the bandwidth or the community or the wherewithal to demand change. Guilt makes you quiet. It makes you shrink. It makes you not want to talk about things."

We have this cultural societal conditioning that we must be giving, must be producing, must be sacrificing ourselves. Anything that brings us happiness starts to feel like a luxury, something we have to earn — or something incredibly selfish. So we don't do it often. As a result, we become disconnected from our joy.

I couldn't put a name to that sinking feeling until now. Any time I wasn't giving or producing — any time I was doing something just because it made me happy — I felt like I was doing something wrong.

Meghan French Dunbar (~08:00): Once I realized I was disconnected from my joy — that a lot of it was societal conditioning, that disconnecting from my joy chronically was putting me at more risk of disease and stress — I was like, okay, I'm going to be intentional about how I relate to joy.

One thing that flipped a switch for me: I was reading Leading with Joy by Akaya Windwood and Rajasvini Banzali. Right at the beginning, they wrote:

"Joy is dangerous. It's a threat to the systems of control and power-over — and is therefore one of the best tools we have as leaders making change. It allows us to move from extracting from others for our self-centered benefit toward transformation for all society."

As I read that — what if joy isn't selfish and a luxury? What if joy is a beautiful act of resistance against the toxic systems that have made it so women feel like they have to be disconnected from their joy?

In a world where we have toxic workplaces, where we're constantly made to feel we're not enough, that we have to do more, give more, produce more — unashamedly finding joy and being in a place of pure joy is radical. It's a gorgeous act of resistance for women to reclaim their autonomy and model to others that it is, in fact, okay to be joyful.

I was like — okay. It's an act of resistance. I like this.

Meghan French Dunbar (~09:30): Then I looked at the research.

If you listened to episode 3 — Harvard's Human Flourishing Program identifies happiness and life satisfaction as one of the five core markers of flourishing. Joy is a NECESSARY component for humans to flourish.

Dr. Barbara Fredrickson pioneered the Broaden and Build theory. Her research shows that positive emotions like joy and love actually broaden our mindset — they open us up, make us more expansive. Whereas negative emotions like fear and anger shrink us. When we're more open and expansive, it helps us make better decisions, be more innovative and creative, more aware, more present, and build stronger relationships.

But wait, there's more. These short-term positive emotions make us MORE resilient in the face of future challenges.

Pull it all together: the more you access your joy, the more you flourish, the better decisions you make, the better relationships you have, the more present and aware you are, the more innovative and creative — which makes you more resilient in the long term. At work: a better leader. At home: a better damn human.

Joy makes you better at everything.

Aha.

Once I had this realization — joy is not being selfish. Joy is making me a better leader, better human, better partner, better mom. It's a core element of flourishing AND a radical act of resistance for women dismantling harmful systems.

Holy macaroni.

Meghan French Dunbar (~12:00): And even still, it was hard to actually reconnect.

Fast forward a few months from that Cari dinner. My dad was diagnosed with two different types of cancer requiring months of chemotherapy. I would go down to his sessions at the Rocky Mountain Cancer Center and sit with him.

If you've ever been in a chemo center — this one had about 50 recliners in little groups. Fifty people receiving chemo. As I was there — often my dad would be tired from chemo, sleeping, and I'd hold his hand — I would look around the room and have the heart-wrenching realization that a lot of the people in the room were my age or younger.

And it brought me back to Leila Janah.

In 2017, we had the formidable entrepreneur Leila Janah grace the cover of Conscious Company Magazine. She was CEO of Sama Source — an incredible social entrepreneur who had changed the lives of hundreds and hundreds of people. I still remember going to San Francisco for the interview. Leila was a force of nature. She swirled into the room. She'd just gotten back from wingsuiting through the mountains in France or something bonkers. She had this joy of life. Everything she was talking about was THE BEST. She was building incredible things. Changing so many lives. Nothing she couldn't do. I felt inspired to be a better version of myself as a result of being in the room with her.

A few years later, I heard through the grapevine that Leila had been diagnosed with a very rare and aggressive cancer. Of course she was going to beat it. She was Leila.

Later that year, she lost her life. She was 37 years old.

When I saw that she and I were the exact same age — it was like a spear-in-the-chest moment of remembering that nothing is guaranteed. Tomorrow is not guaranteed.

So there I am in the chemo center with my father, looking at people my age, thinking about Leila. And of course I ask myself:

If this were my last year on earth, what would I regret?

Fortunately — I've taken some big swings. I've done a lot of the things I want to do. I've launched the magazine. I have incredible experiences. Beautiful relationship with my husband, kids, all the things. Really, there's very little I would regret —

With the exception of that I don't do much anymore that brings me joy.

That was the pivotal moment. Driving home from the chemo center — 30 minutes back to Boulder — I started thinking: how do I reconnect with my joy?

Meghan French Dunbar (~15:30): Practice 1: Define what brings you joy.

I had felt so disconnected that I actually couldn't have told you what brought me immense joy at the time. So I went home and asked myself: how do I re-access my joy?

I thought about every memory where I felt immense joy — deeply content to the core of my soul, awe-inspired, laughing so hard my stomach was on fire. The moments I imagine will cycle through on my deathbed. I wrote them all down. Then I looked at the common denominators.

