Delivering peak performance as an executive while maintaining your well-being can feel like an impossible challenge, especially if you don’t have the right systems in place. But you can do both, especially if you get clear on what “well-being” means for you.
The first step is to realize that “you already have your well-being. You don’t have to hustle for that,” says Maggie Gough, my chief operating officer here at Bright Arrow Coaching and someone with a unique perspective on well-being, including an early-career stint as a dietician.
“So the question is, if you already have it, what is diminishing it? What is amplifying it? Because now the well-being is yours, and it’s the external factors impacting that. It’s the system that you’re in,” Maggie adds. “And then you start asking very different questions. Not ‘what do I need to implement in my life to be better?’ but ‘what do I need to invest in?’”
In this episode, Maggie shares her unconventional career path from dietician to corporate executive. She provides a refreshing perspective on wellness that emphasizes flexibility and self-awareness over rigid health standards. She also shares practical strategies for leaders looking to support their personal well-being and that of their teams.
Wellness as an Internal Light
Before Maggie became an executive, she was a dietician with early exposure to the world of corporate well-being, which was an exciting time as she helped employees live better lives. But about 10 years into her career, she realized that she didn’t have the well-being she wanted — and the standard advice wasn’t helping.
“The basics, like eating my fruits and vegetables and getting my daily exercise, those were there. I was trying to get good sleep, but I was just perpetually exhausted,” she says. “And so it was this hard disruption for me to get really curious about, how do we actually support people in the midst of life and what does it actually mean to help someone have a sense of well-being in their own life?”
One of Maggie’s realizations was that we shouldn’t be chasing destinations and operating under rigid models. We need to be more flexible even as we set boundaries and practice self-care at work and outside of it.
Maggie outlines several practical strategies for leaders to support their well-being and that of their teams:
- Setting Boundaries: Establishing clear boundaries around work and personal time is essential. Leaders should model this behavior to their teams, demonstrating that it’s possible to achieve balance.
- Daily Check-Ins: Regularly tuning into your needs can help identify areas that require attention. Simple practices like meditation, mindful breathing, or taking breaks can add up. Ask yourself, “What do I need to invest in? What are my needs? What things are diminishing my needs?”.
- Creating Supportive Systems: Leaders have the power to influence the environments in which their teams operate. By fostering a culture that prioritizes wellness, leaders can create supportive systems that amplify well-being.
“I came up with this analogy that you have to imagine your well-being like a light that you hold inside of yourself,” Maggie says. You possess this capacity innately, rather than it being something to chase or earn.
To go further with this analogy, Maggie points to experts like Brené Brown, who would tell us that we are already worthy. We don’t need to prove this.
What Wellness Looks Like in Corporate Leadership
One of the key takeaways from Maggie’s insights is the role of leaders in modeling wellness behaviors. As leaders, the way we treat ourselves sets a precedent for our teams. By prioritizing our own well-being, we signal to our teams that it’s important and achievable.
Most leaders are high achievers who have likely worked through burnout, Maggie says. And so it’s likely your people are doing the same — unless they can see a better path to model. She learned this lesson early on from a manager.
“Every once in a while, I would say, ‘I’ve got too much to do. I’m going to skip lunch.’ And she would stand at my desk and say, ‘There is nothing that you have to do that is more important than going to lunch right now. Let’s go.’ So it just didn’t become an option to behave that way.”
Leaders can influence their teams by:
- Taking Regular Breaks: Demonstrating the importance of rest and rejuvenation by taking regular breaks and encouraging your team to do the same.
- Setting Realistic Expectations: Acknowledging that there will be times of intense work, but also recognizing the need for downtime and balance.
- Encouraging Open Communication: Creating an environment where team members feel comfortable discussing their well-being and seeking support when needed.
And perhaps most importantly, keep checking in with yourself and with your teams, because the state of wellness is always evolving. “No businesses have the same problems day to day, month to month, year to year. No families exist in stasis,” she says. “So it is a regular tuning in to what is going on around you.”
People in this Episode
Maggie Gough: LinkedIn
Transcript
Maggie Gough:
I worked a lot with insurance brokers and they would be like, “This thing we’re telling employees and employers to do is not working.” So I started just naming what was wrong, but then inevitably comes the question, “Well then what do we do?” I had to answer the question for myself and for the other people who were asking as well. And so I came up with this analogy that you have to imagine your well-being like a light that you hold inside of yourself and one in this model, it’s already yours. You don’t have to do a set of things to get it.
