The Fulfilled Leader with Jean Balfour

Ep. #98 Why Fulfillment in Leadership Matters Now More Than Ever

• Jean Balfour • Season 4 • Episode 98

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In this powerful opening episode of The Fulfilled Leader, Jean Balfour shares the personal and professional journey behind the podcast's transformation. After nearly four years of Making Sense of Work, Jean saw a shift - both in herself and in the leaders she coaches. The focus is no longer just on performance or organizational outcomes, but on fulfillment, emotional wellbeing, and resilience at work.

Jean openly reflects on closing her successful coach training business to focus more on one-to-one coaching, retreats, and creating content that supports leaders in leading from their inner strength. She introduces her new Fulfilled Leader model: a six-part framework designed to help leaders cultivate deeper purpose and satisfaction in their work lives.

💡 What You’ll Learn

  • Why fulfillment and emotional resilience are becoming central to effective leadership
  • The myths we hold about what leaders are “supposed” to feel
  • Jean’s six core components of a fulfilled leader:
    1. Deep Satisfaction
    2. Aligned Clarity
    3. Grounded Confidence
    4. Centred Calm
    5. Relational Connection
    6. Intentional Growth
  • The personal story behind Jean’s decision to shift her career focus
  • What’s next for Jean’s work with leaders - including 1:1 coaching and retreats

Book a free strategy call: https://calendly.com/jean-balfour/30min

Learn more about my work: https://jeanbalfour.com/

For more information on the podcast, show notes and journaling prompts visit my substack blog: https://jeanbalfour.substack.com/

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeanbalfour/

Speaker 1:

Welcome to the Fulfilled Leader Podcast, the podcast to strengthen your emotional resilience and find fulfillment at work. I'm your host, jean Balfour, master Certified Coach, with over 5,000 hours one-to-one and tens of thousands of hours in groups. I've coached incredible leaders like you to overcome their biggest work challenges and go on to lead resiliently, finding the type of fulfillment they never knew possible. They are leaders people want to work for and organizations want to hire. In this podcast, we have conversations about the psychological and emotional struggles of leadership. About the psychological and emotional struggles of leadership, you're going to hear neuroscience, psychology, leadership models and evidence-based approaches that all have an impact in helping you be a resilient and fulfilled leader. Every week, you learn ideas and tools that will shift the way you lead and live your life, making change possible. Let's start the show. Hello and welcome to the first podcast episode of my newly refreshed podcast, the Fulfilled Leader.

Speaker 1:

After nearly four years of my Making Sense of Work podcast, I could see a change in what my clients were seeking from me. Increasingly, the leaders I've been coaching are talking to me about issues related to their own emotional well-being and their fulfillment at work. Leaders who were looking for ways to be happier and more satisfied in their work, who were looking for strategies to help manage the incredible pressure that they and we are experiencing in this complex time. Alongside this, I've seen a shift in my own work experience and what was leading me to fulfillment or not, and I could see that something was changing fulfillment or not, and I could see that something was changing. So in this episode, I'm going to share with you my own personal journey that's happened recently and also the case for why I think focusing on being more fulfilled as a leader matters now more than ever, and I'm going to introduce you to six components that I see as giving us a key to being a fulfilled leader. I will also share a bit how my coaching offer and the work that I'm doing is shifting to create opportunities for us to work together in new and fresh ways. In new and fresh ways and let me start with my own journey by January 2026, so in six months time I will have been running a coaching and coach training and leadership development business for 25 years. I can hardly imagine how that happened, but here I am, 25 years older and so much water under the bridge. As I've talked about recently in the podcast, I also turned 60 late in 2023, and both of these milestones have led to a lot of soul-searching about work and about this next season of my working life.

