Erica: Hey, girl. By now, you know

Erica: I have Her Collective, my online community for ambitious women who are done doing it alone. Her Collective is for the women who are smart, capable, and driven, but they find themselves stuck on the sticky floors like self doubt, burnout, and waiting for permission that quite honestly never comes. Inside HER, you get more than motivation. You get real support, real strategies, and real momentum. We work on things like clarifying what you want now and what's coming next, building confidence without burning yourself out, navigating hard conversations, career moves, and leadership moments with clarity, and surrounding yourself with women who actually get it.

Erica: This isn't about hustling harder. It's about moving intentionally with the right tools and the right people in your corner. If you're ready to stop spinning, start choosing yourself, and build a career in life that actually feels aligned, I'd love to welcome you inside her collective. You can learn more and join us at www.joinhercollective.com. Because honestly, girl, you were never meant to do this alone.

Erica: Are you ready to transform your challenges into your greatest strengths? Or have you ever wondered how the top leaders navigate this tightrope of corporate success without losing their authenticity? And do you find yourself at a crossroads? Maybe you're longing for a change, but you're not sure about the path you should take. Today, we are going to dive deep into the world of empowerment, of resilience, and the art of thriving amidst adversity.

Erica: Sarah Biernbaum is a true pioneer in leadership and personal growth. As the CEO and head coach at Nimble Penguin, Sarah has transcended the roles of a VP in various companies to spearhead a movement that champions the cause of high performing leaders everywhere. Today, we're gonna talk about something that I honestly had never heard about before, before, and that is achievement dysmorphia. We're gonna talk about bragging versus celebrating and how you can keep doing hard things. Root yourself in resilience and lead authentically.

Erica: We cover a lot in this short episode, so get ready to be inspired. Y'all, we have Sarah Berenbaum with us today, and Sarah is what I like to call a decorative corporate soldier. We are talking someone who has had the VP title with a few different companies, but she is now the CEO and head coach at Nimble Penguin. So I am super pumped to talk all things sticky floors with her today. Sarah, how are you?

Sarah: I'm doing well. Thanks so much for, welcoming on here, Erica. It's great to get this chance to chat with you on

Erica: I know. I am so pumped. And one thing that already has me intrigued is you are all about choosing your own adventure, and you have had quite a few adventures. So I'd love to hear a bit about who you are and your backstory.

Sarah: Yeah. Absolutely. I think to lead into my backstory, it sometimes helps to talk about where I am now and then how I got here. So I today, I work with high performing leaders, and, in my experience, leadership is remarkably lonely. I bet you hear that from a lot of the folks you talk to.

Sarah: Oh. I my superpower is that I am an empowerment instigator. So I help exceptional leaders transform uncertainty into empowered growth as a coach, a guide, an adviser, a consultant, and a fractional leader. I meet leaders where they are, and I bring the full breadth of my experience, including years as a professional stage manager, as a nonprofit arts manager, and over a decade leading post sales operation and operations in start ups. All those tools in my toolbox, I bring those and we partner in together to build a path to extraordinary results.

Sarah: So I work with leaders one on one, in pairs, in teams, or small groups, and it's tons of fun. I got a lot of I got a lot of joy out of empowering other folks, in case you can't tell. And how the the sort of short version of how I got here, I mentioned I was a professional stage manager for years, which I loved. I did that for over a decade. And at some point, figured out that I wanna do something else, just the lifestyle of freelance.

Sarah: And, you know, in America, we don't pay artists well. So I was ready to maybe earn a little more money and found my way working in tech startups. And, in that period, I also worked in arts management at a nonprofit for a bit. But I found that, in the world of tech startups in particular, there's an incredible amount of creativity and collaboration that is not dissimilar to what I've experienced working on a new play or a musical. And I like to joke with my theater friends that I'm I'm I'm still herding cats.

Sarah: I'm just working in a different industry. You know, it's sort of this, the the element of being a stage manager where you are the person who is taking all of the creative energy outside of the room and all of the creative energy inside of the room and making sure people are speaking the same language and talking to each other and everyone knows what's happening, it relates very easily to then working in post sales and operations at a start up where you are looking at all the customers who are outside of the room, so to speak, and all the people who work at the company and making sure that they could communicate with and understand each other. So over time, it's been interesting to really see those consistent threads throughout my career even though I have tried many different things. And and it yeah. It all comes back to this piece in the middle that I just get such joy out of empowering others to figure out what makes them thrive and work in life.

