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Heather Travine
The more people you serve, the larger your team gets, the more you will have to expand your capacity for discomfort and emotional things. Because in order to do the quantum leap growth that we want to do, I have to make big moves. That means I have to expand my capacity to serve more people, to lead more team members, to get more feedback on things. A courageous CEO is able to really expand their ability to manage those emotions. Client complaints, employees quitting ad campaigns that stop working. These things a few years ago had me in emotional turmoil. But now these things I know they're just a part of the choice of going after big goals. Being in turmoil over those things is optional. The faster you will make decisions and you will make moves and you will move forward on things that will have positive outcomes as well.
Are you growing a business or creating the most sought after med Spa in your market? Welcome to the MedSpa CEO podcast where growth means better results, bigger profits and a schedule that actually gives you your life back. I'm Heather, strategist to the industry's most profitable aesthetic practices. From solo injectors to multi seven figure teams, I'm here to help visionary leaders like you package your brilliance, scale with clarity and build a business that feels as beautiful to run as the results.
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Well, hello my beautiful friend. Welcome back to another episode of the podcast. Today kicks off a special two part series where I am sharing one of my most popular trainings from inside the Med Spa advantage called the Courageous CEO. This episode isn't as much about strategy or systems. It's about the emotional capacity it takes to build and scale a business that lasts. Because what actually separates those of you who hit half a million in a year from those who go on to build multimillion dollar companies isn't talent or tactics. It's your ability to manage your emotions, take bigger swings and stay grounded. Through the highs and lows of leadership. We're diving into what I call the invisible work. The mindset, self leadership and emotional strength that allow you to keep going. Most people would quit if you've ever felt like you're doing all the right things but still getting stuck. This episode is going to hit home and if you've been thinking about joining us inside of the Med Spa advantage, now is the perfect time. We just released a completely free training where I walk you through the three growth levers we use to help our clients double their revenue without adding more chaos. You can snag that free training and learn more about MSA by clicking the link in the show Notes. Right now is an epic time to join because in December we're hosting our annual planning meeting where we help our clients vision, cast and map out their entire 2026 like rockstars and then support them in actually implementing it. So if you've been wanting to work with me in a smaller high touch setting and you want your team supported too, the medspa advantage is for you. Let's dive in.
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I want to talk about this idea of the courageous CEO and there's been a number of things that have sort of an impetus for the inspiration for this particular topic. It's something that I am definitely working on in my own coaching work and have been for a long time. But really this last year especially, I've been diving into it and I was recently listening to a podcast interview with Gary V. Gary Vaynerchuk and he was asked the question, what do you think is the difference between the $700,000 a year shop owner and the business owners who scale to ten plus million hundreds of millions of dollars. And I thought his answer was really interesting. He said risk tolerance. He didn't say talent. He didn't say luck, although there's always an element of luck in things. He didn't say hustle, which is kind of what I expected him to say. But how many examples do we know of people who hustle? A lot. And, you know, you may even have examples in your own families of people, you know in your personal network who were the hardest workers that you could possibly know. But they're just playing. They're hustling inside of a game that is just too small to produce really epic results. And he goes on to kind of give some context and says that he has invested in more companies that have gone bankrupt than in companies that have actually been hits or winners, if you will. And he says that he invested $200,000 into Facebook. Like in 2008, he had $236,000 in his savings and he took 200,000 of it invested into Facebook. And his attitude about it was that he's going to learn so much regardless of whether or not that investment hits. Now, we all know the spoiler alert to that story. That investment really hit for him. But I thought it was interesting that him and these two gentlemen that are having this discussion. And it's basically the idea that the people that are having the huge results are deciding to play on a bigger stage. They are deciding to make big moves. And so today's topic, I want to unpack how to become a courageous CEO. Because Gary's example of risk tolerance and really taking big risks can only be come to fruition for you if you have the courage to go out and create big things. And so courageous CEO you could call it mature CEO is one of the coaches I work with calls it being a mature CEO is kind of her take on it. Courage doesn't feel good when you are experiencing. Sounds so lovely. And if you've been watching any of the trainings in msa, you know this is not the first time that you've heard me talk on this topic because many of you have been told when I look at somebody like Gary Vee, just as an outsider, I'm like, I would describe him as confident. And I had been told all my life, like, you have to be confident, you have to be confident. And I was like, I keep