Tegan Trovato:
Hey there. Welcome to the Life + Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Tegan Trovato, founder and CEO of Bright Arrow Coaching. In this show, we dive deep into how leaders like you can turn business challenges into personal growth opportunities. Whether you’re a seasoned executive or an aspiring leader, this podcast is your go-to resource for unlocking your full potential in both your professional and personal life. Join me as we hear from executives, experts, and innovators about their leadership journeys and learn how to develop better strategies and activate them for success. So if you are ready to fuel your journey to becoming an extraordinary leader who makes a lasting impact, you’re in the right place.
Let’s dive in. In this episode, we’re focusing on the critical and often overlooked topic of wellness and its intersection with executive leadership. This conversation is incredibly relevant for anyone striving to balance high performance with personal well-being.
Joining me is Maggie Gough, the chief operating officer at Bright Arrow. Maggie brings a unique blend of operational expertise and a deep understanding of wellness stemming from her extensive career in wellness prior to transitioning into executive leadership. This fusion of skills has been a game changer for our organization, and I’m excited to share her insights with you. Maggie shares her unconventional career path from a dietician to a COO and discusses how her wellness background has profoundly influenced her approach to leadership.
She talks about the common struggles executives face in maintaining their well-being amidst demanding careers and how traditional wellness models often fall short. In our discussion, Maggie provides a refreshing perspective on wellness, emphasizing the importance of flexibility and self-awareness over rigid health standards. She also highlights practical strategies for leaders to support both their well-being and that of their teams, reminding us that true wellness starts from within and is amplified by the systems we create around us.
Get ready for an enlightening conversation that challenges conventional wellness paradigms and offers actionable advice for integrating well-being into the fabric of leadership. Maggie Gough, welcome to the podcast.
Maggie Gough:
Yay. I’m excited to be here. We’ve been waiting to do this.
Tegan Trovato:
I was going to say the exact same thing. So listeners, as you already know from probably the intro, Maggie is our chief operating officer at Bright Arrow, and I have personally been sitting on my hands for quite a while on this topic, so excited to get her out in front of everybody because she is our chief operating officer first, and she has been a COO for many years, but she had a whole career in wellness prior to moving into the executive space. And so for us at Bright Arrow, we felt like that was lightning in a bottle, that we get this brilliant operating mind that leads our organization and then understands so deeply the human experience that our executives and their employees are having at work.
So I mean, just do the math on that for an executive coaching firm that is just unreal, an unreal mix. So I always call her my rainbow unicorn executive. So Maggie, super-excited, and we’ll let you tell all our listeners your own story of leadership through working in the wellness space and then eventually coming into executive leadership and stepping out of that industry. So why don’t you, on that note, go ahead and tell listeners about your experience in wellness and what you used to do and how that’s led you where you are today.
Maggie Gough:
Yeah, so I had a pretty unconventional pathway in my career where I started off as a dietician and I didn’t really fit into any of the standard places where a dietician might traditionally go. And at the time in the United States, we were having this influx of movement into corporate wellness and I ended up being able to work with a woman who was from Canada. Canada was ahead of us in this corporate wellness world. And so I had this phenomenal mentor right out of the gate. Like many people coming out of college, I had this new set of ideas and ways that I was energized to go help people in the world and help them understand how to eat healthy and navigate all of this territory.
We all know that the health and wellness industry is a multi-billion-dollar industry, and we’ve all been taught for so long to keep our bodies healthy and well, especially as women, we’ll add in skinny. And so I thought, “OK, this is really good. I’m going to be able to come in here and share all of these ideas.” And so I ended up doing that through the lens of organizational well-being, corporate well-being, and from there I ended up really transcending that space entirely because I hit this point where I’m 10 years into my career, I have two kids and I’m about 10 years into my marriage, as well. And I’m flailing on all fronts. And so many people I talk to, men and women alike, all have had some moment in their career or their lifetime where they’re going, “I’m a mess.”
