163. Steve Chua: How Your Identity Is Either Healing Or Destroying Your Health
5/12/20261 hr
Most high performing executives will spend thousands optimizing their glucose levels, their sleep, and their body composition without ever stopping to ask why none of it makes them feel any better. The answer almost never lives in their labs and it almost never lives in their training program. It lives in the identity they built their entire career on top of, and the silent narrative driving every decision they make, that tells them their worth is only as good as their last result.
In this episode of Extend, I sat down with Steve Chua to explore the real root cause of executive burnout and why fixing your physiology without addressing your identity is like putting the right fuel into the wrong engine. Walk away from this conversation with a completely different understanding of what is actually driving your performance, your exhaustion, and what it is going to take to finally lead from a place of genuine strength instead of fear.
Steve Chua is an executive life and leadership coach with over 30 years of experience working with international leaders and organizations, and the founder of Steve Chua International and InsightOut, a coaching and consulting firm that empowers leaders to grow from the inside out. He operates from the conviction that healthy leaders create healthy companies, and his unique ability to help individuals resolve past conflicts, gain clarity in the present, and align their purpose and vision for the future, has made him one of the most sought after leadership coaches in the world.
Check out Dr. Shah's Sleep Optimization Workbook here: https://www.drshah.com/sleep
What's Discussed:
- (3:24) Steve's personal story of comparing himself to his brothers, failing out of Oxford, and standing on the ledge of a building at his lowest point.
- (5:57) The difference between living for value and living from value and why most executives are running on the wrong fuel.
- (7:46) The three levels of identity work that create lasting change: self awareness, self management, and self leadership.
- (11:34) Why picking up your phone first thing in the morning is the equivalent of eating a sugary breakfast for your brain.
- (21:06) Why high achieving executives become the bottleneck of their own companies and what that reveals about their identity.
- (37:49) The three things people lose when they burn out and why burnout is almost never just about working too hard.
- (44:10) Why your 40s and 50s are not a midlife crisis but a shift from success to significance.
- (51:30) The four life questions that when answered change everything about how you lead and how you live.
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Learn more about Dr. Darshan Shah:
Website: drshah.com
Clinic: next-health.com
Instagram: darshanshahmd
Learn more about Steve Chua:
Website: stevechuaintl.com
InsightOut: insightoutcorp.com
Transformational Leadership Podcast: insightoutcorp.com/podcast
Instagram: @stevechuaintl/
Facebook: steve.chua.net
Clips
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsDarshan Shah· Host0:00
[gentle music] Welcome to Extend, with me, Dr. Darshan Shah, a podcast dedicated to cutting-edge science, research, tools, and protocols designed to help you extend your health span. Having become one of the youngest doctors in the country at the age of 21, and trained and board-certified at the Mayo Clinic, I've accumulated three decades of practice as a board-certified surgeon and longevity expert. Over that time, I've discovered that a mere 20% of health knowledge yields 80% of the results when it comes to your health span. We are living in a new era where we are creating a new healthcare system no longer focused on disease management, but achieving optimal health and vitality. Join me as I interview world-renowned experts, offering you a step-by-step guide to proactively avoid disease and, most importantly, extend your health span. There's a version of burnout that no biohack can fix. It's when your labs look fine, your sleep score is decent, and your routine is dialed in, but still something is fundamentally off. Today, I'm joined with executive coach Steve Chua. He's spent 30 years working with leaders across the world, and he finds over and over again the same thing underneath what's going on with these leaders' fatigue. It's the striving and the quiet sense of falling short. People who have built high-performing lives around their role and their results and expectations often suffer from a long-term fatigue and emotional exhaustion.