Speaker 1:

I am a driven person, I love work, I love to work and I don't have any intention of retiring, despite many people asking me recently about my retirement plans. However, in the last year, something has just not been sitting right with me. For about the last eight years, I've been running our accredited coach training business, where we train leaders to become professional coaches, and I'm super proud of this work. It's been one of the most fulfilling parts of my career to see the personal and professional transformation which happens during the training, and in many cases, this transformation is life-changing, and I remember that. For me, too, training as a coach really changes you. However, the last couple of years of running the business have been increasingly complicated and time consuming. Our professional body keep making changes which require a lot of back end work updating materials, changing curriculum and keeping abreast of their requirements, and I've noticed how attending to this work, to that work, was taking me further and further away from the work that I love and that is to coach, to teach and to create. Alongside this, I've had a growing number and have a growing number of senior leaders who are coming to me to ask for private coaching of senior leaders who are coming to me to ask for private coaching. So this is coaching that they could have asked their organizations to fund and provide for them, but they've preferred to come privately so that they can explore areas of their working life that they don't want to share with people at work, and I love this work. I love it Sitting alongside a leader whilst they explore everything from how to manage a toxic boss or how to develop strategy in an ever-changing world, to emotions at work related to past work experiences or, in some cases, even how our childhood or schooling is impacting us as a leader, and the freedom that we both feel in this coaching space enables some great transformative work to happen.

Speaker 1:

In this work, I've also found personally the most amazing personal fulfillment, and even on the days where I've been caught up in back-to-back business challenges, when I've come to sit with a senior leader, either in person or on Zoom, in that coaching space, the challenges melted away and I found myself really fully present, energized and open to help. So I began to see that it was time for me to take some of my own medicine and work out what was best for me. I was asking myself a lot, you know, what would bring me more fulfillment in my working life? How, in this next act of my life some people call it the third act from 60 to 90, do I move forward towards being able to do more of that work that's right at my core, which, as I've said, is teaching, coaching and creating. And so, after an announcement of yet another change from our professional body, I decided it was time for my own transition.

Speaker 1:

Over about two weeks, I sat with this idea of closing the existing coach training business and, as you might imagine, this was a really hard decision. As I've said, this is something I'm proud of. I'm proud to be part of it. I'm proud of the people I work with and I love seeing how this journey impacts the people who come on. It impacts the leaders who train with us, and closing has big implications for my team and for the people who had hoped to train with us in the future. But and this is a big but if I'm increasingly struggling at work and not doing the work that I think is best for me to be doing, I'm not serving well and I'm not working from my best place, and I could see that there are other ways to help people in this next season of my life, and so, in late February 2025, I announced with sadness that I was and am closing the coach training business, and here I am already moving into this next phase of my working life.

Speaker 1:

Moving into this next phase of my working life, the last cohorts of our coach training have started, and by the end of 2025 they will have finished, and from June from now, I am shifting my focus to doing more of this work that I love, and, in the first instance, this is opening up more space for one-to-one coaching for senior leaders, helping you to find your own fulfillment and to build emotional resilience in these challenging times, and together to look at what fulfilled leadership looks like and how we can get it, how to go after it, and also planning to start running in-person one-day leadership retreats here in Singapore later in the year and in other locations, and then the plan is next year to move on to more residential retreats, and there will also be other offers emerging as I go through this transition period, and if you're curious about these and how you can work with me, you can head over to LinkedIn or jeanbelfordcom and send me a message and we can connect. I also have opened up plenty of spaces for a free strategy session if you'd like to explore this, if this is for you, as I've been exploring the space and working with the leaders, I've been working with. Something emerged about leadership that, once I saw it, I couldn't unsee it, and I want to spend the rest of this podcast episode talking about what I saw and I wonder if it's going to resonate with you. Resonate with you. What I could see was that we seldom, if ever, talked about leaders themselves, about their own fulfillment, about how happy they are at work. I'm doing this work with individuals privately, but when I looked, I seldom saw organizations, if ever, exploring this, and at the moment, our world of work is hard. We can see this everywhere. There was recently an article in the Straits Times saying that the age of empathic leadership was over and, in the presence of the challenges that we're facing, we seem to be ignoring how hard leading is at the moment for you, for leaders themselves.

Speaker 1:

We talk about a leader's purpose. We talk about ambition and drive. We talk about the things that leaders need to have in order to be successful, like emotional intelligence or the ability to lead through complexity. We hear a lot about a sense of duty and your commitment to the job, to the people you lead, your devotion or loyalty to the company and to the board of directors, to your shareholders, board of directors, to your shareholders, and it feels like there's only one way you are supposed to demonstrate happiness and fulfillment as a leader, and that's through delivering things for others, through supporting others, through supporting the organization. But what about you? What about leaders ourselves? And as I looked further, I noticed that we talk about employee engagement and employee development, but we don't talk about leader engagement. And when we talk about emotional intelligence and self-awareness, we focus on the external impact of the leader, how they're impacting others, not whether you, the leader yourself, are well and how you are In leadership development. We describe the components needed to lead the organization and people well and, again, not what you, as an individual leader, need for your own personal growth, for your own growing as a human inside yourself, for you to be fulfilled and happy at work, for you to feel emotionally resilient.

