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, handling 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 a 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.

Jennie: I think for me, that was really my big limiting belief, was I'm not enough, which kept me tricked into thinking, well, if I just do more, then I can feel, again, at the end of this week, if I could just get this next project sold, then I can feel settled. And the words I would have used at that time, I wasn't in touch with the fact that it was not enough, but I never finished the statement. It was always, if I can just get to the next project. I never finished it to say, what? Then I'll feel peace?

Jennie: Then I'll finally feel like I'm enough? Then I'll be able to take a rest? Like, I didn't know what that if then statement was, but I would say it all the time. If I can just get through this week, if I can just get to the next level. But I think without that definition of that endpoint, I was just chasing for what is the thing that will make me feel like I'm enough.

Erica: Today, we have the corporate rehab queen, Jennie Blumenthal, who I absolutely adore, because she is a woman who is on a mission to help leaders thrive. She's a CEO, a best selling author, speaker, coach, board member, and a university adjunct professor, which, that's a lot. But she has mastered this shift, y'all, from surviving to thriving, which, let's be real, we all need to be on this track.

Erica: So, Jennie, how are you?

Jennie: I'm doing well, Erica. Thanks so much for having me today.

Erica: Oh, I cannot wait. Our work is so intertwined. So I'm just so pumped to have you here, but I've gotta hear the story. You had this successful corporate career going for you, you know, according to your LinkedIn.

Erica: That's what it looks like. Right? I'd love to hear kind of what got you there and then what got you here.

Jennie: Yeah. So, long story, but I'll sum it up. What got me ahead in corporate America is probably what got me to rehabbing myself post corporate America. Really, my story starts back in Virginia. I grew up on a farm, raised by parents and big influence from my grandmother who was raised in the Depression, valued hard work, valued grit, valued resilience, all the things that are wonderful character traits, but also tend to keep you very focused on surviving.

Jennie: And so I survived my way right up that corporate ladder, and for a long time really enjoyed my job. And there were so many things I liked about it. I was building a huge practice within this consulting firm. I wound up making partner there, was running a $200,000,000 business unit, managing 250 people, living the dream, living my grandmother's wildest dream. And in a lot of ways, I enjoyed coming into the boardroom and owning the room and managing this huge network.

Jennie: But there was a part of me that kept thinking, this little quiet voice within my soul saying, I don't really know this is what you're meant to do. And there's this grind that I started to feel in terms of the Sunday scaries, of not really wanting to jump back into work, or thinking, really, what I did is fooled myself a lot of the time. I think this week will be easier. I think if I can just get through the next week, if I just get this person onboarded or just finish this project, then it will be easier. And so I put my head down, and I did what had always gotten me ahead, which was just work even harder and faster, and hope that trying to accomplish more would get me not only to the top of the corporate ladder, but more time with my children who were elementary schoolers.

Jennie: My husband had his own job. And so by the time we hit the pandemic, I was on planes three times a week, and suddenly thinking, wait a minute. This isn't exactly what I thought I'd worked so hard for. Is this the life I really wanted? And when the pandemic hit, at first I thought, great.

Jennie: We have a little bit more time. But then quickly, it just became fourteen hour days on Zoom and a whole lot of early excitement around saving industries that were in peril, that then turned back into just go sell that multimillion dollar deal and boost the share price, and it just lacked meaning. And so that hard work kind of got me to a point where I had burned out, and I decided I didn't know what was happening next, but I couldn't live like this anymore. And I pivoted out, and that's really where my real leadership, I think, began, or the next phase of my journey, where I decided I would look into why I stayed as long as I did and what kept me stuck, that was in me, and what kept me stuck in the environment that was around me. And so that's really how I got from leading this huge Fortune 500 consulting career into now becoming an entrepreneur and an author and building what's next.

Erica: Oh my gosh. Well, first of all, as you were telling your story, I was like, is she talking about me? And I felt so seen when you said this week will be easier. This week will be easier. Because I think so many of us, we have this massive to do list, and we think, if I just get through this to do list or this day or this week, and then we have this false hope maybe that the next week, I won't have that to do list.

Erica: But you're right. It never changes. So I felt very seen by that.

