Overwhelmed Working Woman: Boost Productivity, Master Time Management, Overcome Overwhelm & Stop People Pleasing
Are you sick of juggling a million things, and pleasing everyone BUT you?
What if I told you that you could achieve more and find your calm by doing LESS?
In this podcast for accomplished working women, discover where you're going wrong with managing your overwhelm and the exact steps to feel more composed and productive.
Tune in to learn unlikely time management hacks, tips to feel less overwhelmed, and surprising ways to do less with your host Michelle Gauthier, who has over 6 years of experience coaching hundreds of overwhelmed working women.
If you want to to start reclaiming your time, setting better boundaries, and nurturing your mental well-being, you're in the right place.
Get started by listening to fan-favorite episode "The Power of a To-Don't List."
Overwhelmed Working Woman: Boost Productivity, Master Time Management, Overcome Overwhelm & Stop People Pleasing
#127| Why Time Management Won’t Make You a Better Leader—Focus On This Instead for More Productivity: Overwhelm, Productivity, Time Management & People Pleasing
Have you ever wished you could stay calm and collected during workplace conflict instead of feeling overwhelmed and reactive? My guest today, leadership consultant Katie Calagui can help.
Whether you're navigating tough conversations at work, feeling drained in your leadership role, or struggling to balance your energy between your job and home life, this episode offers practical tools to help you lead with clarity and confidence. Mindfulness isn’t just a buzzword—it’s a real solution to everyday leadership stressors and interpersonal challenges.
In this episode, you will:
- Learn how simple mindfulness techniques can instantly shift how you respond to stress and conflict at work.
- Discover why managing your energy—not just your time—is the secret to staying present and productive in all areas of life.
- Gain actionable strategies to improve workplace relationships, reduce emotional overwhelm, and enhance your overall quality of life.
Press play now to uncover real-world tips you can use today to feel more grounded, effective, and empowered in both your work and personal life.
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Life can be overwhelming, but on this podcast, you'll discover practical strategies to overcome overwhelm, imposter syndrome, and negative self-talk, manage time effectively, set boundaries, and stay productive in high-stress jobs—all while learning how to say no and prioritize self-care on the Overwhelmed Working Woman podcast.
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when we interact with others, it's not just our brain that gets activated, it's our emotions that get activated.
Michelle Gauthier:You're listening to Overwhelmed Working Woman, the podcast that helps you be more calm and more productive by doing less. I'm your host, Michelle Gauthier, a former Overwhelmed Working Woman and current life coach. On this show, we unpack the stress and pressure that today's working woman experiences, and in each episode you'll get a strategy to bring more calm, ease and relaxation to your life. Hi, friend, thanks for joining today. If you're looking for a better way to handle stress in the workplace, or you're struggling with interpersonal challenges at home or at work, or just feeling overwhelmed in your leadership role, today's episode is for you. My guest, Katie Calagui, is a leadership coach with a background as chief people officer, and when you listen to the episode today, you'll discover why mindfulness is the key to being a strong leader, not only at work, but also in the rest of your life. She also gives us great tips on how to handle workplace conflict in a way that actually improves relationships and productivity instead of making things worse. And then, finally, she shares the power of managing your energy, not just your time, so that you can stay present and engaged at work and at home. A lot of times, we use all of our energy at work and have nothing left for home. She's got a great ability to make these concepts really practical and actionable, so I'm confident you'll walk away feeling good with some good strategies you can use immediately. Let's dive in. Hi, katie, thank you so much for joining us today. Hi, michelle, so great to be here. Yes, I'm so glad to have you.
Michelle Gauthier:I think this is going to be a great podcast for our listeners, because we do have so many people in leadership who are listening. And the reason why I invited Katie to be on today is because she's a leadership coach. She has previously been chief people officer and had all kinds of experience in helping leaders grow, and I love that. Her spin on it is a lot of mindfulness and the way that you think of mindfulness as the first step to being a good leader. So I wanted to have you on today because I think you can help our overwhelmed working women feel less overwhelmed and less stressed, even if they have a job that might take a lot out of them. So do you want to tell us a little bit about how you got into mindfulness? Because you started off in financial services, which isn't necessarily thought of as a mindful career. So do you want to just tell us a little bit about how you got into it and then what you teach your clients and then what you teach your clients.
