Former U.S. Coast Guard commander turned executive coach shares her Trauma Default Method for sustainable leadership success
Christy Rutherford knows what it feels like to lose everything. The former U.S. Coast Guard commander left her military career with just three and a half years until full retirement, trading financial security for what she thought would be freedom in entrepreneurship. Instead, she found herself in stage 12 burnout, unable to speak for a year, living with her brother in South Carolina after losing her savings.
Now a Forbes-featured executive coach and creator of the Trauma Default Method, Rutherford has transformed her devastating experience into a mission to help elite leaders sustain success without sacrificing their health. She’s worked with over 300 leaders across 20 countries, generating more than $421 million in revenue growth while reversing stress-related medical conditions and saving 30 marriages in the process.
How did you move from being a U.S. Coast Guard commander to being an executive coach?
I was a coach before I knew that coaching was a thing. I’ve always been the rational friend, the person who started reading self-help magazines when I was 12. As I entered my career, I did my job, but I also mentored a lot of people. When I went to a conference in 2006, I heard a woman talk about coaching. I’m like, wait, what? That’s a thing? Because military people, we’re in an ecosystem, I can get paid for this? So I went to Georgetown, got my certification.
Coaching today in 2025 is oversaturated. I like to call myself an advisor, because everybody’s a coach. You have people who are coaching because it’s part of their purpose, and you got people who do it just for the money. I do it because it’s part of my purpose, but I also want my money.
How does leadership ambition without self-awareness destroy you and the legacy you’re trying to build?
I was a high-achieving military officer, killing the game, mentoring 90 people outside of my office with 160 people working for me. Then I ended up running into a toxic boss who started to harass me. I resigned with three and a half years left to retire with a full pension. I resigned, or I was going to die. I was literally going to work myself to death because I was addicted to proving people wrong.
Great leaders can be great, but we don’t know how to stop. Even as I’m burning out, I didn’t know that I was burning out, because we think of burnout as time. But burnout actually goes up in stages. There are 12 stages of burnout. After I left my career, I joined entrepreneurship because clearly entrepreneurship represents freedom, and money, and I can be rich in two months, and that was a lie. So I burned out in stage 12, mental collapse in 2013, 18 months after I resigned, because I took my bad habits of overworking from my career into my business.
Can you explain the two-degree drift and what warning signs leaders should watch for?
There was a plane in the 1970s that was off two degrees, so the mechanics recalibrated the system, and the airplane was off two degrees for four and a half hours. It ended up crashing into a mountain in Antarctica and killed 275 people on board, because it was off just a small amount for a long period of time.
When it comes to leadership, we get off in our habits, and in our peace, and in our joy, and working out, and eating healthy. High achievers are trying to outrun a past that we think success is going to heal for us. High achievers, a lot of self-made, successful people are runners. We have something in our past that we’re trying to make right. Over time, we get off course, and over 10, 15 years of doing the same things, we’re oblivious that we’re not spending time with our families. We’re oblivious that we’re probably thicker than a snicker, and we don’t really want to be.
High achievers don’t know they’re burning out, because burnout is normal. High achievers are oblivious. Even in stage 11, 11.5 burnout, I was telling people I was okay. In the advanced and critical stages of burnout, you’re incapable of rational thought.
What new leadership model is needed to develop whole leaders who can sustain influence under pressure?
Coming from the military, leadership is very important to us. Once I left, I started to look at some of the world-renowned leaders. They have never been leaders. Like, one guy has four New York Times bestsellers on leadership, he’s never had a job.
Leadership isn’t a theory, leadership has to be action, because the leadership models assume that a leader is perfect leading perfect people. Well, humans are humans. You show me, of the 160 people who work for me, they’re not homogenous, they’re not all the same person, they have different personalities, different preferences.
A lot of the things that I see in corporate, with regards to leadership, all leaders are failing and they’re never good enough. So a leader never really feels successful, regardless of what position we obtain, because we’re chasing these illusions of what a great leader is by somebody who’s never been a leader.
I think a part of leadership is being able to own that I may not be perfect. Instead of always looking at where to fish and what makes me great? So you can actually stop chasing. Can I be an imperfect leader that’s always trying to be greater, leading imperfect people? That’s the model.
Walk us through self-care, self-awareness, and self-actualization for executives.
When I think about Great Leaders Finish Well. I’ve worked with great leaders, and over time, I’ve studied some of the world-renowned leaders from the early 1900s, real leaders who’ve led real people. The thing about leaders, we all have a lot of the same challenges, because we have a lot of the same behavior patterns.
We’ve reversed stress-related medical conditions, high blood pressure, diabetes, fibroids, lupus, fibromyalgia. One of my clients was on the liver transplant list. She got off that list once she started to take care of herself. Some of them have lost hundreds of pounds. $421 million in salary raises and business revenue after leaders have actually taken care of themselves.
My recipe for great leaders is to work out three times a week for 30 minutes. Meditate for five minutes, three times a week, and then sleep eight hours, three nights a week. It seems so simple, but to hold a leader accountable for actually taking care of themselves and not doing it for everybody else is almost impossible.
Self-care is, if I can get you to slow down long enough, then I can make you aware of the show that you’ve created of your life. We’re not self-aware. If I can get you to slow down a little bit, and get some sleep, and now become rational, then it’s like, oh my god, I’m not spending time with my spouse. Oh my god, I’m spending 90% of my time at home complaining about my job.
Now that you become self-aware of the life that you’ve created, self-actualization is now let’s get you back on the path and the original plan that God has called you to do. Now let’s awaken to your purpose. Leaders wear eight different hats, and we’re failing at all of them. How about you just become one great person, and then lead in eight different ways?
What results are you seeing when organizations invest in developing complete leaders rather than just high performance?
The investment into sustainable leadership is people are taking these retreats, but you’re not necessarily addressing what the leader’s running from, which is what we do different. We talk about the Trauma Default Method.
I had a client from East Africa, and when she moved to the U.S., she was bullied because of her accent. Her teacher put her back a grade because she said, I don’t understand you, you speak African. As an adult, she does not have an accent. She has four or five degrees, a PhD, she has an MBA, and she went to Johns Hopkins, Yale, the best schools. She was thinking about getting another degree.
She’s making over $200,000 a year, it doesn’t matter how many degrees that she has, she doesn’t feel successful, and you can only run that race for so long before you start to wear yourself out. What we do is we go back to that one scenario and figure out what’s driving your success. A lot of self-made people where driven by pain. Pain is normal, so we’re not driven by passion. We’re not chasing a passionate pursuit. We’re driven by people underestimating us.
When it comes to leadership, if you only teach her how to breathe and you’re not figuring out why she needs to breathe, and what’s driving her success, that’s why the training doesn’t work, because we’re not addressing the root cause of the conflict.
How can people reach out to you for help?
They can take my burnout quiz at christyrutherford.com. Once you become aware that you’re in the critical stages of burnout, you’ll be like, oh my god, now I need to do something. A lot of people don’t know where they are, so that’s that self-awareness piece.
You can also connect with me on LinkedIn and Instagram by searching my name. My goal is to make leaders aware that it’s okay not to be okay, but it’s not okay to stay there. Burnout is catastrophic. Burnout will cost you everything, and some people don’t recover. Can I share enough information to make people aware they’re on the path right behind me? We’ve saved 30 marriages with our clients just getting some sleep.