And so I hit this point where I’m trying to figure out, “How do I solve for my own well-being?” I am not well, I’m not mentally well, I’m not physically well, I’m not spiritually well on any front. And I’m wondering what do I do? Because all of the things that I had been telling everybody else to do would not have worked for me. The basics like eating my fruits and vegetables and getting my daily exercise, those were there. I was trying to get good sleep, but I was just perpetually exhausted. And so it was this hard disruption for me to get really curious about how do we actually support people in the midst of life? And what does it actually mean to help someone have a sense of well-being in their own life?
Tegan Trovato:
What I appreciate about how you framed that at the end, I think it could have been tempting for anyone to say, “How do we support people when they’re going through these difficult parts of their lives?” But what you said was, “How do we support them in their lives?” And when you said it that way, it’s like, “Yeah, because that is life. It is difficult.” And especially when you introduce a busy career maybe and children and maybe a marriage, it’s just exponentially hard and that is life and it goes on for decades that way. So I just want to call out that it was challenging for you to meet your own wellness needs when normal life was happening. So that’s just such a beautiful way to emphasize that for our listeners. So thank you. And for those listening, how would you define wellness for us as we think about that today and listen to your story and your expertise on executive wellness?
Maggie Gough:
Yeah, so the conventional model that I taught, starting out, was there are things that you can do for your health and well-being that, when you do them, help you reach a destination. And that’s what we teach. And it’s a brilliant model because this multi-billion-dollar industry, it all allows us to sell something. So you’re here, you’re at this starting point, you need to get to this end point, and we have the thing in the middle that you need to get to your end point or there’s a new secret, there’s a new set of research that only a few people know, but if you knew you could be better. So we’re always inserting some new thing into the equation that you need that only we can give you, and that is the conventional model.
And in that model, we all have to do this thing where we assess our own lives against this rigid set of expectations that someone else has given us who doesn’t know our life, by the way and then we have to follow that. And your ability to be well is predicated on how well you can achieve those things. So you take an executive who’s been successful or any person in their career who’s been successful on a multitude of fronts, they’re healthily raising a family, they’re accelerating in their career, all of these things, and then they’re just failing on this one front. And so you have to ask yourself the question, what is the thing that we’re trying to implement? And is the model broken? Because why is it that so many people say, “I know what to do, I’m just not doing it,” when it comes to their health and well-being?
Tegan Trovato:
As you’re saying that, I’m thinking back to when you called out execs and then you said, “Well, really anyone.” I thought quickly back to my own years. So I had kids way later in life, so I had decades that I only had to focus on work. And even then it was a challenge to feel well and whole because of the number of hours I would work or just the general stress. But talk a little bit about how needs might flex based on those variables you and I have already identified in the opening of our conversation.
Maggie Gough:
So if we say the model’s broken, and then the question is, well, how do the needs flex? What we’re talking about is how do we reinterpret that middle piece where we have to achieve a certain rigid set of expectations? And so we’re moving from the word rigid to flexible, and I think that is part of reimagining the model. And to that end, people then would say, “Well, if that’s not it.” Because when you get curious, when you hit that disruption like I did and you get curious about the things you’ve been teaching, the first thing you do is just start naming what’s wrong. And when I started naming what was wrong, everybody would go, “Yeah.” Like that deep guttural knowing —
Tegan Trovato:
In the wellness space?
Maggie Gough:
No, anyone! It could be employees that I was teaching. I worked a lot with insurance brokers and they would be like, “This thing we’re telling employees and employers to do is not working.”
And I would name what was wrong, and then they’d go, “What do we do? Who would think it was working?” So there was almost like this hushed deep knowing and this guttural like, “Yes, OK.” So I started just naming what was wrong, but then inevitably comes the question, “Well then what do we do?” I had to answer the question for myself and for the other people who were asking, as well. And so I came up with this analogy that I played with over years, but what I say now is you have to imagine your well-being like a light that you hold inside of yourself and one in this model, it’s already yours. You don’t have to do a set of things to get it.
Tegan Trovato:
Oh, hold on. That is gorgeous. I just want to emphasize that before you even say anything else. OK, so the traditional wellness industry is putting the wellness outside of us. We have to go get it. You are re-imagining this to say it is ours. It is inside of us already. OK, you may proceed. I just had to absorb that. That was powerful.
