[00:00:00] Welcome back to Corporate Fuckery, stories of Survival, psychological Warfare, and choosing what's best for you. I'm Lauren Delia, certified success Coach, subconscious strategist, astrologer, and former corporate Insider turned truthteller. This podcast isn't about glorifying burnout or dunking on bad managers or leaders.
It's about naming what's been normalized and reclaiming what's been lost in the process. Today's episode is all about cost, but not the salary. They flash on your offer letter. When you get that big promotion, the emotional invoice, they slip under your door. After years of performing, producing, and people pleasing, let's talk about it.
I am gonna begin with an email I received from a woman. I'll just refer to her as Jane, just four days after launching this podcast. She's an executive and like many of us, she's brilliant, reliable, and navigating corporate [00:01:00] fuckery in real time. Hi Lauren. I just wanna reach out and say thank you. Thank you, thank you for your podcast.
The Instagram algorithm served me up one of your reels this morning, and it was exactly what I needed today. I'm a senior lawyer working in a tech company, chronic high achiever and high performer, unrelenting cheerleader of others, and always the useful one, holding work, family, and work life together.
Less than 24 hours ago, I got a shocking medical diagnosis out of the blue. My first thought, how am I going to manage this and keep my commitments to my employer and the work colleagues? I was feeling bad about taking one day off of work for an inpatient screening procedure, and now I would need to take at least one more day off as medical leave while I learn about my diagnosis and learn how to adjust my new life, [00:02:00] not to mention off work for future doctor appointments and medical procedures. I feel selfish for the negative impact this would have on work colleagues and the projects that depend on me.
In recent years, I've been aware of the resistant to striving culture. I made a deliberate decision not to continue to climb the corporate ladder, instead choosing to do my current role the best that I can and master my craft. That helped me feel closer to my true self, but it wasn't until the past 24 hours with the diagnosis, coupled with your own honesty and reflections in your podcast that I finally had a breakthrough realization shrugging off the culture of hustling and striving was just the beginning. My next step is to learn, to allow myself to shut down and get quiet, rather than always sacrificing, showing up and performing. Thank you for sharing those ideas. It is [00:03:00] exactly what I needed to hear and I am so grateful to you.
I don't know what my next steps will be exactly. It will probably involve walks in the forest and journaling and trying to quiet my mind to the point that I can reconnect with whatever version of me lies beneath the corporate performance structure.
Parenting goals and community expectations, and it will definitely involve listening to all your future podcasts, reading your website content, and cheering you on down here in Australia. Thank you for the impact you've had on me. Thank you for sharing your perspective with the world, especially when you're going through such a rough time yourself.
With thanks, Jane. Take that in for a hot sec. I was literally screaming in my car when I received this email, and it still makes me smile every time I read it.
The real cost isn't just a sick day, it's the guilt that shows up when [00:04:00] you need one. The programming that tells you you're selfish for slowing down even in a health crisis. That's the corporate conditioning. We're here to disrupt.
I'm coming with receipts in this episode and providing you 10 tools to untangle corporate fuckery by the end of our time together today.
So let's get into it. I wanna talk about the two currencies. Corporate fuckery costs you the most. It's your time and your energy. We think burnout is the problem, but burnout, that's just the invoice. The problem is what came before it. The constant override of your nervous system, the pushing through the micromanaged calendars, the feeling like you're always on, even when you're off the clock.
I talked about this in episode three, how the National Institutes of Health now call this the burnout cascade framework.
Cute, right? But let's be clear, this is not just a framework. It's [00:05:00] a full system failure. It doesn't mean that you're bad at boundaries. You've just been conditioned to betray your body, your mind, and let's be honest, your soul in the name of high performance burnout is the byproduct of living in survival mode for too long without relief.
And most of us, myself included, don't even recognize it. It's not just a one time flame out, it's the erosion that happens when the world keeps taking and you never replenish. First, your sleep gets shallow, then your joy gets dim.
Even your cortisol taps out and your body starts keeping score. This is how we get there. Not in a dramatic moment, but in a thousand quiet yeses that we actually meant no, or, let me think about it, that we're act. This is how we get there. Not in one dramatic moment, but through a thousand [00:06:00] quiet yeses. That we're actually probably nos, but we're truly self abandonment. And yet we use survival mode and burnout interchangeably, but they're not the same.
Survival mode is your nervous system gripping the wheel, white knuckled , trying to keep you from crashing out. Burnout is the engine seizing, the brakes failing. You don't even care if you crash. You just want out and you want for someone else to help you press the eject button so you don't have to make that decision.
We don't talk about how many high achievers are in survival mode, but think it's normal. That's not resilience. That's chronic override and Jane's story. The wake up call I know down in my soul hole that you do not need one more productivity hack. You actually don't even need to set a goal for yourself to like achieve more or accomplish more, but maybe to [00:07:00] find a little peace in your soul so that that meeting that you dread every single week doesn't hit you like a wrecking ball and rack your nervous system before noon on Tuesday.
