Risk & Business Magazine Nesbit Agencies Risk & Business Magazine Fall 2017 | Page 10

A WORKAHOLIC’S LESSON
I
guess you could say from the
outside looking in, I had it all.
The career, the house, a loving
husband, beautiful and healthy
kids, the M Sport BMW, the
spa membership, and the audience
(including you) that gave me affirmation
of my “perfect” and envious lifestyle on
a daily basis.
The problem was that it was all a
facade. I was actually in a deep, dark
depression that was progressively
getting worse, and I didn’t know it until
I was committed to a mental hospital on
December 14, 2016.
The start of 2016 looked incredibly
promising: I became obsessed with
going on LinkedIn, seeing that I was
in the “Top 1 percent viewed profiles”
(what does that even mean?) and my
posts were receiving hundreds of
thousands of views. The fame of being
recognized as having the “Highest SSI
Score” at LinkedIn’s annual conference
and shooting those infamous free
throws with Shaquille O’Neal took me
far—further than I ever expected. I
capitalized on that fame on a daily basis
to grow my newfound business, Lindsey
Boggs Consulting.
The work poured in. I was on a plane
every week, traveling across the
world to speak on social selling, lead
generation, and how to grow a pipeline.
Occasionally, I was hired for giving
motivational speeches concerning
career growth and how I went from
opera to sales. It was a high. I loved
being on stage and I was in my element.
My Snapchats and Instagram posts
were consistently showing me with
mimosas in first class, Ritz-Carlton
suites, and expensive wine at glamorous
restaurants. What they didn’t show was
me missing my daughter’s birthday,
layovers of doom, an addiction to
sleeping pills (due to time-zone issues),
growing friction with my husband, and
missing every single extracurricular
activity with my daughter and son.
My life was presented to the outside
world like this: bliss.
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But it came with a price.
That summer brought an incredible
opportunity to be a keynote speaker
with leading marketing expert Gary
Vaynerchuk at the Cisco/Avnet
conference in San Francisco. That
same week, my husband and I were to
celebrate nine years of marriage. So
I brought him to the conference and
we were put up at the Ritz-Carlton
for the three-day conference and
then left for Carmel, CA. Since I felt
I had to capitalize on the recent Gary
Vaynerchuk encounter (real-time,
folks), I ended up working on my entire
anniversary trip. Friction escalated
greatly and to this day, I cannot look
at the fake smiling photos we took in
Carmel.
Then, on Tuesday, September 27,
2016, my life changed forever. I was in
Dallas at a trade show and I got a call
saying my sister Melissa had been taken
to the hospital for a suspected brain
aneurysm. I took a 5 a.m. flight the next
day to Washington, DC, and was told
upon arrival that there was a 90 percent
chance she would die. Ninety percent
chance. How could this be? I just talked
to her earlier that day.
It took me three attempts to even enter
her hospital room. All of the machines,
wires, tubes—things I want to erase
from my memory—scared me to my
core. Once I was able to walk in the
room, I sat with my parents and Melissa
for the next three days and played her
favorite music—Pink Floyd—while
we waited for her to be matched up to
people for organ donation. She was a
nurse and it was her dying wish to help
others, so we helped her fulfill her wish.
On October 1 at noon, my sister
Melissa saved eight people’s lives by
donating her organs.
From there, I traveled even more
frequently, and from mid-August to
late September, I was gone every single
week. I hardly knew what my children
were working on in school, my husband
and I grew further and further apart,
and I was only home long enough to do
my laundry on the weekends and then
head back to the airport early Monday
morning. I didn’t even make an effort
to be present when I was home because
it became too exhausting to try. My
photos that I put out there were sure
fun to look at, though—always had
a smile and a witty statement on my
Snapchats.
What I realized (and it was probably the
most important lesson I learned that
year) during those days of sitting with
my brain-dead sister that surgeons and
doctors go home every day and think about
the patients that they lost—people that
died in their care. In my world, I was
obsessing over losing a software contract
or a speaking gig. It put everything into
perspective for me.
Life spiraled downhill quickly from
that point. Planning a funeral for my
one and only sibling was something
I never expected I would have to do
at this point in my life—she was only
38. On top of all of that, I had just
started a new and exciting software
sales job at Medallia, and me, the Type
A overachiever, expected to achieve
top-notch performance and to win right
out of the gate. I wasn’t functioning at
full capacity, not even close. I was still
traveling a ton, and I missed even more
special events at home and became a
stranger to my children. My son would
cry when I tried to read to him or put
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