12. Work-life balance is a lie we’re still telling

What if the reason you're stuck… is because you're building something that isn’t even you?

This episode is a full-throttle brain dump from my bedroom floor. I talk through the mess of launching something that doesn’t feel aligned, and what happens when you stop forcing what’s not working. You’ll hear about my decision to open House of Collab, the flopped launch of my Permission to be Human program, and how using human design helped me make peace with the pivot.

I also unpack why women are burning out from trying to be everything at once: the fixer, the feeler, the leader, and how that’s not a personality, it’s a survival strategy. If you've been stuck in overfunctioning mode or second-guessing whether you're "doing it wrong", this is for you.

You'll leave this episode with full permission to do business and life your way, plus some seriously honest truths about leadership, nervous system safety, and why toxic workplaces are killing more than just motivation.

Let’s make this a two-way conversation, come tell me what landed for you over on Instagram @sheshonestlymental

In this episode we cover:

• Recap of Episode 10 and the guilt of choosing yourself
• Announcing House of Collab and how it came to life
• Why Permission to be Human didn’t feel right
• Discovering alignment through human design
• How Corrina helps other women untangle their businesses
• Using AI and ChatGPT to support overwhelmed founders
• Rant on toxic leadership and emotional unsafety at work
• The importance of nervous system-friendly environments
• Realising work-life blend is more real than balance
• A heartfelt reminder: you’re not broken, just overwhelmed

Resources and links mentioned in this episode:

• Becca Francis – Human Design courses
• Dent
• Diary of a CEO episode on women’s health

• Invictus Apothecary (discount code: SHMFAM)
• Connect with Corrina on Instagram at @sheshonestlymental
• sheshonestlymental.com.au
• The Messy Middle – free community for offloading
• The Chaos Letters – sign up for raw mental health reflections
• Instagram (co-working): @hausofcollab
• Lifeline: 13 11 14
• Beyond Blue: 1300 22 4636