Sarah: But but, wherever I go, that's what I keep doing.

Erica: Here's what I love is that you already knew what I was going to ask because I was going to say, Sarah, what the heck is that one thread that ties together a stage manager with a VP of customer success? But you did it for me without even having to ask. And empowering others is such an important purposeful work. Right? Like, we all need people who are going to help us hype each other up and pull out our best superpowers.

Erica: But the question I have for you is you make it look so easy. You've you've had all of these different adventures, and you're doing great things. What are some of those sticky floors that showed up for you kinda throughout your evolution?

Sarah: Yeah. I mean, it's thanks for saying I make it look so easy. I mean, there's I can think of so many moments, especially, you know, early in my career as a young stage manager, feeling like I just, you know, was making it up as I went along. But I I the one that comes to mind in particular that's more recent, as you're mentioning, sort of my VP roles in companies, is that, you know, everyone has that first time that you do certain things. And that first time that I got to have that VP title next to my name, which I don't know.

Sarah: I'm a person who's likes to try to think the titles don't matter, but they matter. They matter to us and to the world. And so I was super excited to have that VP title, but, you know, it was also the first time. And so a lot of imposter syndrome or, as my friend Jamie likes to say, achievement dysmorphia, where you are, you have this giant book of achievements and somehow you have lost sight of them and you're just standing here thinking I haven't done anything that's actually relevant to this job and everyone's gonna figure out that I'm a fraud. And that I love that you call it a sticky floor because I think about myself in that role.

Sarah: And, of course, there were things that I probably I did well or even extraordinarily well. I mean, I am good at what I do. But the feeling of being in this role and feeling like maybe I'm not supposed to be here, it it is this it can or can be this, like, self fulfilling prophecy or this, like, cycle where I was sitting there feeling I can only describe it as this clenching feeling, this sort of internal tightness where, and we we, as humans, I I find are our best selves when we can sit more in that feeling of abundance and and freedom and, comfort and here are all the things that I'm great at. And, of course, there's some things that are gonna be a struggle for me, but I'm gonna lean on my strengths and I'm going to do great things. And for me, standing in that VP role, I had the celebration of hooray.

Sarah: I made it to this role, and now I have to actually do it and feeling like, every little thing that went less than perfect just was a little further chip on this tight little armor that I was trying to build from feeling so uncertain and feeling so insecure about whether I should have this role. And there were any number of other things happening in my environment in that role that didn't necessarily foster a sense of self confidence. And so I don't want to layer that all on myself. Of course, you know, our environment is a huge impact, both the internal environment and

Erica: the external. Right? But all

Sarah: that said, at the heart of it, external. Right? But all that said, at the heart of it, when I was feeling uncertain and insecure about my abilities, I then just fell on my face a lot more and was not my best self. I was not showing up as the strong leader that I am and that I can be because I the more I doubted myself, the less I was able to show up in the way that I know how. And so it it it was even though I could almost see it happening in the moment, it was like I couldn't turn it off.

Sarah: I couldn't turn off this cycle in my head of, that negative self talk, I guess, is the best way to put it.

Erica: You said something earlier, and it really caught my interest, and that was achievement dysmorphia because that is not a term I had ever heard before. But you talk about being that internal resistance to how awesome we are, and I was like, oh, shit. That's me. Because how often do women achieve something great and then we say, oh, it's not a big deal. Right?

Erica: Or even if we comment on, like, you look nice today, it's like, oh, this? I just threw this on. I just did this really quick. Like, we always talk ourselves down. Why do you think that is?

Sarah: I mean, it's a great question. And I you know, first, the I have to credit Jamie Ellis, the incredible Jamie Ellis of coming up with the term achievement dysmorphia. In terms of, like, why we resist acknowledging and celebrating our accomplishments, I think that there are a couple of things that come into that. I think, in all honesty, especially for women growing up in America because that's who I what I know because that's who I am as a for a woman who grew up in America, there's a huge amount of, social pressure and expectation not to be too bold, not to, you know, brag about yourself, not to whatever. And so I think we are taught early on, I think, unfortunately, this idea that a version of humility that is instead essentially amazing things that you're doing, rather than saying it is you can be humble and also celebrate yourself.