You need permission to stop asking your body to do what your soul no longer consents to. And all of that is even before we calculate what your time is actually worth. So let's talk about those numbers. 2080 hours. That's the baseline for full-time employment at 40 hours a week. But most of you listening, you're clocking 50, 60, sometimes more. And if we're being really honest, most employers expect at least 45. So we're gonna do some rough math here together, and we're gonna estimate a hundred thousand dollars salary.
I want you to double the following numbers if you're making anywhere close to [00:08:00] 200,000 or north of that . if you earn $100,000 and work 40 hours a week, you're making on average $48 an hour, and that's before taxes. If you're working 50 hours on average, making a hundred thousand dollars a year, you're making $38 an hour before taxes.
And if you're working 60 hours on average per week, you've just reduced your hourly rate to $32 an hour. That isn't six figure freedom. It's $32 an hour and a side of resentment. And while this is just rough math, this is corporate Fuckery 1 0 1. You give them the best years of your life, your sharpest thinking, your evenings, your boundaries, your weekends, your mental load, and in return you get a two and a half percent raise and a pizza party during burnout prevention [00:09:00] month.
I don't even know how to quantify the cost of the pinky promises, but I carry the weight of them. And I know you have two. They sound like this. You promised you'd be at the school play. You said you'd call your dad back.
You swore this month, you'd take that Friday off. You committed to the family trip only to cancel last minute, but your deliverables keep multiplying like rabbits. The pinky promise becomes a guilt grenade and you whisper to yourself Next time, just get through this quarter.
But what if this quarter becomes your year or even your life? That's the sneaky cost, not just of your time, but of your presence, your peace, your personhood. Let's talk about what I call. Corporate shadow work. Next, I'm talking about the work of bringing to light the subconscious patterns that were trained into you inside systems that reward performance and [00:10:00] punish pause that see yourself sacrifice as dedication and that call your burnout.
Excellence that build entire brands on your ability to emotionally contort yourself to stay relevant, promotable and likable. I used to call myself Gumby. I used to contort into any version of myself that people needed in order for me to think that they thought that I was successful. But here's the irony.
You've probably told yourself you're just bad at work life balance, but the truth, you're not bad at balance. You're level expert at self abandonment because that's what earned you your seat at the table this whole time. And there's nothing wrong or bad about that. That's how you survive the war zone of psychological warfare that no one talks about.
That is dressed in designer heels you bought at Nordstrom. Scrolling at 3:00 AM and framed as an opportunity. [00:11:00] You were trained to override your intuition in favor of optics. To answer quickly, to show up flawlessly, to perform endlessly even when your inner world was in chaos. This is a subconscious pattern and your subconscious, as we covered last week, it craves familiarity over freedom.
Even when it's hurting you, that's why entire corners of the internet are now devoted to quitting your job and taking your life back or quiet, quitting. And I get it. I don't blame them. Not even a little. But there's also another option one that doesn't require burning it all down, but instead builds new relationships with this system and with yourself.
Corporate shadow work happens in the quietest moments when you pause before saying yes out of obligation. When you feel [00:12:00] that pang in your gut before accepting the calendar invite or oversubscribing to a weekend full of shit that you don't wanna do, and when you realize your Sunday scaries aren't just dread, they're grief.
Grief. For a version of you who's been buried under deadlines, optics, and other people's expectations. This is how the awareness begins, not through shame, but through truth telling. Because the real cost of corporate fuckery, it's not just the missed birthdays or unprocessed emotions, it's the slow erosion of your soul.
It's the quiet resignation that says, I guess this is just how it is. It's waking up one day and realizing you've spent more time being productive than being present. And if you're thinking, maybe I just need a better mindset, let's go there for a second. 'cause I could talk about this all [00:13:00] day long. Enter the mindset bros, the Dispenza's and the Tony Robbins clones.
Just telling you to think better thoughts. And yeah, sometimes there's value in that too, but if your subconscious still believes that rest is dangerous, that stillness means irrelevance, that slowing down equals failure, then choosing better thoughts doesn't actually stick. You'll keep grinding. You'll keep proving, keep betraying yourself because your nervous system believes that that's what's safe.
This is the fuckery we're here to undo, and I'm gonna give you the exit strategy right now. So here's how I invite you to reclaim your time, your energy, and your piece, and I've included these down in the show notes. Be below so that you can review and reflect on which one might fit best for you to try on.
Number one seems so simple and obvious, but I want you to start tracking your hours. I [00:14:00] actually used to do this back in my Gilead days and would laugh at myself because on average I was working 15 hours a day. But I want you to start auditing your reality.
