Member since July 2018
Leadership Capacity & Resilience Strategist • Speaker • Creator of Dynamic Resilience™ • Helping Leaders Thrive Without Burning Out
Sophia Asghar is a leadership capacity and resilience strategist, keynote speaker, and founder of True Measure®. She is the creator of the Dynamic Resilience framework, working with leaders and organizations to build the capacity to thrive in the face of chaos without burning out.
With a Bachelor of Science in Physics from The Ohio State University and more than twenty years of experience in leadership, business, and human performance, Sophia brings a rare blend of scientific thinking and practical leadership to today's workplace challenges.
After experiencing burnout herself while running the wellness business she had built over a decade, Sophia began questioning why so many high performers struggle to sustain their success. She realized the problem isn't simply stress. We are asking leaders to keep carrying more in a world of increasing speed, complexity, information, and expectations, without fundamentally changing how they lead. Her work now challenges the assumption that greater capacity comes from greater endurance, and explores what becomes possible when leaders get more intentional about what they choose to carry.
Today, Sophia's work explores a different approach to leadership and sustainable performance through Dynamic Resilience™ and practices like JOBO™, The Joy of Bowing Out™. Through research, storytelling, humor, and practical tools, she helps leaders build the capacity to navigate chaos while making more intentional choices about where their finite energy and attention can create the greatest return.
I love that moment when someone in the audience gets this look: eyes get big, then comes the head nod, the lean back and a huge exhale. It’s the “ohhhh…well, crap….heck yeah” realization that something they’ve been doing or thinking for years might actually be tripping them up, and now they have permission to blow it up.
I’m all about challenging the assumptions that keep smart, capable people exhausted, especially the idea that success means carrying more, pushing harder and becoming endlessly more efficient at doing things they probably aren’t worth doing in the first place. Sometimes the most productive thing you can do is bow out.
One of my favorites is about a ritual I had with my mom growing up: going to the library, where she taught me the completely reasonable practice of checking out as many books as I could physically carry.
Arms full. Books stacked to my chin. Barely able to see where I was going.
Which, it turns out, is also a pretty accurate model for how a lot of high achievers approach life and leadership.
We keep asking, “Can I carry one more thing?” instead of asking the much more useful question: “Why am I carrying all of this?”
It gets laughs because most of us recognize ourselves immediately. And then I get to introduce one of my favorite ideas: great leadership isn’t measured by how much you can carry. It’s measured by what you choose to carry.
I got into this work the hard way.
I spent years helping other people get healthier while becoming increasingly terrible at taking care of the person running the wellness business. That would be me.
In 2012, after a decade of building that business, burnout caught up with me and landed me in the hospital. Nothing says “wellness expert” quite like that.
But it also made me start asking better questions.
My background in physics had taught me to look at systems and relationships, the fundamentals of how things work. My corporate career taught me how organizations really operate beyond the mission, vision and values. Burnout gave me a front-row seat to what happens when demand keeps exceeding human capacity.
Eventually I realized we’ve been trying to solve a modern capacity problem with an old strategy: work harder, push through, carry more.
I figured we needed a better strategy. Dynamic Resilience™ grew out of that pursuit, and so did JOBO™, The Joy of Bowing Out™: getting much more intentional about what deserves our finite energy and attention, and what absolutely does not.
One of my favorites is about a ritual I had with my mom growing up: going to the library, where she taught me the completely reasonable practice of checking out as many books as I could physically carry.
Arms full. Books stacked to my chin. Barely able to see where I was going.
Which, it turns out, is also a pretty accurate model for how a lot of high achievers approach life and leadership.
We keep asking, “Can I carry one more thing?” instead of asking the much more useful question: “Why am I carrying all of this?”
It gets laughs because most of us recognize ourselves immediately. And then I get to introduce one of my favorite ideas: great leadership isn’t measured by how much you can carry. It’s measured by what you choose to carry.
I got into this work the hard way.
I spent years helping other people get healthier while becoming increasingly terrible at taking care of the person running the wellness business. That would be me.
In 2012, after a decade of building that business, burnout caught up with me and landed me in the hospital. Nothing says “wellness expert” quite like that.
But it also made me start asking better questions.
My background in physics had taught me to look at systems and relationships, the fundamentals of how things work. My corporate career taught me how organizations really operate beyond the mission, vision and values. Burnout gave me a front-row seat to what happens when demand keeps exceeding human capacity.
Eventually I realized we’ve been trying to solve a modern capacity problem with an old strategy: work harder, push through, carry more.
I figured we needed a better strategy. Dynamic Resilience™ grew out of that pursuit, and so did JOBO™, The Joy of Bowing Out™: getting much more intentional about what deserves our finite energy and attention, and what absolutely does not.