Sarah: And so I think it is actually a skill that we don't necessarily teach well, which is how to look at what you have accomplished and celebrate it, acknowledge it, and then maybe even take a moment to say, how are all of these accomplishments going to help me on the next thing? Like, what what specifically are the puzzle pieces that I have created that are now gonna help me do this next thing? I think about even just having a simp a coaching conversation with someone the other day, and they were facing this challenge that they felt like, oh my god. I can't. This is impossible.

Sarah: And I we broke it down to what was that little thing that was super hard for them. And I said, well, tell me about another time in your life when you have dealt with something like this. And suddenly, they had three, four different examples of, like, how they you know, I was like, great. So, like, what did you do then, and how can we apply this here? And it's it seems so simple, but we just really don't teach that.

Sarah: And I and I at least I don't remember learning it. I feel like, other than learning it myself through trial and error, and I think that there's and, of course, there's other external factors as well, like toxic work environments where people are, you know, pushing negative energy at you even when you are doing extraordinary things, whether it's someone who's envious of your success or having their own insecurity issues. There all sorts of things can happen. But I but I would think about the things that are like, a toxic work environment, how much can you control that? You can leave, but what we can control is our own the own ecosystem we have of ourselves and our internal thoughts.

Sarah: And so when I think about learning how to just actually celebrate your own wins and understand that humility can coexist with that instead of this idea that humility only exists when we just pretend we don't do stuff. Yeah. I think is is is key.

Erica: Yeah. Well and I think one of the big things too is we were always taught, you know, don't brag. You know, don't be this the whole big, you know, bodacious person who's out there doing those things. But it isn't that hard to just change a little bit of our language instead of brushing off our accomplishments to just say, thank you. I worked really hard at that.

Erica: And own that because number one, you know you worked your ass off for it. So just acknowledge it because you're not doing yourself any favors, and you're also not doing any of the other women who are behind us any favors easy. Because if we sit there and say, oh, it's no big deal. You know, it's don't worry about it. Then other people think that it shouldn't be a big deal.

Erica: And when they struggle and they're like, well, Erica didn't struggle and Sarah didn't struggle, We're not doing anyone any favors by not actually showing up and saying, yes. That was a very hard thing, but I did it. Damn it.

Sarah: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I love this phrase that my my friend Talia Kovacs uses, and she actually works with kids. But she has this phrase that she encourages parents to use, which is that was hard and then I did it with kids.

Sarah: And I love that because she really is teaching this idea of resilience, you know, and and being able to celebrate. But it's not a bad thing to say to yourself either.

Erica: I know. That's a that's a really great way to start just showing up for yourself and teaching that to everyone around you. I'm like, yeah. That was really hard, but I did it. Mhmm.

Erica: Oh, I love that tip. So So I wanna talk about another sticky floor of yours, and that is all about speaking up, hyping yourself up, highlighting that expertise, advocating for yourself, all of that wrapped up in one. Can you tell me a little bit about how this showed up for you?

Erica: Hey there, listeners. If you have ever felt like you're stuck in a place, held back by self doubt, perfectionism, or that pesky inner critic, you're not alone. We all face those sticky floors that keep us from reaching the heights we dream of. But guess what? It's time to shatter those limiting beliefs and toxic behaviors to uncover infinite possibilities.

Erica: My book, Glassy Leads and Sticky Floors, is your ultimate guide to smashing through barriers, overcoming limiting beliefs, and stepping into your full potential. This book has been endorsed by none other than the great Mel Robbins, best selling author and motivational powerhouse. It's also been featured in Success Magazine, so you know it's packed with insights that work. Inside, you'll find real life sticky floor stories, practical strategies to help you navigate your own sticky floor moments, and a whole lot of inspiration to keep you climbing. This isn't just a book.

Erica: It's your road map to success, confidence, and freedom. Grab your copy of Glass Ceilings and Sticky Floors today at www.ericaandersonrooney.com. Whether you're in the boardroom, the classroom, or just starting out, this book is for you because no one, and I mean no one, deserves to stay stuck, no one deserves to feel small, and you have glass ceilings to shatter. Let's do this.