Very specific things came up for me:

- Traveling — solo or with others, doesn't matter, the experience of adventure and seeing new things

- Eating delicious food — I'm a foodie, savoring incredible meals

- Deep conversations with people I love

- Hosting salon dinners — getting to know people

- Being around four or five of my closest friends playing board games — laughing our faces off

- Being outside, in nature — walking in aspen trees, hikes with friends and family

These are things I know 100% without fail bring me joy.

What would it look like to intentionally reengage with these things?

I was like — what's the biggest effing thing I could possibly think of to reconnect with my joy? (That's part of my personality.) You know what?

I am going to go on a joy trip.

A joy trip is a trip specifically built around the things that bring you the most joy in your life.

As a result of having a child, then the pandemic, then another child — we hadn't traveled in ages. In my brain, I was like: it's cool, I'm just not going to travel for the next decade. That became my story. I wasn't allowed to travel anymore, especially not alone. I couldn't leave my children. I couldn't leave my work. All the things.

I was like — no. We're going to shelve that particular story. I'm going to come up with a joy trip.

Mine: UK. A few days by myself in London traveling. Meet my brother. Go up to Liverpool for a Liverpool soccer game at Anfield (I'm a huge Liverpool football supporter — this is the Mecca of soccer, aka football). Then down to Cardiff, Wales, where my brother was living, to see my nieces who I hadn't seen in a couple of years.

I proposed it to my husband. My beautiful, gorgeous, supportive, loving husband. His first response: "Are you serious?"

Because neither of us had been accessing our joy or doing anything like this for so long that he initially thought I was joking.

The old me — the one who felt joy was very selfish and had to be deserved — would have 100% caved. "Yes, you're right. I'm being unreasonable. This is ridiculous. Never mind."

The new me was like: "Yes, Scott. I am in fact serious. Here's why."

I told him about how I'd felt disconnected from my joy. How it was something I would regret. How life was short. All the reasons that had led up to this moment.

He was like: "Okay. Let's figure it out."

I proposed that, as our resources dictate, at least every other year — or every year if we can swing it — each of us gets a joy trip. One week to do whatever we want.

I got to do the first one. Flew into London. Few days alone. Traveling, eating good food. Met my brother. Went to Anfield. Met my little nieces. Experienced Cardiff for a few days.

On the last day, I was having dinner with my brother and sister-in-law Katie. I was talking about the genesis of the trip. My sister-in-law said:

"I don't even think I know what brings me joy anymore."

I told her — ironic that I'm on my joy trip and I'm hearing this from you. I hear it from pretty much every woman I know.

I flew home. Realized as soon as I walked back in the door how restored I felt. How rejuvenated, energized, reconnected. As Fredrickson's research predicted, because I'd been accessing joy so intentionally for a full week, I came back more present and aware. Building better relationships. More creative. Had incredible ideas on the trip about things I could do when I got home. Which — as the research shows — makes us more resilient in the long term.

I've made it a continual practice. Last week I got back from my 2025 joy trip — I went to Prague with my best friend Katie. She called me a few months ago: "I have to go to Prague for an MBA capstone project. I have a free hotel room. Want to come?" Funny timing. I'll be there 100,000%. We flew into Munich. Salzburg. Prague. I had four days completely alone in Prague. Came home lit the F up.

Meghan French Dunbar (~23:30): Practice 2: Make it a regular practice.

Daily or weekly. Two Harvard-backed practices to re-access joy:

Gratitude journal. Writing down three things you're grateful for. It reconnects you to the experience of being happy and joyful.

Savoring. Spending five to ten minutes drinking a cup of coffee on your porch or going for a walk outside — doing something you enjoy and intentionally savoring every single element of it, using your senses. What does it feel like? Look like? Smell like? Sound like? Just being fully present.

We have a daily check-in practice with my little family. My kids are three and five. Every night at dinner: what is the most joyful part of your day? What was the best thing that happened to you today? For my husband and I, this is powerful — there are days where I'll be like "I just worked today, I didn't..." and it helps me dig deeper. Or I'll realize I've had multiple days in a row where I didn't have something to say. And often I'll be like — do you want to know what my most joyful moment is? Right now. Having dinner and talking about this with my beautiful little family.

Whatever practice works for you — the key is consistency. At the end of your week, write down the three most joyful moments. This keeps joy in your psyche as something to pay attention to. Something you're not earning. Something you have permission to access every day.

Meghan French Dunbar (~26:00): Practice 3: Schedule it.

When I first thought about scheduling joy, it sounded so wrong. But yeah — put it on your effing calendar. If it's not in your calendar, it often doesn't happen.

Entrepreneur Erin Wade — she's the restaurateur who founded Homeroom Restaurant in Oakland — was running a hugely successful smash-hit restaurant and it was overwhelming her life. She had a realization in the middle of it that she was not particularly happy. She wasn't prioritizing what made her most joyful (surfing) or, when she did do it, she was hiding it from her team and feeling guilty about it.

She was like: "Wait. If I'm going to model well-being and a beautiful workplace culture — I need to show them it's okay that the CEO does it herself."

So every Tuesday and Thursday morning, she put surfing on her calendar. Not "busy." She wrote surfing. And she was very open with her team:

"I will be surfing on Tuesday and Thursday morning from these hours to these hours. Do not disturb unless there's an emergency over a certain amount of dollars. I will be on the water being joyful and super happy and surfing."

