Erica: Hey, girl. By now, you know 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.

Erica: 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. 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 and 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.

Erica: Because honestly, girl, you were never meant to do this alone. Welcome to the Glass Ceilings and Sticky Floors podcast, the podcast where we get real about the challenges women face in work, life, and leadership. I'm your host, Erica Rooney, HR executive, keynote speaker, and executive coach, and I'm on a mission to get more women into positions of power and keep them there. This is the space where we call out the paradoxes.

Erica: Being told to lean in, but not too far. To speak up, but not too loudly. Be ambitious but not too ambitious. Does that sound familiar? Yeah.

Erica: We're over all that. Here, we break down the sticky floors that keep us stuck, from imposter syndrome and perfectionism to burnout and fear, and we give you real strategies to shatter those glass ceilings once and for all. So if you're ready to rewrite the rules, own your power, and take your career and life to the next level, you're in the right place. Now today's guest is tackling the core problem that kills women's confidence, deep seated societal conditioning and the silence around taboos. She is not just living this.

Erica: She is really going deep, talking about empowerment and building companies and movements to help achieve just that, from the boardroom to the bedroom. So y'all, this is going to be interesting. Jingjin Liu is a serial entrepreneur, investor, and global advocate. She is the founder of the Elevate Group, dedicated to advancing women's leadership, and the cofounder of Zazazu, Asia's first sexual wellness company for women.

Erica: With a background that includes being the youngest global marketing director in a male dominated automotive industry, Jingjin knows what it takes to fight discrimination and sexism. She understands this core truth, that confidence in the bedroom leads to confidence in the boardroom. Her mission is to help women build intrinsic confidence by empowering them in all aspects of their lives. So get ready, because today we are diving into how to reclaim your power, fight back against microaggressions, and elevate your ambition by defining success on your own terms. Jingjin, welcome. How are you today?

Jingjin: Thank you so much for having me, Erica. I love to hear my own intro. I don't feel any humbleness or anything. I was just, damn right, that's me.

Erica: No, I hear you.

Jingjin: I hear you.

Erica: I did all that. You feel that?

Jingjin: Any doubt just disappears once you hear your own intro.

Erica: Oh my gosh, right? I tell everybody, you've got to get a hype woman who can introduce you like you're getting on stage for a keynote or a podcast, because that's the thing that will give you a confidence boost in no time. Am I right?

Jingjin: So true, so true.

Erica: Oh my gosh. Okay, we've got to talk about this journey of yours, because you grew up in China, you've worked in Germany. How have you gone from the automotive industry to the sexual wellness industry? You have ping ponged all over. Give me the details. Give me the high level Jingjin story.

Jingjin: High level Jingjin story. It actually all makes sense at the end. I grew up in China, and I was a very socially out of norm, a weird girl. First, I have dark skin, which was not well seen in the eighties in China. I grew up in Beijing, the capital, where social norms are even stronger, where you had to be the good girl, be good in academia, don't speak up too loudly, don't chase the boys. All the things that tend to put girls down to be the good girls. But I am naturally an extroverted person. I like to challenge the status quo. I like to ask a lot of questions. If the teacher said you cannot do this, my first question was, why can't you do this? Combined with my dark skin and my parents being so busy with work that they didn't have a lot of time to take care of me, I became this very weird kid who always spoke too much and always challenged everything. So I was deemed the bad girl.

Jingjin: When I was 16, I told my parents I would not be able to succeed in a country like this. I wanted out. I had always been a petrolhead, and Germany was the natural association. Back then, we didn't have the internet, so anything fast and automotive was linked to Germany. I convinced my parents to send me to Germany, and this is where most things changed for me. Your skin color suddenly becomes beautiful because Western skin tones are more brown toned, and your extroverted personality as an Asian person is a light bulb moment for many who studied or worked with me, that the Chinese girl can be outspoken even though she doesn't speak German. I didn't speak German back then, but I tried to communicate, to make friends, to establish myself even without the verbal language.