Katie Calagui:Yeah for sure. Yeah. So I started working with my first coach 15 years ago. So I was working for a family business, my father's firm. I was asked to step into a leadership role. It's a pretty big jump, given where I was in my career. They had actually never had kind of a professional leader of the firm yet. It was a very entrepreneurial firm at that point. And so I first thing I said is I need a coach to kind of help me navigate this. And so my first coach I ever had she was trained. I mean, she had a very long corporate life but had done a lot of training in mindfulness and that was kind of the foundation of a lot of the work that we did and the tools around mindfulness that she taught me.
Katie Calagui:I think what stood out and why I was kind of an instant believer and have incorporated that into all of my leadership going forward, is that, you know, the impact was so immediate and it was so large, like these very small shifts that mindfulness can provide us just made a huge impact into how I navigated whatever challenge was facing me.
Katie Calagui:So that's where I got introduced to it and, like I said, as a result. I just really see it as this foundational piece to leadership, because we think about the challenges that come up in leadership. It's not so much the practical problems we have to solve Like we're all smart, intelligent people, like our brains can figure out the business side of stuff what's challenging and overwhelming are the interpersonal interactions, and that's because we're all individual beings with our own stories and histories and personalities, and when we interact with others, it's not just our brain that gets activated, it's our emotions that get activated, and so if we don't have a way to work with our emotion, our interactions at work become more challenging. And so that's really what kind of led me down this path of like okay, how do I use these mindfulness tools in leadership?
Michelle Gauthier:Okay, I love that. So I just want to highlight something that you just said, because that felt like a real light bulb to me. So, if we think about all the things that we have to do in a job, what I hear you saying is the actual part of the job. The function of the job is the easier part than interacting with all the people, and, at least in all of my corporate roles, interacting with people was like 90% of my job. It's very rare that we have a job these days where you're just like sitting in an office doing your exact thing. Even if you have a job like being an accountant, you still have to, you know, communicate with everybody else around you. So I love that you can help people feel better in that area. Do you have specific tips?
Katie Calagui:Yeah, well, I think one of the first things that my coach taught me that was one of those kind of quick, high impact things was, you know, when I would get into discussions and we were problem solving and emotions were getting activated. You know, not only was I working in a leadership team, but with family, so emotions were even more heightened. You know, if I felt defensive in a meeting or I felt angry or frustrated, I would kind of go home and, you know, being a very self-improvement driven person, I would try to figure out, like how do I not get frustrated? Like what is wrong with me for getting frustrated? I need to, like, not get emotional.
Katie Calagui:And I was doing all this work, trying to figure out how to not be emotional, and my coach explained to me that, like you can't not feel emotion, like we don't have that ability, it's an innate thing that happens, and so trying to figure out how to make it not happen or how to talk myself out of it or, even worse, criticize myself for having the emotion, was really counterproductive. So what I needed to do instead was I needed to start developing a language to identify the emotion I was having and learning how to tolerate it, understand it and move through it, because actually the better that you can tolerate it and work through it, the faster you can move on from it. It's actually kind of counterintuitive that that was what I needed to learn, as opposed to trying to figure out how to not be emotional, because that wasn't going to happen.
Michelle Gauthier:Yes, oh my gosh, that's so good. I too. If there would have been like a box you could check and be like, feel no emotions between the hours of eight and six, I would have been like I'm in. That sounds good. And I also think, especially I don't know if you experienced this, but especially as a woman, I was like I can never cry at work. I will be seen in such a bad light if I ever cry, I have to be nice. I can't ever get mad. I had all these kind of rules for myself, so I love that.
Michelle Gauthier:So, when you're teaching this stuff, because I know you work with women, you work with men too, right? Oh yeah.
Katie Calagui:Actually, I've probably worked with more men in the space that I'm in, I mean I'm in financial services. So I've definitely worked with both, for sure.