Many CEOs and leaders I know who are thriving schedule their joy the same way. Steph Gripne — CEO of the Impact Finance Center in Denver — puts partner dancing on her calendar at least once a week. She loves partner dancing. She goes to a place in Denver. Never misses.

Our friends Emily and Cesar have a weekly practice. Emily gets Tuesday nights. Cesar gets Thursday nights. One is released to do whatever they want to access their joy while the other stays home with their young child. Friday night is couples joy night — date night with a regular sitter. Joy on Thursday. Joy on Tuesday. Joy on Friday. Everyone wins.

Find a way to put the things that bring you joy on your calendar. Small daily things. Weekly things. Monthly. If you want to get crazy — the yearly big-ticket item: the joy trip.

I've inspired multiple friends to do this now that I'm open about my yearly joy trip. And reciprocity: last year my husband went to New Hampshire with three of his best guy friends. Week on a lake. Just being super happy and joyful. He returned to his family so much more present, engaged, excited.

Instead of thinking about all the reasons it won't work — figure out a way to make it work. We both have demanding careers. Young children. It's a lot to leave one of us home alone with a three and a five year old. Our joy trip usually centers around a time when one of our parents can come help out. We get extra help. Save up. Whatever you need. Figure out a way to make it happen on a consistent basis rather than immediately jumping to why it won't work.

Meghan French Dunbar (~31:00): Those are the three practices: define what makes you joyful. Reconnect with it on a daily or weekly basis. Schedule it.

Pretty simple.

The more you do so, the more you reconnect with your joy — and reconnect with yourself and the beauty of life.

Joy is not something that has to be earned. It is, in fact, a birthright. You do not have to be worthy of being happy. You do not have to produce a certain amount or give a certain amount of yourself. You deserve to flourish. Each of us does.

Joy is one of the key ways to come back to yourself and ensure you're actually flourishing.

Until next time.

Meghan French Dunbar (32:15): Thanks again for listening to Better Than This. As a reminder, you can always find show notes and any corresponding resources for the show on the show's website at meghanfrenchdunbar.com/betterthanthis. If today's episode resonated with you, I would be very grateful if you could leave a review or a rating on whichever podcast platform you're listening on — or share the episode with a friend who you think would appreciate it.

You can also subscribe to my Substack for weekly insights and tools to support your growth along the way.

Until next time: keep challenging the status quo so we can — wait for it — build something better than this.

Take care.

If you've ever hit the big goal, celebrated for a week, and then quietly wondered "is this it?" — fair warning, this episode is going to feel personal.

Unbehaved* host Meghan French Dunbar opens with a scene from 1992 Bergen Elementary: an 8-year-old version of herself in metaphorical war paint dominating field day, then heading home to add her blue ribbons to a Scrooge McDuck-style pile under her bed.

That childhood conditioning — achievement = worthy = loved — kept working for 30 years, right up until it didn't. When COVID took away every external marker she'd used to prove her worth, she landed in her therapist's office with a diagnosis of clinical depression.

In this episode, Meghan lays out why the old playbook of "social success" is failing so many high achievers — with research from Brian Knutson (who found the dopamine hit of anticipating a reward is neurologically identical to the hit substance addicts get), Edward Deci + Richard Ryan (who found extrinsically motivated people have MORE anxiety and depression after achieving their goals), and Harvard's Human Flourishing Program (the five actual markers of a flourishing life).

Then she introduces the new playbook of "soul success" — and walks through concrete practices for reorienting your entire relationship with what "successful" means. Including the story of turning down a headhunted CEO role that her ego wanted, the Ted Lasso permission-slip conversation with her mentee Maddie, and the weekly check-in practice you can start using this Sunday.

*[Editor's note: This episode originally aired under the show's former name, "Better Than This." The show is now "Unbehaved."]

- Why your definition of success dictates every major decision you make — whether you realize it or not

- The 1992 Bergen Elementary field day story: how by age 8, Meghan had already indoctrinated herself into believing achievement = worthy = loved

- The 30-year script — Dean's List, MBA, founding a magazine, standing ovations — that worked right up until COVID

- The COVID collapse: going from CEO on stage to full-time mom of a 9-month-old, catastrophizing that she was Macaulay Culkin (a childhood movie star peaked too soon), and getting clinically depressed

- Elaine Dinos's 12 years at a global consulting firm and the "happiness as a thin layer of varnish" reveal

- Alfa Demmellash on lasting three days at Bear Stearns and coining the word "self-incarceration" for the careers we choose against ourselves

- Mindset shift 1: Brian Knutson's neuroscience research — the dopamine hit of anticipating a reward is the SAME physiological response substance addicts get. Extrinsic motivation is literally addictive.

- Mindset shift 2: Edward Deci + Richard Ryan's research — people who chase extrinsic goals have INCREASED anxiety and depression after achieving them. Those pursuing intrinsic goals get the opposite.

- Mindset shift 3: Harvard's Human Flourishing Program identified 5 markers of a flourishing life. Daniel Pink identified 3 drivers of intrinsic motivation. Almost none of them show up in a typical career definition of "success."