Jingjin: Germany helped me build a lot of confidence in my youth. I naturally studied industrial engineering and moved into a very male dominated domain, because I also wanted to give Asian, especially Chinese, women the global stage, since there are so many outstanding ones. But because of our culture, we don't know how to speak up. So we carry the heavy baggage, work hard, and never get seen, especially in non English speaking countries. I entered the commercial vehicle industry and became the triple only, as they called it. Only woman, only Asian, and only senior director under 35. I was also building my own company on the side, which became a fairly big operational company, and I took it to Singapore to expand. In 2017 we got an exit, and with some financial runway, I asked myself, what's next for you? For me, it was still, I want to help women, especially Asian women, find their truth, find their confidence, let their great work be seen. But I'm not a big fan of the lean in narrative or empowerment through power poses. I believe something needs to come from within, but I didn't yet know what that was. I did a lot of research, and I found the angle through sexuality. If you don't even dare to ask your partner, whoever you share the bedroom and the home with, for pleasure, or to wash the dishes, or to pick up the kids, how can you make the ask at work, where most of the peers, the decision makers, the board, the ones who hold position, privilege, and power, are still men? You have to start somewhere much more intrinsic. That's how Zazazu was born, to help women, Asian women specifically, express themselves and have the boldness and courage to ask in the bedroom, then move to make the ask elsewhere.

Erica: Hey there, listeners. If you have ever felt like you're stuck in 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, Glass Ceilings 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, 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 deserves to stay stuck, no one deserves to feel small, and you have glass ceilings to shatter. Let's do this.

Erica: And that's what led to your TED Talk, titled Confidence in the Bedroom Leads to Confidence in the Boardroom. Jingjin, tell me all about the TED Talk. I want to hear how you break down this link between a woman's sense of security in her sexuality and her ability to negotiate, pitch, and lead powerfully in a professional setting.

Jingjin: The bedroom per se isn't only about sexuality. A lot of things happen in the bedroom. Watching television together in the evening. When they sleep, do they open the window? Some people like more light, less light, colder or warmer. You have the most intimate conversations in the bedroom, about your kids, your desires, your work. It's way beyond just sex, but that's how we're conditioned to think, okay, sex. And in the bedroom, this is a place where women, in a heterosexual relationship, make the most compromises.

Jingjin: Take pleasure, for example. We did an actual survey, for Asian women specifically, with 500 women, asking, have you ever had an orgasm? Yes, no, or I don't know? You can guess which answer was chosen most. It's I don't know. 88% said, I'm not sure. When you ask deeper, how can you not be sure, it's because there's unfortunately no way to measure it. No fitness ring or watch can test that. So how do you know your own desire? Do you understand your body? Do you know what turns you on? More importantly, does your partner know? A lot of women say they kind of know their own desire, but when it comes to whether their partner knows, most say no, because they're too ashamed to ask, or they can't elaborate, or they think he wouldn't understand. The communication gap starts there. You have a certain desire in the most intimate setting, but you can't communicate it to your partner because you don't dare ask or find the words.

Jingjin: This is the first wall you build at home, in the bedroom. And it carries from the bedroom to the kitchen. Ask for help washing dishes, picking up the kids, any household chore, and a lot of women don't ask, because it's easier to just do it yourself, since if you ask your husband he might take forever. So the woman takes over the task herself. In a hot country like Singapore, women generally feel colder than men, so men turn the air conditioner very cold. Instead of asking to turn it off, women accommodate: put on warmer pajamas, cover up. Same with watching TV. A lot of men say they need to wind down with Netflix, but a lot of women want to sleep, so instead of asking for it to be turned off, they use an eye mask and earplugs. Little by little, from the bedroom to the kitchen, from sexual desire to who's on which side of the bed, women make compromises at home, and then carry that same pattern into the workplace, because you're already used to compromising there. You can't even ask the closest person in your life for something small. How do you find the confidence to ask a boss, a peer, a project manager, for a bigger budget or a better salary, because deep down, women think, I'm not worth it.

Erica: This is fascinating to me, because I'm seeing all the parallels. What you're saying is we tend to segment and think we're only conditioned in the workplace, or only conditioned in the personal, home space. But really it's the whole picture, because we start and end our day in the bedroom. We're not asserting ourselves, we're not speaking our minds, we're not putting ourselves first in any way, shape, or form. And then we carry that on throughout the day. It's this natural extension of women accommodating, accommodating, accommodating, caregiving, caregiving, caregiving, that we end up stuck in this cycle. How do we break free from that?