Sarah: Yes. So, when I had had this first VP role and I was like, alright. I'm a VP. I've I've done it. And and, you know, once I think as much as that first role I struggled with, as you're saying, like, imposter syndrome, achievements, dysmorphia, all those things, I also realized, right, everyone in these roles is just a human like me, and this is we're all at a certain level figuring things out as we go.

Sarah: It felt less scary. So I thought, okay. I'm ready for the next thing. And I was interviewing for roles, but I was interviewing for these companies, you know, head of customer success for early stage or VP of customer success or whatever. And I felt like these are roles I could clearly do, and I, at least in some cases, was just really not progressing.

Sarah: And one in particular, I think about this role, and I honestly can't remember even the company now. I just remember the internal recruiter because she was so kind and helpful. But, you know, I was I was not progressing in these jobs. I was not getting job interviews. I was not getting feedback because you almost never do.

Sarah: So I didn't really know. They were just like, we just want someone who was a better fit. And I'm like, that. Great. So I have no idea.

Sarah: So at that point, we get to the end of the process. I don't progress to whatever final round. And this recruiter agreed to give me feedback, and she hopped on a call. And she said, well, you know, the truth is this role is for a very technical leader who really has deep implementation and project management experience. And I thought and I said, really?

Sarah: Well, that's but that's me. That's literally the essence of my career. Like, how did you and she was genuinely shocked. She said, oh, I didn't realize that you had this kind of experience. I'm sorry we didn't talk about this.

Sarah: And I sort of went, okay. This is clearly my failing that we've had several interviews at this point, and no one knows that my entire career is built on all of this work. And so that was a huge light bulb moment for me that, you know, sometimes we can be our own sticky floor because I literally just wasn't talking about. And I think at the time, I thought, my resume speaks for itself. If you can see what I've done and I talk about project management and implementation, then you know those things.

Sarah: And I just need to now interview and connect with this person and feel like we could work together well, and and that will that will get me the job. You know? I'm a kind, interesting, engaging human, and my experience speaks for itself, which was clearly wrong. And but it was an important lesson. And in the end, I, of course, since then have had other jobs, and I founded my own company and been a consultant and all that.

Sarah: And so it it all it was it worked out. But what I really learned is that I had to figure out how to talk about myself and my achievements and my expertise to other people in ways that felt true to me so I didn't sound like a robot and were interesting enough that they didn't feel like I was just reading my resume and that were, that translated to them thinking, oh, I wanna actually work with this person because they have these skills and this expertise. So through, like, a lot of trial and error, I figured out better ways to talk about myself. But that was a huge lesson was to realize, oh, I just this thing that seems so obvious, literally no one's gonna know unless I say it. And it's, again, sounds I don't know.

Sarah: Sounds obvious. Right? You don't talk about it. No one will know. But somehow, it didn't occur to me.

Sarah: And I've certainly talked to plenty of other people who have had similar experiences where you think that your work would speak for yourself. You maybe feel awkward or uncomfortable promoting yourself. Right? Or think that Absolutely. Earlier, talking about yourself is, like, boast full or self involved and, like, who who does that?

Sarah: No.

Erica: Absolutely.

Sarah: Yeah.

Erica: Well and here's the real deal. Right? Like, this is a huge problem for women across the board because they sit back and we say, like, oh, they know how much work I'm doing. I'll get the promotion, or they'll give me the promotion or the title when I deserve it. And, like, they know better than I do.

Erica: I don't need to talk about all of the things that I'm doing. But here's the deal. You do have to talk about all the things that you're doing because your leader or your manager, whoever, they truly don't know. Even if you have the best manager, they don't know all the amazing things you're doing, so you have to advocate for yourself by actually talking about those things. Do you have a recipe, a road map, a tip, whatever, in taking that first step to advocate for yourself?

Sarah: That's a great question. There are so many things to think about there. I think the honestly, the biggest one is I find is when people have a long list of accomplishments or they've got a whole bunch of information they want to share, it's really easy to get lost in the weeds of it. Someone, you know, someone says, oh, even just a simple example that you have on an interview and someone says, oh, tell me about yourself and how you got here. And they're like, well, you know, I was my first job was, like, scooping ice cream at Haagen Dazs, and you get, like, a soul like law.

Erica: Does that matter?