waiting for this confidence to just be granted to me. And as you know, you actually don't need confidence. You just need courage. And if you haven't had a chance to watch it yet. I definitely recommend going back and watching Courage over confidence, the lesson on courage over confidence as well. So I want to talk today, and we're going to kick it off with talking about five traits of courageous CEOs, what they have. And then I want you to kind of notice where you may not be being the courageous CEO, because if you become a truly courageous CEO and honestly, a courageous leader of your life, there's nothing you can't create because you will keep taking the massive action necessary to make the big moves that you need to make in order to get big results. When I look at all the successful coaches I have worked with, all the clients I have coached hundreds and hundreds of clients at this point, and even my own success, if I were to pinpoint one characteristic, it would be their ability to keep taking action and betting on themselves, despite their emotions and despite the circumstances that happen in the world, or despite even the circumstances or results that happen from them taking that action. So let's dive into the traits of a courageous CEO. I'm going to give you some pragmatic frameworks to walk away with today, and I want you to really start noticing this because this is trait number one. The first trait that a courageous CEO has is their awareness that they're stinking impacts everything. Their thinking impacts everything. Their thinking impacts their ability to, like, how they show up to implement work. It affects their ability to be able to make big moves. It affects your ability to be able to recover from setbacks, which we're going to talk about here as well. It is really the key to being able to show up and to create big results. Many of you have heard these stories before, because when I discovered this in my own work, it has changed everything for me. And I discovered this later in life. And I had done, like, a lot of personal development therapy, other things throughout my life. I mean, I had. I was in therapy as a child for anxiety as well. And I just, you know, I really believed. I believed there was a certain amount of things that were within my control and that many of the things happening were just outside of my control. And, you know, there's like, kind of a spectrum. Like, none of us are perfect at all, really. Actually having 100% awareness on how our thinking is impacting everything that we're showing up to. But there's a spectrum on this. Some of you are probably over here, closer to, like, having a lot of awareness on this, and then some of you are still over here. And one of the questions that can be helpful is If I were to ask, or it's a. As a coach, I can tell kind of where people fall on this spectrum when I ask a few questions, if I ask a few questions about someone's business and why things are the way they are. So why do you think your revenue is this? Or why do you think this isn't working? And if they give me a lot of story about circumstances that are outside of their control, oh, the economy's bad, oh, a new competitor opened up across the street, I can tell that they're over here more. Because the more you attribute your thinking and your action and behavior to the results you're creating, the more you will actually be able to control the results that you create. Now, of course, there are outside circumstances that are affecting everything all the time. Right. One of the examples I think of is that I give all the time is. And what really made me dive into this work and integrate this work with the marketing and the sales and the menu strategy is covid19 and how I had 150 something aesthetic clinics that I was working with in a social media membership and literally everybody's doors were closed. We had US and Canada based businesses we were working with and the circumstance was our doors are closed. Okay. Now when I look at the clients I worked with that we were able to help coach through some of the thinking that they had, right? So some of our clients, this is the end. This is we're doomed. And then some of our clients that really dove into coaching with us, we were able to shift that thinking and to have different thinking about how this is an opportunity for me to like really double down on my marketing. This is an opportunity for us to really figure out our skincare styles. Really figure out, could we do sell these things? Could we do sell these things? You know what, we're going to be close for a month. We're going to double down on our marketing and be able to hit the door running when our doors open again. And the clients that I had that were able to manage their thinking were able to have exponential growth even during COVID 19 or directly after when their doors were able to open again because they had awareness that their thinking was impacting whether or not they were going to show up and take the action items necessary to actually lead their business to success despite the fact that COVID 19 had closed their doors. The time in my life that I've shared with many of you before that this had the biggest impact on me is when I had the diagnosis of my hereditary cancer syndrome. So have a Lot of history of cancer in my family. Both of my parents had cancer young. My mom was in her 30s, my dad was in his 40s. And so my primary care doctor recommended that I got genetic testing. And so I went and got genetic testing done. And long story short, I was diagnosed with a hereditary cancer syndrome, genetic mutation called SDHB type 1. And this predisposes me to endocrine tumors. I was 40 at the time, and the genetic counselor who was giving me this news with my husband said to me that the average age that these two tumors present is 30. And I was 40 at the time. When I found out, and each of my daughters has a 50% chance of having this same genetic mutation. I was absolutely