- The reframe: shifting from social success (extrinsic script) to soul success (rooted in what actually predicts flourishing)

- The Conscious Company Media closing-day call — and how the metrics of human flourishing revealed the company was actually a wild success

- The headhunted CEO role Meghan turned down — and the question she asks now when opportunities feel too tempting

- The Ted Lasso permission slip: Meghan's coaching moment with her mentee Maddie about guilt, joy, and success

- The practice: a weekly Sunday check-in against the markers of human flourishing (with specific prompts you can steal)

"I might as well be a baby William Wallace from Braveheart, donning a child-sized kilt and war paint as I head into field day. It is my favorite day of the year. Why? Because I dominate."

"I've just indoctrinated my brain to believe everything is about winning, achieving, proving myself, being the best."

“In the absence of achievement — in the absence of an outlet to be seen, validated, awarded by my peers — I didn't know how to value myself."

"I'm a childhood movie star who peaked too soon in my career."

"Happiness can feel like a thin layer of varnish. But I wasn't joyful. I wasn't whole. It was filling a void."  — Elaine Dinos

"It felt like a self-incarceration. I was opting away from the people and communities where I knew life, where I knew what is real, what deeply moved me." — Alfa Demmellash

"The burst of dopamine that surges to your brain when someone anticipates a reward is the same physiological response substance addicts experience when they're about to get their substance."

"Even though our culture puts a strong emphasis on attaining wealth and fame, pursuing these goals does not contribute to a satisfying life. The things that make your life happy are growing as an individual, having loving relationships, and contributing to your community." — Edward Deci

"High Achiever Meghan — I see you. I love you. I have compassion for you. Thank you for all you've brought to me. And — new idea of success — if I'm maximizing for joy and deep human connection, I am in fact crushing it right now. This means I am being entirely successful."

- 00:00 — Cold open: what this show is for

- 00:58 — How do YOU define success? (And why the answer is more consequential than you think)

- 02:00 — 1992, Bergen Elementary field day: the blue ribbons and Scrooge McDuck under the bed

- 04:30 — The 30-year linear achievement path: Dean's List → MBA → CEO → standing ovations

- 06:00 — COVID: the collapse, the depression, the Macaulay Culkin catastrophizing

- 08:00 — Therapy: "you're clinically depressed" and the realization that achievement was her only worth

- 10:00 — Elaine Dinos's story: 12 years at a global consulting firm and the thin layer of varnish

- 14:35 — The old playbook of "social success": the societal script we were all handed

- 16:30 — Alfa Demmellash's story: three days at Bear Stearns and the word self-incarceration

- 20:00 — Mindset shift 1: Brian Knutson's research — extrinsic motivation is literally addictive

- 22:00 — Mindset shift 2: Deci + Ryan's research — extrinsically motivated people get MORE anxious and depressed after they achieve

- 24:00 — Mindset shift 3: Harvard's Human Flourishing Program (5 markers) + Daniel Pink's Drive (3 intrinsic drivers) — and how few of them show up in a typical definition of success

- 28:00 — The Conscious Company Media closing-day call and the reframe that changed everything

- 35:00 — The new playbook of "soul success" — reimagining what to optimize for

- 37:00 — The headhunted CEO role Meghan turned down (and why)

- 39:00 — The Ted Lasso permission slip: Meghan's coaching conversation with Maddie

- 42:00 — The practice: a weekly check-in against the markers of flourishing

- 43:54 — Sign-off + subscribe

People + companies referenced:

- Elaine Dinos — former global consulting firm executive; source of the "thin layer of varnish" reflection

- Alfa Demmellash — Ethiopian refugee, Harvard grad, founder of Rising Tide Capital; source of the self-incarceration framing

- Brian Knutson — neuroscientist whose research found the dopamine burst of anticipating a reward is neurologically identical to what substance addicts experience

- Edward Deci + Richard Ryan — psychologists whose research on extrinsic vs. intrinsic motivation followed college students post-graduation and found extrinsically motivated people ended up MORE anxious and depressed

- Daniel Pink — author of Drive; identified three key drivers of intrinsic motivation: purpose/meaning, growth/mastery, and autonomy

- Rachel — Meghan's former editor-in-chief at Conscious Company Magazine; her Asana / Conscious Leadership story

- Justin Rosenstein — co-founder of Asana

- Maddie — Meghan's 24-year-old mentee; the Ted Lasso permission-slip conversation

- Nell Derrick Debevois Dewey ("Nell 3D") — Meghan's friend who developed the weekly-check-in spreadsheet practice

- Eileen Fisher — cover of Conscious Company Magazine issue three; referenced for the Irvington visit

Books + frameworks referenced:

- Drive by Daniel Pink — 3 drivers of intrinsic motivation

- This Isn't Working by Meghan French Dunbar (Hachette, 2025)

- Harvard's Human Flourishing Program — 5 markers of human flourishing:

- Conscious Leadership Group

- Book: This Isn't Working: https://meghanfrenchdunbar.com/book — available wherever you buy books

- Website: meghanfrenchdunbar.com

- Substack: https://meghanfrenchdunbar.substack.com

[Editor's note: Lightly cleaned for readability. Preserves original voice + delivery.]

Meghan French Dunbar (00:01): Hello there, and welcome to Better Than This. This is a show for ambitious humans who are tired of the status quo playbook and are looking for something better. My name is Meghan French Dunbar, and I've spent the last decade exploring what it would take to improve work for everyone — to discover whether or not it's possible to succeed in business without being forced to sacrifice ourselves, without the chronic stress, the burnout, guilt, overwhelm, the anxiety.