Jennie: Good. Well, I'm sorry, but I also am thrilled, because sometimes all it takes is just knowing it's not just you.

Erica: Absolutely. You're not alone in it. That's why we do this podcast. Because you look at how great everybody else is doing, and if you're sitting back there just barely surviving, wondering how can this Jennie be climbing the ladder and leading all these companies and doing all these things, and I can barely make it through my list.

Jennie: Right. Exactly. Then if that's the case, then you're just like, oh, it's just that I don't have the one app that she's discovered yet. Or maybe if I had the planner, then I could feel like I had all the things done.

Erica: Planners. So question for you. I love this term corporate rehab. What brought you to the term corporate rehab? How did you come up with that?

Erica: What does it mean to you?

Jennie: Yeah. So it started actually as a little bit of a joke, because when I left at the top of my career and I had so many people saying, oh my god. What happened? And what are you doing now? And, oh my gosh.

Jennie: I bet you're gonna unveil this big other job you're going to. And it was the early days of the pandemic. It was October 2020. And I started to tell people that what I was really doing was putting myself through my own corporate rehab. And I said that because I had recognized that these patterns that I was stuck in were no longer good for me.

Jennie: And there was this substance that I was hooked on, and I couldn't tell what it was. It wasn't alcohol or drugs, but there was something that was making me stay in these patterns that I knew weren't great. They weren't great for the relationships around me. They weren't great for me being able to live my full life. They were great for fulfilling this image of this career woman who can do it all and who's superwoman.

Jennie: And so I just kinda kept with that premise, and I started researching. I have an MBA. I've got all the business accolades. I was like, let me go figure out all of the emotional, mental, social, physiological stuff that we're not taught in school. And what is it about these patterns that I have?

Jennie: How much of this is me that I should have realized, maybe gotten the best planner and realized this a long time ago? And how much of this is the environment around us? And I started joking about that name, but the more I said it, the more I couldn't get away from it. Because for me, it's now a sense of really reconnecting to yourself, to this version of you that you were before layers got added on. And if we think of it as even physical therapy when it comes to rehab, you're just restoring the capability of an arm or a leg that used to work in a certain way, and then you had wear and tear on it or you had an accident of some sort.

Jennie: Now you're restoring that capability. Or even if we think about substance abuse, and I take that very seriously and don't mean that to be taken lightly, but typically there's pain involved when that's the case. Whenever we have these coping mechanisms that keep us coping with whatever pain we have.

Jennie: You know, we as a society look down on substance abuse and have a perspective on that, but we don't have any issue with workaholism. We don't have any issue with consumerism. We don't have any issue with social media consumption. All of those are acceptable coping skills. And so I just looked at it as, when you let your identity, and you let what I determined was the root of my issues that I think is the same for a lot of people.

Jennie: It's this hustle culture that we get hooked on, where it could show up as us fitting in one more meeting or getting to this next level of salary to finally feel like we're enough. It could show up as getting your kid into the right piano recital or the right summer camp or on the right list at the right pool in your neighborhood. Whatever it is for you that feels like you're finally enough is the thing that sometimes we can get hooked on, that makes us fulfill these needs that we actually have as humans in a bit of a false way, as opposed to actually reconnecting with yourself and fulfilling your needs at a human level in a healthy way. And so that's really what it means to me now. And the work that I do is actually rehabbing leadership.

Jennie: The way that we lead, both inside and outside of corporate America, the way we lead ourselves, the way we lead others, needs to change. We go from this command and control, listen to what I do, let me try to run and do as much as I can, achieve all at once, towards, I'd like us to get to something where we don't have the hustle culture running our lives, and we're actually able to lead from a more authentic place, which really requires us to shift some of the mindsets and patterns that we've brought with us till now.

Erica: I don't think that it takes away or diminishes any type of true rehab for alcohol or drugs or whatever it may be. Although I'm sure there are plenty of people out there who may disagree with me. But I do believe that that is important, because it's all about unlearning the behaviors that we have instilled over time. You know? Just like with alcohol and drugs, if you are doing that, it is giving you a certain outcome that you are seeking, a certain reward.

Erica: Right? Maybe it's numbing.

Jennie: That's right.