devastated. I spent the next two weeks in just total misery and grief, which is I was allowed to do and is fine. You don't want to not have grief when grief is meant to be had, what have you. But there was this point in time where I was like, gosh, my. My life happiness is over. That's really what I believed at the time. I was like, this isn't just impacting me, it's impacting my three daughters. And that is when I found the model and thought work, and I discovered that I could decide to see it differently than how I was seeing it. I couldn't change the fact that I was given this diagnosis, but I could change my thinking about the diagnosis. And I shifted my thinking to be that I am so lucky. I have the most amazing team of doctors at the Mayo Clinic that are watching my care. I'm being screened so heavily, and if I end up having one of these endocrine tumors, it's going to be caught so early that we're going to be able to treat it. So I'm just using this as an example to say I switched my thinking around. Something that I could give you a lot of evidence is something that I could have felt doomed about if I chose to think that way. So the awareness that your thinking is impacting everything is something that a courageous CEO starts to notice about everything. Trait number two is deciding how you want to think and feel about things. The more people you serve, the larger your team gets, the more you will have to expand your capacity for discomfort and emotional things, things that would knock me out emotionally even a few years back, I can now get through in.
A matter of minutes.
And this impacts your ability and my ability to make big moves, because in order to do the quantum leap growth that we're having and that we want to do, I have to make big moves. That means that I have to expand my capacity to serve more people, to lead more team members, to get more feedback on things. So things like, tell me if you can relate to any of these things knocking you out emotionally. A courageous CEO is able to really expand their ability to manage those emotions. And this is what Gary was talking about, like their risk tolerance, which is just all risk tolerance means is that you have the emotional capacity to take bigger risks. So client complaints, employees quitting, ad campaigns that stop working, peers stealing my work. These things a few years ago maybe would have had me in emotional turmoil, but now these things, I know they're just a part of the choice of going after big goals. I'm going to serve more people, I'm going to have more visibility. And with that serving more people, having more team, having more visibility, investing in more things comes more things happening that can affect you emotionally. More undesirable things can happen as you expand the opportunity for the desirable things to happen as well. I no longer have sleepless nights over the things that even a few years ago I would be in turmoil in. I'm curious if any of you can think of things, even right now, that you've experienced in the last week or two, that have you in turmoil, that have you up at night and maybe even jot those things down. I want to offer to you, being in turmoil over those things is optional. And the more that I can help, you all actually have the tools to be a courageous CEO and to decide that you're not going to let those things keep you down, the faster you will make decisions and you will make moves and you will move forward on things that will have positive outcomes as well. Because every action we take in our businesses has the opportunity for positive results and what we might consider undesirable results as well. Regardless, the more you stack up those results, whether they're desirable or undesirable, the more results overall you will have created. The only reason I know so much about what is going to create positive results in my online marketing is because I've taken so much action over the last decade and I have lots of undesirable results in my online marketing as well too. But both stacks of those results have made me a more courageous CEO. So my resilience when my Facebook ad campaign stop working, which they're working right now, but I've historically gone through periods where they stop working or creative fatigue or what have you, or the. The quality of the leads aren't as good, or what have you it's like, of course this is gonna happen. And my ability to lead and to think on my feet and to press forward is so much stronger. That muscle has just been built over the years of actually building that, deciding ahead of time that, of course, you know, the more people you serve, the more opportunity for feedback there is. The more employees you have, the less control you have over how things are done. The more, you know, marketing that you are testing out, especially when you're new to marketing and certain marketing channels, the more opportunity in the beginning, beginning for the results to not be so desirable. And if you have awareness over that, you've decided, okay, this is a new thing and I'm learning how to do this. My expectation is that it's not going to make me a million dollars in the first month because there's a learning curve in all different, you know, I'm learning which offers are going to work, I'm going to learn about what follow up is going to be most effective as well. And I'm learning how to get my organic content, all those things. The more ahead of time you, you tell your brain that and you have decided that you are going to keep courageously taking action in that area, whatever it may be, the more you can press forward and actually create results.
That's it for today on the MedSpa CEO podcast. If this show's been valuable to you, the best way to say thank you is to leave a quick, quick rating and review. It means the absolute world to me. I read every single one. And it helps more women like you find the support they need to grow something they're proud of. I'm so glad you're here.
