Episode Overview
Speed is the currency of the Chief of Staff role, but Carrie McMahon argues the way to sustain it is to slow down. A two-time Chief of Staff at one of the fastest-growing AI companies in San Francisco, she treats energy regulation as a performance strategy, not a wellness perk, and shows why a depleted operator makes worse decisions right when the team needs them most.

About Carrie McMahon
Carrie came up through go-to-market, not operations. She started in sales at Zendesk, then built the sales-development and product-led-growth functions at Coda (now Superhuman), ran enablement at Benevity, and served as Chief of Staff and head of RevOps at Productboard. She's now Chief of Staff at Horizon3.ai. The through line is cross-functional building in ambiguity, which is also what led her to teach breath work, yoga, and somatics to other strategic operators on the side.

Key Takeaways

• Energy management is four things, not one: your daily rhythm, matching tasks to your natural energy, building in micropauses, and how you wind down at night. Most burnout hides as a "leak" in one of them.

• The Chief of Staff holds the container for the exec team. If you're spiraling, there's nowhere for everyone else to land.

• When you're depleted, your prefrontal cortex stops optimizing. You get reactive and make fast calls without the analysis to back them.

• "How are you feeling?" is a better opener for an exec 1:1 than "How's your week?" It reads state and lets you tailor the next 30 minutes.

• Yoga isn't shapes on a mat. The goal is quieting the mental noise that keeps your nervous system in low-grade fight-or-flight, which is exactly the noise operators live in.

• Start small and stay consistent: two breath-work techniques mid-day for four weeks, box breathing (inhale 4, hold 4, exhale 4, hold 4) at your desk. It's a practice, not a one-time fix.

Explore more of Carrie's Somatic Coaching and Corporate programs on her website here: https://www.groundandregulate.com/