Erica: Whatever. When you're a workaholic and you are just grinding and hustling, chasing the next reward, those accomplishments are your drug.

Jennie: And you're chasing these things, but they're not connecting with your values or the person that you want to be. That's exactly right. That really led me to be really curious about, okay, well, we've kind of accepted socially that being an alcoholic is a bad thing, and you must not be able to handle it.

Jennie: There's this weakness to you, versus maybe that person is just choosing alcohol instead of Netflix as their coping mechanism. And one of them seems okay, and the other one we don't tolerate as a society. And the same thing can be said, to your point, of performance and productivity, when we're raised that that is the outcome that we should all go for. Which we would all look at it and say, of course you'd wanna be productive. Of course you wanna perform at work. That makes sense.

Jennie: But when it becomes this outsized part of your identity, when it covers more of your needs than being whole and human and reconnected to yourself or the relationships in your life, it's taking on more of an unhealthy coping mechanism, just like anything else we'd put at that center. And part of this work is putting yourself back at the center, not in a selfish way, because for the women listening, that's often an easy thing that we get a lot of mixed messages around. I believe if you put yourself at the center of this, you can also do that in a way that's not selfish, that's really just centering your natural talents, if depending on your belief system, your god given talents and gifts for this world, or what the universe is expecting you to do. You can do that without becoming egotistical or overdoing that. It's just really about reconnecting to yourself, because we spend so much of our life disconnected.

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, 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 handle 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. So true.

Erica: So true. So you talked about that moment where you felt like you were living a dream. It wasn't that dream after all. Maybe it was more of a nightmare. I don't know.

Erica: What was that pivotal moment for you? Kind of that realization.

Jennie: Yeah. So it kinda built over time, and then I think I was trying to be happy for so long that I realized that I wasn't actually happy. I was just really trying to be happy. And for me, it kind of was the confluence of a couple of events right around the pandemic. So it was September, early pandemic.

Jennie: Instead of being on all these planes and flying everywhere for clients, I was taking up tennis with my family, and we were getting to reconnect, and it felt great. And all of that built up to the new fiscal year for the company that I was working for, where all of a sudden they started out the next year, and all of the messages of we've worked so hard to save all these jobs in the industry. I was leading our travel and hospitality group at the time, which meant that I was getting up every day and leading a task force of partners who were trying to reinvent new solutions, and it felt really purposeful. I was really helping people save their jobs, feed their families, have hope when we were all in lockdown. Then July 1 happened, and the new revenue goals were set out for the next year.

Jennie: And the questions were, well, how are you going to get all of these people redeployed onto new teams and selling multimillions of dollars worth of things? All we care about is those $10,000,000 deals. Which, no disrespect to capitalism, we all need money to pay for things. But at the same time, going from this place where I felt so purposeful about what I was doing to this place where it was just like, you're just a number, you're just a cog in the wheel to make everybody else more money, and get out there and sell, sell, sell, it lacked meaning, really, for me.

Jennie: So it was that. And then the firm restructured and laid off a bunch of senior partners that had been there for so long and dutifully moved their families every couple of years, and suddenly were tapped on the shoulder and said, you're no longer needed.

Erica: Mhmm.

Jennie: I've seen that message play out with layoffs across the industry now, but that was one of the things early on that I thought, boy. And my husband gave me some tough love and was like, you're gonna be 52 one day, and someone's gonna tap you on the shoulder and say thanks, but no longer needed. Which sounds really young now that I say it.

Jennie: But it was a real wake up moment. You know, my kids were in third and fifth grade at that point. And I was thinking, I can keep going down this path, but in ten years, I'll have more money, and I'll lose the opportunity to have a connection with my children, with my husband. And ultimately, what I didn't realize at the time, but I learned through this, is with myself. I was really putting myself last in so many things, just to get everything done, and not in touch with my own needs, that it was really holding me back from being able to be the type of leader that I wanted to be.

Jennie: And so that was really the main confluence of events. And one night, my son was delivering me dinner on a Zoom as I was leading a team meeting from this office. And I said, oh, it's so hard, buddy. I know this is really tough. We haven't been able to get outside.

Jennie: And he's like, it's okay. I get to see you on the weekends. That's great. And I was like, okay. What am I doing this for?