Good news: it is.

As an author, entrepreneur, journalist, and resident instigator, I've interviewed over a thousand extraordinary business leaders who've achieved success by throwing the old playbook out the window and doing everything differently. What's even better is that this new playbook improves your performance, your workplace, and your life. If you're ready to admit that the way we're working isn't working, and are looking for something better than this — you're in the right place. Let's get started.

Meghan French Dunbar (00:58): When I ask you about the word success — how would you define success for yourself? What comes to mind? What goals, aspirations, accomplishments?

Here's the thing about success — subconsciously or not — whether you're very clear on your definition or it just floats in the back of your brain, my guess is there's some aspect of achievement, awards, titles, some pinnacle of your career you're aiming for.

And the thing we don't realize about success is how consequential the concept is. How you define success dictates many, if not all, of the decisions you make in your life. What work you do. What compromises you make. What you spend the most of your time on. Where your energy, wisdom, insights, and passion all go — all of it points toward what you think of as success.

For most of us, we don't consciously think about success. It's just been handed to us — conditioning from a young age that equates it with achievement, accomplishment, setting goals, winning awards, being the best in the class.

In this episode, we're going to talk about why that concept of success actually sets you up for failure. It does not lead to long-term contentment. And it doesn't track with what we now know helps humans flourish.

We'll cover: what the old playbook of ambition looks like and why it's failing so many of us. What the new playbook looks like — rooted in values, well-being, and flourishing. And then how to bring this to life in your own life, with practices for reorienting your relationship with success.

Let's get into it.

Meghan French Dunbar (~02:00): To bring the old playbook to life, let me give you a little peek into my psyche as a child. We're going all the way back. It's 1992. Bergen Elementary. And it is FIELD DAY — the annual competition of extraordinary feats of agility. The three-legged race. Running while balancing an egg on a spoon. Running while balancing a hula hoop.

I might as well be a baby William Wallace from Braveheart, donning a child-sized kilt and war paint as I head into field day. It is my favorite day of the year. Why? Because I dominate. I am that absolute dick of a child who takes field day WAY too seriously and wants to win every single competition.

And I do.

I've grown up with an older brother four years older than me, so everything in my life revolves around winning, competing, being the best, trying to prove myself. So I get all my blue ribbons from field day — as I did the year before and as I will next year — and I take them home. I have this little box under my bed where I keep them. I pull it out and add the new ones. And I might as well be Scrooge McDuck laying on my bed of coins.

Except mine is a bed of blue ribbons. And they all tell me something about myself:

I am a good girl. I am the best. I have proven myself. I am worthy of love.

Because that's what achievement means. That's what we tie our self-worth to.

And I've already done this by the age of 8.

I've just indoctrinated my brain to believe everything is about winning, achieving, proving myself, being the best. This is the pattern that sticks with me for the rest of my life. High school: captain of the soccer team, captain of the basketball team, top of the class — everything so I can get into the best school. College: Dean's List, two degrees in four and a half years, proving proving proving. First entry-level position at the Environmental Defense Fund — my goal is to get promoted to associate, then to director. Everything is promotion, goal, next achievement, salary, title. Linear.

I do my MBA. I launch a company. We sell the company. I'm a keynote speaker. Every way I ever imagined I was going to succeed has come to fruition. My ego feels great. I'm getting standing ovations. Everything about my life is rooted in how successful I am by all the external achievements I can show off.

Meghan French Dunbar (~06:00): And then COVID hits.

I had my son in the summer of 2019. I'd been leading my company for nearly five years. When I got back from maternity leave, I was terribly burnt out. No gas in the tank.

I remember coming back and thinking — I am not the leader my team needs. They deserve something better. I can barely get out of bed. I'm exhausted to the core of my being. I have a newborn. All the newborn parent stuff on TOP of years of overextending, overworking.

I told myself: I'll just get us through our big event — the 2020 World Changing Women's Summit in January. I got us through. I resigned on February 1st. March 13th was my last day.

March 17th we were in global lockdown.

I went from CEO — on stage hosting events with hundreds of people, with a name for myself in my professional community, giving keynotes to leaders twice my age, being invited to exclusive events — to full-time mom of a nine-month-old.

I did not plan for that. I was going to launch the next venture (an in-person events company for women) immediately. Then COVID.

I have ADHD. I'm a creative spirit. My therapist once called me a business artist. I never imagined being a full-time mom. I AM a great mom. But I had a little too much entrepreneurial pizzazz to be a full-time mom to a nine-month-old in a pandemic. And month after month went by. I slipped further and further into pretty sincere depression.

I'd contended with burnout, chronic stress, and low-level depression before. This became significant depression. Crippling fear-based thoughts about my son getting hurt on the playground. Snapping at my partner. Everything was wrong. I was catastrophizing:

"I'm a childhood movie star who peaked too soon in my career. I'll always look back at what I had and be resentful. I've ruined my career. It's over. I'm never getting back in."

I finally saw a therapist. It only took five to six months of that to be like — okay, I'm ready.

First session: "You're clinically depressed."

Which — yes. I knew that.