Sarah: Right. Exactly. And so, you know, I think about, you know, any executive or leader who's been working long enough for you know how to manage that. Right? We know that the people above us, whatever that means at your company, are busy.

Sarah: And I always say that we have to assume that if you're sending an email or telling someone something, that assume that you get maybe one or two sentences and then they stop listening. And so it's key to figure out it's like when you write a paper in college or high high school or whatever that I don't know about you, but I used to do this thing where I would write my papers and I would, like, save some, like, a big interesting reveal for, like, the last paragraph. My teacher would be like, Sarah, like, this is can you just put your thesis statement in the first pair? Like, why are you saving all of this to the end? And it is it's the same thing in business, right, that we, like, want to build to something.

Sarah: And that's fine if you're telling a story, but if you're in the work environment, if you're interviewing, if you're talking about yourself, if you're trying to convey some key piece of information, if you only had one sentence to say the most important thing, what would you say? Say that, and then, of course, you can add more details or 17 charts of all the research you've done or whatever if your CEO or whoever has time for that. But chances are they don't. They just wanna know, is it is this taken care of or not? And, like, what is the most important thing I need to know about this?

Sarah: The the example I always give people is when I was a stage manager. So stage manager is usually sitting in the theater. You've got your headset on. You've got a table. There everyone is working on the show as in the same space.

Sarah: There's a whole lot of crazy shit happening. And you're rehearsing, let's say, a transition from one scene to another. There's moving scenery. There's moving parts, and you have an assistant stage manager backstage on headset with you. And you got to the transition, and it's like, people go off stage and it's like a giant train wreck.

Sarah: Everything falls apart, and you stop. And as the person sitting out in the theater that can see the train wreck, I'm running this whole ship, and I have to say to my assistant, what happened? What I wanna hear is some version of, let's say, the cart ran off the stage and got into some trouble, the traffic jam. We're gonna figure it out. Give me five minutes, and we can run it again.

Sarah: Amazing. Right? It's one sentence, two sentences maybe, and I will sit I will turn to all the people in the theater and say, hey, guys. We're gonna work through this again. Here's what we're doing.

Sarah: The not helpful version is, well, you know, the cart came off, and then they tried to turn left, but they really should've turned right. And, like, these people were changing costumes over here and they got run into. And, like, all of that information did impact the train wreck, but I don't care. And maybe later in a debrief, my assistant and I could have a long chat about all the things that went wrong. But in that moment, I don't care.

Sarah: I just need to know we need five minutes to fix it and try it again. And so I feel like that is a as a metaphor for any kind of communication, especially communicating up, where it's what is if you had, like, one sentence, what would you say to make sure that the most important point gets across? And then from there, if they want more of your amazing details, great. Have those ready. Dig into the challenges or the charts or the analytics that offer background to how you got to this key point.

Sarah: But if they only hear your first sentence, at least they know what's the amazing thing you accomplished and how much of that did you do yourself versus with your team.

Erica: What's so important about that too is exactly what you said. People stop listening, especially if you're rambling on. And I don't know if it's from nervousness or whatever has you putting in too many words. That clear, concise language is so important, and it it just made me think about executive influence, which is often a piece of feedback that women get where they're like, you need to work on your presence. You need to work on your executive influence, and everybody's like, but how?

Erica: Clear, concise language. Right? Getting to your point from the bat, and then you can fill it in on the back end, I think, is so critical. One thing to you, when it comes to owning your accomplishments, what it makes me think about is this one time when someone asked me, how do you do it all, Erica? Right?

Erica: Number one, the key answer is I don't do it all, but I also recognize that I do a lot. Right? I do podcasting. I have a full time job. I'm a mom.

Erica: I like to work out. Like, there's all these things that I do. And I used to be that woman that would just brush it off and

Sarah: be like, no. No. No. It's not a

Erica: big deal or it doesn't take that much time. And I was really not owning how much work I was doing, which was minimizing everything that I was doing. So I started to switch that language, and I actually started telling people I'm like a a productivity queen, right, or a productivity expert. Expert. I've really learned how to maximize my time.

Erica: And I actually had somebody say, oh, she likes to brag because I said that. Mhmm. Because I called myself a productivity expert. And I thought about that, and that bugged me for a little bit because I was like, well, I guess I shouldn't say that or, you know, maybe it comes off wrong. But then the truth of it was, I don't know that they would say that about a man.

