How Good Can It Get

I'm becoming suspicious of the way I've defined growth for most of my life. For 20 years, I lived inside reports. As managing partner, COO, and chief strategy officer, I watched revenue, headcount and expense trends, and the "successful" direction of every line was up. Flat meant a problem. A sharp decline meant a crisis. Somewhere along the way, I started measuring my own life the same way. More...

I know what it feels like when the thing you built becomes the thing you have to leave. Ashlei Rolloff got the email on her day off. The million-dollar agency she had built was being divested and spun out to her. On paper, it was a gift. Inside, it showed her how much of her worth had been tied to her VP title and her output. In this episode, Ashlei shares the grief that came in waves and the very...

I signed up for something a few weeks ago that my body was already saying no to... and I said yes anyway.   Fresh off the Growth Day Conference, I've been sitting with the word growth. Somewhere across 20-plus years of work, I started treating growth and more as the same thing. More clients, more partnerships, more posts, more speaking engagements, all stacked on top of what I already carry.   The...

I've drafted email replies in my head while someone I love was telling me about the best moment of their day. Guilty. Maybe you've been there too. You walk through the front door (or up the stairs, if you work from home) and realize you never actually left work. Your body is home, and your mind is still in the 3:00 meeting, rewriting what you should have said. Then the shoes and backpack in the en...

This week felt heavier than most, and I don't want to pretend otherwise. Every time I opened a news app, there was another story where something went terribly wrong for a woman, and the people who were supposed to help...didn't. None of those stories were mine. And my body carried them all week anyway. In this  episode with our new, shorter format, I'm naming what I believe gets activated in momen...

I came back from a summer that expanded me in ways I'm still catching up to, and the first thing I felt was a pull to make sure I wasn't leaving any of you behind. Before I tell you where we're going, let me tell you where I've been. This summer held executive retreats I got to lead, a hypno-breathwork Level Two certification, and a whole lot of work that stretched what I thought I was capable of....

I built the thing I most needed, and in this episode I finally lay it all out for you. There is a version of exhaustion that sleep does not fix. You can leave the job, take the vacation, change the boss, and finally close the laptop at 5:00, and the experiences still go around and around in your head. You still hear the criticism from that meeting. One email lands and your whole body snaps back in...

I really wish someone had handed me this one question earlier in my career, back when I was climbing and striving and sure that the next title would finally make me feel like myself. How good can it get? I say it all the time on this show, and coming back from the most wonderful summer, I realized I've never fully explained what I mean by it. So this episode goes back to basics. This phrase stuck...

I really wish someone had told me this earlier in my career: working harder isn't necessarily what moves you forward. For so many of us, especially women, we inherited a simple formula. Keep your head down, do great work, and eventually someone will notice. But as Giselle Marcus and I talk about in this conversation, career growth has an invisible side that many of us were never taught. It's relat...

Some of the most powerful work we can do isn't changing what's happening around us. It's changing the story we're living inside. Kyle Smith and I recorded this conversation a year and a half ago, and that idea has stayed with me. So many of the patterns I see in my clients come back to the stories we quietly repeat about who we are, what we're capable of, what we're allowed to want, and whether we...

When this conversation was first recorded almost 2 years ago, I thought we were talking about career pivots. Listening back now, I realize we were talking about identity. About the quiet moment when you start wondering whether the life you've built is actually one you chose. This episode explores: why so many of us confuse achievement with alignment the hidden "rulebook" that shapes our career dec...

Two years ago, I recorded this conversation before I'd fully connected the dots between visibility, work, and opportunity. Looking back, I realize this episode isn't really about LinkedIn. It's about something much bigger: the courage to let people see your work before you know exactly where it will lead. Whether you're building a business, growing your career, or simply wondering what's next, you...

Two years ago, I recorded this conversation before I had fully articulated what Work Recovery really meant. Looking back now, I can hear so many of the ideas that have become central to my work today. This conversation isn't simply about leadership. It's about questioning the systems we've accepted as normal and asking what becomes possible when we build workplaces around humans instead of product...

Two years ago, I recorded this conversation before I had language like Work Recovery.   Looking back, I can see the ideas that were quietly shaping everything I believe today.   This episode explores: why being told "it's just stress" can disconnect us from ourselves the relationship between chronic stress, trauma, and physical health learning to trust your body again intuition versus authority wh...

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 leav...

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 conve...

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...

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...

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 dissatisf...

Work Isn't Working, Now What? Part 4: Regulate 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 nervo...

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...

How Work Is Quietly Harming You — Physically, Mentally & Emotionally 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 relationship...

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 o...

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 h...

Episode 125: C'est la Vie – A Spring Restart Spring isn't just a season change—it's an invitation. Q1 has been rough for many of us. Work let us down. The world felt heavy. We carried burdens that weren't ours to carry. But what if you could give yourself permission to let it all go and start fresh? This episode reframes "c'est la vie"—not as resignation, but as permission. Bree explores why sprin...