[00:00:00] Welcome back to Corporate Fuckery, stories of Survival, psychological Warfare, and choosing What's best for you. I'm Lauren DeGolia, certified success coach, subconscious strategist, astrologer technologist, and former corporate insider turned truthteller. This is it. This season one finale 10 weeks ago, the day after I was let go from Microsoft, I hit record still in grief from losing my dad just.
Three weeks earlier, still in shock for more corporate betrayal in my career and holding together a family system that was quietly spinning out. I didn't know where this podcast would take me, but I knew I needed to start talking and what I've learned since then.
Corporate fuckery isn't just real. It's everywhere. it's in the hallways. The zoom rooms, the slack channels. It's the invisible contracts we've signed with ourselves and our workplaces.
And the cost of it. [00:01:00] It ripples outward into our health, our families, our sense of self. This episode is about that ripple effect.
What happens when corporate culture doesn't just touch your paycheck? It reshapes your identity, your nervous system, and your very definition of worth. We're gonna start with something a little raw trigger warning, but if you haven't heard, a Microsoft employee just 35 years old, was found dead in his office at 2:00 AM this last week.
His family is now publicly warning tech companies, not to overwork their people, saying that this was preventable. And it highlights something really important that this is the price of leaders writing checks, impossible. Deadlines stripped down headcount, dangling bonuses that employees just can't cash.
When the math doesn't work, the body pays the bill and when the body can't anymore. Families pay. It's not just long [00:02:00] hours. It's the quiet panic of Sunday scaries the pit in your stomach before running another team meeting. The jaw that locks when slack pings.
That is corporate fuckery at work in your nervous system . Now let's talk about why this cuts so deep. High achievers, especially women, live inside an invisible contract and it goes like this. Be useful, be agreeable, be perfect, be quiet. We cash in on performance as protection. And when we hit our bonus target, when we crush the quarterly goals, when we stay late, but stay safe. It feels like proof we belong. But when we miss.
Even if it's because of shifting markets or slash budgets, it doesn't just miss the number. It nicks our identity. I remember clawing my way through the last year at Microsoft feeling like I had one of the most challenging reporting situations of my entire career. [00:03:00] Six months later, I earned an org-wide award.
Only to get half my bonus after giving everything, I had 4:00 AM wake up working 60 hour weeks. Only to be disappointed that I got 50% of what my quote unquote target was, and I'm not gonna talk about what that impact is to the total compensation package in this episode.
But I think that we can agree that total compensation versus target bonus is corporate fuckery in its own right. That's when I realized this isn't about performance. This is about power, and women feel it differently because our conditioning says, take anything handed to you. Prove yourself twice as hard and you'll be safe.
Until one day you're standing in a corner office with a hollow chest wondering why you don't recognize yourself anymore and how you're gonna crush that big goal that the C-Suite just handed to you. Here's the part that most people underestimate, [00:04:00] that energy, it ripples. When you override yourself at work. Your nervous system doesn't compartmentalize. It doesn't say that was just a bad meeting. It carries the static home to the dinner table, to your kids, to your partner, to your sleep.
Ultimately to your health. That's how energy works. You've seen it time and time again, but maybe you've never considered how it's playing out in your life. Sometimes it shows up like this. That one unfair review results in multiple months of anxiety attacks, and that one toxic boss inadvertently adds strain to your marriage that might already feel highly transactional.
That just a business layoff becomes your child, watching their parent crumble. Corporate fuckery never just stays at work, and that's why this isn't about toughening up. It's about reclaiming your humanity so that you can protect your peace and the humanity of everyone you interact [00:05:00] with.
I need you to really understand the connection between your energy and your mind. The 5% that thinks logically knows you're exhausted. That's your conscious mind. It knows the gaslighting is wrong, the targets are shifting, the AI replacements don't make sense, but your subconscious, the 95% running on autopilot, built on every lived experience and decades of conditioning is holding the survival code. Achievement equals belonging. Doing more equals better results, and the system will take care of me if I can just keep it all together.
That's why you keep saying yes. That's why you cry in the shower and then wipe your face before logging on. Here's the science neuroscientists call it neuroplasticity. Your brain wires itself to repeat What once kept you safe? Joe Dispenza calls it the energy of. Thought. Every thought produces a chemical.
Every chemical produces a feeling, and [00:06:00] those feelings hardwire into your state of being. If your subconscious keeps projecting, I only belong when I overdeliver. Your body literally lives in that energy until you rewrite the code.