Jingjin: By starting with something very small. I'm a firm believer in breaking the ceiling at home first. It's kind of like a maternal wall. Think of it as seven, seven, seven. Seven hours of sleep, seven hours of work, seven hours with family, friends, and leisure, ideally. So the majority of your time outside of work, a big amount of it, is actually spent in the bedroom with your partner. You need to start exercising there. Confidence is a muscle. It's like a strong bicep, someone trained for it, they weren't born with it. You start by making small asks, the kind you usually wouldn't make for whatever reason, shame, or just because it's faster to do it yourself. But those small accommodations accumulate. You wash the dishes, you pick up the kids, you do the dry cleaning, and suddenly you're what I call an eco parent, and eco parenting doesn't mean fifty fifty. It's nowhere close to fifty fifty. So you have to start somewhere. Start in the bedroom, where it's most intimate, and it doesn't need to be sexual. It can be as simple as, what do you not like in your bedroom? We women can be very picky, but there's always something we tolerate because of our partner or circumstances, and we talk ourselves into it. I had a woman tell me her husband snores so loudly it wakes her at night, and their baby is already five years old. She said she asked him to get it checked, but it never worked out, so now she sleeps with an earplug in one ear. Women tell themselves this kind of story because they think they can't change the other person, and because for men, there are no consequences. Men don't understand it as a real cost. We're so used to this pattern, inherited from our parents and the women around us, that our tolerance is far too high. You have to start somewhere.

Erica: It's almost like I'm hearing, we've got to lower our tolerance for bullshit, because we've built up such a huge tolerance. That snoring example is so perfect. Every woman can relate to that. I sleep with expensive noise cancelling earbuds because my husband snores. It's like we've got to lower this tolerance level, and I love that instead of the tired old put your own oxygen mask on first analogy.

Jingjin: Yeah.

Erica: But okay, so I know you've faced sexism and microaggressions of all kinds in the workplace. In my world, we talk a lot about sticky floors, the limiting beliefs and toxic behaviors that keep you stuck. Talk to me about the badass women you've encountered in corporate settings. What is the most common sticky floor you see them stuck in? Is it the likability trap, or being worried about being judged as a mom? What advice would you give them?

Jingjin: I think twofold. One is the likability trap, and this ranges from junior manager to CEO. You make a tough decision, and suddenly your team thinks you're a bitch, unfair, combative, all the bad words. It's very difficult for women, due to our upbringing, to separate a business decision from an emotional one, because we genuinely care about people. If it were up to us, we'd rather compromise on profit to keep more people employed than compromise on headcount for better margins. But the rules in most corporations, even at the big companies, are designed for men by men, and no one has really challenged them. If more women ran things, I think the business KPIs would look very different. But today the KPIs are about the bottom line, the top line, shareholder value, and with those KPIs you can't be liked and also make tough decisions. You have to make tough calls that let people go sometimes, even good people who aren't right for the position or the company anymore, and that carries an emotional cost at home, even when it was the right business decision.

Jingjin: The second sticky floor is perfectionism. It's so deeply ingrained, and it's strange because nothing is ever actually perfect. You'll always find something wrong with what you deliver. There's the eighty twenty rule, spend eighty percent of your time on the twenty percent that matters, not the other way around, but women still worry the deck isn't perfect, there aren't enough details, what if they ask a question I don't have the answer to. We were brought up to always be perfect, because if you do something out of the norm, the criticism comes immediately, from parents, from teachers, from friends' parents. Even in a corporate setting, if a woman is too assertive in a meeting, everyone bristles, even other women, myself included sometimes. But let a man say the exact same thing, decisively shutting down a tangent to refocus a meeting, and no one blinks. It's so deeply ingrained in both women and men. The perfectionism trap keeps you holding everything in your own hands, which doesn't actually progress your career. Those are the two stickiest floors I see.

Erica: I love this shift from being liked to being respected, because it's important in your professional climb to be liked, to build relationships with your peers. But once you're in a position of authority, you have to switch your mindset from I want to be liked to I want to make decisions that will be respected. You kind of led into my next question when you mentioned perfectionism. I've also seen women trying to tear down other women, what's been coined tall poppy syndrome, going after the people rising above everyone else because then they're not like us anymore. I know you're passionate about women supporting women. How do we move past this scarcity mindset, that there's only room for one of us at the top, and really embrace collective growth to disrupt the existing power structure?

Jingjin: I wish there were an easier answer, but it's so deep. I fight this myself every day. Some of my closest friends and I came up together, and some of them are doing really well, and the first question I often ask myself is, why not me? I am proud and happy for them, and I've noticed that when you actually manage to genuinely be happy for someone, you realize her doing better does not mean you're doing worse. There's a huge gap between those two ideas. If someone is doing better, first, it means there's room, there's opportunity for you too. And second, when more women reach positions of power and privilege and decision making, everyone else gets lifted too, because it's no longer rare. I think the logic is that when there are twelve seats on an executive board and only two are held by women, that already feels like enough to some people. I was once on a C-suite speaking panel, and someone told me, Gigi, we actually don't need you anymore, we already have one woman, out of four panelists. I thought, what's the reasoning there? No one ever says, there are three men on this panel, we don't need a fourth man. Because of that social conditioning, we get distracted fighting each other for the one crumb of the cookie, instead of saying, I could get the whole cookie too.