Jennie: Like, if I'm really doing this job for my family and to provide for them and to show them what a hardworking career mom looks like, is this it? My 12 year old delivering me dinner at 8PM? I don't think so. I don't think that's what I want for my life, and it's certainly not what I want them to see. And that was the moment that really solidified things for me.

Erica: Gosh. Isn't it wild how sometimes just a small moment like that? You know, they use the term the straw that breaks the camel's back, but it is just such a small act of him. And he probably did that many times before the pandemic.

Jennie: Totally. Yeah. And in that case too, my husband was telling me his own perspectives of what he thought I should do, and I was still trying to, you know, a strong woman is one who is resilient and pushes through, and I can just get through this next thing. And if I just keep going, and I don't wanna be weak, I don't wanna quit, I don't wanna be a quitter.

Jennie: And it took a child to say, hey, this is great, mom. It's just good to see you on Saturdays. And I was like, what am I doing? Who am I fooling at this point?

Erica: I'm gonna give him five stars for being an optimist, though.

Jennie: Totally.

Erica: You know? He wins the optimism award. So you talked a bit about burnout and how you were experiencing burnout. How did that show up in your life? Was it emotionally? Was it physically?

Erica: Did you change habits? What was that like for you?

Jennie: Yeah. So for me, it's a great question. For me, it was emotional. But part of my story is I learned a long time ago to cut off the emotions that weren't that welcome in my life growing up, and they weren't that helpful in serving me at work.

Jennie: And so it was a heck of a lot easier to honestly go through life just distancing myself from any of the frustration and use those emotions to fuel you. And, I mean, basically, pick any strong sports coach that we would see in the public eye, what they would tell an athlete. That's what I was telling myself. Like, don't feel hopelessness or loneliness or frustration. Just use that as fuel and keep going.

Jennie: Sounds great on a Gatorade bottle. But for me, it was really leading me to my own burnout, and I wasn't in touch with the messages my own body was sending me. I did start developing pain in my hips, which I later, once I went on this whole journey, realized was a place that you can trap anger. And a lot of times when your creative process isn't being able to be expressed, that's where the seat of creativity is within our bodies spiritually. And so there were a lot of messages my body was already sending me.

Jennie: And for a lot of reasons, I decided to put my head down. I was trained to put my head down. Right? And I think we're contending as a workforce right now with marrying that up with, how do you be authentic at work and vulnerable and show up as yourself. And there's still some cultures where we say those things, but then we reward different behavior.

Jennie: One of the interviews I did for the book, a woman said, we talk a lot about how it's important to show up as yourself and that we reward wellness, but we increased our mental health benefits the same day that we increased our utilization targets for client billing. So it's that type of left hand, right hand that I see all the time, unfortunately. Mine was really showing up as this emotional robot, essentially, is where I got to by the end of it, where I was not listening to my body. And it was sending me a ton of signals, but I just wasn't connected enough to interpret them.

Erica: So I wanna touch on this showing up as your authentic and empathetic self, because this is super popular right now. This is super big, and I believe that it is so important, but I also believe that it can add a challenge to women and to leadership of, like, am I authentic enough? Am I being empathetic enough? And almost going too far to the left, to where they are trying to be as authentic and empathetic as possible, and then as a result, not.

Erica: Do you ever see that?

Jennie: Yeah. That's a great point. I mean, I do see that a decent amount with the corporate clients that I'm working with, of how to actually show up as yourself and know how much of that is on you as the leader, and how much of it is on you to create a sense of safety and empower your teams, which I think is the key in a lot of this. As we all fumble through this, which is natural. Right?

Jennie: What we're seeing is a lot of generational divides, where you have people in power tend to be part of the Gen X and boomer generation, and they're saying, is this all on me to make sure that everybody's happy and I have to guarantee their happiness? And I don't believe that. I think we're each in charge of defining our own success, figuring out what happiness and joy looks like, deciding what's realistic of how much we get from our jobs versus other parts of our lives. All of those are a big piece of that. But then also fully taking ownership of that.

