#67 | 3 Smart Ways To Reclaim Headspace So You Can Lead, Influence And Nail A Promotion.

What could change in your career if you had more headspace for strategic thinking, influence, and bold moves?

In this episode, Caroline shifts from awareness to action with practical ways to reduce mental load and reclaim cognitive bandwidth. Because this is not just about feeling better. It is about protecting the headspace you need to contribute at a higher level, increase your visibility, and make the moves that support promotion and career growth. If your best thinking keeps getting crowded out by invisible responsibilities, this episode will show you where to begin.

You’ll

• Learn practical ways to reduce mental load and reclaim more mental space
• Protect more bandwidth for strategic thinking, stronger influence, and bigger career moves
• Understand how redirecting your cognitive energy can support visibility and promotion

Press play to start reclaiming the headspace you need to influence more, lead more clearly, and move your career forward.

New episodes are released every Monday, Wednesday and Friday mornings.

Stuck, simmering, or onto something juicy? I want to hear it. Drop me a line at caroline@inspireyourgenius.com - I read them all.

This podcast explores resilience, imposter syndrome, and credibility while unpacking how boundaries, conflict, and feedback shape the way we handle pressure, influence, and guilt at work. It also looks at promotion, work-life balance, people pleasing, decision making, and visibility, offering honest conversations about how to grow professionally without losing your confidence or yourself.

Transcript

Right, we've told the story, we've done the science, we know what's happening and we know why it happens. We also know what it costs you. Today, today we feel it and then we move it because that's what Fridays are for.

Welcome to Unshakeable Her, where we believe that building your confidence and influence doesn't require a personality transplant, just a few resourceful little habits and someone in your corner. That someone is me. I'm Caroline Esterson. Let's get into it.

So today you're going to hear the science of your brain reframed as a superpower and then you're going to feel it in your chest at full volume.

Today we hand you something back, a song to add to your playlist. Then you're also going to get one single move that connects the mental load directly to your career, to your bold move that keeps almost happening.

The third move today is the one that changes that. And of course, it wouldn't be complete if you didn't have three. Three little moves that you can actually do this week. Not a fix for the whole system, you know, that conversation is coming and it's a big E, but three precise, practical moves to start closing the tabs that don't deserve your brain power and redirecting that extraordinary processing power somewhere that does.

So let me start today by explaining why I picked today's song. Because it wasn't the obvious choice. I scoured through hundreds of my favourites. On the shortlist were things like Seven Nation Army, Wow, That Incredible Battle Cry, and Titanium by David Guetta with Sia. The beats in that alone signal all those tabs open in your brain

And the explosion in the song is a signal of what happens when we don't shut them down. But no, they weren't good enough for this episode. Although I would naturally add them to our Power Anthems playlist anyway, because they're great. So what did I choose? Well,

When you think about a song for this episode about the mental load, about the carrying everything and a brain that doesn't switch off, you might want to reach for something angry that validates that frustration. Something that says this is unfair and I'm furious about it and I know that song exists and it has its place.

But that's not the emotion that I wanted to leave you with today. Because Wednesday didn't end with your brain being a burden. It ended with recognizing that it's actually just an overloaded superpower, that interconnectivity and parallel processing that ability to hold the room, track the politics and notice what others miss.

That frankly is extraordinary. It's just currently being spent on things that don't deserve it. So the song I wanted wasn't actually about rage, it was about something harder and more powerful than rage.

It was about standing in the middle of everything that you are, the full complicated, magnificent, exhausting everything of it and deciding once and for all that you're not going to apologize for it anymore.

So today's song is "This Is Me" by Kiara Settle from The Greatest Showman. And I need you to go and find it right now, turn it up as loud as you can bear. And here's what I want you to listen for. Listen to where it starts, quiet, almost tentative, one little voice just about holding its ground.

That's Jaz at 6.43 in the morning. That's you in the meeting tracking seven things and saying nothing about it. Then listen to what happens. The moment it decides not to shrink, not to manage down and make itself smaller so that others feel more comfortable.

but the moment it just becomes itself fully unapologetically and then the chorus arrives. And after everything we've covered this week, the tabs, the cortisol, the stolen bandwidth, the meeting where Dan got the credit, after all of that, that chorus is not just a song.

It is a physiological event. It will hit you somewhere between your chest and your throat and it will feel like recognition. Because it is. This song is not about pretending to be strong. It's about claiming what was already there and was already yours. Your brain, your wiring, your extraordinary, inconvenient, unstoppable capacity to hold everything at once.

