5 radical principles that go against everything women are taught about work

How to resist the "good woman" trap and reclaim your life

Girl Resting on a Sofa by Beatrix Whistler (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

One afternoon not so long ago, I found myself sprawled on the floor in a pool of sunlight for over an hour. I wasn’t having a crisis: I was just DONE for the day.

I'd managed five solid hours of deep work, which seems to be my maximum these days aged 52. As I lay there like a contented cat, one thought kept circling: even five hours feels like too much. What I really want is to work just three hours a day.

My mind didn't immediately jump to solutions, mainly because I’m sick to the back teeth of hearing about better systems, time management hacks, and productivity apps. Instead, I found myself wondering:

What actually gets in the way of women doing less?

Why are we all so bloody exhausted?

And why does reclaiming any sense of spaciousness feel nearly impossible?

Your entire life has become a workplace and nobody talks about it

The World Health Organisation defines burnout as "a syndrome resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed." But what happens when your entire life becomes the workplace?

For most women, burnout doesn't stem from one job or office. It's the cumulative toll of a thousand invisible workplaces where we've been taught to labour without rest: the kitchen, the inbox, the WhatsApp group, our businesses, our relationships, our own bodies. We don't clock off because there's no off switch.

Even when the obvious tasks are done, there's the endless noticing:

• The fridge that needs restocking

• The birthday present that needs buying

• The sock that needs retrieving from the floor and putting in the washing machine

• The emotional ripple from your child's offhand comment

• The passive-aggressive family message still sitting unanswered

This constant cognitive load is exhausting, and it's largely invisible.

A Woman Doing Housework by Geertruydt Roghman ca. 1648–50, public domain

The voice in your head isn't actually yours

Here's what Naz and I have discovered after coaching hundreds of women: the system doesn't just live outside us, it lives within us. From childhood, we're trained to track every need in the room, anticipate unspoken feelings, and value being useful over being authentic.

This shows up as an internal voice we call the system within. It's how we've internalised the patriarchal, capitalist, consumerist systems we all live in: the part that notices everything that could be done and then quietly insists we do it. Even when we don't write it down or actively plan it, there's a persistent tug keeping our nervous systems on edge.

There's fascinating research in psychology about something called affordance perception: how we interpret our environment. A chair “affords” sitting, a handle “affords” turning. But sociologists have found that men and women are socialised to perceive different affordances, especially at home.

Men might see the sofa as something to sit on: women see the floor as something to hoover

Men notice leftovers to be eaten: women notice the fridge needs to be restocked

Men see a messy coffee table and sit down anyway: women see it and start clearing it up, rather than relaxing

Men walk past a child's discarded jumper: women pick it up without even thinking

This isn't biology, it's training.

From early childhood, girls are praised for noticing, helping, and anticipating needs before they're even expressed.

So what do we do about this? How do we unlearn all this productivity obsession, the busy work, the unpaid labour, the invisible mental load? The templates and blueprints we're presented with as women business owners and solopreneurs usually just make us more tired and burned out. Sometimes it feels like there are NO good blueprints at all that work for women.

But don’t give up quite yet. Because there's something brilliant happening in the Netherlands that offers genuine hope…

A group of Dutch nurses accidentally discovered the future of work

Community nursing there had become a disaster, run like Amazon logistics with nurses scheduled to the minute, expected to visit as many patients as possible as quickly as possible. No time for conversation, no time for actual care. It was "efficient" but it wasn't working. Patients weren't recovering, nurses were burning out and resigning, and a sense of humanity was completely disappearing from healthcare.

Enter Buurtzorg, a revolutionary care organisation that completely flipped the model. Instead of top-down micromanagement, they introduced self-governing teams. Small groups of nurses were trusted to decide what their patients actually needed: sometimes medical care, sometimes tea and company, sometimes just presence.

No one tracked how long they spent. No one dictated their schedules. They were simply trusted to know what mattered and act accordingly.

The results were incredible:

• Patients recovered faster and lived longer

• Nurses stayed in their jobs longer and felt happier

• Costs went down

• Standards of care went up

It worked because of the way Buurtzorg flipped the script on Business As Usual, summed up by its core priorities: it trusted people, and prioritised autonomy over bureaucracy, simplicity over complexity, and presence over productivity.

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What these Dutch nurses have figured out that we can steal from them

We believe this model holds profound lessons for how we as women might restructure our own work and lives. From Buurtzorg's revolutionary approach, we can extract five principles that have the power to transform everything we do:

1. Give up the need to control, and learn to trust things will work out

We've spent decades learning that our worth comes from managing every detail perfectly, always being ten steps ahead, foreseeing and averting crises before they happen. Trusting (ourselves, our instincts, other people, the universe) feels terrifying because what if it all goes wrong? What if people are disappointed? What if things fall apart?

For many of us, the need to control is actually about safety. We believe that if we keep everything under control, we'll avert disaster, keep everyone safe. But pay attention to what happens in your body when you're not controlling everything: that anxious, worried, unsafe feeling.