Jennie: And I think what you're seeing now is the swing of people saying, well, I'm not happy, and, boss, you're supposed to make me happy. And then the boss is like, well, shoot, I need to be really empathetic. What can I do to make you happy? Where the pendulum kinda needs to net out in the middle is that boss showing up as an empathetic leader, with all of the retraining and the new language and the things that will actually make them authentic, but hopefully also empathetic at the time, and not just command and control.

Jennie: But then the employee is really getting to a place where they feel like they're able to take back some of the power they're just giving to a leader to go fix it for them. Things like setting time and energy boundaries, things like understanding what's within their control, versus what are they just doing within autopilot, of how to say no to something in a way that lets the team get it done or takes turns. As opposed to where I think we're netting out, is a lot of people are saying that the younger generations are just coming in as entitled. I don't quite buy that. I definitely think there's individuals that are absolutely entitled, just like I think there's bosses that are jerks. But I think the majority of people are looking for ways to integrate their work and life a little bit differently than we have in the past.

Jennie: And so we're struggling with that tension to figure out how does that show up, and then how do I integrate that within the rest of my culture in this workplace.

Erica: I think that's a great point. And also every team, every company is all different. What makes leadership challenging is that I have to meet every single one of my team members where they're at. And it's on me, the onus is on me, to make sure that you're involving everybody so that they can take some of the ownership of that, and that'll kinda get you to that place of authenticity and empathy.

Jennie: That's right. It's a lot better for everybody. Yes.

Erica: So when you think about your sticky floors, and we've touched on workaholism, burnout, we've talked about pulling in those old emotions of resilience and grit and not being able to let them go, what would you name that sticky floor?

Jennie: Yeah. So mine was a limiting belief for sure, and my limiting belief is I'm not enough. And so that kept me running for a long time. By the way, that's, like, one of the number one limiting beliefs of women. So if someone's listening to this and saying, oh, jeez, me too.

Jennie: That piece, like, I need to be stronger. I'm not enough. I need to run faster. All of those things kinda stem back to, there's this way that I can produce my way to being enough. Or I can produce my way, the other piece of it, to not feel vulnerable.

Jennie: So if I produce and I have this title and I have enough money and I have the security, then I don't have to feel the bad feelings of shame or unworthiness, or not being able to afford the vacation, or feeling vulnerable with my husband or kids around my title or whatever it might be. And so I think for me, that was really my big limiting belief, was I'm not enough, which kept me tricked into thinking, well, if I just do more, then again, at the end of this week, if I could just get this next project sold, then I can feel settled. And the words I would have used at that time, I wasn't in touch with the fact that it was not enough, but I never finished the statement. It was always, if I can just get to the next project. I never finished it to say, what?

Jennie: Then I'll feel peace? Then I'll finally feel like I'm enough? Then I'll be able to take a rest? I didn't know what that if then statement was, but I would say it all the time. If I can just get through this week, if I can just get to the next level.

Jennie: But I think without that definition of that endpoint, I was just chasing for what is the thing that will make me feel like I'm enough. Had I ended that sentence and realized that what was really ending that sentence was, I will finally feel like I'm enough, then I could have questioned it and said, will this next level make me feel like I'm enough? Will this amount of money ever make me feel like I'm enough? Will checking these 10 things off the task list for the day make me feel like I'm enough? And I could have maybe questioned that a little bit.

Jennie: But to your point, the sticky floor was this limiting belief running in the background that I wasn't even aware of, kept me running for my worth outside of myself for so long. And it took me stopping running for a little while to kinda return to myself and find that out.

Erica: That's an amazing exercise, because as you were talking, I'm going through my head of all the times I've told myself.

Jennie: Oh my gosh.

Erica: And one of the biggest things initially was, I've always told myself it'll slow down. Let's be real, Erica. Let's flip forward to next week. What does that look like?

Jennie: Right. Exactly.

Erica: So I'm just telling myself this fallacy every single Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and then I get to Friday. I've got two days to breathe, and then it's, okay, I just gotta get through this week, and then I'll be less busy. But are you?

Jennie: Yes. Exactly.

Erica: And 99% of the time, the answer is no. Going deeper, it's even peeling back that onion, because it isn't necessarily about the slowing down.

Erica: It's about peeling back the onion to get to that I am enough, or I'm running from something else, or I'm covering up for something, whatever it is. So that's a very interesting exercise.

