Battling perfectionism with EVEN founders Ellen Sullivan and Dr Nora Koslowski
Get EVEN Podcast | Ellen Sullivan and Dr Nora Koslowski, Co-Founders, EVEN.
Season 2 of the Get EVEN podcast is live!
In this episode Ellen and Nora share the leadership lessons they learned the hard way, the standards women are held to that men are not, and answer a real listener dilemma about career progression and family.
Key takeaways:
Your internal bar is probably set too high
Most women in leadership carry a standard for themselves that nobody around them is meeting. Nora remembers as a young leader, walking into a senior leader meeting and watching male peers show up underprepared, underdelivering, and still advancing without consequence. It was a genuine awakening. Her advice now: negotiate every offer, ask for more, and stop treating discretionary effort as the baseline.
Ellen shares women are statistically more likely to have the qualities of effective leaders, yet they question whether they belong more than their peers do. The problem is not capability. It is a bar that was never applied evenly, and that too many women keep raising for themselves.
Personalise what work-life balance means for you
Work-life balance does not have to be an aspiration you are always falling short of. It can simply be defined by you, for you, based on what you actually need.
Ellen describes her version not as equal hours between work and family, but as full presence in both. Genuinely productive when she is working. Genuinely present with her kids when she is not. That distinction changed everything for her. Nora frames it the same way: the people who matter most do not need your constant availability. They need your full attention when you are there.
Start by asking what your non-negotiables are. Not what balance is supposed to look like, but what it needs to feel like for you specifically. Once you name those, the decisions become clearer. You stop measuring yourself against a version of balance that was built for someone else's life, and start building one that fits yours.
Your external network can change your career
Ellen names this as the skill she would have built earlier than anything else. She spent years mastering the internal workings of her organisation, knowing every shortcut, every workaround. What she underinvested in was the network outside it: people in different industries, different functions, people who simply sparked something.
When she built it, the effect was immediate. More energy. Broader strategic thinking. Clarity on whether she was in the right place. Her advice is straightforward: if you are telling yourself you are too busy, something else on the list needs to come down. Relationships outside your organisation are not a reward for when things slow down. They are the work.