Intentional, Demanding, Rewarding: Paula Comfort on Hard Work and Betting on Yourself
Paula Comfort arrived on a boat.
Not metaphorically. Literally — on the HMS Corinthia, crossing the Atlantic from England to Canada because her family couldn't afford to fly.
She didn't know she was on a boat. The ship was too big to comprehend.
Looking back, it's the perfect metaphor for Paula's entire life: moving toward something enormous without fully knowing what it was yet. Just trusting the direction. Just doing the work.
Her parents had already shown her how that worked.
Her father — a gifted athlete, a high academic achiever, a man who could have gone further if his family had the money — became an electrician. Then an engineer. Then a man who came home from a long day and went straight to his books. Her mother started as a bank teller, spent thirty years at the same institution, and became the person every young employee came to for advice.
Paula watched all of it.
And she learned.
By grade seven she was getting cut from teams. By grade nine she was sitting on the bench — again. But something in her kept pushing. Her basketball coach, Linda Kirkpatrick, saw it early. Even as the youngest and the shortest, Paula was the one people gravitated toward. The one who debriefed the game on the bus ride home. The one back in the gym the next morning at 7 AM.
She didn't just build resilience on that bench.
She built a blueprint.
From kinesiology at Waterloo — 20 hours of classes, 20 hours of labs, weekly — to a part-time job at a health club where they handed her the keys within a month. From a fitness director role to running a $3 million business at 23. From five clubs to eighteen years with Sports Clubs of Canada, eventually overseeing 23 locations as their most senior executive.
Paula didn't walk a straight line. She ran.
She got married at 34. Had three daughters at 36, 38, and 40. Got promoted to the most senior role in her company — while seven months pregnant. Managed international travel across 13 global openings while making sure she never missed a Christmas concert. The nanny. The carpools. The 9 PM calls with China on a Sunday night.
She made it work.
Until the moment everything fell apart.
A toxic new leader. A public shaming. Legal battles. Her husband's own career restructure. Two mortgages. Three daughters. The realization that the company she had helped build — the one she called her baby — had changed beyond recognition.
Everything stripped away.
What came next was the chapter no one plans for — and the one that defines everything.
Consulting work that barely covered the gap. An executive coach helping her get back to her why. A retainer from an Orange Theory owner that closed the financial gap just enough. A slow pivot toward recruitment — something she was uniquely positioned to do better than anyone, because she had actually lived the business from the inside.
Today, Paula is the founder of Higher Ground Talent, an executive recruitment firm placing senior leaders across the health, fitness, and wellness industry. She brings something no one else in the space can: 30 years of operating at the highest levels of the industry she now serves.
When I asked Paula to describe her career and motherhood in three words, she gave me three good ones.
Intentional. Demanding. Rewarding.
Intentional — because every year, she scrolls through every photo she's taken and writes down her reflections: the highs, the hard moments, and how she came through. She did goal-setting exercises with her daughters when they were small. She has a folder for every year.
Demanding — because her husband still says he can't keep up with her, and her daughters might argue she kept them in gymnastics a little too long.
And rewarding — because she looks at those daughters today, and their networks, and their discipline, and she knows something about how those things were built.
Paula's story isn't about having perfect timing.
It's about a woman who was handed a work ethic before she was old enough to name it, who built a career one unglamorous rung at a time, who lost almost everything and rebuilt — and who found that the relationships she tended through all of it were the thing that held everything together.
"The minute you start pulling away from your core values," she says, "they're out."
She's been tested on that. More than once.
She's still here.
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