The goal, the move that we're making today is not to get rid of that. It's to stop spending it on things that don't deserve it and start spending it on things that do.

Okay, you've got it logged, added to your playlist, perfect.

Right, now three moves. Let's go. These aren't fixes. That mental load is not a personal problem with a personal solution. We'll talk about the systemic side of this in a future episode. And that conversation is coming, I promise you. But today, three things you can do this week in your own brain, in your own life to start redirecting that magnificent processing power somewhere it actually serves you.

Move one, schedule the spreadsheet. So here's what I see is happening right now. The invisible spreadsheet is open all the time, 24 hours a day, running in the background, consuming processing power, whether you want it to or not.

You can't close it by trying harder to relax. We covered the neuroscience, your default mode network doesn't fully switch off. Telling it to stop is like telling your heart to pause for a bit. But here's what you can do. You can give it a designated time to run. 15 minutes, same time every day. Mornings work particularly well for this or the end of the working day sit down, you open the spreadsheet deliberately and you run it. You let your brain run it. Everything you're tracking, everything you're holding, everything that's been quietly nagging in the background. You write it down, triage it and you decide what needs action and what can wait.

And then, and this is the important bit, when the spreadsheet tries to open at 6.43, or in the meeting or in the shower, you've got somewhere to put it. Not now, not on Thursday morning, you put it on the list.

You're not suppressing it, you're scheduling it and that's the difference. One creates pressure inside your brain, the other creates space. And space, as we now know, is where your best thinking lives. It deserves space. Move to do a visible handover, not a delegation. There's a difference between delegating a task and handing over the management of the task. 

And it's the difference between adding to your load and actually reducing it. When Jaz tells Steve that Ruby needs a pat lunch on Wednesdays, she's delegated a task. She'll still be the one who remembers it's Wednesday. She'll still be the one who checks it happens. She has outsourced the action, but retained the knowledge, the tracking and the follow-up. That's not handover, that's task splitting with extra steps.

My husband acknowledges it at home all the time by saying, it's audience participation time now, is it? I wonder what your version of that is. A real handover sounds like this. You are now the person who owns school lunches. That means you know which days, you know what she'll eat, you know where the lunchbox is, and you check. I'm no longer holding this.

It's actually harder than it sounds because handing over the management, not just the doing, means tolerating the possibility that it will be done differently and maybe not the way that you do it. Let it be done differently. The tab being closed is worth so much more than the tab being managed to your exact specification.

Move two: Pick one thing this week at home or at work and do a real handover. Not the task, the whole thing, the knowledge, the tracking, the ownership, all of it. Do it. Close that tab properly. Okay? Hope you're not having palpitations yet at leaving that at the door, but go for it. You'll be amazed at what difference it makes. 

Move three: Protect one slot of strategic headspace every day. This is the career move. This is the one that connects the mental load directly to your visibility and your ability to make the bold move you keep almost making.

Your brain really is extraordinary. It can hold 47 things simultaneously, but the thinking that gets you promoted, the strategic thinking, the creative thinking, that thinking needs a different kind of space. It needs to be unhurried, uninterrupted. And right now, that space is being quietly consumed before you even get to it. So you have to protect it.

20 minutes, once a day, in your calendar, blocked, named, call it whatever you need to call it so nobody books over it. Nothing else, no smoothing over anyone's anything, just your brain, blank page, and one question. What's the most important thing I'm not thinking about because I'm thinking about everything else? You don't have to solve it in 20 minutes, you just have to give it air.

You need to develop the discipline of letting things go and giving yourself space. Because here's what happens when you do it consistently. The bold move stops feeling like something you'll get to eventually, and it starts feeling like something that's actually already in motion. Your brain was never the problem. It just needed somewhere worth going.

So that's it for episode four, The Mental Load. We named it on Monday. We understood it Wednesday. And today we decided what to do with it.

Because here's the thing about a brain that runs 47 tabs, when you stop spending it on things that don't deserve it, the broken zip, the smoothing, the meeting you held together while someone else got the credit, when you stop spending it there and start spending it on you, there is nothing your brain can't do.

Next week we're going somewhere new. We're going to talk about what to do when you feel that you're being undervalued at work. But know that this conversation isn't finished. The invisible tax is coming and trust me, once you've heard it, you'll understand why this move was just the beginning.

Have a fabulous weekend and take some time just to be.

That's it from me today on Unshakable Her. If something landed, share it with a woman in your world who needs to hear it. She probably won't say so. She'll just be really glad you did. I'm Caroline Esterson and you are completely entirely unshakable.