Meet and chat with Richella Boggan

Changing the conversation for business people everywhere

You’ve been making waves within the business landscape lately. What’s your back story?

I’d say my story is a familiar one to many people. I was raised as a ‘doer’ and climbed to being a C-staff executive within Global FMCG companies over a 25-year career. I had the cars, house, money, titles and holidays to Dubai. I was focused and relentlessly target driven and hugely successful at putting together winning business strategies. I had a strong respected voice in the company and I thought that that was what success was supposed to look like and, from the outside in, it certainly seemed that way. The reality was quite different. I had a niggling feeling deep in my gut that, at the time I could only articulate as: “Something’s not quite right...” I had been so busy meeting business objectives that I had narrowed my perspective and created a tiny fishbowl, which had become my life.

So, in true high achiever fashion, I decided it was time to wake up, refocus and create a new agenda, one where I could create a wider map for my life that included my wellbeing, as well as the high-performance results I had built a reputation for. I set about truly understanding what I wanted and then made a plan to skill up on the things that would help me create it. Here we are, years later, having this conversation!

Where did your wakeup call come from?

I remember speaking to a mentor of mine, really successful guy with a fantastic reputation within his industry and as our conversation unfolded,

I was telling him that despite my achievements, I still had this void of unfulfillment. To this day, I remember how he looked at me, took a noticeable breath and asked: “Why are you on the run all the time? Is there somebody chasing you? What do you want?”

That moment still stands out to me as clear as day because up until that conversation, I didn’t realise I was being driven by goals, targets, people and business needs. None of which, I had chosen and none of which had my personal wellbeing in mind. I was a cog in the machine and yet had still managed to ‘succeed’… to a degree.

The difference I learned, was that the void I felt was a need for a more internal agenda. I wanted to discover what I could do to actualise the other potentials I had as a human being, not just shift a few extra units of product.

A lot of leaders talk about those kinds of wake-up moments. What did you do to transform your perspective?

Tons! It was a real process of unlearning and re-education for sure. Some of the things I skilled up on really changed how I was driving myself to succeed. The biggest and most fundamental thing I learned was really how backwards we are in terms of resourcing our energy as human beings to be successful and not get burnout. We look outward for things to do and achieve and have. Really, that way of driving success has a finite lifespan. It plays havoc with our nervous system and we are letting ourselves be hijacked by our limbic system. Where we are most effective, is when we assess our executive centre and allow our thinking to dictate our feelings, and not our feelings to dictate our thinking. When you look into the neuroscience and biochemistry of peak performers you realise that success is something they create an ecosystem for. It’s not just a technique or a trend, it’s an environment built up of many factors that all feed into the performer’s agenda. That’s what I do now. I coach and mentor peak performers and leaders to create and sustain an ecosystem that supports their vision and their agenda.

What advice would you give to executives and leaders reading this?

We’re already data rich, so I don’t think executives and leaders need more data or knowing to be honest. I’m more interested in asking the right questions that will help them activate the knowledge, data and resources already available to them. Other than that, it’s really about working together to creating an ecosystem that enables long term success and that’s as unique to each person as a fingerprint or retinal scan.