How Good Can It Get

This week's episode is another special reshare from the vault—one that feels just as relevant today as it did when it first aired. Bree sits down with entrepreneur and business coach Ina Coveney to explore what happens when you're forced to rethink your career, your identity, and the stories you've been telling yourself about success.

After being passed over for a promotion while on maternity leave, Ina made the difficult decision to leave corporate and build a business on her own terms. What follows is an honest conversation about entrepreneurship, resilience, and the invisible work of unlearning the need to earn approval. Along the way, Ina introduces a metaphor Bree still thinks about today: the two horses that pull every entrepreneur's chariot. One is the clients who keep us accountable. The other is the deeper purpose that carries us through the moments when motivation disappears.

The conversation also explores the realities of being a working parent, from navigating guilt and societal expectations to recognizing that so much of the pressure we carry comes not from others—but from ourselves.

This week's episode is a special reshare from the vault — and one of the most listened-to conversations in the show's history. Bree sits down with Christy Bowman-White, who went from middle school dropout and teenage parent to principal of a Distinguished School in Washington state... and then burned out completely.

Christy's story centers on a metaphor that's stuck with Bree ever since this conversation was first recorded: the basket. For years, Christy poured everything — her time, her identity, her worth — into the basket labeled "career," while every other basket in her life sat empty. Then the Mack truck came. In this episode, Christy gets honest about self-abandonment, the moment she realized her core value of "excellence" was really just perfectionism in disguise, and why emotional intelligence belongs at the foundation of leadership, not on the side as a soft skill.

What You'll Learn in This Episode

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Something big is coming. Bree is pulling back the curtain on what the How Good Can It Get? team has been quietly building behind the scenes — and it might be the most exciting thing this podcast has ever produced.

New guests. New series. Conversations so good she almost cried in the recording booth. Tune in to hear what's on the way and why the wait is going to be very, very worth it. The best is genuinely yet to come. How good can it get? You're about to find out.

The Upcoming Series You're Going to Want to Tell Everyone About

Exit Wounds is coming. Real women. Real exits. Corporate roles, multimillion-dollar businesses, marriages, partnerships, friendships — and in one case, an entire country. These are the stories of what happens when a woman finally stops holding on to what no longer fits and starts building the life waiting for her on the other side.

Bree has already started recording. Her words: "I almost feel like crying."

While you wait for the new series, the archives are full of exactly what you need right now. Bree is curating the best of How Good Can It Get? all summer long — the most downloaded, most shared, most life-changing episodes from nearly 70 countries of listeners. You may have heard some of them before. But you are not the same person you were then.

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We've regulated. We've rewired. Now it's time to take your agency back. In the final installment of the Work Isn't Working series, Bree introduces the third step of the Work Recovery Method: Reclaim.

This episode is an honest look at the "good enough" zone so many high-achieving women quietly settle into, the victimhood cycle that keeps us pointing outward instead of turning the mirror around, and what actually becomes possible when you stop outsourcing your joy, your purpose, and your sense of self to circumstances you're waiting to change. Bree shares her own ongoing journey of shedding the shoulds, and offers a practical starting point for anyone who needs to begin reclaiming their life in small, powerful doses.

What You'll Learn in This Episode

The Love List Exercise

If big-picture reclamation feels too abstract for where you are right now, start here.

Make a list of 20 or more things that bring you genuine joy, pleasure, and happiness. Go small and specific. The first bite of ice cream on a hot day. A new bird at the feeder. A dog jumping into your lap. A particular song. A particular light.

The Work Recovery Method™: A Series Summary

This is an ongoing cycle, not a finish line. Two steps forward, one step back is still growth.

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Most of the rules running your life were written before you were old enough to question them.

In this episode, Bree introduces the second step of the Work Recovery Method — REWIRE — and breaks down the invisible operating system underneath all of our behavior: your ABCs (agreements, beliefs, and conditioning). If you've ever changed jobs and still ended up in the same cycle or pattern of dissatisfaction, this is the episode that explains why, and what to do about it.

Key Takeaways

Reflection Question Take a look at one recurring pattern in your work or relationships. What agreement, belief, or conditioning might be sitting underneath it? Is it something you chose, or something you inherited?

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Insta: @breejohnsonofficial

Website: www.executiveunschool.com

Keywords: rewiring beliefs, work recovery method, agreements beliefs conditioning, burnout patterns, why the same job problems keep happening, invisible operating system, neural pathways rewiring, autopilot behavior, self-worth and work, burnout recovery tools, subconscious patterns women, how to break work cycles, ambitious women burnout, conscious living, executive burnout

When work stops working, the instinct is to think harder, plan faster, and do more. But what if the doing is exactly what's keeping you stuck? In part four of the Work Isn't Working series, Bree introduces the foundational step most high achievers skip entirely: regulation.