Session after session, we got to the heart of it: I had nothing to attach my self-worth to. In the absence of achievement — in the absence of an outlet to be seen, validated, awarded by my peers — I didn't know how to value myself.

I felt entirely worthless without something to show everyone. I didn't have my blue ribbons.

She helped me unpack it — all the way back to childhood. 30-plus years of conditioning that the only way I felt worthy of love was to achieve.

Fortunately, I knew I wasn't alone. I had met many other professional women in the same boat. For example: Elaine Dinos.

Elaine Dinos (~10:16): [Elaine, on making it to the top of a global consulting firm] When I joined, I quickly prided myself on being all things to all people. It was a services-oriented environment — the customer is most important. I noticed in my organization, and many others, you are not rewarded to take care of yourself. You're rewarded to sacrifice.

The metrics for success were all externally validated. How much productivity, how much compensation, how hard you're working, how late you're staying. Being rewarded for my productivity felt good. It felt like self-worth.

As I've unpacked the 12 years I spent there, I realized: a lack of self-worth and needing to prove myself was really generating a lot of that. I gave so much of myself.

I was the busiest of the busy. We'd walk by each other in the hallway and someone would say, "How are you?" And I'd say, "Busy. So busy." Like — I'm doing great if I'm busy. That's not how you are. That's a wall up.

I climbed the ranks. Top performer. During the 2008 downturn, they let two-thirds of the staff go and I got promoted and took on double the work. And I was proud of that. Already overworked, and then just more extraction. The treadmill goes faster and faster. I had one child, replaced my social life with baby things, kept giving everything to my employer. And I got rewarded. Promoted. More money.

Until I had my second child. That's when the rubber met the road and revealed all the cracks in the foundation. The work I'd built for myself and the life I was longing for were not compatible.

Happiness can feel like a thin layer of varnish. Yeah, I was happy going out to lunches, having happy hours, getting flown to New York with partners, staying in nice hotels. I was happy calling C-suite leaders. I got a lot of ego gratification.

But I wasn't joyful. I wasn't whole. It was filling a void. A lack of self-worth. A lack of believing that I'm enough.

Looking back, it was a very superficial version of happy. It wasn't joy. Happiness from compensation and title and who I knew was a very thin house of cards.

Meghan French Dunbar (14:35): Elaine's story. My story. Many stories I've heard. Maybe your story. All align with what I call the old playbook of social success.

Social success is rooted in the societal script we're all handed as we come out of the womb: your job is to do the best in school, to set yourself apart so you can get into a better school — a big-name school — do the best there so you can get a good job at a big-name place, make the most money, climb the corporate ranks so you get the big fancy titles, so you get influence and power. Set aside anything about passion or purpose. You need a practical, stable, well-regarded career. Make it to the top by 60-ish. Retire if you've saved enough. And THEN, maybe, start pursuing the things you actually enjoy.

That's the script. Supposed to work for everyone. Supposed to lead to happiness.

The entire time along the way, you're climbing a linear ladder based entirely on extrinsic motivation — motivation to participate in something based on meeting some external goal: praise, approval, competition, award, payment, influence, power.

Extrinsic motivation is not driven by the desire to engage in an activity for its own sake. It's all about appearances and showing how worthy you are.

This especially becomes a narrative for people trying to meet their family's expectations. We see this a lot in immigrant families. Here's what Alfa Demmellash — an Ethiopian refugee to the United States — told me about the pressure.

Alfa Demmellash (~16:39): [Alfa] A lot of times the expectation begins in your home life. You go to Harvard. Definitely the expectations were there. Not only is the family liberated — because Alfa is going to graduate Harvard, go do investment banking and financial-woes-for-everybody. It's over. It's like — you get a car, you get a car.

Meghan: Just Oprah.

Alfa: Totally. Like, regional economic development plans. Is this the investment of an entire nation? Okay.

When I did graduate, there was that pressure. My parents were like, "What are you doing?" I said, "I'm investigating where the pockets of economic poverty and othering are around me." They were like, "To do WHAT? You can't possibly be trying to get INTO the neighborhoods we're all trying to make sure to ESCAPE."

So there was pressure. Six months in, I did take a job at Bear Stearns, which is no longer with us. I lasted like three days. I walked out. I felt — when you're in the wrong place entirely, every part of your being knows it. I was spending more time in the bathroom at Bear Stearns than at the cubicle, having a conversation with myself in the mirror saying — why are you here? What happened? What went so awfully wrong that you are choosing to self-incarcerate in this way?

It felt like a self-incarceration. I was opting away from the people and communities where I knew life, where I knew what is real, what deeply moved me. And I was all of a sudden dressed up, putting on makeup and heels, walking through the doors of a giant black building — and not coming out until the sun was down. I couldn't answer "who forced you?" other than I just wanted to prove to my parents I wasn't being foolish.

But it was so egregious at a soul level that I was willing to do anything else. I knew the path would have to be defined differently.

Meghan French Dunbar (20:04): Alfa's story. Elaine's story. My story. I hope if you're seeing some of yourself in these stories — know that you're not alone.

Three things really shifted my mindset about extrinsic motivation and how I was thinking about success.

Mindset shift 1: Extrinsic motivation is addictive.

This was research done by Brian Knutson on the impact of anticipating a reward on the brain. He discovered that the burst of dopamine that surges to your brain when someone anticipates a reward is the same physiological response substance addicts experience when they're about to get their substance.