Speaker 1:

There seems to be a myth that leaders don't actually need to be happy and fulfilled at work. The myth that, because leaders are paid more, is that they should just get on with it, grow broader shoulders and take care of themselves. A myth that leaders should take the pressure and keep quiet about it. And whilst they are struggling with all of this, we still expect them you to be taking good care of others. And I have such a problem with this myth. Leaders, you we are humans too and we need to be thinking about our well-being. We need to talk about resilience, yes, but not from how can you do more without burning out from that perspective, but from how can you enjoy work and feel energized? We hear about these incredibly high burnout rates and we know this is worth with leaders, and I don't think a few mindfulness courses is going to solve the problem. I wonder how you see this. If you think back to the leaders that you've had maybe the best ever boss there's a chance that they were actually pretty emotionally resilient and that they did take care of their inner world and themselves. They knew that they shouldn't take out their own emotional struggles at work on their teams and they enjoyed their job. And if you think about your worst boss, I can think about mine there's a good chance that emotion was playing a big part of the problem. It might be in the form of anger or passive aggression, or just in being so busy, so caught up in their own world of pleasing their bosses, keeping calm, keeping the shareholders happy that they weren't able to notice you.

Speaker 1:

As I was researching for this episode, I got really curious about whether this was just me, whether this was just something that I thought. Was I imagining it? So I did some research and I looked at a wide range of leadership behaviors or competency frameworks from large and well-known organizations, and I've worked with a lot of these frameworks myself over the 25 years or longer I've been working in leadership development, and what I saw, and what I wish I'd seen long before this, were that all of the descriptions were about how to lead the organization, to lead others, to lead the business and to relate to clients and external stakeholders. I did find one framework that mentioned self in leadership, and this framework focused on women, so then I thought we had a gender bias there. I really couldn't find anything about leading yourself.

Speaker 1:

Now, of course, all those other areas are critical to success as a leader, and organizations need leaders who are also strong and resilient, who are enjoying the work they do and the challenges that come their way. They need leaders. We need leaders who are not just emotionally intelligent relation to others, but emotionally well in themselves. I came away from this research feeling quite disheartened. You know, we're under so much pressure, organizations are under so much pressure. We need leaders who are able to navigate this crisis.

Speaker 1:

But if we don't take care of our leaders, if we don't focus on you and how you, as a leader, can be happy and fulfilled at work, then what is the point? And I'm not believing this myth that leaders just need to take care of themselves. We also need to take care of our leaders and I know that, as I said, whilst organizations are not talking about this, my coaching clients certainly are. Time and again, they come to me to talk about their inner world, seeking more inner strength, resilience and fulfillment, but it feels a bit secret and stealth. We need to talk about vulnerability at work, but nowhere near work. It's like. At work we need to show ultimate strength as a leader, but inside we're struggling. But here's the thing in this time of chaos, unless you, dear leader, focus on being centered and well in yourself, I don't believe you'll be able to lead through this time, you'll be caught up, holding your own pain and anxiety and worry whilst frantically solving the problems in the external world. As you can hear, I feel quite strongly about this, as I know too well, as my own recent experience has been.

Speaker 1:

Leadership can be fulfilling and leadership can be hard. And even those natural born leaders and I know many of you are those who were leading right from early days there are going to be moments of hardship. Every, every leader I've coached has had at least one moment in their career where they were challenged in a deeply personal way. It can be a personal shock, such as redundancy, or an organizational shock, poor organizational performance, or leading or working in a toxic team, or working for a boss who undermines you, or struggling with your relationship with a board and losing your autonomy. And it's in these moments of challenge that shock can happen if we haven't learned who we are and if we haven't developed the ability to be emotionally resilient. I also know, sadly, many leaders who would actually like to leave their toxic workplaces but they can't because they have responsibilities to themselves, to their family, to others. They would love to feel fulfilled at work and they're looking for ways to come home feeling more satisfied after a good day's work and to be getting better sleep.