Maggie Gough:
Let’s take it even further, and let’s put it in a leadership development world. When we hear someone like Brene Brown say that you are already worthy, you don’t have to hustle for that. You already have your well-being. You don’t have to hustle for that. So the question is if you already have it, what is diminishing it? What is amplifying it? Because now the well-being is yours and it’s the external factors that are the things impacting that. It’s the system that you’re in. And then you start asking very different questions, not what do I need to implement in my life to be better? But what do I need to invest in? What are my needs and what things are diminishing my needs? And that can be on a daily basis. So the more I started to absorb this for myself and play with it, I had very little kids at the time, and so I could be listening to my kids joyfully play in the background, and then somebody would be fighting over Legos.
And so I was like, “Oh, your well-being can ebb and flow throughout the day.” Because there are all of these things impacting. You could have started your day doing meditation, centering yourself, walking into work and thinking, “This is going to be a good day. I’m ready for hyper focus, I’m going to crush it.” And you walk in the door or you tune into your Zoom and you find out that there’s a customer that’s really upset, a client that you now have to pause and solve for that would impact your well-being that day. Even if you had all the right implements. Would you be able to navigate through those difficulties better if you had done the meditation in the morning and centered yourself? Absolutely. So I don’t want to say that the things that we might implement are not good. I think we just have to shift their purpose to the outcome.
Tegan Trovato:
Would you be willing to share your own self needs assessment from back then? So that was quite a while ago, but I wonder if there were a few things that stick for you that could help illuminate the point.
Maggie Gough:
OK, so I remember sitting in my living room breastfeeding a baby, and looking out at everything that was a mess and thinking, “I don’t need to eat more fruits and vegetables. I don’t need to go for another walk. I don’t need to get more sleep. I’m doing these basics. I don’t need to journal.” What was challenging at that time in my life was my career. I was suffering from postpartum anxiety that had gone undiagnosed.
Tegan Trovato:
As it so often does.
Maggie Gough:
Yeah, I mean we screen for depression. We don’t screen, at least not then. We may be doing it now, but we don’t screen for anxiety. And I’m a hundred percent certain I was not a top-notch employee. I just wasn’t. I also wasn’t in a great workplace at that moment in time either. So it was like these colliding factors and then my marriage was struggling and we’re two people who deeply love each other, but just kept missing each other’s needs and communication and both feeling like we didn’t have anything else to give, which I think is relatable in all relationships sometimes. So I needed a therapist, I needed a marriage therapist who was going to take me to a place to listen and both give us some new perspective, and I had really little kids, so I needed more flexibility to ebb and flow in my own life and not hustle out the door every morning. So I left my job and started a business which probably. There’s two ways-
Tegan Trovato:
Not the word of advice we give everyone, yeah.
Maggie Gough:
… There’s two ways to start a business. One is you have a really brilliant idea and you want to go after it, and the other one is you’re just like, “OK, screw it. I’m going to try this because it’s what I need and I think there’s something more here.” So that was my model. So I think that’s probably the most succinct way I can say. But I also want to be clear that I didn’t sit down in a single afternoon and go, “Ah, these are the things I need.” It was a long period of being continuously curious, and I continue that practice now. When I’m feeling really crunchy, the question has to be, what do I need?
Tegan Trovato:
Yeah, beautiful. If we bring this into the broader leadership space and thinking about our clients, the people we work with, executives, what would you say this practice looks like for leaders specifically?
Maggie Gough:
So what this practice looks like for leaders is first letting go of this conventional model that says, the problem is that we haven’t implemented the right implements into the system and it’s external, and we have to then achieve this rigid set of things. So I have led C-suite days around well-being, and if you ask leaders if you start with, “What’s one thing in the last year that improved your well-being?” You get answers like, “I set boundaries on my calendar and it was really uncomfortable. Not everyone was happy about it, but in the end, I got better at my work, I had more time for my relationships and I was able to take better care of myself.” Somebody else, another leader that comes to mind said, “I came home and started spending 20 minutes when I first arrived home before I do anything else sitting with my son.” So when you ask somebody, “What’s one thing in the last year that you’ve done that’s enhanced your well-being?” It shifts them out of the, like, “What are more things I have to do to become better?”
Tegan Trovato:
Yeah, beautiful.
Maggie Gough:
And I guess you could say in both of those examples, those leaders did things, but they were more like adjustments to the systems that were already in play.
Tegan Trovato:
That gave them energy, things that gave them energy, is how I would interpret that. Yeah.