It follows the same script as addiction. Think about it.

Think about the last time you achieved the big goal — a sales target, revenue goal, promotion, new title, new role. You celebrate. Go to dinner. Champagne. Maybe you feel good for a week. Maybe a month. Then — what happens?

You need the next thing. And it has to be bigger. So — I'm a senior vice president. What's next? You're just on this hamster wheel and there's never an endpoint. Never enough. Perpetual cycle of contentment → disappointment → need the next thing.

That was the first realization. This is addictive behavior — which is not typically considered healthy.

Mindset shift 2: Extrinsic motivation is not particularly satisfying.

This was research by psychologist Edward Deci and Richard Ryan. They studied college students in two groups. Group A based their entire idea of success on extrinsic motivation — their post-college goals were about title, salary, influence, power. Group B was intrinsically motivated — post-college goals about impact, growth, evolving as humans.

They followed both groups. Many achieved their goals.

Group A: Regardless of the level of success they hit, they had the SAME level of life satisfaction as in college, AND increased levels of anxiety and depression.

Group B: Regardless of the level of success they hit, they had INCREASED life satisfaction as compared to college, AND decreased anxiety and depression.

Deci's words: "Even though our culture puts a strong emphasis on attaining wealth and fame, pursuing these goals does not contribute to a satisfying life. The things that make your life happy are growing as an individual, having loving relationships, and contributing to your community."

Mindset shift 3: Almost none of what predicts flourishing shows up in our definitions of success.

Harvard has a Human Flourishing Program. They've identified five markers that across the board result in humans feeling like they're flourishing:

Daniel Pink, in Drive, identified three key drivers of intrinsic motivation: purpose/meaning, growth/mastery, and autonomy (freedom, voice, choice).

When I started imagining these as what actually brings us flourishing — how many of them do we equate with success? How many of our goals or professional aspirations have anything to do with these markers?

For me — very little.

Meghan French Dunbar (26:36): Does that track for you too? Not even being aware of the key elements of flourishing as part of your definition of success?

If none of us are basing our ideas of success around what brings us flourishing — and we know extrinsic motivation is addictive and doesn't make us happy in the long run — maybe we can start to understand why so many high achievers aren't happy. Feel like something's missing. Feel like they're doing it wrong.

That's how I felt. I've done everything right. I've done all the things. I'm not particularly happy. I'm actually really stressed, anxious, bordering on depressed. Someone promised me a vision of the future — if I did everything right, I'd be happy. This doesn't feel right.

So many of us just keep adding more and more to our plates. Maybe I just need to do more. Have a bigger goal. Once I hit the next thing, that's where the happiness is. And it doesn't come. We keep adding. The relentless busyness distracts us enough that we don't have to feel we're not happy. But any time we pause, we feel it in our bodies — something is missing. Something is wrong.

And that's a hard pill to swallow.

Really hard. If the entire societal script you've been sold — what you've been told your whole life will make you happy — doesn't actually help you flourish. It's not an easy thing to just accept.

There's not a particularly easy solution either. But there are things you can do.

The key thing: reimagine success from maximizing for productivity, accomplishment, achievement, wealth, and influence — to maximizing for the key markers of human flourishing and intrinsic motivation.

How can you maximize for deep human connection? Mental + physical health? Joy? Growth, mastery, following your passion? Impact and values alignment? Freedom to do the work you actually want with the people you actually want on the things that actually matter?

Flip the script. Make decisions about your career based on maximizing what matters — not maximizing productivity.

Let me show you how this has worked for me.

Meghan French Dunbar (~28:00): Back to the COVID story. I left my company. The parent company closed the magazine. Eventually the whole business.

I felt like a tremendous failure. Like I'd wasted six years of my life and had nothing to show for it. It hadn't made heaps of money. So — it had failed.

Part of me needed closure. So I organized a Zoom call with many of my former teammates. About 10 of us from around the country. And I asked a simple question:

"What were your favorite memories from our time working together, building this crazy company?"

The call went on for over two hours. Story after story about the relationships people had built with each other and with people they'd met through the work. The impact from a specific article. Someone coming up at an event saying: "Because I read your article, I changed my entire management style."

Rachel — the editor-in-chief for a while — was so excited about learning about the company Asana she went and spent a day with them. That led her to meet the Conscious Leadership Group. That has become an entirely new chapter in her life. She talked to me about how much she'd grown as a human as a result of one story she wrote for us.

Every single thing on that call was about people, connections, meaningful experiences, growth, knowledge, mastery, passion, purpose. Every element of human flourishing and intrinsic motivation.

I left the call feeling so much better. I told my husband: "Maybe it wasn't a total failure. Maybe we succeeded in some way."

Only later — once I'd learned these key elements — did I realize how INCREDIBLY successful that tiny little magazine-turned-media-company was. For me personally: six years of running a company, PhD in business, evolved so much as a human, learned communication, listening, feedback, being pushed. Built deep friendships. Met people who inspire me. Interviewed Eileen Fisher at her house in Irvington, New York. Took a float plane from Vancouver to a tiny island off the coast of Canada to give a keynote.

My life is so much more textured. So much richer. As a result of doing something that made a profound impact on so many people.