Speaker 1:

Many of the leaders I coach are coming to me when they're struggling and they might be struggling with anxiety, burnout, overwhelm, all the things I've talked about and they're lost. They're not sure how to recover. They're often exhausted and under this relentless pressure. And bear in mind, this pressure was something we didn't think was possible to increase. You know, we're in times of unprecedented change. Everybody says that that, but we were saying that 10 years ago and then we thought COVID was that change and now it's just getting greater.

Speaker 1:

And yet, in spite of the struggle and in spite of all of these challenges, the leaders I work with are ambitious. They are seeking fulfillment. They don't think it's mutually exclusive to be fulfilled and successful, to be driven and happy, to be emotional and to be strong. These things belong alongside each other and they're not an either or, and when they connect in with what gives them that fulfillment, with their values, their best expression of their strengths, things change. They see themselves becoming a better leader, able to lead from the strength, learning to let others lead on areas that are best for them, and they signal to their teams that being fulfilled at work matters not just for the leader, but for them too, and they're able to seek ways to support their colleagues.

Speaker 1:

I believe that when we are fulfilled, resilient and emotionally strong, we lead from this as a power. We're better able to focus on the organisation and the people we lead. When we've taken the time to focus on our internal drivers and become better aligned with these, we can get on with work and focus on the challenges coming our way, and I believe that now more than ever, leaders, we need to be able to connect with our own sense of fulfilment at work. Otherwise, burnout will be more real and we'll not find a way to lead through this crisis. And, sadly, in the absence of organizations leading on this, I think we as individual leaders maybe have to do this ourselves.

Speaker 1:

So if you truly believe that being fulfilled is something that everybody in your team needs, you also can demonstrate this yourself. Your job is not just to find purpose for the why of the organisation, but also for you, and the more senior you are, the more this matters, because people will look to you to see are you happy and fulfilled at work? Are you enjoying it? Do you feel emotionally strong and resilient. Being a fulfilled leader is about knowing your voice, knowing what matters to you and being able to lead from this place where your mind is clear and your voice is strong, and it's where your inner world supports the impact that you're having on the organization. It's about being able to articulate your own story of how you think the organization can be, and it's about doing what you do with a sense of why it's important to you and why this makes you happy. It doesn't always align with working hard, but it's about aligning with working with purpose, and I believe we can find fulfillment and we can become more emotionally resilient.

Speaker 1:

So what is fulfillment as a leader? How can we describe it? In order to ground this, I've identified six core components which I believe help us to be fulfilled as a leader, and in the coming months I'll expand more on each of these, supporting you to find a way to be more resilient and happy in your work. But here I just want to briefly go through each of these components. They're based on my belief that true fulfillment and work comes from within, not from external validation or circumstances, and each of the dimensions increases your capacity to lead from the strength, to lead from wisdom and through deep fulfillment.

Speaker 1:

The first is about seeking deep satisfaction. So when, as leaders, we do this, we know that meaning and fulfillment in our work matters and that it's not found in titles or promotions, but it's found in feeling deeply engaged and nourished and proud of how we show up. We feel energised by meaning at work and we're grateful to have opportunities to express ourselves through our leadership. I wonder how deeply satisfied you are. You can ask yourself what parts of my work feel deeply satisfying and how can I honor those more fully. Maybe I'm chasing external success, and where is that? And is that at the cost of inner fulfillment? And what can I do about it? And what about on a daily basis? Are there moments where I can lead from my strengths, from my values, from what drives me, and make sure that I do work that energizes me?

Speaker 1:

The second is leading with inner alignment and clarity. When we lead from this inner clarity, we know our why, we know our values, our vision, and they guide our decisions. Even in complexity, we're able to filter out the noise around us, to focus on what matters without losing our humanity. We know our strengths and inner wisdom and are able to lead from what fuels us. Are you feeling aligned and clear? As, as you think about this, you can ask yourself what truly matters most in my leadership right now, what are my core values and how can I live by them day to day, and where might I be misaligned in my leadership and what can I do to find alignment?

Speaker 1:

The third is having grounded confidence. This is where you know and trust your worth and even when doubt whispers or shouts, you can sit in it. Your confidence isn't about bravado, it's self-trust and it's rooted in your own sense of truth. It's not the absence of an inner critic, because we know the inner critic is ever present, but it's that you're not ruled by it. You have strategies to manage it and you see the fear and you find the courage to lead through it. You're able to say no and you manage your boundaries without worrying about what others think. To find this and to build your own grounded confidence, you can ask what do I know is true about my leadership, even when I doubt it, even when the inner critic is there? And what would change if I trusted myself fully? And how can I deepen my confidence and sense of self-trust? My confidence and sense of self-trust?