Maggie Gough:
Yeah. Or if you go back to this light model, what is amplifying that light and what is diminishing that light? So I think for leaders, it’s recognizing that you are a high achiever, it’s why you’re a leader. You’re very resilient. You probably perform through burnout and you probably have been for a long time. So if this is true for you, it’s also true for the people that you serve. So now we start to think about, “Oh, what does it look like to care for my employees? If this is what it looks like to care for myself? What are the things that I’m leading? In what ways am I informing the system in which my employees work?”
And now this is really important because in the wellness industry, we go to leaders and we sell them a package where then they are tracking their employees’ health and requiring their employees to do more for their health, which fails because one, there’s no human in the history of the world that’s ever been able to effectively control other humans’ behavior. If we had that ability, we would all be healthy and well, we’d all eat our fruits and vegetables all the time because somebody else would make sure we did it. That’s not how human behavior works. We all manage our own behavior.
So we’ve put leaders in this situation where they’re now in charge of tracking somebody else’s steps that they’ve walked. But if we say to a leader, “You are cultivating a system in which someone else works,” then we can say, “What things do you have control over in this system that allow you to support this person’s well-being?” So we put them back into a situation where they are in control, they’re in their own sphere of influence versus trying to track people’s steps or how many fruits and vegetables they’ve eaten in a day, which is maddening for them and watching their insurance rates go up because they haven’t effectively done that.
Tegan Trovato:
What comes up for me as we think about this is what some of our execs talk about in terms of their well-being, and I will often reframe for them when they’re like, “No, I can’t do that for myself. It’s just not possible right now.” And then I said, “What if your employee asked you for this?” Then their eyes get big and they’re like, “I would never let them do this.” This being seven days a week, this being never eating lunch and having a raging headache every afternoon because we haven’t nourished ourselves. So real basics are not being tended to at the executive level. And Katie Rasoul, who was a former co-host of the Life + Leadership podcast — Maggie, you know her — she talks about in her last executive job how it was a miracle if she could eat a banana in the elevator.
So when we would be talking about clients that are in burnout, we would start using the phrase they’re eating bananas in elevators. I mean, the basic needs are not met. And so in the executive space sometimes what that looks like from my seat is challenging an exec to not work seven days, but to work six and a half as a start and to have an afternoon where they’re just not answering emails. And I’m talking about during peak times, like raising funds or board prep or whatever it is that can make a leader need to be on all day seven days a week. So sometimes well-being is just getting to a place of minimal care, which is not great, but that is often the place I think execs are starting. I don’t know if you saw the same thing in your practice back then.
Maggie Gough:
Absolutely. I mean, setting a few boundaries on a calendar is not rocket science and it’s a baby step, but I think there’s a lot of things that come up for me in what you just said, and one of them is that we are executives. You and I have been executives in places with very high demands and have struggled through that. We know the clarity we had, the mental capacity we had in those places, and it wasn’t the best, just not. And the thing is, when you’ve been in it for so long, you forget what good feels like. So I think the baby steps matter because it’s a tiny thing where you go, “Oh, that worked. Things didn’t fall apart. What else can I do?”
And the other thing I’ll add to that is as leaders, there are times that you are going to hustle, you’re going to grind, you’re going to get it done. You’re where the buck stops and you know it. No one’s asking leaders to separate from that reality. The question is, to your point, was like, are there off seasons where you might be able to try a small thing like working six days or six-and-a-half days instead of seven? And that is the start. And then the final thing that came up for me was in one of my previous roles, I said to the CEO, “If we’re miserable, we better be OK with it because we’re the ones that made it that way.”
Tegan Trovato:
Oh, whoa. Yes.
Maggie Gough:
So I think as leaders, we have a lot of demands and we’ve made it to the C-suite because we are so good at that hustle. We pride ourselves on the grind. We’re good, we like it. We have a little codependency relationship with it, that’s OK. So we create this narrative that we got to do it. There’s all these demands and I’m the only one that can show up for them. But also, you’re the only one that can show up for yourself. And this is where our world’s combined between wellness and leadership, truly, because you talk about all the time as a leader, you’re being watched all the time. That is true for how you treat yourself.
Tegan Trovato:
Absolutely, yes.