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:01

Welcome to She's Honesty Mental, a podcast for women who are done pretending they're fine when they're falling apart on the inside. I'm your host, Karina Rollinson, ADHD Brain, Medicated Mind, and Proud Mental Health Hospital alumni. Still here, still showing up somehow. This is a space for the fillers, the fixers, and the ones who carry it all and still wonder if it's enough. We talk about the chaos, the connection, and everything in between because silence nearly killed me. And these conversations save lives. Alright, cacao in hand, headphones on, chaos semi-contained. Let's get honestly mental. Ugh. How exciting. I am recording today's episode from my bedroom. No fancy recording studio happening here. I have had the wildest kind of week. It's been. I suppose it's not even been wild, it's just been one of those weeks. But for me, this episode is kind of. I feel like I'm about to drop a bomb on some subjects and things that I have been really affected by. And I don't want to say things to get myself in trouble. I'm probably going to say something that may offend people. Well, maybe I won't because I think I've attracted the right people to my tribe, if you know. But this is one of the other kind of situations that I find is affecting women on a really deep kind of cellular level. And it really kind of fucks me off. So let me pull up my notes. Okay, so this is episode 12. I'd probably wanted to give you a little bit of an update. Episode 10 a couple of weeks ago was me recording an episode in the storage room at Surf Club. And in that episode, I spoke about the emotional weight of what it looks like when you start choosing yourself after a lifetime of overfunctioning for everyone else. I talked about the tension between building something that's just yours and the guilt that sneaks in when you do. And it's been really wild because since I recorded that episode, I can say that I am opening House of Collab, a networking co-working space here in Esperance, which is so cool. I know that our local Chamber of Commerce has been trying to do it for ages. And there's been other businesses that have looked at doing it, but it's just not been a sustainable idea. And of course, then I've decided that I wanted to do it. And Jared's gone to me, well, you can't because there's no money for it. And maybe me's just gone, oh, she'll be right. It'll be totally fine. So House of Collab is opening. I'm very excited because I've signed, well, I haven't yet signed the lease, but that should be happening this week. I'm excited. The rent is pretty minimal. Uh, it's not a huge space, but it's a starting point. And now I've already got lots of support for it, which just makes it really, really fucking exciting. So watch this space. House of Collab is coming. And I suppose the other thing is I've been trying to build this program, Permission to be human, which was supposed to be this like work with me for 12 weeks, be a part of a community, let's all work together on your mental health together. Let's all get in and, you know, we'll have sessions and I'll send out freebies and all of this really cool stuff. And every time I tried to do it, it just felt a bit off. It didn't feel me. It felt very salesy, and that's not who I am. And I then signed up for another course through Becca Francis, who teaches people how to read human design. And I was going through trying to learn and understand how to read other people's charts because I found human design has been one of the most amazing tools for me to understand me as a person. And by doing that, I've been able to pick apart the program permission to be human and work out why it's not working for me, why trying to sell something like this isn't really who I am, why it's not aligning, why people are not signing up. People don't really talk about this. And it's been funny because when I try to do something that's forced or it doesn't feel aligned with me as a person, it doesn't work. And it's like this energetic shift of I'm trying to fit a round peg in a square hole or a square peg in a round hole. I don't know, one or the other. But I'm trying to force something and it's just not, it's not right. And it's funny because I've always had this idea in my head about trying to bring together the way organizations work, in the sense it really pisses me off when you have small businesses out there that are trying to do their own marketing, they're trying to do their own finance, they're trying to do their own HR, they're trying to do their own ops, and it looks shit. I feel so judgmental, but I'm like, it looks really crap. And that's because I look at it myself and I have been practicing and doing these skills for a really long time. And that's when a friend messaged me and she goes, Karina, look, I'm actually really keen. I'm thinking about separating my business brand and my personal brand and having those as two kind of separate entities. And I said, Girl, I've actually been thinking that for the last three weeks when I've been looking at social media. And so she goes, This is what you need to be doing. You need to be this kind of like visionary almost of a sense of being able to see the bigger picture, which has been something that I've always found I'm really good at, is being able to kind of step back and look and analyze what's going on, and then kind of not step into their situation fully, but as a person on the outside looking in, being able to listen to them, go through the conversation, listen to their story, and then analyze it and help them put it together. And so that's what I did. I have worked with someone, two people in the last couple of weeks, completely kind of spontaneously, but it felt so natural because they've got their own businesses, they're trying to put stuff together and they haven't been able to cohesively see it because they've been too overwhelmed in the little things. Whereas for me, the little things are like muscle memory, setting up accounting, setting up bank files, setting up your social media, getting it all to talk. And I get really frustrated when I see people trying to do it all on their own because I'm like, girl, I could just get in there, jump in, fix it, show you how to do it, make it so easy. And I think particularly in this day and age, I don't know all of the answers for things, but I know where I can look to find the answer for things. And so what I'm offering to the world is, and I'm sharing this not to sell it, but I'm sharing it because this is when you have an idea and you want to do something, but then there's all these like friction points going on. You go, oh, too, that's too hard. I I'm not interested. I I can't do this. Instead, I'm sharing it because, of course, this is she's honestly mental, and this is actually what goes on in my head probably most of the hours of the day. If you've been around for a while, you already know my mornings don't start without my kick out. I've been drinking Invictus Apocalypse ceremonial cacao since 2020. It's literally been everywhere with me, across Australia, up to Broome, and even in my inpatient hospital stays. It's my one little moment of sacredness each