Don’t F*kn Shrink: Sustainable Performance for High-Achieving Women
Success shouldn't cost you your health.
For years, women have been taught to push through stress. But what if that's exactly what's holding you back?
Don't F*kn Shrink is the podcast for high-achieving women who want to perform at their best without sacrificing their health, relationships, or identity. Hosted by performance physiologist Daffney Allwein, each episode explores the science behind sustainable performance; from nervous system regulation and stress recovery to strength, longevity, leadership, and the psychology of ambition.
Whether you're leading a company, raising a family, building a career, or navigating midlife, you'll learn how to work with your body instead of against it so you can show up with more energy, confidence, and clarity
Because success isn't about shrinking yourself to fit your life. It's about building a life where you never have to.
Subscribe and join thousands of women who are redefining what success looks like - one grounded, sustainable step at a time. If an episode resonates with you, share it with a friend and leave a review. Your support helps more women discover the tools they need to lead, perform, and thrive.
Daffney shares the real story of Stacy, a mid-level professional in her late 30s who came to her burned out, sleep-deprived, and quietly giving her best energy to everyone but herself. What happened over the next eight weeks changed everything: her body, her boundaries, and ultimately her career. You'll hear how Stacy went from saying yes to everything to showing up to meetings with sharper focus, sleeping through the night, and curating her social circle with intention. And the plot twist? She didn't campaign for a promotion. She was asked into a partnership, because people noticed she put in the work.
→ Your body is talking. This Free 2-Minute Quiz can help you pinpoint what’s draining your energy, impacting your health, and keeping you stuck in survival mode.
In This Episode:
(02:35) Identifying energy leaks and auditing your schedule
(06:40) Building sustainable exercise routines instead of chasing performance
(11:00) Re-evaluating friendships and relationships during personal growth
(15:55) The physical and emotional transformation after eight weeks
Connect with Daffney:
The Game-Changer Consult → This 60 min deep dive offers you clarity and insight into what’s possible for your next 60 days. Leave this consult feeling full of possibility and with the energy of purpose!
Hi, Daphne. My name is Stacy Sanders, and my colleague suggested that I reach out to you. This is where the email started. And today I want to tell you Stacy's story. Now, I have changed Stacy's name because what I love most about working with professionals and folks that I love working with is the level of trust that comes and the openness and vulnerability that it assigns and allows in this process. So, no, I'm not going to give the actual name of the wonderful, wonderful person that I'm going to talk about today. But I want to share with you her story and how within 15 minutes of that email, we were deep into planning and a conversation that really had her stepping back for a season only to emerge healthier physically, mentally, and with the promotion of a lifetime she didn't see it coming. Welcome to Don't F and Shrink, the podcast, where we stop playing small and start showing up big. I'm your host, Daphne Allwine, and I'm here to cut through the noise, ditch the self-doubt, and get honest about what it takes to live and lead with unapologetic confidence. Each week you'll hear unfiltered conversations, powerful stories, and in real life strategies to help you take up space in your life, your work, and your world. So buckle up because shrinking is not an option here. Let's dive in. You know, so often when I meet women in their mid-30s, especially just after childbirth or at the start of perimenopause, one of the things that I notice is a similar number of maladies. And what I mean by that is the inability to sleep through the night, as if as if you're being woken up in the middle of the night, which causes you to not have actual energy to get up and work out the next morning. And the numbers don't budge on the scale, but there seems to be a high incidence of weight gain or at least increase in inches, very specific to the middle of their body. This is not out of the ordinary for 35 plus clients. Because what happens is our body starts to assign and work differently. The stresses that we put on our body start showing up much differently. And the way that we compensate as we get older requires us to think and move forward differently. Stacy was such a joy to work with. And the fact that she was an open book and she recognized that what was about to change and what was ahead of her was an entire shift in her focus, in her energy, and in her purpose. Where did it all start? Well, in our first conversation together, one of the things that we recognized was where the energy was leaking from Stacy's time, her schedule, and most importantly, her body. It included things like agreeing to social interactions that didn't benefit her personally, energetically, or even really align with where she wanted to move forward. She was just saying yes to everything because it seemed like the right thing to do, or what would make other people comfortable and happy. So we did this incredible audit of her schedule, of her ability to choose. And one of the things that we did in step number one is when it came to invitations, when it came to projects, when it came to things in her job, in her personal life, in her social life, that she had the right, and I gave the actual