Where is your time actually going? Number two, micros sabotage the machine. End meetings 10 minutes early. Ignore slack, disrupt the default. Take your norm and flip it on its head just a little bit. Three, the rebellious reset. Put your nervous system reset in your calendar and honor it like it's your boss's birthday.
That could literally be 10 minutes of tapping a meditation, a walk around the block, journaling, anything to disrupt that normal pattern of pushing through. Number four, flip your calendar life first, then work. Even if it's just one personal item per week. I know how hard this is to choose you, but I guarantee you [00:15:00] after the third or fourth time of doing it, you're gonna feel a new sense of freedom, I promise.
Next, number five, reverse your ROI ask, is this giving me peace or points, presence or panic? And adjust accordingly. Number six, we're gonna call it the Jane Protocol. Ask yourself, if I just received a life altering diagnosis, would this still matter? And now here's where we're adding to the mix. Number one, create a five minute ritual, break music movement, breath, clear your energy, like you clear your inbox.
This is where EFT tapping or emotional freedom tapping is a huge tool to literally move that dense energy out of your body. I did not use to believe in this, but I 100% believe that this can help clear any energy in about eight minutes flat. Number two, I invite you to not let this [00:16:00] experience harden you, let it show you where your choices need to change.
This is self preservation. This is true leadership. Next I want you to consider fantasizing on repeat. Imagine how your day could feel from start to finish and then start playing it out and gamifying it. Your subconscious mind loves creativity, it loves imagination, and it loves for you to put things on repeat so it can normalize that.
Next, talk to your future self. They're already on the other side of this whole chapter that you're navigating. Ask her what She knows I can help you meet her. This is the part that I'm trained in and I am actually level expert in, and I believe that your future self is truly your best coach and mentor.
I can help give you the tools and the guidance and the advice, but truly, you know what's best for you. [00:17:00] Next, reframe. The delay. Didn't get it done. Try this, and this is one of my favorite things, especially when you're navigating a hundred tight timelines. Try telling yourself I wasn't supposed to get that done yet.
The optimized moment is still coming. And then give yourself a little timer to get it started or get it done, and watch how your brain gets on board with achieving the thing that you felt behind on. And last, I want to invite you to do 5% less. And if 5% feels too big, I want you to start with 1%. That's enough.
You can do this in a super playful way by asking your AI bot whichever one you use. What's one way I can shave off 60 to 90 minutes from this week from my to-do list without compromising results? Let your brain see it's safe to delegate or [00:18:00] even delete. So here's your mission. Should you choose to accept it this week, pick one of these untangling tools and take it for a spin.
I don't care if it's a rebellious, rest, a reverse, ROI, or asking future self for cheat codes. Just try one. Give your nervous system a moment of relief. Give your subconscious mind a pattern interruption. Give you a taste of what it feels like to operate from intentionality instead of obligation. And then I want you to email me.
Seriously, tell me what happened. Tell me what shook loose, what made it possible, or even what you almost talked yourself out of. Because I wanna celebrate with you, not just your results, but your resistance. Because choosing yourself in a system that profits from your exhaustion. That's not self-care, that's rebellion with receipts and I am so here for it.
So if you're multitasking [00:19:00] right now, no worries. I dropped the full untangling list in the show notes below, so you don't have to rewind this episode 14 times while you're trying to find milk at Whole Foods. But remember this, and this part's important, so I'm gonna speak softer so you can lean in for a hot sec.
These aren't just tips. These are breadcrumbs, tiny, intentional acts that help you remember who you are underneath the performance, the patterning, and the pressure. And when you start following these breadcrumbs, you don't just reclaim your calendar, you reclaim your clarity, you reclaim your capacity, and you reclaim your power.
This podcast is for the high achieving leaders doing the same, especially the ones who have built lives that look damn good on paper, but don't feel good in their bodies. The ones that wake [00:20:00] up every day wondering how something so successful could still feel so hollow. The ones who know deep down that the life they built is no longer the one they want to keep living, and who are finally courageously willing to admit that.
There's no shame in that. None. In fact, that flicker of awareness, that quiet whisper that says something has to change. That's not a red flag. That's a divine signal. That's your soul. Remembering that something more is possible and that you're worthy of it. This podcast, it's a home for those leaders.
, A place to name the quiet grief, the invisible compromises, and the psychological warfare. We've been sold as success. A place to call out the corporate fuckery without apology and reclaim the parts of ourselves we abandoned to survive it.
Because the truth is the cost of staying in a life that [00:21:00] doesn't fit you anymore is your peace, is your presence, is your power, but the opportunity is everything because when you choose what's best for you. Not what makes people clap, not what looks good on LinkedIn, not what gets you the bonus or a gold star, but what's actually true for you.
You don't just change your life, you change your legacy, you change the system, and you change the whole damn universe. And we are just getting started.
