✦ Podcast Guest ✦
Karen Spies
Running on Fumes
You did everything right. So why does it feel like you lost?
Good fit for shows about: midlife reinvention, women leaving corporate, burnout and fatigue, Gen X, creative life after a long career, women in business and pricing, boundaries, women over 40.
And somebody calls her a bitch.
Good. That isn’t an insult. It’s a receipt.
The Bitch Academy
The turn
A woman stops shrinking. She doesn’t knock ten percent off her pricing before anybody flinches. She says what’s true even if it’s briefly awkward and lets it sit there. She leaves early because she can and doesn’t invent a sick kid to cover for it.
That’s the word the contract hands you the second you stop performing small. It’s how she knows the trade is finally over.
That’s what The Bitch Academy is named after, and it’s what I’d rather talk about than being tired and burned out. Tired is the setup. Getting willing to be called difficult is the actual transformation, and almost nobody’s teaching it, because most of this space is still selling women a nicer way to be nice.
What your listeners get
Why she gave herself away in pieces, and why every piece made sense at the time.
The turn itself. Why that willingness to step outside the norm improves all her relationships, including her trust in herself.
What a room of women who quit apologizing actually looks like. It’s the least tired room you’ve ever stood in, because nobody in it is performing.
Why understanding it has never once moved it, which is the part that made her cynical, and what does move it instead.
Before and after
Hosts tend to ask how anyone can tell this is real. Every pair below is behavior somebody could watch her do.
She answers every email the second it lands so nobody ever waits on her.
She doesn’t, and it turns out nobody dies.
She says a price and discounts it in the same breath, apologizing for the number before anybody reacts.
She says the number, stops talking, and lets the silence do its job.
Her yes is automatic and her no needs three paragraphs of justification.
The no is one word, and it holds.
The work that’s actually hers happens in the leftover margins, late at night, whenever there’s time, which is never.
It’s what she builds the day around, and everything agreeable gets fit in around it.
Questions you can ask me
Why call it The Bitch Academy? Aren’t you handing people the insult?
My listeners would say they’re just tired. What are you telling them it actually is?
What’s a misfire nobody would notice from the outside?
Why doesn’t leaving the job fix it?
What’s the smallest thing a woman listening right now could do this week?
How do you know when someone’s actually changed, rather than just feeling better about it?
On the name
Hosts sometimes ask. It’s deliberate, I can explain it in thirty seconds, and I’ll match whatever your show’s comfort level is with the word. Truthfully, if it’s toeing a line for you, I’m probably not the right guest.
Booking
Logistics
How I show up
Remote · Central time
Riverside or your platform. Clean audio, wired mic, quiet room. Thirty to sixty minutes, or whatever your format is. I promote the episode to my own audience, and I’m happy to supply pull quotes and clips.
Find me
Karen Spies
Host · Second Wind Women
thealquemie.com
Instagram @thebtchacademy
TikTok @thebitchacademy
Facebook: The Bitch Academy
secondwindwomenpod@gmail.com
Bio
Karen Spies was a working creative who moved from making art jewelry into a long list of decisions that all seemed practical at the time: a philosophy masters, web development, arts administration, even a stretch running a housecleaning company. Running through every one of them was a question she couldn’t put down. What would I be doing if I weren’t so busy protecting the feelings of everyone around me?
The Bitch Academy is what she built after years of keeping the Good Girl Contract. It’s for the woman who’s excellent at her job, dependable to everyone around her, and no longer able to say what she wants without a business case for it. She’s also the host of Second Wind Women, a podcast for women in creative and entrepreneurial pivots.
You are not too much.
You were holding a contract that was too small.