If I'd gone in with a new idea of success rooted in flourishing and intrinsic motivation — it would have checked almost every box, with the exception of my own mental and physical health and some social connections (which I overworked myself past).

Meghan French Dunbar (~35:00): So I came out of this in 2022 and thought — what if I reimagined my own personal definition of success?

I would invite you to do the same. What are the things that matter most to YOU out of the elements of flourishing and intrinsic motivation? What would it look like if your idea of success and what you're shooting for was to maximize for those things?

How healthy and well you are. How happy and joyful. How much you're learning and growing. How passionate you are. How impactful. How aligned with your values. How free you are to explore opportunities or work where you want, with who you want, on what you want.

For me, autonomy is a big one. Freedom to work on what I want, with who I want, where and when I want. Flexibility to stop every workday at 3:30. Work from home. Minimize travel. I have two young kids. I identified key sources of stress and actively choose not to participate anymore. Do I have time and space for mental and physical health?

Then I started to put it into practice.

Meghan French Dunbar (~37:00): Shortly after this epiphany, I got headhunted for a pretty significant role. Well-known organization. CEO title. Huge pay increase. Access to influential leaders. I was so honored to be headhunted. My ego felt fantastic.

The role 100% would have made High Achiever Meghan very happy. Definitely aligned with the old idea of success. But new-idea-of-success Meghan? Not really. It would have been challenging — I would have grown, learned new things, had new experiences. But: no autonomy. Overly stressed. High pressure. Constant travel. Away from my kids. No option to work from home. No option to stop when I wanted.

So many considerations made it so I could not maximize for the way I flourish. I had to say no. And I felt VERY good about saying no — especially when I realized I was only considering it because of my ego. Because it was the next higher step on the linear progression toward high-achievement success that lived in my head.

This also comes into play with smaller day-to-day stuff.

Meghan French Dunbar (~39:00): My delightful mentee Maddie is 24. Just graduated from Johns Hopkins. Works for a women's leadership organization. She calls herself "a baby adult." She's been in the high achievers' cycle her whole life — everything about building her college resume, best schools, best job, the whole script.

She told me: "The other night I watched a few hours of Ted Lasso and I got to the end and I felt terrible about myself. I felt so guilty for watching Ted Lasso."

I said — girl, Maddie, I hear you. I just had the same experience.

Last month, I went to Austin with my three best friends from college. All of us work. All of us have kids under seven. We went for three days just to reconnect. Day one, I was okay. Day two — sitting by the pool, having little sneaky snacks, catching up on life, just having a delightful day.

And about every hour, my nervous system ramped up to 11. Something is wrong. This is not okay. I am not producing. I'm not with my kids. I'm not taking care of something. I was checking my phone, waiting for a notification. Wracked with guilt for taking a single day to enjoy being with my friends.

Around hour five, I took a breath and — wait. Stop, stop, stop. High Achiever Meghan — I see you. I love you. I have compassion for you. Thank you for all you've brought to me. And — new idea of success — if I'm maximizing for joy and deep human connection, I am in fact CRUSHING IT right now. This means I am being entirely successful.

Goodbye, guilt. Thank you and goodbye.

So I offered this to Maddie: "Just hear me out. Ted Lasso — does it make you happy to watch that show?"

She said yes.

I said: "What if that's your idea of success? Your career, the way you're working right now, the life you're building allows you time and space for things that bring you joy — Ted Lasso, for example. That takes the guilt off. It takes the pressure off. We can prioritize these things as the things we actually WANT to be doing to maximize our success."

Meghan French Dunbar (~42:00): One of the best practices to actually root yourself in this new definition of success is a regular check-in.

My friend Nell Derrick Debevois Dewey — Nell 3D as she calls herself — has a spreadsheet she uses at the end of every week. I use a little journal. You touch base at the end of the week on what the week looked like when you oriented it around the key markers of flourishing and intrinsic motivation:

- How happy or joyful did I feel?

- How did I support my mental and physical health?

- Did I feel deep social connection this week?

- Did I grow, learn, or develop?

- Did I gain any new knowledge?

- Did I make a positive impact or feel aligned with my values?

- Did I have the freedom to work on what I wanted?

Score yourself 1-10. Write out where you felt aligned and where you fell short. Whatever resonates. The key is consistency.

When I started doing this, I realized the areas where I was woefully deficient — I never made time for my mental and physical health. It was always on the should list, never on the do list. When I started looking at it as something that actually helps me flourish as a human — that makes me happier, that makes me feel good — it became something I prioritized.

At the end of the week, how can YOU check in with each of the things that matter to you?

I would recommend writing down a new definition of success rooted in flourishing and intrinsic motivation — and checking in with those key elements every week to make sure you're staying on track.

That's it for today. I so appreciate your time and the fact that you're part of this community. Hopefully I'll see you next week.

Meghan French Dunbar (43:54): Thanks again for listening to Better Than This. As a reminder, you can always find show notes and any corresponding resources for the show on the show's website at meghanfrenchdunbar.com/betterthanthis. If today's episode resonated with you, I would be very grateful if you could leave a review or a rating on whichever podcast platform you're listening on — or share the episode with a friend who you think would appreciate it.

You can also subscribe to my Substack for weekly insights and tools to support your growth along the way.

Until next time: keep challenging the status quo so we can — wait for it — build something better than this.

Take care.