Before strategy, before decisions, before any meaningful next step, your nervous system needs to feel safe enough to think clearly. This episode explores why dysregulated states produce reactive choices, what nervous system regulation actually looks and feels like in practice, and how flipping the cultural script from Have, Do, Be to Be, Do, Have changes everything about how you build the life you actually want.

What You'll Learn in This Episode

The Insight Worth Writing Down

Most of us have been living a Have, Do, Be sequence: get the thing, do the work, then finally feel at peace. The sequence that actually creates abundance and joy runs the other way. You be first, grounded and connected to yourself. From there, you do with clarity and intention. And then you have more of what you've been working toward, built on a foundation that can hold it.

Reflection Question

Where in your life have you been making decisions from a dysregulated state? And what would one small regulating practice this week make possible?

Connect with Bree

Website: executiveunschool.com 

Instagram: @breejohnsonofficial

Next in the Series

Part 5 of Work Isn't Working is coming next. Once you've regulated, a whole new question becomes available to you: what do you actually want? When you're not operating from chaos, that answer might surprise you.

If this episode resonated, share it with a woman in your life who needs permission to slow down before she speeds up.

What happens when the thing you built your entire identity around disappears? In this episode of Work Isn't Working, Bree gets personal — sharing how the intoxicating elixir of career success quietly consumed her identity through her twenties and into her thirties, until the whole thing came crashing down and forced her to ask the hardest question: Who am I without my work?

This is the episode for every high-achiever who has an easy answer to "what do you do" but a complicated one to "who are you."

In This Episode, You'll Hear: 

Key Takeaways

Reflection Question If you woke up tomorrow and your job — your title, your role, your professional identity — was completely gone, what would be left? Who would you be?

Connect with Bree

Insta: @breejohnsonofficial

Website: www.executiveunschool.com

Keywords: work identity, burnout recovery, contingent self-worth, nervous system regulation, Work Recovery Method, overachiever burnout, identity after burnout, hustle culture, executive burnout, reclaiming yourself, who am I without my job, work wounds, conscious leadership, ambitious women

Part of the Work Isn't Working series on the How Good Can I Get? podcast

In this episode, host and former employment attorney digs past the surface-level conversation about workplace stress to expose the measurable, documented ways chronic work pressure is harming your body, reshaping your brain, and eroding your relationships.

From elevated cortisol and cardiovascular strain to impaired prefrontal cortex function and trauma-mirroring neurobiological patterns, this episode names what most organizations — and their EAP programs — refuse to.

Key themes

Chronic cortisol elevation: How sustained work stress keeps the body's stress hormone dangerously high for years — or decades.

If this episode resonated, subscribe and leave a review — and share it with the high performer in your life who keeps saying they're "fine."

Next week: why we build our identities inside our work, and what it really costs to walk away.

Keywords:

burnout recovery, chronic workplace stress, work stress physical effects, cortisol and burnout, nervous system dysregulation, prefrontal cortex stress, work trauma, work wounds, high performer burnout, executive burnout, Sunday scaries, emotional numbness at work

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New Series: Work Isn't Working...And It's Not Just You Episode #1

Burnout gets all the attention — but what if it's not actually the root problem? In this episode, host Bree Johnson digs into why treating burnout like a time management or resilience issue keeps you stuck in the same cycle, and what's really going on underneath the surface.

If you've tried all the "fixes" and still feel off, this one will reframe everything.

In This Episode:

Key Takeaway

You are not broken. You are responding to something real. And the moment you stop trying to fix yourself and start understanding what your system actually needs — that's when something different becomes possible.

Keywords burnout recovery, workplace stress, high achiever burnout, nervous system and work, work wounds, emotional recovery from work, burnout symptoms, high performance burnout, work trauma, sustainable career

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What if the life you've been working so hard to build is actually getting in the way of living it? In this personal episode, Bree reflects on a cultural conditioning that keeps so many of us perpetually future-focused — always planning, optimizing, and preparing — while the richness of ordinary life quietly slips by.

Influenced by the recent passing of her 94-year-old grandfather, Bree shares an honest and vulnerable look at the moments she missed, the regret that followed, and the radical but simple shift she's choosing going forward: more presence, less rehearsal.

Topics: mindfulness  ·  present moment living  ·  work-life balance  ·  grief & loss  ·  personal growth  ·  intentional living  ·  hustle culture  ·  family & relationships

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