Erica: And so I'm gonna continue owning that I am a damn productivity expert, a productivity queen, and I am doing probably a lot more than most people. The reason I share this is I wanna share the message with other women that it's it's going to be hard for others to accept that. And, usually, that is a direct result of how they feel about themselves or what they're doing or not doing versus you. So I think that's a big important thing to remember that usually it says more about the other person.

Sarah: Absolutely. And I think also I wanna sort of couch this in the context that, like, I am a white woman of a certain level of privilege, and I can't I can't speak to the lived experience of, for example, a black woman who has any number of other barriers again up against speaking up for herself in the workplace and how people react to that. And I think I hope that one of the things that we can do as all women, as we start to speak up in the different ways, is create spaces for people who are even further marginalized to be able to speak up and feel safe doing so as well. And that's easier said than done, of course. And just because I, as a white woman, am getting better at speaking up for myself doesn't magically mean that that space will somehow be safer for an Asian woman or a black woman or any number of things.

Sarah: But I do think that any of the work that we do to create, conversations around well, okay. But, like, this response that you think that I like to brag, because I talk about myself that way. Like, what's that about? And, you know, how do we start shifting that perspective? And how do we start just asking questions like, oh, that's so interesting that you hear me say that and think that I like to brag.

Sarah: What does bragging mean to you? You know? Like, what does that word mean to you? Tell me more.

Erica: Okay, Sarah. All of that is fantastic. So tell me about your new program, speak up, because this program really plays directly into this whole thing that we've been talking about, imposter syndrome and also advocating for yourself. So tell me all about that.

Sarah: Sure. I'd love to. It's, a four month accelerator for leaders who are ready to get promoted or hired and recognized. The framework is you are an exceptional leader, and it is time to hype yourself. So many folks I talk to are they know they're good at what they do.

Sarah: They deliver value every day. Colleagues see them as a high achiever, and they are hungry for that next thing, promotion, the next job, or they just want more recognition at work and something isn't clicking. And so, whether it's, like, they deliver amazing results and senior leadership isn't noticing or they land initial interviews, but they're not progressing to the next round. And so it's it all is rooted in what we were just talking about, this idea of no one will recognize your value if you don't promote yourself. And so speak up is built around that.

Sarah: So, yeah. So I

Erica: would love to see that. What we will do is I will link that in the show notes for anyone who's interested in the speak up program or anyone who might struggle with really advocating for yourself and promoting yourself and essentially speaking up for yourself. But, Sarah, what I love to do is I always end the podcast on this note is what is that one piece of advice you would give to Sarah who was a stage manager turned VP, but the Sarah who wasn't getting that next job? What is that one piece of advice you would tell her?

Sarah: Oh, that's a great question. I think that it comes back to you are amazing at what you do. And if you're anytime you're feeling stuck or maybe, like, you're not progressing in the way that you want, sometimes it's worth just taking a moment to look in the mirror or whatever that means to you, whether it's journaling or taking time to go back and look at your career and actually document some of your accomplishments or talking to friends who have seen you work and can reflect that back to you. But really find a version a way to look at the mirror and see what you've done to get where you are today so that you can build on that to get to the next thing.

Erica: I love it. And that's a great first step. Right? Document. Document what you've already freaking done already.

Erica: You know? Yeah. Well, Sarah, thank you so much for being here. This conversation was so important.

Sarah: Thank you. I appreciate it. Thank you, Erica. It's been been a real pleasure

Erica: to talk to you. Oh, that was such a good one today. I am obsessed with talking about bragging and achievement dysmorphia now. Obsessed. But thank you for tuning in to this conversation with Sarah.

Erica: Her journey from corporate soldier to empowerment instigator, it really shows us that the path to leadership isn't about climbing the ladder. It's about building your own ladder, one empowering step at a time. Now, if today's episode resonated with you, I would be so incredibly grateful if you would take a moment to rate, review, and subscribe to our podcast. Your feedback, it helps me grow. It also enables me to bring more inspiring stories like Sarah's directly to you.

Erica: So please make sure hit that little five star button and let's keep this rolling. One thing I wanna remind you of though before you leave me is stop putting ceilings on what is possible and start smashing through them. Thanks again, and I'll see you next time.