Michelle Gauthier:Yeah, and do you see, is there a difference between the amount of emotion that people are willing to feel or like? Does anyone take to this lesson better than others? Or do you see that once people learn how to just quickly be like, ok, I'm angry and I'm going to name it and feel it and allow that, does it seem to work for anybody?
Katie Calagui:Well, it's funny you bring up the being a woman part, because I feel like we kind of get labeled emotional. But I'll never forget being in I think at the time it was a cab, not an Uber with one of my male bosses was very frustrated with another woman on the team and he was very angry and he was saying how she's just so emotional and she can't get her emotions under control. And I'm just sitting there thinking, like you know, anger is an emotion and like he and that mom, that was being very emotional.
Michelle Gauthier:Yes, yes, how ironic. But like it seems that there are emotions that are acceptable by gender, like women, we're not supposed to get mad or we get labeled as you know, bitches. If men are mad there it's fine, you know, and maybe we're allowed to cry and they're not allowed, or whatever it is. So that's funny, though that's a great thing to point out.
Katie Calagui:Oh, my goodness.
Michelle Gauthier:Well, well, I want to hear about, like, how you help your clients with this, but I also, as a coach myself, I totally believe that in order for me to teach anybody anything, I have to embody it as well. So before you tell me how you help your clients, tell me how you help yourself. How do you use this in your daily life?
Katie Calagui:Yeah. So I always, you know, kind of think of it as mindfulness is like my main toolbox right, Like we, just as we go through life. We kind of our job is to assemble a toolbox to navigate challenges, because the challenge is always going to be there. We're always going to, you know, slip into our usual reactions. It's just how quickly can we get into our toolbox toolbox. And so for me it's like, as I'm moving through my weeks and my months, I feel like there's kind of three levels. I'm either frustrated, dealing with a conflict, or I have an issue. If that's compounding, then I'm in overwhelm, and if that's getting really bad, I find myself in anxiety, and mindfulness can help me at any of those stages. The sooner I catch it the better.
Katie Calagui:But you know, the first tool being like just checking in with what I'm experiencing and being present with that and tolerating it, like I said. And sometimes the body has to tell us before the mind can. So you know, if I'm feeling uneasy and worked up, I might not know what the emotion is yet. So it's like, okay, is my chest tight? Is my belly hurting? Like, am I breathing heavy? Like sometimes our body will clue us in first. So if I can't really get the words to what I'm experiencing, I first try to get some clues from what my body is telling me and that just starts to slow down, kind of that flight or fight reaction, and then I kind of think about OK, what am I experiencing?
Katie Calagui:If I can label the emotion and I can kind of allow it, then I can start to work with it and figure out, okay, where do I want to go from here? What can I do? That's within my control. You know, one of the cores of mindfulness is being present, and so we know that if we're worrying about the future or we're mulling over something in the past, we're departing from the present and that's going to create more overwhelm and anxiety. So can I bring myself back to this moment Like what's actually happening now? Am I okay in this moment? Are? Can I bring myself back to this moment Like what's actually happening now? Am I okay in this moment? Are these things I'm thinking have they actually happened or am I just worried that they're going to happen? So it's just kind of bringing me back to sort of the wiser parts of myself, as opposed to the kind of primitive, reactive, self-protective parts of myself.
Michelle Gauthier:Yes, yes, so it sounds like and it's very similar to what you said about at the beginning too, just about emotions being part of everyday life. So I love that. You just know, no matter how advanced you get in mindfulness and I will say me too to this that stuff still comes up, you still get upset, you still get frustrated, you still get overwhelmed. But just noticing it and asking yourself questions and slowing down really seems to work for you and, I'm sure, for all of your clients. So how do you help your clients Like, do you work with a big group? Do you work with people one-on-one? And then my follow-on question to that is what's the impact? I'm thinking of you going into an organization where they haven't learned anything about mindfulness and then suddenly all the leaders are trained and able to be much more mindful about things. What's the impact on the business when you do something like that?