Speaker 1:

Fourth is centered calm, and this is our ability to find a steady space inside no matter the storm. And this is so critical for us as leaders, because we know that if we can find calm, it's not actually the absence of pressure, it's our ability to stay centered within the pressure. When we're here, we are in tune with our nervous system and we have strategies to regulate it, and that means that we can respond rather than react, and in moments of stress, we're still able to maintain clarity and presence. We also, when we're calm, are aware of our emotions, but we're able to regulate them appropriately. So we know what they are, we can bring them to the surface and then we can say, okay, I see you and I'm okay. So you can ask yourself how can I do more of that today? How can I find moments of more inner space? Today? You could explore any emotional patterns that may be showing up for you and think about how you could meet those differently. And think about when those emotions rise which they do always how can we process them, how can we move through them? And, really importantly here, if you are experiencing a lot of emotion, who can you find to support you, especially in those moments when you're emotionally flooded.

Speaker 1:

Fifth is about having a relational connection with others, and here you know that you can lead with humanity, empathy, humility and heart. You're leading through and with people and you thrive in authentic community. Leaders who lead through relationship are skilled at nurturing a real connection with others and they make time for conversation, they build trust, they ask for help and they stay anchored in compassion for others and for themselves. And they're asking questions like who are my true allies and companions at work? Where could I build deeper connections to strengthen my leadership? And when work pressures increase, what can I do to remain connected to others so that I don't lose it?

Speaker 1:

Finally, we have intentional growth, and this is where we intentionally expand in our life and in our leadership. We are inspired to learn and grow as a human and as a leader, and we know that growth brings emotional resilience and fulfillment. We see that leadership is a lifelong journey of deepening impact and meaning, and when you are feeling stagnant and stuck which we all do at times we can look to ourselves to learn and grow and to move back towards our purpose and to regain our energy for leadership, and we're committed to that through self-awareness. Our energy for leadership, and we're committed to that through self-awareness, and this means asking ourselves is there a new version of myself as a leader that's ready to emerge and what's the next frontier of my leadership journey and who are the people supporting me in my growth as a leader, and what can I do to accelerate this? And so I believe that being a fulfilled leader lives at the intersection of these six of deep satisfaction, aligned clarity, grounded confidence, centered calm, relational connection and intentional growth, and I know from my own experience that when we engage in each of these components, we find more ways to be happy and enjoy work.

Speaker 1:

As I said, in coming episodes I'll expand more on this. I'll talk to experts and leaders about how they are finding ways to lead from emotional resilience, and I will also share more of what I'm learning about myself and from the leaders I'm coaching about how we can continually deepen and grow as leaders. If you'd like to reflect more on this, I've created a sub stack block and if you go over there, you can find more detail on this leadership framework, and each week with each episode, there will also be some journaling prompts to help you think about your own leadership fulfillment, and you can find a link in the show notes or on LinkedIn. I'm so excited for this next stage of my own professional journey and I'm excited to go on it with you and I look forward to sharing it with you. Thanks for listening to the Fulfilled Leader. If this episode resonated, share it with another leader or friend and don't forget to follow the podcast so you never miss an episode. You can even rate and review. You can find more support and resources at jeanbalfourcom, or come and say hello on LinkedIn. Take care and keep leading with heart.

Speaker 1:

Welcome to the Fulfilled Leader Podcast, the podcast to strengthen your emotional resilience and find fulfillment at work. I'm your host, jean Balfour, master Certified Coach, with over 5,000 hours one-to-one and tens of thousands of hours in groups. I've coached incredible leaders like you to overcome their biggest work challenges and go on to lead resiliently, finding the type of fulfillment they never knew possible. They are leaders people want to work for and organizations want to hire. In this podcast, we have conversations about the psychological and emotional struggles of leadership. You're going to hear neuroscience, psychology, leadership models and evidence-based approaches that all have an impact in helping you be a resilient and fulfilled leader. Every week, you learn ideas and tools that will shift the way you lead and live your life, making change possible. Let's start the show.

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Jean Balfour MCC, MSc

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