 |
The HX Podcast with Stacie BairdAuthor: Stacie Baird
A weekly podcast focused on stories that demonstrate how defining our own human experience (HX) leads to elevating the same across teams, organizations, families and communities. Each week Language: en Genres: Business, Careers, Management Contact email: Get it Feed URL: Get it iTunes ID: Get it Trailer: |
Listen Now...
The Fog Has a Name — Transitions Series, Episode 1 of 3
Episode 14
Tuesday, 31 March, 2026
She was a senior leader. She had navigated mergers, built teams, managed multimillion-dollar transitions. And then she stood in a meeting she had prepared for, in a room she had sat in a hundred times — and couldn't find the word. Not a complicated word. A word she had used ten thousand times. It was just gone. She didn't say anything. She pivoted. She stayed composed. And then she went to her car and sat there, because something felt different in a way she couldn't name. That experience has a name. It's perimenopause — and almost no one in the organizational world is talking about it. In this first episode of the Transitions series, host Stacie takes us inside one of the most significant and most ignored neurological events in women's working lives. What perimenopause actually does to the prefrontal cortex, the hippocampus, and the HPA axis. Why neuroimaging research on the menopausal brain didn't exist until 2021. What the cognitive fog, the 3am wakeups, and the emotional reactivity are actually signals of — and why none of it is failure. And then: what it costs when organizations stay silent. The 900,000 women estimated to have left the UK workforce because of menopausal symptoms. The CIPD data showing two-thirds of affected women say it impacted their work — and more than half told no one. The intersection of perimenopause and imposter syndrome that no one has named out loud. This is not a clinical episode. It's not a complaint. It's an argument — backed by neuroimaging research, longitudinal population studies, and lived experience — that perimenopause is not a personal health issue an employee should manage alone. It's an organizational design problem. And the organizations that understand that will be the ones worth returning to. Stacie For more episodes, visit StacieBaird.com.