task for her to say no to at least three things. Now we came up with some really specific ways to say no and ways to engage with people so that we didn't cut off the ability to work with them later. But we also talked about the fact that it is your responsibility to say no. Because if you're saying yes to everything, you're essentially saying no to others because you lose that opportunity. So we talked in our first, very first meeting about what were the things that were most important to work forward on as a priority. We talked about needing time, needing to prioritize a workout that she enjoyed or a schedule to move her body that she enjoyed. And a lot of times that starts with personal training. That starts with actually building a physical library for your body. There is no better investment you can make. If you work with a professional, an exercise physiologist, somebody who understands your body, your mechanics, and your needs, it builds a library that you can continue to take on and on throughout your life. So you can add things, you can subtract things based on what your training interests are. But as far as keeping your body strong for the body type you have, for what your body responds well energetically from, when you work with a professional who understands your body, you are actually building a library. So it is a sometimes an initial investment that some people struggle with, but there is no better investment in my mind than to figure out what your body's asking for, work with the body and the physics you have so that you're less prone to injury and things that are going to set you back. So knowing your body type, knowing what you enjoy from a level of physical activity creates a sustainable library. And as we know, when you get into a healthy routine of doing things, not based on performance, not based on what everyone else is doing, but something that's sustainable and you actually enjoy doing, you start building back better. You can always add a fun class or engage in a social, social fitness activity. But when you are literally looking at your body from an architectural standpoint, building the that exercise routine is key. And being with somebody who understands the physics of your body and can help you make those corrections or adaptations so that you can be successful is paramount. So we focused on saying no to at least two things per week so that we could build that library early. In doing that, in the very first six weeks, what I really noticed was she was beginning to say no to more than two things. It's hard. Well, you have to do it once. And once you do it once, two, it she was actually starting to enjoy after six weeks saying no to things because she realized she was prioritizing for her future. She was just prioritizing for the way she felt with these activities. So she was showing up in a way that she had more energy after six weeks. She was showing up to meetings with a different intensity. She was showing up for her family, more playful, more whimsical, and more available as opposed to being exhausted at the end of the day. She was ready to come home and be part of the excitement. And that is really when we're building exercise and exercise strategies. You're not building for how many calories can you kill? Can you get up on the leaderboard of a class? It is literally about designing for your future. So you're building, you're building energy, you're building all that additional muscle in your body, which just has you showing up, looking different, feeling different. And I promise you, everyone in the room that you walk into notices too. So early on, building that structure was so important. And she could tell instantaneously by just saying no to two things a week. It turned out three or four. It as she kind of got on a clip with it, did a number of things for her life and her career. One, her body started to shift. She started understanding, and her body was responding so well and feeling so powerful that we were able to increase load and frequency and actually push in a way that she never had energy before. And as a beautiful byproduct of that, clothes started feeling better, posture was better, breathing, eating felt a little more natural because you seemed to be more interested, or she seemed to be more interested in eating better food because she was on this glorious trajectory that when your body and your and your mind and everything start to align, you just want to feel better. You just want to show up and give your body the things that it's asking for. So, second byproduct is the actual diet started to come in and make sense and didn't feel so laborious. It wasn't about making hard choices that didn't taste well. It was about knowing what was perfect in restoring her body and feeling good and keeping that energy stable throughout the day. And we talked a little early about sleep is really difficult because there was so much anxiety and so much pushing and stress during the day. Her brain would have trouble at night when it was actually quiet to slow down. It's as if her body suddenly decided, wow, it's quiet. I can start having thoughts of my own. So by working in our very important conversations and dynamics into our workout, it actually gave her a voice to move and say the things and have these really important epiphanies and realizations. So she was powerfully moving her body. And at the same time, it was allowing her brain and her voice to come loud and be curious and answer questions about things that were laying deeper into her muscle fiber with her story and her maybe some traumas and things that existed that maybe we weren't entirely aware of until we started moving our body. So one of the