Tony Robbins says, where focus goes, energy flows. If your subconscious is focused on survival, then all of your energy. Physical, emotional, creative gets poured into proving you're safe, not into creating what you actually want. Now, let me be clear. I am not putting the load on women to single handedly fix broken systems. That's not the point. But I am challenging us to step into radical responsibility for protecting our own peace because when you do, you stop leaking your power into a system that drains you, and you start modeling what real human leadership looks like.
Think of it like upgrading your operating system. The old code says. Work harder, prove more, stay safe. You're running outdated software that [00:07:00] freezes and crashes under pressure. Subconscious reprogramming is the upgrade one that gives you stability, capacity, and new ways of processing reality.
And once you run on that new os. Everyone around you feels the difference. That is the ripple effect in action. And you don't have to take my word for it. The ripple effect shows up in your stories too. Stories you've sent me, stories I carry with me as proof that this isn't just theory. These are lived realities of what happens when subconscious code of achieve more, prove more, survive.
Collides with broken systems. They show both the cost of staying and the courage of leaving. One writer, a director, overseeing a $600 million budget was once praised as indispensable, shredded in feedback. Friday mob emailed and completely erased. The next week, she landed a $200 million contract and got [00:08:00] nothing.
But silence HR tried to trap her with a non-compete that would erase her whole network. She refused, ended up with PTSD, but ultimately took back her sovereignty. The next reader wrote in and said, after years of dedication. Being bullied by a narcissistic boss who uses performance plans as weapons. My final straw was being screamed at because posters weren't laminated.
She quit. No savings, just sanity. Sometimes the bravest promotion is the one you give yourself. My last writer today, after two decades of measurable wins, was replaced by AI and a brand new graduate ghosted through a fake comeback process passed over for a man parachuted in her pivot line.
If a company confuses tools with talent. They're the liability and there are dozens more careers dismantled, family shaken, nervous systems fried. [00:09:00] These aren't edge cases. This is the pattern, and here's my truth. The day after being let go, I hit record.
In the middle of grief, in the middle of family chaos, and here we are 10 weeks later and what I've learned is this, survival is not the point of life, but survival is what corporate culture currently demands savage ness at a baseline. And I don't buy it, and I know you don't either. I'm not here to sell you that thrive mentality. I'm here to restore your say, to remind you that your relationship to your work, to your daily life, to your body, to your family, to your legacy, it matters.
And if it's not what you want it to be, it's time to change it.
Here's what I know in my bones. We cannot leave this work to the next generation of people addicted to the patriarchal structure of corporate life. I'm not demonizing it in any way, but calling out [00:10:00] that the cost is too great. Naming a system built for greed, not humanity.
I believe women will be the ones to usher in a new reality, to create legacies that aren't bought with our bodies to leave this world better than we found it. Not by doing more, but by refusing to collude with what drains us. That starts in the subconscious with the code you run every single day.
Change the code, change the culture. So here's the invitation as we close Season one. Number one, name a boundary you'll hold this week even if no one else notices. Number two, drop one metric. You'll stop worshiping, whether it's response time, email volume, or hours online. A zero email box isn't what it's cracked up to be.
Number three, protect one restoration ritual, a walk, a breath work session, a nervous system reset no matter what.
If you're ready to go [00:11:00] deeper, to reprogram the Good Girl contracts, to reclaim your energy, to normalize your next level of success without more sacrifice. Come work with me. Book a consult. The links are down in the show notes.
Here's how I want to end Season one with deep gratitude to you listening, reaching out, sharing your stories, reminding me and each other that we're not crazy and we're not alone.
Corporate fuckery isn't just a podcast, it's a community of truth tellers. Choosing to live and lead on their own terms.
Let's be clear, we're all leaders. Whatever part of the org chart you sit in, you carry influence. But if you're at the top in the C-suite holding the title, this is what leadership looks like moving forward, being the model of what human really is, the good, the bad, and the expansive.
That doesn't mean we can't have it all. It means we have to learn how to balance it to protect our peace. Even [00:12:00] as we expand, because as Gandhi said, if you want to change the world, start with yourself. You, my friend, are the ripple. You are the change we are all waiting to see. And because you showed up here, season one doesn't just close, it becomes a launch point.
Here is your final season one reminder. What's good for you is good for the entire universe, and we are just getting started. Come back soon for season two.