That anxiety is like a little anxious girl inside you who's frantically doing all the work. She's juggling all the to-dos, bearing all the burden, worrying about what's going to go wrong. But she's just too little. She needs to not be doing that job anymore.

What she needs is for the capable, competent adult in you to step in and say:

"You don't have to do it all. You can step back. You can drop the balls. We're going to figure it out because we're grown-ups, and your grown-up is taking over now. Everyone's going to be doing a lot less around here because it's not all your responsibility. And if things do go wrong, or if it doesn't all get done? That's fine. That's actually fine. We'll deal with it."

Here's what Buurtzorg shows us: when we let ourselves sit with the discomfort of not knowing exactly what will happen next, something remarkable happens. The world doesn't end. Our businesses don't collapse. We all figure things out together. It’s safe to trust.

2. Drop the frantic multitasking, and allow yourself to be present

We've been praised since childhood for juggling multiple things at once, for being the one who can handle it all simultaneously. We feel guilty when we're doing just one thing because there's always something else that needs our attention. Our brains have been trained to scan constantly: what else needs doing while I'm doing this?

But here's what we need to understand: multitasking is a lie. What we're actually doing is rapidly task-switching, and it's hurting us. When we're juggling, we're keeping ourselves in a state of high alert, releasing cortisol and adrenaline. We can't keep this up, so we start burning out.

The research is clear: multitasking reduces efficiency, increases stress and frustration, and makes us more likely to make errors. Those who think they're good at multitasking are often the most ill-suited to it and show high levels of impulsive behaviour.

But when we allow ourselves to calm down, be still, and really focus on one thing, one person, one task at a time, we drop into 'rest and digest' mode. We feel safer, more connected to others, more social, more content.

This is what the Buurtzorg nurses discovered: when they stopped rushing from patient to patient and started being truly present with one person at a time, healing happened faster. The nurses' job satisfaction shot up. Patients recovered faster and lived longer. It has profound physiological effects.

When we're truly present, we shift from that anxious, scattered, high-alert state into what's called 'ventral vagal' – our nervous system's safe, social, connected mode. The practice here is to allow ourselves to deeply connect to what, or who, is in front of us.

3. Stop following the rules, and recover your autonomy

The patriarchal, capitalist, corporate way is command and control. It's hierarchical. Power sits at the top, everybody has to fit into the system, follow orders, fit into the same way of doing and thinking and behaving.

We can see this in women - our conditioned desire to look out for the rules, follow the rules, be "good", do what other people tell us is going to be best. We're giving away our power. We're conditioned to be good little identikit cogs in the patriarchal machine. But we're not little cogs.

Most of us are living by what Naz and I call the "should compass" - all the scripts we've internalised from our families and culture about what being a good girl, good woman, good businesswoman looks like.

This keeps us in constant comparison, always looking outside ourselves. We're constantly giving away our power to people we think have more expertise or know better than us: "This thing I've created isn't as good as theirs. I should be following what they say; they're the expert, what do I know?"

But here's what Buurtzorg shows us: it's not complete chaos if you allow everyone their own power to think for themselves. When nurses were trusted to follow their professional judgment rather than rigid protocols, both they and their patients thrived. It's actually much more effective than command and control, and everyone doing the same thing.

Equally, it's better when women think for ourselves and each do it our way. This is the antidote to fitting into the patriarchal system. We can begin the work of rediscovering and reconnecting to our true compass - the thing we're here to do, that feels meaningful to us, and the values that give us the fuel and momentum to create it. This true compass isn't just words or a vision board. It's something you can feel and consult in your body - a "touch tree" that you can always come back to, that you can locate yourself by. This one takes a lot of deliberate rewiring, but it is so very worth it.

4. Choose simplicity, and deliberately remove complexity from your life

We're living in an age of technological complexity, bombarded with information, complex strategies, complex software and platforms. We've been conditioned to believe that more systems, more tools, more optimisation will finally make everything manageable. A lot of these claim to make our lives simpler and more efficient, but they just don't. They require constant managing and wrangling.

There's a widespread belief that technology is a set of powerful tools that help us. But actually, our technology shapes us - it shapes our lives and hugely impacts our nervous systems. We don't acknowledge the power technology has over us, because it doesn't make us feel good.

Here's what Buurtzorg shows us: they've got a deliberately stripped-back management system and easy-to-use IT infrastructure that makes it simple to share knowledge across the network without logjams and inefficiency. They took a look and asked: Do we really need this? We might have always had it, but can we actually bin it? Can we do without all this management, all these SaaS platforms, all this bureaucracy, all this admin? Just because we can do something doesn't mean we should do it.

When they stripped away the tech, the admin, and the organisational bullshit, nurses got to do more of what mattered - spending time with patients, actually nursing. That's what they're there to do. That's their life purpose.

You can do the same with your life and business right now. Get rid of all the stuff you do because you've always done it. It's like Marie Kondo-ing your business: does this bring me joy, or am I just doing it because I've always done it, and it's a total drag?