Jennie: Yeah. And it's interesting you say that, because if I think back, I definitely had the Sunday scaries, although mine took the form of getting everything done, the meal planning, and that. It was like the Sunday frenzies, if that's a better word. But my Mondays, I was so optimistic. Like, everybody is like, oh, if you're burned out, you look towards Monday with dread.

Jennie: And I was like, that wasn't me, so I must be happy, because I'm so excited to go to work. But to your point, I was excited because I was like, this is the week it's all gonna get done. And my downtime was Friday, where I was like, oh my god, I didn't get all these things done, but there's always next week. And if I had been watching my life as a movie, I'd be like, oh, she's gonna figure it out. Nope. She still hasn't figured it out this week. Next week is gonna be the same.

Jennie: And it does take that slowing down a little bit to kind of go within and understand that piece. And one of the things I love coaching on this and training on this, but one of the best exercises, I think, for limiting beliefs is Tara Brach's RAIN methodology, where she focuses on four steps to kind of recognize that limiting belief and then reframe it.

Jennie: I'll share it now in case it's helpful with anybody, but RAIN stands for recognize. So first of all, recognize you're having that limiting belief. I think the best time to do it is when you've just made a mistake. So you've got to the presentation unprepared, you yelled at your kid, whatever it might be that you catch yourself. Right there, try to recognize what's the next thought that goes through your brain.

Jennie: For me, I have to say it out loud in order for me to recognize how mean it is. A is allow, is the next piece, and that means don't add shame to it. Okay? So if my recognize was, ugh, I yelled at the kids again, I can't believe I did that.

Jennie: Allowing it would be, I just yelled at them. I understand. I just yelled. As opposed to, I always do this. God, why am I such a bad mom?

Jennie: And they're gonna hate me when they get older. That would be adding shame and shame and shame on top of it, which adds the shame spiral, which prevents you and shuts your brain down from seeing anything else. So first of all, allow it. Right? Recognize, allow.

Jennie: The I stands for investigate. So once you've given yourself space to actually recognize it and allow it, then dig beneath it. Like, why did I just yell? And why do I think I always yell at them? Or why did I say I'm such a bad mom?

Jennie: Or what makes me feel that way? And sometimes you find some interesting answers. That's like the whole piece where I got to my I'm not enough. Why do I always feel like I need to do this?

Jennie: Well, because if I was a better mom, I would do these 10 things. Well, okay. Is that really true? And just kind of investigate whether that's the real truth. And then N is probably the hardest part of all, which is nurture, which is add some self compassion to that.

Jennie: I'm a great mom. I just made a mistake in that moment. Right? And I don't always yell. But when I yell, I feel really crappy about it, and I can always repair.

Jennie: So giving yourself, through nurture, a different thing to say to yourself, so that when your mind pops up, you're not going down that same track, is the way to do the RAIN methodology for any limiting belief you have. And it takes some time, but I think it's worth doing, to kind of reprogram some of these automatic responses we have that kept us safe at one part in our lives, but are just holding us down and keeping us stuck in behaviors that might not be that healthy for us now.

Erica: So I feel like the self compassion piece of this is the hardest.

Jennie: Mhmm. Mhmm.

Erica: How do you go about exercising self compassion for yourself when you feel these limiting beliefs bubble up?

Jennie: Yeah. So for me, and again, this comes to the I'm not enough piece. Sometimes this gets into perfectionism, but I'll first tell you how I got there, and then I'll tell you how I chose compassion on top of it, where I felt these feelings I didn't wanna feel. Like, oh my gosh, I'm a crappy mom.

Jennie: My solution was always, what's always worked? Work harder. Like, just punish myself and just jump in. Okay, well, tomorrow, I'm gonna do this.

Jennie: And next time, I won't ever raise my voice at all. And if I could just be better, then we don't have to feel this disconnection that we're feeling. And so the first step for me, when I had to apply nurture, was to just admit that it's okay to have that feeling, that all moms have that feeling, or all workers who walk into the boardroom unprepared feel like that. And just to give myself permission to be human, which was really hard, because I didn't realize that I was holding myself to this really, really high standard. And then the other piece of it, I just have to remind myself that I wasn't born a perfectionist.

