Q&A with Dr. Daryl Appleton

Photograph by Josh Adam

For International Women’s Month, we reached out to Dr. Daryl Appleton, an award-winning executive coach and private advisor for Fortune 500 executives, Ivy League surgical programs, global brands, thought leaders and elite athletes, who live in Saunderstown. Appleton launched the wellness podcast Feelings & Other F Words, which has been featured on “Today” and in Cosmopolitan and Elle, and was recently named a Top 10 Wellness Podcast by Vogue magazine. According to its tagline, the podcast is “here to set one thing straight, you cannot hack, girlboss, diet or work-life balance your way into a more successful life. Feelings & Other F Words is a podcast determined to make sense of why we are the way we are and just what the F to do about it.” Appleton pulls from scientific studies, neuropsych research, business journals and common sense from twenty years in the fields of psychology, high-performance coaching and stress and success research to cut through Instagrammable wellness and shed light on what is fact versus feeling.

Let’s start with your origin story of how you got into career coaching. How did you first get into it, and what do you love about it?

It was always destined to happen. This sounds crazy, but I love serial killers. I love learning about why people do what they do. My father was also a musician and worked with famous people who were very big in their careers, who sometimes failed under pressure or rose under pressure. So that was really interesting to me. And I was a college athlete. I played basketball in college [at Stonehill College]. So that idea of, ‘How do you get somebody or a team in a direction to be not just good, but great?’ Those things were always in the background, running in my life, so mental health just seemed like the obvious step. I remember being in college and wanting to do what I do now. And everyone was like, ‘You should really think about being a counselor.’ A few people in my life told me not to do it, and that just made me want to do it more. It was always destined to happen, to be working with people. If you look in my eighth grade yearbook, it said that I wanted to be a psychologist. So as time went on, I started in mental health. I started my career at Brown, working on a study looking at risky behaviors with sex and drinking and drugs. We would recruit people who were there in the ER. And it was fascinating to me.

All the fun stuff. Sounds just like rock and roll. 

[Laughs] So I always knew I wanted to open up a private practice, which I did, and I realized that the majority of people I was working with were high performers. It wasn’t necessarily because something was wrong. It was because we, as a society, valued productivity over sustainability. I started to home in on that. More and more people came to me with what we call, in the mental health world, adjustment disorders, but there wasn’t an actual diagnosis. They were just feeling crushed under the weight. A lot of them were women. At the time, I wasn’t yet a mother, and I wasn’t juggling all the things that I have in my life. So I pivoted. I was teaching at Johnson & Wales at the time as an adjunct, and I really loved that. So the idea of working in a contractual setting was appealing to me. I really enjoyed the teaching aspect and putting things into plain language, taking all the research, all the data — I’m a huge nerd — and giving it to people succinctly, so they can digest it.

That’s what I love about your podcast, too. It dials it down.

Thank you. We have so much information thrown at us, and a lot of times, it’s, ‘Now what do I do with this? How do I understand this? And then, what are the action steps?’ And I’ve always been very good at taking in a lot of information and being able to distill it. Insurance companies weren’t going to pay me to do that, so I leaned full force into coaching. I have a lot of friends who, luckily, are in executive positions. As I got older, I had a ton of friends who were professional athletes. So I got to work with the Knicks and the Nets and players with really cool owners in the coaching capacity on things in their life. So it was very male dominated at first, and then I saw how much women needed the help and support. Especially women in high performance positions who don’t want to ask for help. I think society has said that this makes us feel weaker, right?

It’s the mentality that we can handle it all. I’ve got this, right? That’s the mantra we must constantly combat.

I don’t think that we can have it all in the traditional sense, but I think we can have a piece of everything. I think that there is a way to orchestrate life where you align it, rather than try to do it all or handle it all or hold it all. I’m very big on the idea of alignment.

And what is alignment? Can you explain what that means for me?

The way that I explain it to my clients, is having a life you don’t want to run away from. And this idea that your choices are going in a direction where you can say yes to them every time. So sometimes it’s easier to feel what’s out of alignment. We start with things like, ‘What don’t you want?’ And sometimes, especially for women, that’s easier, because it’s a visceral feeling, or it’s very clear. And then we work on, ‘What is your definition of success?’ And that’s something I do with every client — whether it’s a board room full of people trying to work as a team, one on one, or an organization like Brown — asking, ‘What is your definition of success?’ And then they say things like strategy, revenue, happiness. And I say, ‘What does that mean?’ And we pare it down to a few different dimensions of what success looks like, professionally, personally, familially. What common thread is there? What words show up over and over, and now we’re talking about a value system. When you choose your values over and over, you’re going to get yourself more in alignment than choosing things directly opposed to your values.

Or choosing values to be liked by someone else, right? Sometimes we do things just to appease others. 

100 percent. We as women don’t have that as part of our narrative growing up, unless we are deliberately taught it by our family, by mentors, by people in our lives. The most inspiring work that I do is helping people find alignment by asking good questions and letting people know that the choices you make impact your life. But you are in control of that. You get to say no to things that don’t matter to you, and that’s okay.