Host: Heather Terveen
Date: November 12, 2025
In this episode—the first of a special two-part series—Heather Terveen focuses on the mindset and emotional capacity required for med spa owners and leaders to foster sustainable, significant business growth. Rather than focusing on tactical business strategies, Heather discusses the “invisible work” of leadership: how to cultivate mental resilience, handle discomfort, and continue taking bold action even when external circumstances are challenging. Drawing from her work with hundreds of med spa CEOs, industry leaders, and her personal experiences, Heather details five key traits of “the Courageous CEO.”
Quantum Leap Growth Requires Emotional Maturity
“The more people you serve, the larger your team gets, the more you will have to expand your capacity for discomfort and emotional things.” (Heather Terveen, 00:00)
Normalizing Setbacks and Emotional Discomfort
“Being in turmoil over those things is optional. The faster you will make decisions and you will make moves and you will move forward on things that will have positive outcomes as well.” (Heather Terveen, 00:52)
Risk-Tolerance, Not Just Hustle or Talent, Drives Big Results
“He said risk tolerance. He didn’t say talent. He didn’t say luck… But how many examples do we know of people who hustle … [yet] they’re just playing inside of a game that is too small to produce really epic results.” (Heather Terveen, 05:57)
Courage Over Confidence
“You actually don’t need confidence. You just need courage.” (Heather Terveen, 08:28)
Leaders who attribute their results to external circumstances become powerless; those who focus on their own thinking and actions can create results regardless of challenges.
Example: The COVID-19 closure showed that clients who shifted their mindset from doom to opportunity rebounded faster and achieved more growth post-pandemic.
Quote:
“The more you attribute your thinking and your action and behavior to the results you’re creating, the more you will actually be able to control the results that you create.” (Heather Terveen, 12:40)
Personal story: Heather’s genetic health diagnosis initially devastated her, but mindset work reframed it into gratitude for medical support.
Quote:
“I couldn’t change the fact that I was given this diagnosis, but I could change my thinking about the diagnosis.” (Heather Terveen, 17:12)
As your business grows, challenges increase. Developing emotional resilience and intentionally choosing how to respond is essential.
Practice: Don’t let setbacks determine your emotional state—choose conscious responses over knee-jerk reactions.
Encourages listeners to jot down current sources of turmoil and recognize that the emotional response is within their control.
Quote:
“Being in turmoil over those things is optional. The more that I can help you all actually have the tools to be a courageous CEO and to decide that you’re not going to let those things keep you down, the faster you will make decisions.” (Heather Terveen, 22:47)
Heather relates this to risk tolerance: expanding your emotional capacity to tolerate setbacks translates into daring, strategic moves that drive quantum leaps in business.
Building resilience is like training a muscle—the more you face and recover from challenges, the stronger your leadership becomes.
“The only reason I know so much about what is going to create positive results in my online marketing is because I’ve taken so much action over the last decade and I have lots of undesirable results in my online marketing as well too. But both stacks of those results have made me a more courageous CEO.” (Heather Terveen, 22:15)
| Timestamp | Speaker | Quote | |-----------|-------------------|------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------| | 00:00 | Heather Terveen | “The more people you serve, the larger your team gets, the more you will have to expand your capacity…” | | 05:57 | Heather Terveen | “He said risk tolerance. He didn’t say talent… They’re hustling inside of a game that is too small…” | | 08:28 | Heather Terveen | “You actually don’t need confidence. You just need courage.” | | 12:40 | Heather Terveen | “The more you attribute your thinking and your action and behavior to the results you’re creating, the more you will actually be able to control the results that you create.” | | 17:12 | Heather Terveen | “I couldn’t change the fact that I was given this diagnosis, but I could change my thinking about the diagnosis.” | | 22:47 | Heather Terveen | “Being in turmoil over those things is optional. The more that I can help you… the faster you will make decisions.” | | 22:15 | Heather Terveen | “Both stacks of those results have made me a more courageous CEO.” |
“I want you to kind of notice where you may not be being the courageous CEO, because if you become a truly courageous CEO… there’s nothing you can’t create.” (07:35)
Part 2 will continue the exploration of the remaining traits of the Courageous CEO.