morning, usually brought to me Made with Love by Jared. Bless him. The beautiful humans behind it, Jody and Ben, aka the Captain and the Crew, also run Naturally Esperance, their gorgeous local store and dispensary. They've been part of my world for years, and I'm honestly so grateful for what they've created. And now they give me a little something for you, my She's Honestly Mental fan. You can get 10% off their 250 gram and one kilo cacao in store and online using the code SHM FAM, all one word. Just head to Invictusapochery.com.au or pop into naturally esperants if you're a local. So I've had one friend who's starting her own nail salon, and she came over a couple of weeks ago and was just telling me about it. And I said, girl, like tell me all your things. I sat there, I had my little Otta AI open, and it just recorded the conversation between the two of us. And it was really great because at the end of the conversation, or we kind of got halfway, and I grabbed the transcript from that, I punched it into Chat GPT because I have GPTs that I've built that have helped me strategize and analyze different situations. And it spat out this basically to-do list for her. And she said to me, that's the smartest thing that I've ever seen. And it's not even that hard. It's not even that hard because it's been able to pull into what she really needs. It's been able to look at the advice that I've been able to give her. And then it's literally spat out a to-do list that suits her brain and the way that she works. And she said to me, Karina, this has been the biggest gift that you could ever give me because this stuff really stressed me out. And this is what I stand for we are so trying to be perfect. We are so trying to hold everything together. And all it's doing is making us more vulnerable to failure. It just blows my mind and it's so wild that in this day and age, we are still behaving like this because we're too scared to be seen as who we are, which is a human being, not a human doing. And it makes me really sad. But in saying that, I still live by that for me sometimes. It's so funny. I try and start with a bit of a outline for the podcast of where I want to take it, and it never really happens. But we get like I think that's the point of it, is it's very raw. So I'm working with this amazing team called Dent, and it's through a guide, Daniel Priestley. He talks a lot about being the key person of influence in a particular area. And for me, I want to be the person, or I feel like I am one of the people that so openly talks about mental health, the cost of mental health, and the ways that we can try and flip it and find support for people as they are that have actually signed up to do his program. And it's been incredible. So for me, what I really believe is that we have this deep ingrained fear of if people saw how much we were actually struggling, they'd think that we were failures. And that is a lot of the driver for people that are struggling with their mental health, is that they feel like, and I mean, I'm generalizing here, they feel like if people actually saw who they were or saw that they needed help or that they couldn't do something on their own, that they would be seen as a failure. Because that's what I lived and breathed for a good five to six years of my life. That is what led me to the edge multiple times. And so I see myself, and this is written in my human design too, is that I'm like this living, breathing, walking experiment of life. And then I have this skill of being able to openly talk about stuff. So that's where this podcast sits. And what I've truly hope is that anyone that listens to this podcast, when you start listening to when you finish listening, that you definitely feel like you can show up as you are, and you have that opportunity to your nervous system finally settles. You start to see yourself, and you feel like you're finally held. If that's all that you get out of this, I literally feel like I could die a happy lady. So these are the things that I've found are kind of like pain points, is you know, we have this feeling of I can't keep doing this. We have this feeling of I'm burnt out, anxious, overstimulated. We have a feeling of if I stop, everything stops. And it's really, really tough. You know, we're spending time believing that we have to be the strong one. We're thinking that vulnerability equals weakness. We assume that our worth is tied to how much we can hold and do. And I have lived that so much with all the different organizations and community groups and stuff that I do. Then if you're burnt out, you feel like you're not capable of leadership. It's just amazing how skilled and talented so many of us are in our own ways. And it might not traditionally look like leadership. Another client of mine that I was working with this week, and she said, you know, you and M, and we're talking about MG legend, she said, you and M are such great leaders in the space that you're in. And she supports us in our businesses. And she goes, You guys are just such great thought leaders. You do such a good job, and I'm just here to kind of do mine. And I said to her, Do you understand that what you're doing is actually being a leader? You are a thought leader in this space that you're in. What you're doing and the way that you're showing up is not something that's common. It's not something that we sit back and go, oh yeah, you're just, you know, kind of below us. You're sitting at the table with us. That's not because we hire you to do stuff. It's like you're hiring me to do this. So that, you know, we're just all on the same side. And it was interesting because the shift that she saw from the beginning of the conversation to the end of the conversation was, yeah, you know what? I'm actually valuable. Of course she's valuable to her. So it's that thinking what we think different things look like, i.e., leadership, isn't always what leadership is actually about. And I mean that's yeah. Believing that she should be able to handle it all and taking responsibility for everything because no one else steps in, believing support when you're having support, when you're having someone be there for you, actually equals weakness or dependence. So that's kind of where we're at with it. It's kind of crazy because I've gone from thinking that I'm working with kind of women on a personal level only, but really what I'm doing is I'm working with women on a whole level, because it's not just about you as a person at home. It's about you as a person in every kind of situation. For me, I found again, it's not work-life balance, it's work-life blend because it is just a flow. Because I think that's the way that the world really is these days, is it is the flow of the work-life. There's no real line. And I'm not talking about the women that go to work and do nine to five or nine to one or whatever. I'm talking about the women, the entrepreneurs, the leaders, the people that are trying to create things. There's so much that gets involved and your brains just don't really stop. So you're trying to find a way that you can work and almost like compartmentalize and have those strategies to support you throughout the day so that