So how do you say no? How do you say it without hurting someone’s feelings or offending someone?

Sometimes that’s really difficult. As women, we’re conditioned to hold so much, but part of being able to do well for other people is being able to mitigate unproductive things in your life. I think of us as a phone. My phone does all this amazing stuff, but if its battery is drained, it doesn’t work at all. It’s a brick. And sometimes, I like to say that selfish isn’t a bad word. People sometimes misunderstand and they get all riled up. But there’s a difference between selfish and self-centered. You’re allowed to be selfish. You are allowed to plug yourself in, and people have to come to you just like you would have to go to your cell phone when it is recharging. You’re allowed to have that. So sometimes you think everybody should center around you and what you want, but you are allowed to take that space for yourself.

I think that’s so important to be able to charge your batteries so you can be better for yourself and everyone else in the long run. So what made you want to start a podcast — Feelings & Other F Words — after all the career coaching you were doing?

It was a millennial urge, geriatric millennial, if you will. It was right after I had the girls. [Appleton is the mother of four-year-old twin girls.] They were about eighteen months old, maybe younger. We had just moved into our new house, and I had this overwhelming feeling of ‘I don’t know who I am.’ I am an external processor, so I started the podcast to externally process and start to talk about why we are the way we are and what to do about it. And I thought if I can talk out loud to myself, maybe somebody else might want to hear this as well.

Each episode caters to someone else who might need important information on how to handle something or pro tips. It’s very well rounded. So who is your ideal listener?

I think it’s high performers. I mostly speak by default to women, but it’s men, too. They want to do well. They want to learn, but they want to work smarter and not harder. With my brand, I believe in controlled chaos. I believe in working smarter and not harder. I believe that sometimes doing more is not the answer. You need to do less better. 

Quality over quantity. That’s that old adage that we were always taught.

I think that the people that I want to reach are people who are looking for a way to optimize their lives that doesn’t crush them in the process.

Do you have some favorite topics that you’ve covered? I know I asked you for your top three podcasts before, but if you want to touch on a few favorite topics.

There have been some really cool guests. From the science side, I enjoyed learning about families. That was very eye-opening for me because of some of the stuff that I’ve gone through with my in-laws. So many people go through the blending of families, whether you’re newly married or now you have kids [“F is for Fractured”]. I really like the one I did on self-awareness and the masks that we wear [“F is for Forgery”]. And I just did a new one about friction and the January tax [“F is for Friction”], and how sometimes, neuropsychologically, it’s so difficult to get and stay motivated.

I saw you post about that: why it’s so hard to kickstart the New Year.

Yeah, it’s lawlessness, and your brain actually doesn’t do well with that. And there’s so much dopamine with the holidays. We’re actually running at a deficit, so we get bored more quickly. I love neuropsychology. I love understanding that it makes so much sense. So whenever I find a piece of research that I find really interesting, I try to create an episode.

You back it up with a lot of research. It must take you a long time to come up with each topic. I don’t know if you script it in the beginning, but it doesn’t sound like it, because you’re so conversational.

I save things as I go along. I pull them up and gather two or three pieces of research that are saying similar things. I think I might do one on everything that’s happening with the “toxic mom group” phenomenon with Ashley Tisdale.

I know I’ve seen a lot of press about toxic mom groups. And I don’t know why I’m interested in it, because I don’t have that problem with other moms, but maybe because it relates to part of our lives.

There’s some cool research. It’s almost from an evolutionary psychology perspective, groupthink, and how we need community, but at some point, that community can actually impact our mental health or how we feel about ourselves. It’s deeply rooted in an evolutionary sense that you are more likely to die if you’re a lone wolf than you are with a pack. So we tend to acquiesce and assimilate, and that’s not always a good thing, and how to recognize it. I am working on it now.

I will be patiently waiting for that. So your focus is on high-achieving women (and men!), but how do you help your clients navigate the burnout and the feeling like they are navigating a stressful life and trying to do it all?

It comes down to the fact that burnout is a choice. That’s a very controversial statement, but at the end of the day, your choices matter. I’m a Jersey person, and I’m very direct, like you have a choice here. You can say yes to this extra task, but then you can’t complain to me that you said you wanted more time. We can figure out a way to talk to your boss about what you need and what you want, and to set a boundary where you’re still leaning into work, but at the same time, know that every yes means a no somewhere else, right? And that dichotomy exists in every choice that we make, and there is opportunity loss that comes with a yes.

I think about that with every choice I make. 

Is it worth it? So I help people break down micro choices, like we zoom out and look macro. What do you want? What do you need? What does that look like? And then we zoom in on the micro. What does that look like? What do you need in the next twenty-four hours? What about in the next week? And really helping people empower themselves. It’s hard to do it yourself. I can’t even do it myself all the time. I need my own mentors and coaches to see me through the forest. But I help them with the burnout. It is based on choices. You do have power and control, even though it feels like you don’t, and you’re allowed to ask for help. That’s very simplistic, but at the end of the day, it comes down to personal choices. drdarylappleton.com