Katie Calagui:Yeah, well, you know, I think like one of the biggest values of the work that I do and other coaches and consultants is I'm always striving to improve quality of life. So it's like you know, yes, there's things we're going to do that make the business better, certainly, but I want people to experience their work life in a better way, and so I think the biggest part of that that I help teams with is how to navigate conflict well, and so I do that one-on-one. So most of my executive teams that I coach, I coach the whole team as a group. So I'll facilitate meetings and we'll work together as a group, and then I'll often coach them one-on-one individually, and so we'll do some work one-on-one and then we'll do some work as a group.
Katie Calagui:One of the things I do with groups generally, like a kickoff retreat or one of our off sites or even in a regular meeting, is I print out a page with words of emotions on it, because, interestingly enough, we don't actually know how to label a lot of emotions and we kind of mislabel things in a lot of ways, like, instead of saying I feel hurt, we're used to saying that person was a jerk. You know, it's always very external, so just giving language so that people in the moment can start learning how to say hey, I feel confused right now, or I'm feeling stuck, or I'm feeling hurt. If something is really escalated, I try to help us. You know, work through like how do we communicate what we're experiencing versus going on the attack or getting defensive, which is what typically happens when we're finding ourself in conflict. And you know, good process, also with a group, helps as well. So if we have a good structure for what we're doing, we have good, clear objectives, that kind of also helps them or the conflict.
Katie Calagui:And then one I really debriefing with individuals on. You know what happened, what was your experience, and let's talk through that. And so you know we'll kind of generally start from a very self-protective place and we'll start weaving these stories around. You know that person was mean to me or out of line and this is not going to work and I just give up. And you know, our kind of self-protective narratives start getting very, very loud and you know it's kind of our ego talking a little bit. And so if I can help one-on-one with clients kind of refocus on well, what do we know for sure? What are the facts of what happened? What were you experiencing? Did you feel hurt? Did you feel scared? Did you feel what was going on with you?
Katie Calagui:So someone might start with like, well, I'm angry because Joe is a jerk and if we let that story play out, we go down a path of how he's wrong and I'm right and I can't work with him and all that, and then we actually start to abandon ourselves and we're operating from a place of survival versus wisdom.
Katie Calagui:So instead, if we can say, hey, I was hurt because I felt attacked in that meeting and now I'm feeling really insecure about my idea and you know, maybe I got something wrong. And so if we can really get to the heart of what's going on with you, then we can talk about okay, how do you want to respond in a way that feels authentic to you. Maybe it's I need to go back to Joe and set some boundaries, like, hey, joe, it's okay to not like my idea, but it's not okay to raise your voice at me. Or maybe I need to find out what's going on with Joe, because that was really unusual and he doesn't usually act that way. So is there something going on with him that I don't know about? But, like, our defensive behaviors are not going to lead us to places that are true to ourself, and so if we can get back to you know, kind of moving back into that rational side of how we want to handle things, then we can act in ways that are more aligned with our wisest self.
Michelle Gauthier:I love that. I love it so much. And if I think about the repercussions of that, let's say you teach someone that skill at work and they've just reduced by a huge amount the number of hours that it's going to take to solve that problem because they can just talk to the person instead of being mad and defensive and them arguing. And then I'm picturing that person going home and being able to use those same skills with their wife or husband or partner, kids or anything. I mean just it feels like once you teach them that as a leadership skill, they can just take that everywhere in life with them. I love that. Yeah, 100%. Okay, that's awesome. So I feel like you've given us already a lot of great tips. But if there's one thing that you would want to tell someone who's like I don't do anything mindfulness wise ever, what's the number one thing that you would say to them?
Katie Calagui:to just get started, Well, the easiest thing is always to breathe I think we've all heard about this and it doesn't have to be like a isolated meditation, breathing on a cushion, like just doing four counts in holding it, four counts out slow that kind of reactive, protective, self-defensive reactions, right. So if we can just slow down a little bit, and then the second thing would just be to like check in with your body, like if that's all you can do in the moment is just kind of start to notice your body Cause again, that gets you out of like your head spinning and more grounded and it just kind of slows that reaction. So, just learning to take a couple of breaths, you can do that anywhere you know. If we have time to pick up our phone and scroll for two minutes, we can stop and just breathe for two minutes and that can really start to kind of build those neuropathways that help us identify what's going on in our experience faster.