really cool effects into all of this is socially, it felt like for her, this these are her words, a lot of the social things that she had on her calendar really weren't aligning with how she was feeling anymore or how she wanted to show up. She realized that most of her social was being led by what made other people feel comfortable, what didn't hurt other people's feelings, and not really sincerely connecting with who she was or what she wanted out of social interactions. So often we forget that we're not really leaving people behind. We're not shedding people, we're not canceling people from our lives. But there are seasons in our life for relationships. Not every relationship that we ever have from preschool on is meant to follow us our entire life. And it doesn't mean that we are disconnected or distant from that, those people, or somehow we think that we are better or that we are, you know, abandoning these people by not making it a consistent piece of our social awareness. So she started making long-term plans with people that she was seeing more frequently, family members, family circles, social circles that were, you know, as a different part of her career, different chapter of her development. And she was now deciding that prioritizing her time with other friends, with specific work colleagues, especially people in the C-suite above her, really engaging and being curious with them as individuals, actually opened up a number of opportunities for her that she didn't see coming. So by actually exercising her ability to step back and not give every ounce of her energy away because she felt compelled or she owed it or she felt guilty about these interactions, she now is being very purposeful with her time. And this beautiful thing happened with her mental health. I remember the morning she came to me with such clarity and said, I don't know if I just had the best night's sleep, or if I just bridge the gap of I don't give up anymore. And I had to laugh because sometimes when we're in our late 30s and we're coming into our 40s, we like to blame everything on menopause and that we have this big hormonal shift and that's that's the change, and we just stop giving Fs to everyone around us. But I think the reality is in this case, Stacy was basically telling me she now valued her time, her experience, and what she wanted in life without guilt. She didn't need to explain to anybody around her why it was no longer essential to do happy hour every Wednesday, every Friday. It was not a mark on her record if somehow she didn't make it to every PTA function. She recognized in that moment that her time and her interests were so valuable and that she no longer wanted to give those things away to temporary situations. So in six weeks, in now in eight weeks, we're having not just a physical transformation of her body, but in eight weeks, we're recognizing that she's actually just coming into her own self in a way that maybe as women, we realize that we spent so much time being conditioned, that now this recognition that it's okay to want things for yourself. It's okay to see yourself or who you really are without all the titles, without having to be the daughter, the mom, the friend. When we recognize that we are just Stacy, we are just a person who has needs and wants and values what they value without needing other people to agree. It is this incredible dynamic. The joy of working with clients, especially women 35 to 55 for me, is that huge chapter, is that realization that moving your body, understanding your body, listening to your body is the most pivotal thing you can do in this chapter. If you really are serious about performance, about reaching a professional goal, about feeling your best, about showing up with unapologetic confidence, these are the steps I use with my clients. And like I said, in this story, Stacey blew my mind when she showed up 10 pounds later. And then it felt like she gained a hundred pounds of confidence when she walked into that room. Because when she started showing up that way in her professional and her personal life, everyone else turned their head and noticed. And come Christmas, about two years ago, she reached out to me to let me know the morning after a partnership meeting where she was asked to join. And the feedback she got was you really put in the work this year. She hadn't done anything different. In fact, she probably said no or passed on more things than she accepted. But what she did do is she chose with intention. When she worked on a matter, when she worked on a project, she chose with intention and gave more focus and gave more passion to that thing she worked on. It wasn't a numbers game anymore. It wasn't about productivity and pushing out as many hours. It was about what the quality of the outcome was and how impressed they were with that work. If I could ever get the opportunity to stop and have a conversation with every single person who is at this crossroads, is looking for what's the next thing, what's keeping me from jumping to this next chapter, what's the thing that's been holding me back? Start with physical movement. Start with a recognition that your body already knows the answer. And when you start moving with intention, when you start moving with the idea that you know what's right for you, and it's not coming from the outside any longer, you're unstoppable. If you're feeling stuck, go to lift pro wellness. That's L-I-F-T-P-R-O Wellness. And at the top banner, you're gonna find a quiz there. And what I love about this quiz is it's two minutes. This is gonna be a scope for you to just stop, pause, and get some introspection about where you should start. Thanks for joining us.
.png)