Inspired Leadership Group starts with a simple premise: to inspire leaders to take care of themselves so they can better take care of their teams. With retreats across the United States—Florida, California, Texas and Colorado among a growing list—and across the globe in Mexico and Italy, Inspired Leadership Group focuses on an integrated approach to well-being, guided by founder and executive coach Linda Mullins.
“By bringing in psychologists and naturopathic doctors in addition to the fitness, stretching and meditative elements, we’re promoting lifestyle habits instead of just medicating one specific part of the whole,” Mullins says, “It’s a holistic approach of mind, body, spirit and emotion, to really dig at the roots to achieve overall wellness for the individual. Wellness is the lifestyle we all need; there’s no bias, no boundaries to define who can suffer from burnout, from the CEO of a household to the CEO of a Fortune 500 company.”
Most recently, Inspired Leadership Group’s traveling concierge of experts were at the Sand Pearl Hotel in Clearwater in January for an immersive retreat, attracting leaders and executives from across the U.S.
Mullins has more than 15 years of personal and professional experience in the field and she’s committed to the continued need for wellness.
“Before the pandemic, the wellness travel space was the largest growth segment of the travel industry and it’s beginning to skyrocket again,” she says. “Everybody is exposed to the same kind of stressors and, especially now, we’re all on the same playing field, the working from home, the kids, the this, the that of the pandemic, plus the fear. Fear, to me, is another pandemic and that creates an abundance of stress. We’re here to help our clients learn to mitigate stress through lifestyle changes. If we can get the leaders well to avoid burnout, then they can build themselves up to spread wellness to their teams.”
Mullins knows firsthand about the dangers of burnout. Flying high in corporate life with a lucrative career in the automotive industry involving extensive travel and long hours, Mullins experienced her first burnout in 2007. After gaining nearly 100 pounds in one year, Mullins walked away, determined to take time out for herself. She enrolled in a Los Angeles “boot camp” for physical fitness, working out six hours every day for six weeks.
“I was fortunate to have a good experience in L.A., but I realized from the start that there were critical pieces missing, that the fitness piece was not addressing the whole. I began transforming physically but I was missing the mental wellness piece to truly change my mindset,” she says.
The experience inspired Mullins to share her awareness of the importance of integrated wellness immediately, even in her own process of healing. She came home to St. Petersburg from L.A. and began formulating her business plan for her first start-up, Core Fitness Solution, based in Madeira Beach.
Emphasizing all aspects of wellness, the company filled an important need immediately but the success of the company eventually landed Mullins right back into burnout mode.
“I was overseeing a team of 13, all sorts of practitioners and personal trainers and it got incredibly stressful. We started in a recession and lived through the Gulf [of Mexico oil] spill havoc that hit Florida tourism and we were thriving, but the company was no longer serving me,” Mullins says. “I was not the wellness person that I had been when I started Core.”
Mullins sold the company in 2014 and shifted again back to corporate, hopeful that her experiences in the wellness field would allow her to better manage the stress of corporate life. Instead, she found herself surrounded by an increased need for wellness, especially at the executive level. Inspired Leadership Group and its subsidiary, Luxury Executive Wellness, was born.
Approaching its four-year anniversary, the success of Inspired Leadership Group has allowed Mullins to launch a new initiative in 2022—paying it forward by providing opportunities for our first responders to also benefit from an immersive retreat.
“I come from a military family. My father raised me with four brothers, and three of my brothers went into the military so I’m just a big military fan. And we’re all aware of the special difficulties facing veterans,” she says. “There’s simply unconscionable numbers for veterans, 22 suicides a day and so many suffering PTSD, and other trauma, and there’s just not enough help with the lingering stigmas with machismo and bravado that surrounds our first responders.”
Inspired Leadership Group is pairing with Help22, a nonprofit organization focused on suicide prevention for veterans, founded by right-wing media personality and former psychologist Keith Ablow last year. For everyone who buys a retreat in 2022, Inspired Leadership Group will contribute up to a $500 match when a client company or individual sponsors a soldier or veteran for their military-specific retreats.
From both personal and professional experience, Mullins believes in the power of an immersive experience for everyone, to propel clients on a new pathway of wellness back home.
“I’m a fan of retreats and there’s a lot out there. But what sets us apart is our attention to the individual. In addition to our all-inclusive package, every client receives two one-hour sessions apiece with our range of specialists, to ensure a personalized approach to wellness. At the end of the day, it is about the individual healing and working it out from the inside out,” Mullins says.♦
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