you can go, okay, well, so for instance, this morning I was at Surf Club and I get in the water at about nine o'clock and I don't get out of the water till 11. I didn't look at my phone between 8:30 and lunchtime today. What? But that's because I'm so involved in what I'm doing. I know that my work and everything like that, it's not important right now. And I know it's obviously surf club is on a Sunday, but if I was at home and we didn't have Surf Club, I'd probably be working. I mean, look at me now, it's 5.36 on a Sunday afternoon and I'm sitting on my bed recording a podcast. Though for me, this isn't working. It is working, but it's that blend. So this kind of leads me into the next kind of level of where I'm going and something that's probably been pissing me off for a long time is around leadership and organizations. Because I know that there's I feel like what's actually making the world really struggle is we've got people out there that are super toxic leaders, and no amount of toxic positivity, no amount of positivity or affirmations or anything like that can really flip that part of leadership. And if we've got organizations and leaders out there that are allowing and not having, you know, those workplaces that are emotionally safe or community organizations that are emotionally safe that are allowing behavior, it makes it a lot harder because we try and regulate at home and then we go to a workplace or to a community organization and we're unable to kind of regulate there because it's not want for the better words, emotionally safe. Because you've got people out there that just don't give a shit or they've got so much trauma that they behave like assholes. It makes it really hard. And that's why I think there's a lot of people that don't volunteer these days because you just get treated like shit. There's a reason why there's a lot of dysfunction in businesses because you have owners and leaders who think that they're king shit and that it's the best way forward is their way, it's my way or the highway. And to some extent it can be like that. But also the world has just not been curated, designed, however you want to say it. Like it's just not a place that really honors our nervous systems. And you can look as physical as fuck, you can be as healthy as you want to be, like skinny and beautiful and fit and all of the rest of it. And you can try and journal your way out of it. But if the environments that we're putting ourselves in are not prioritizing our nervous systems and the way that we regulate emotionally, then I think it's going to be really detrimental to the world. But what I've noticed of late is how much that it is actually changing. I was listening to a Darius CEO podcast the other day, and I think he was saying it was one of the episodes that. And we'll link it in the show notes. It was the episode where he had three females come on. They were all very well respected and well known in their areas of expertise. And they mentioned that women's health data was not actually properly looked into until 1993. Like I think up until then, up until like 1993, they were using Caucasian middle-aged men's data for women's health. I suppose where I've gone this episode is where I've I've had this thought of I should be reaching out and working with women on this level of like one-on-one, right in the mess with the women that are really struggling on a home personal kind of level. And I've realized that that's not really where I can make the most impact. And not that impact is the most important thing for me. It's been really wild because, you know, talking to Jared about House of Collab and all of the rest of it, he's said to me, Well, you're spending all this money on coaching, on podcasting, on building all of these things. We need to be getting some money back in for that. So I've really felt this heavy pressure of trying to make money. But when my friend said to me, you know, I worked with my friend who's building her now business, and then my other friend who's trying to split her brands, they've said, Karina, this is what you need to be doing. And so I kind of mapped it all out, planned it all out, and then I showed Jared, and he goes, Yeah, well, no shit. This is exactly what you should be doing. I said to him, Well, you could have fucking told me this earlier. And he goes, Well, I've got to let you go through this. So I've been through the process of trying to launch a program to make it look pretty and sexy like everyone else's, only then to realise that that's not actually what's right for me. And it's all this testing and seeing where things fit, I suppose, and not being afraid to fuck it up or to have it fail in the hopes that it'll work out eventually. Because it has always worked out eventually. I think I can prove for me and myself, like talking to me is the amount of times that you've tried something and it's failed, but it's not failed and it's been the end of the world because the world's still standing and I'm still standing. It's more so it's failed, but then I've learned from it. And everything that I've learned up until now has given me this capacity to really be that person because I do, I just see it so much when someone has a problem sitting in front of me, and they're all spinning on it, like spinning tops, going, I can't find the answer, I don't know how to do that. And then you have other people trying to weigh in with their opinions, and I'm like, shut the fuck up. It's literally just create an online form and put a link and blah, blah, blah. Like it's that fucking easy. And so I've had to learn to shut the fuck up and let people go through it until they grow through it. But yeah, I'm excited because I'm hoping that I can actually try and start stepping into some organizations and working with them on building nervous system aware programs and systems and improving leadership, because that's been, I feel like, the biggest cost of humanity. These Caucasian men who think they know it all when really they haven't got the slightest idea. Anyway, that's been a bit of a random one. And I would love to hear more if you agree, disagree. Please make sure that you drop a comment in my socials, flick me an email, Karina at she's honestly mental.com.au. Because I love these conversations. I just think it's wild. So yeah, and every time you send me a message, it helps me realize that I'm not wasting my time. I don't know even if that's the right word. It helps me realize that what I'm doing does actually resonate with some people. I think that's the thing with podcasting, is I'm recording these and you're not getting them for four weeks after I've recorded them. And then I forget about what we've discussed. Thanks for hanging out with me on She's Honestly Mental. If today's episode cracked open something inside of you or gave you space to exhale, come say hi over at Instagram at She's Honestly Mental. Or send this to someone who needs to hear that they're not alone. And if you haven't yet, hit that follow button so the next episode lands in your messy feed right where it belongs. Until next time, take care of your brain. You're not broken. You're just honestly mental. And all the best people are.