The Comparison Trap: Why Nothing You Do Ever Feels Like Enough

The Ambition Penalty: Stefanie O'Connell on Why Ambitious Women Keep Getting Pushed Down

So many women are burned out, running on empty, and quietly wondering if they just need to try harder, speak up more, be more assertive, or do something differently. We've been implementing all the advice, and we're left exhausted and frustrated. I am joined this week by journalist and author Stefanie O'Connell, whose new book, The Ambition Penalty: How Corporate Culture Tells Women to Step Up and Then Pushes Them Down, is out this month. It is thoroughly researched, brilliantly argued, and a genuine revelation. We get into why so much of the advice women have been given has actually worked against us (shit!), what the data actually shows about ambition, negotiation, promotion, and pay, and why the burned-out, self-blaming loop so many of us are stuck in is not a personal failing. (Psst! It's a structural failing) This is the kind of conversation you're going to want to share — with your friends, your colleagues, your daughters. And then you definitely need to read this book and give a copy to another woman who needs this too. The Ambition Penalty is out now wherever you buy books.  Find it on Stefanie's site here: https://tooambitious.com/book/ Follow Stefanie on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/stefanieoconnell/ Subscribe to her Substack: https://tooambitious.substack.com/ Share Your Thoughts [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2363172/fan_mail/new] CONNECT WITH EIMEAR  Free Resources and More: https://stan.store/eimearzone Explore Working With Eimear:  Book a Call: https://eimearzone.as.me/breakthrough 📱 Instagram: @eimearzonecoach [https://www.instagram.com/eimearzonecoach/]  💻 Website: eimearzone.com [http://eimearzone.com/] 📧  Email: hello@eimearzone.com  Subscribe to Girl, Choose Yourself on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.  © 2025 Eimear Zone Coaching. All rights reserved.

The Good Girl Hangover

Have you ever followed all the rules and still felt vaguely hollow? Ever done everything right and wondered why it doesn't feel like yours? Ever woken up somewhere in midlife and realised the map you've been navigating by was never actually yours to begin with? Have you ever felt the exhaustion of being so easy to be around — and not been able to explain why that exhausts you? If any of that lands, this episode is for you. This week, I'm exploring one of the oldest and most quietly costly patterns in women's lives. The good girl script. Where it comes from, what it costs, and what happens in that disorienting in-between space when it starts to crack. We go deep on this one. To Sylvia Plath and the fig tree. To Kate Chopin, writing in 1899, about a woman daring to want her own life. To an instruction carved above the entrance to the Oracle at Delphi 2,500 years ago that we are still, somehow, only beginning to heed. This episode is also drawn from Chapter 3 of my book Choose Yourself — The Trouble with Being Good. Come for a walk with me on this one. Share Your Thoughts [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2363172/fan_mail/new] CONNECT WITH EIMEAR  Free Resources and More: https://stan.store/eimearzone Explore Working With Eimear:  Book a Call: https://eimearzone.as.me/breakthrough 📱 Instagram: @eimearzonecoach [https://www.instagram.com/eimearzonecoach/]  💻 Website: eimearzone.com [http://eimearzone.com/] 📧  Email: hello@eimearzone.com  Subscribe to Girl, Choose Yourself on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.  © 2025 Eimear Zone Coaching. All rights reserved.

The Comparison Trap: Why Nothing You Do Ever Feels Like Enough

You achieved the thing, hit the goal, but somehow it still didn't feel quite enough. Meanwhile, someone else's success lands like a small deflation you can't quite explain, and you feel vaguely ashamed of both. This is one of the most raw and personal episodes I've recorded. That's because I lived this one deeply, and for a long time. In this episode, I get honest about where the comparison trap really comes from — long before social media handed it a megaphone — what it quietly costs you, and the only thing that has ever truly freed me from it. If nothing you do ever feels quite enough, then this one is for you. Share Your Thoughts [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2363172/fan_mail/new] CONNECT WITH EIMEAR  Free Resources and More: https://stan.store/eimearzone Explore Working With Eimear:  Book a Call: https://eimearzone.as.me/breakthrough 📱 Instagram: @eimearzonecoach [https://www.instagram.com/eimearzonecoach/]  💻 Website: eimearzone.com [http://eimearzone.com/] 📧  Email: hello@eimearzone.com  Subscribe to Girl, Choose Yourself on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.  © 2025 Eimear Zone Coaching. All rights reserved.

Strive If That's Your Thing — But What If It Didn't Have to Be So Hard?

You're doing everything right. The work, the discipline, the showing up. And yet somewhere underneath all of it is a tiredness that a good night's sleep doesn't touch. A sense that you're pushing against something that shouldn't require quite this much pushing. What if it didn't? This week I've been revisiting the teachings of Neville Goddard — a mid-twentieth-century mystic whose work found me through Wayne Dyer's Wishes Fulfilled and has never really left. What he teaches is quietly radical. Not a productivity system. Not a manifestation formula. Something older and stranger and more hopeful than either of those things. This episode is an invitation to consider a different relationship with what you want. One that doesn't require you to earn it through suffering first. One that starts not with doing, but with feeling. I'm also in the middle of a small personal experiment this week. I'll tell you about it. Bring a cup of something and come for a walk with me on this one. Share Your Thoughts [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2363172/fan_mail/new] CONNECT WITH EIMEAR  Free Resources and More: https://stan.store/eimearzone Explore Working With Eimear:  Book a Call: https://eimearzone.as.me/breakthrough 📱 Instagram: @eimearzonecoach [https://www.instagram.com/eimearzonecoach/]  💻 Website: eimearzone.com [http://eimearzone.com/] 📧  Email: hello@eimearzone.com  Subscribe to Girl, Choose Yourself on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.  © 2025 Eimear Zone Coaching. All rights reserved.

Anxious, Exhausted, Always People Pleasing? The One Root Cause.

We spend our lives building elaborate systems to avoid feeling certain things. And we don't even realise we're doing it. We call it being organised, being responsible, being careful. We call it managing. But underneath all that managing is something much simpler — pain we decided a long time ago we couldn't afford to feel. And it costs us everything. Our energy, our relationships, our sense of aliveness. We were not put here to protect ourselves from feeling. We were put here to live. I re-read Michael Singer's The Untethered Soul this week, and I'm sharing one of the most powerful lessons that has stayed with me since I first encountered it. If something in you recognises what I just described — this episode is for you. The Untethered Soul by Michael Singer is widely available wherever you buy books. Share Your Thoughts [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2363172/fan_mail/new] CONNECT WITH EIMEAR  Free Resources and More: https://stan.store/eimearzone Explore Working With Eimear:  Book a Call: https://eimearzone.as.me/breakthrough 📱 Instagram: @eimearzonecoach [https://www.instagram.com/eimearzonecoach/]  💻 Website: eimearzone.com [http://eimearzone.com/] 📧  Email: hello@eimearzone.com  Subscribe to Girl, Choose Yourself on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.  © 2025 Eimear Zone Coaching. All rights reserved.