Jingjin: There's a lot of reframing needed here, to genuinely see the upside when someone with a similar background makes it. But it has to start with someone who's made it choosing to send the elevator back down for others. That's the part that isn't fully controllable, because it depends on the mindset of that person. Generally, the more women talk about supporting women, the less powerful it actually becomes, because it's the less privileged supporting the less privileged. I think a big part of the real fix is getting allies who are men, the ones who actually hold the power, position, and privilege, to make deliberate decisions, saying, if I have a male candidate and a female candidate, all else equal, I'll pick the woman, to make up for how far behind we still are. If we make that kind of deliberate decision to bring more capable women in, this dynamic can dissolve naturally, because we're not fighting over the same seats anymore, we're competing on who's the better candidate, since we're nowhere close to equal yet.

Erica: I love that. I love this message of get the whole damn cookie. I don't want to split my cookie with you, I want to eat the whole damn cookie. But you're absolutely right, some of the biggest leaps in my career happened because I had an ally or an advocate pulling me into rooms I never would have been invited to otherwise. I'm extremely grateful to advocates, and I'm hopefully raising a little ten year old advocate myself, so he can be there for women too.

Jingjin: Women too.

Erica: You're such a vocal advocate on LinkedIn. One of my favorite things about you is how regularly you post about women's empowerment and getting more women into positions of power. Where do you find all the inspiration? It's magnetizing.

Jingjin: Thank you. I think it's because I work every day with women, and the work I do isn't only career coaching, I actually hate that word, it's so misused. I think most people don't have lived experience, even with an ICF certification. If you haven't actually been discriminated against or fought your way through it, you can't legitimately speak on this topic, and I have. The second part is it's not only about the boardroom, it's also the motherhood journey, every stage of a woman's career combined with every life stage, pre pregnancy, during pregnancy, post pregnancy, perimenopause, menopause. I see empowerment as a holistic thing, because one part can't live without the other. The problem with the lean in movement is it only focuses on leaning in, but you also have to lean out, and lean in at home. You have to look at the whole construct holistically. So I try to challenge the status quo, the cookie scene, or how we make life choices around partners, who you should marry, because prince charming isn't going to fix this for you. The more you look into it, work or home, the social conditioning for women is such a long, deeply ingrained topic, all the way to women's health. There are so many aspects to this, and the more you talk to women and work with women, the more inspiration you get, and it confirms the narrative, because a lot of people outside this space say we're quite advanced, women have it better than ever before. Factually that's true. But if you look at where we actually are, from junior brand manager to CEO, we're nowhere close to where we should be.

Erica: We're not. And it's quite disgusting to me that this is the fiftieth anniversary in America of women being able to get a home mortgage without a man. That's beyond my comprehension, it feels like it should have been fixed in the 1800s. But that's where we are today. Jingjin, tell me, what is Elevate up to next? What are you excited about right now?

Jingjin: What I'm actually excited about isn't a big project, it's a narrative change. Elevate Group, which I founded with my business partner, is a group of companies that help women progress in the workplace, and help companies dismantle gender barriers. We work B2C, B2B, one to one, so it's a broad scope. Our mission has always been to impact 5 million professional women working in Asia and Asian women globally. We've been running this for over two years now, and after I moved to Germany we realized half of our audience isn't Asian at all and isn't working in Asia. They're writing to me from Africa, the US, Canada, Dubai, Abu Dhabi. Someone in Lagos has the exact same problem as someone sitting in Switzerland, the exact same gender discrimination, the same don't be too assertive message. I used to think Western women were more vocal, but the barrier is the same, different but the same. So this shift means changing the narrative, to impact 5 million women in business regardless of where they come from or their upbringing, because we have more in common than we're different. When something becomes a global movement, not just holding hands and singing kumbaya, but really getting decision makers to make change and lifting each other up globally, that's what excites me most. We don't know exactly what it will look like yet, it's about the reach and the narrative.

Erica: You don't have to know yet, that's the beauty of it, you figure it out as you go. That is super exciting, and I love that evolution, I think it's needed, I think it's the right time for it. Women in business, that's going to be so powerful. Thank you, Jingjin, for being here. If today's conversation lit a fire under you, here's your next move. Don't keep it to yourself. Share this episode with a friend, drop a review, and let's keep the conversation going. Remember, your potential is limitless, and the only thing standing in your way are those sticky floors. But guess what, you've got the power to break through them. So go out there,

Jingjin: hang up some dang capes, and let's shatter some ceilings together.