Maggie Gough:
So there is actually a part of leadership that a leader is failing in when they are not treating themselves well and supporting their own needs. People need you to lead that too. So my example of that is this boss from Canada that I had, we would take hour long lunches every day. We would go sit in the middle of the cafeteria of the whole business so everybody could see us, and we’d take hour long lunches, and every once in a while I would say, “I’ve got too much to do. I’m going to skip lunch.” And she would stand at my desk and say, “There is nothing that you have to do that is more important than going to lunch right now. Let’s go.” So it just didn’t become an option to behave that way. And more than that, you didn’t have community connection if you behave that way. I think as leaders, we also have a responsibility to understand our influence in this very same department.
Tegan Trovato:
Yeah. And I would add, I have lied to myself for years when I was in corporate America. I watch my clients lie to themselves about their autonomy and saying, “Nope, I’m eating lunch for 30 minutes,” or “Sure, I’ll come to that meeting, but it has to end 15 minutes early so I can have a bio break because I’m a human,” or, “No, I leave at four 30 every day so I can be the one that picks up my kids.” We lie to ourselves about our inability to command the space. And it is hard for me because my job when I am working with clients directly is to allow them to come to their own truth and it is hard to be patient with that one because I know it’s a lie, and it’s hard to see our way out of that one because we have stepped into the habit of whatever company culture we’re working in. And the point you’re making, Maggie, is we are the manifestors of that culture.
So if you want to eat lunch, if you want your people to eat lunch, you have to eat lunch. If you want your people to be with their children when they go home, then you have to go be with your children. If you want your people to only work five days a week, then you must only work five days a week. It is for me as your partner today on this podcast, if I leave any contribution, it would be quit lying to yourselves about your ability to take care of yourself and your relationships and your own family, it is sinister what our organizations can do to us in that regard, because we get spun up in the habits. As we approach the close of our conversation today. Are there any final truths that you would speak to when it comes to well-being, whether it’s myth busting or truth telling? This is the space. Executives like to hear it straight, so let’s give it to them straight today.
Maggie Gough:
OK, so this is my final truth. I have now been leading this breaking up with this conventional model of well-being for a decade, and I would say that even though I’m the leader of this work, I’m a leader in this work, I still have days where I have to go, “What are my needs? Why am I feeling so fussy and crunchy? What is going on for me?” And so there is no destination to this. This is a regular tune in to yourself because no businesses have the same problems’ day to day, month to month, year to year. No families exist in stasis. So it is a regular tuning in to what is going on around you and for yourself to lead and be supportive for yourself and others.
Tegan Trovato:
Beautiful. Gosh, Maggie, thank you so much for this and thank you. I’m going to say this publicly for what you’ve brought to our organization in terms of elevating wellness for all of us and our programs and how we think about serving our community of coaches, you just really have had a way of weaving all of that experience into your current practice as a COO, and it’s breathtaking and we all are benefiting from it. So thank you so, so much, and thank you for joining us today to share all of this with our listeners.
Maggie Gough:
You’re very welcome. I’m so glad to be here.
Tegan Trovato:
Wellness is an essential part of our lives, and as we’ve explored today, it’s especially critical in the realm of executive leadership. Maggie’s insights remind us that well-being isn’t just about ticking off a checklist of health habits. It’s about understanding and responding to our needs in real time and fostering environments that support this approach. From today’s conversation, we’ve learned the importance of flexibility and self-awareness in achieving wellness. Maggie’s emphasis on viewing wellness as an internal light that can be or diminished by external factors is a powerful shift from traditional models. By acknowledging that our well-being is already within us, we can focus on what truly impacts it, our daily choices, environments, and the systems we create.
For leaders, this means setting boundaries, recognizing and meeting your needs, and leading by example. When leaders prioritize their own well-being, they set a precedent for their teams. Cultivating a culture that values and supports wellness at all levels of an organization. Simple actions like taking regular breaks, setting clear work boundaries and creating a supportive work environment can make a significant difference. As you apply these takeaways to your work and personal life, remember that small consistent changes can lead to significant improvements. Reflect on your own needs, adjust your routines and environments to support those needs, and encourage your teams to do the same. Be sure to stay tuned for our next episode of the Life + Leadership Podcast. Subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube Music. And if you like what you hear, share this podcast with your friends and colleagues. We’ll see you again soon.