Michelle Gauthier:So that's easy to start. I love that because you can do it without anybody else knowing. You know you can count your breaths while you're sitting in a meeting if you need to, and you can check with your body and see. You know where do I feel uncomfortable while you're with other people or not. That's great. I love it. Okay, awesome, all right, thank you. Those have been all great tips. So now I'm going to ask you the two questions that I ask everybody who comes on the show. So the first one is what's one thing that you can do to instantly feel more calm? Is it the square breathing? Did you just give us that answer?
Katie Calagui:No, I wish I was. Yes, I should do that. But I think what I have found is I just have to let go, like I noticed this relationship of the more overwhelmed I feel, the more controlling I get, the more I start to control things. So if I can just let go and kind of let things be and sort of watch the outcome happen without trying to control it, that instantly can bring my overwhelm down.
Michelle Gauthier:That's so good. I think you're the one who taught me this. That said, when women start to feel stressed, they go towards control and men go towards what is anger. That's what I thought. I didn't want to throw them under the bus, but that's it Okay. That resonates for me big time, like when I start to feel stressed and out of control, I just want to control things that aren't in my control. So I love that. Okay. So the answer is let go. And then what's something that you consistently do in your life that enables you to do less?
Katie Calagui:Well, I've become very fierce about managing my energy. Now there's always like manage your time, it's like whatever the day is going to be what it is, but I got really I don't know. Part of being a working mom was like I had to manage my energy and so it was like how much time am I going to give or energy am I going to give to this problem, for example? Or you know this drama that happened Am I going to lose myself in this for 20 minutes and ruminate, or am I going to preserve my energy so I can walk in the door and feel more peaceful after work and enjoy my kids? I think just being very mindful of my energy and very, very protective of it.
Michelle Gauthier:I love that. That's such a great answer. And just so you listeners know, katie is managing, she's got her own business and then she also has a high schooler, a middle schooler and a baby and they're all boys.
Michelle Gauthier:when you're saying energy management to like be home with your husband and your three boys, I think it's like extra, because usually you've got the little kids and you know what that energy is, but then that can end at like eight o'clock because they go to bed and then high school energy is a different one, but you've got them all. So I think you managing your energy is a brilliant idea and something that everybody could learn how to do.
Katie Calagui:Yeah, yeah, I need the energy to like chase the toddler, and then I need the energy to have a very intellectual conversation with my 16 year old, who have those at 1030.
Michelle Gauthier:So, yes, oh my gosh. I saw some meme the other day that said, like the okay, when they're babies, they wake you up in the middle of the night because they're crying, and when they're teenagers, they wake you up because they want to talk to you at a time where they feel energized, which is like 11. And I'm always like, okay, sure, yes, just let me sit up and pull myself together. Yeah, yeah, it's tough being a mom, especially on both ends of the spectrum. Good for you, good for you. So, based on what you've taught us today, it sounds like you work with a lot of leaders, but can you just tell us who you work with, in case people are interested in hiring you, and then how they can find you?
Katie Calagui:Yeah, so easiest way to find me is probably my website, which I know you'll drop in the notes because a long name to spell. And then who I work with you know I work, so I do one-on-one executive coaching with leaders or emerging leaders, and then also with small businesses and their leadership teams. So any business that's wanting to grow, they're hiring more employees and they're looking to professionalize as a team, work better together and then create a great experience for their employees. That's who I generally support.
Michelle Gauthier:Amazing, okay, perfect, thank you. Will you just spell your name for us, in case somebody is only listening and they want to go to your website right now.
Katie Calagui:Yeah, so it's Katie K-A-T-I-E, and then Kalagi is C-A-L-A-G-U-I, and so it's just katiekalagiconsultingcom. There you go.
Michelle Gauthier:Thank you very much. Thank you for listening to the Overwhelmed Working Woman podcast. If you want to learn more about my work, head over to my website at michellegothiercom. See you next week.