What's your purpose? And how can you do more of that, and less of all that complex bullshit that gets in the way of it?

5. Embrace slowness, and reject the tyranny of urgency

We move through our days like we're being hunted. Everything feels urgent, because we've been taught that speed is good, and that efficiency is a moral virtue. We feel guilty about taking time to think, to process, to simply exist without producing. We've learned that busy = important, that rest = laziness.

There's a manic "hurry up" energy that possesses most women. We sprint from task to task, crossing things off lists with the urgency of someone trying to outrun disaster. But when you speed up, you hand away your power and control over your life.

Here's what the nurses discovered: when they slowed down to the pace their patients actually needed, when they stopped treating care like a race against the clock, healing happened faster. Time became their ally instead of their enemy.

There's something counterintuitive about slowness that I learned from my driving instructor Joe when I was learning to drive in London. London traffic can be crazy - everyone on a hair trigger, people cutting in all the time – you've really got to have your wits about you. And when you're feeling stressed and overwhelmed, our natural tendency is to hurry up.

But Joe's advice was: whenever you're feeling panicky, when everything is going too fast, you have to slow the fuck down. Go really, really slow.

And here's what happens when you slow down: everyone around you slows down. They have to, otherwise they'll crash. Some people might be angry about that - they might beep, they might shout, because they're totally in the grip of hurry-up energy. But they still have to slow down. And it’s helpful for everyone - it's safer that way.

When you slow down, you're giving yourself a gift and everyone else at the same time. You're regaining your sense of power and control over your life instead of being swept along by everyone else's urgency.

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Have we missed anything – are there any other principles we can steal from the Buurtzorg example…? We'd love to hear your thoughts:

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Jung had it right (as usual) and we've been doing it all wrong

What if you stopped treating your life like an Amazon delivery route?

What if you stopped treating your body like it’s a robot with no needs of its own?

What if you trusted yourself to notice what matters most and let the rest go?

Carl Jung once said: "I've realised that someone who is tired and needs a rest, and goes on working all the same, is a fool."

We need to stop being foolish. We need to stop doing all the work.

The thing is, if we stop doing all the stuff we usually do, there's going to be resistance. The people around us will resist that change because they won't benefit in the same way they always have. We'll get pushback.

More importantly, we'll get pushback from ourselves. Doing less and being less productive goes against all our conditioning as women. We've been trained from birth to put others' needs before our own, to people-please, to keep everyone happy. That's how we've learnt to get approval, how we feel safe, how we know we belong and won't be cast out.

There's going to be internal and external resistance, but I don't think there's any way around it. The alternative is continuing what we're doing, running the old programmes that not only don't serve us, but are actively harming our mental and physical health.

In one of our programmes, Naz and I always used to kick off with an exercise called "the shit on your plate." We'd invite women to make a massive list of everything on their to-do lists: tasks for themselves, their families, their kids, their partners, their businesses, things they'd promised friends, health and wellness goals, holiday planning, personal development, chores, admin.

Nobody ever finished that exercise. We gave people 10 minutes and everyone said they were just getting started.

It's actually a fascinating exercise you might want to try yourself. You could probably keep going for hours. But when you sit and look at that list, it really lands: how ridiculous our lives as women have become. The sheer nonsensical burden of what we do, not just for our work and businesses, but for others. All the mental and emotional load, the unpaid work, the constant noticing and managing and forward planning and disaster-averting.

So, we need to stop.

Yes, things might get messier. Yes, people will be disappointed. Yes, balls will be dropped. But you might just recover. You might remember what brings you alive and start building a life around what’s valuable, rather than hypervigilance.

Try this experiment: it will piss people off

Here's where the real work begins: learning to spot the tug –that impulse to do the thing, add it to the list, fix it NOW – and pause.

When you feel the familiar pull towards the crumbs on the counter or the unanswered email, ask yourself: "I've been trained to notice things like this. Can I leave this undone?"

Notice who's writing your to-do list.

Is it you, or is it the “system within”?

It’s in that pause, that moment of interruption, that your power starts flowing back.

Every time you resist the automatic tug, you reclaim a bit of your life, your freedom, your power to choose what actually matters to you.

Most women don't have a blueprint for this, but a different way IS possible

We don't have many blueprints for women living differently, but Buurtzorg shows us it's possible. When we stop trying to optimise ourselves within broken systems and start building something entirely new, something that trusts our inner wisdom, conserves our energy, and values our wellbeing, extraordinary things become possible.

This isn't about doing more efficiently. It's about doing what matters, in ways that sustain us, for reasons that feel authentic.

It's about becoming women who don't do it all, but who do what brings us alive.

That might just be the most radical thing we can do.

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We're running a workshop on Money, Power + Your True Value on Thursday 19th June. If you're ready to explore what building a business and life that truly supports you might look like, you can sign up here.

We currently have four spots available in our small group mastermind, From Force to Flow, and we also offer 1-2-1 coaching.

Naz and I are here to help you create a business you love, and that loves you back. Drop us a DM if you're interested in finding out more.

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