A Life In 3 Questions With Liv Golding
Entrepreneur and debut author Liv Golding on learning patience the hard way, shedding the hustle mindset, and helping women reclaim their wellbeing
As multi-hyphenate careers go, Liv Golding could write the rulebook on reinvention. But look closely and there’s one thread running through every chapter.
What began as a passion for yoga while studying and modeling in Tokyo has become the foundation of a thriving wellness empire. The Taiwan-born entrepreneur has a brilliant instinct for turning personal passions into opportunities to empower others. First, building Stretch City, a wellness community in Singapore, before launching FitSphere, a global fitness platform combining yoga, HIIT and strength training. Along the way, she has navigated international moves, life in the spotlight alongside her husband, Crazy Rich Asians actor Henry Golding, and motherhood, all while finding new ways to evolve her business and ambitions.
Now based in London with her two daughters, she is an investor in female-focused beauty and wellness brands, and the author of Thrive, Mama: What Every Mother Deserves and How to Finally Get It, a guide to helping women reclaim their wellbeing. Her story is one of courage, adaptability and a determination to turn the practices that transformed her own life into something that might help do the same for others.
Here, Golding shares her playbook for starting from scratch.
What are you building right now?
I’ve started over perhaps five times in my life. It’s funny being 40; when you’re young, you’re cash-strapped and pulling yourself up on your bootstraps. But now that I have kids and I’m a lot more stable, I can approach my career in a different way and have more fun with it on my own terms.
The world I’m currently building is authorship. My book is a personal story about a woman who isn’t thriving, and how she gets to a place of healing. Building this next chapter of my life has been an exercise in patience. We live in an immediate-gratification culture, and when you’re young or a mum, you’re so impatient. But for the first time ever, I’m having to look years ahead and question who I really want to be and what I want to do.
Thrive, Mama holds such deep personal meaning and I’m excited for women to read it, connect with the story and question themselves. Writing the book pushed me to confront parts of myself and I want readers who are willing to do the same.
What have you outgrown?
Looking back, I’ve always been driven to the point of exhaustion. The hustle culture and mindset I was brought up with were based on the idea that you can be everything, you can do everything and you can have everything in the world – you just have to work hard for it. But working hard is not the way I want to move forward. I want to work smart and be a lot more holistic.
I drove myself to the point where I was diagnosed with vestibular migraines, which cause episodes of dizziness. Now, when a vestibular migraine kicks in, I know it’s my body reminding me that I’m pushing myself too far, that I need to take a step back and recalculate.
My work has also always been my identity, but now that I have kids I realise that it’s not all about who you are in public anymore: who you are when you dress up, go out the door and show up. As mums, sometimes we’re a banker, a therapist, a personal driver. I’ve had to redefine ambition, and what it means to be a career woman.
What do you know for sure?
A big part of my motherhood journey has been relearning guilt, because I’ve always taken it upon myself to make things happen. When I haven’t made things happen, I’ve felt guilty, but when I have, I’ve also felt guilty. A certain amount of guilt is healthy; it works as a biological cursor to keep you safe, but it’s about identifying what is healthy and what isn’t, knowing my core values and asking myself whether I’m living up to them day in, day out.
I also can’t juggle. When I try, I convince myself I’m managing everything, but things fall by the wayside and aren’t done properly. I’ve got much better at identifying when I need to focus on the kids or on myself, and not apologising for it. It’s not that I won’t be there for everything, but it’s important to teach my daughters that their world is not just their mum. Spending time feeling guilty? I’m done with it.
I now know that what you see online isn’t the full picture. I used to spend so much time performing for other people that I was almost performing my wellbeing – that I was OK, put together, a good mum. People in the wellbeing industry especially can get so caught up in having to “look the part”. I’ve been there. I know what’s required to hold that standard of body, appearance and content output. I know what the applause means, and it’s so short-lived. I’m done asking for permission and I’m so much healthier for it.
Thrive, Mama: What Every Mother Deserves and How to Finally Get It is out in March 2027 and available to pre-order now. Find out more at livgolding.com.