Jennie: I wasn't born a workaholic. I earned that title the hard way, and it's not the true me. So if I can reconnect to who I was as a kid, which was playing barefoot outside and picking flowers, that's a very real part of me. And there's nothing wrong with me. It's just a matter of kind of reconnecting to her.

Jennie: But it just reminds me that I'm just peeling back these layers that kept me very safe for a long time, got me ahead for a long time, and now are holding me back from being fully human.

Erica: This keeping you safe thing is so important, because that is why we've always done these things.

Jennie: Yes. That's right.

Erica: They're not always bad things.

Jennie: That's right.

Erica: Where it can get really tricky in recognizing it is because what you've always done got you here. And here can be an okay place.

Jennie: Right? It can be a great place.

Erica: Absolutely. They've been survival mechanisms, and that's the harder thing to kind of recognize and own, and then take that next step forward of, like, okay, this isn't the best way to go moving forward.

Jennie: Definitely. And I'd love to say a couple words on that, because I think it is important. When I say allow it as part of the RAIN methodology and not add shame, I think it's really important when you do this work for yourself to try to drop the judgment and try to just park that for a second. And if you think of it this way, someone gave me this tip, which I love, is drop the judgment and just pick up curiosity for a minute.

Jennie: We're just getting curious about the way we kept ourselves safe. Because where you can easily get to is, I can almost guarantee there's something in your past that made you feel like you had to be safe. So there's a boss, a sibling, a parent, somebody in your past that might have been in a situation where you didn't feel as safe. And the immediate response is we wanna protect that person, and, oh, they did the best they could, or it wasn't that bad. And that's applying judgment to it, or protection and deflecting, as opposed to saying, okay, but there was a reason I felt unsafe in that moment, and maybe I can just get curious about why I felt unsafe in that moment.

Jennie: If we can just drop the judgment and just get curious about it, it opens up a lot of other understanding.

Erica: Back to peeling back the onion.

Jennie: Oh, it's so true. It's so true.

Erica: The layers. I love it. Oh my gosh. So what I also find interesting too, and I get asked this question a lot, is, like, are we free from these sticky floors? Do they go away?

Erica: What is your take on that?

Jennie: Mhmm. So I love to think of this as Maslow's hierarchy of needs, where if we start in the survival mode at the very bottom, once those needs are met, then we're freed up to get the security maybe of a job, then love and connection, then esteem and purpose. And I used to think of it as, oh, once you've got those basic needs met, you're just always moving up the ladder. I think what happens is we're often triggered to go back down that ladder and go back into survival mode by so many things around us. And again, if we remember our bodies are these supercomputers, it's just sensing everything.

Jennie: As soon as it sees a signal, it takes it in to run this program, shut down and start yelling, or start acting this way in the boardroom. And so I think if we keep that in mind, we can just give, again, more compassion to ourselves. Oh, it's just running that program again, as opposed to getting very upset about whether or not we've fully healed or changed these behaviors for good. So, yes, I think we can get out of those sticky floors. Maybe they'll become a little less sticky and not necessarily be completely smooth forever, but just giving ourselves a little bit of compassion to make some of those changes, I think, is absolutely possible.

Jennie: And then especially just giving yourself some grace when you slide back down, and knowing that you can get back up.

Erica: What piece of advice would you give the younger Jennie who was growing up on that farm, being taught that grit and resilience are the traits that you must embody? What piece of advice would you give her today, knowing everything that you know now?

Jennie: Trust yourself. I think for me, I'm a huge empath. I didn't know that. And no disrespect to any of my family. We had no idea what an empath was.

Jennie: Like, how would you know? And to picture myself, who's certainly not perfect, but as a little girl running around and picking flowers and having a huge soft spot for animals and kids. And whenever those things were not valued, I wish I would have trusted myself to value them and said that even if people around me don't think those are important, I think they're important. And so that is something I wish seven year old Jennie would have learned, and I'm helping her learn it now.

Erica: I would love to just say this before I ask you my last question, but we are all doing the best we can. Right? So there's no shame on the parents and the grandparents, because guess what? We're all inflicting trauma on our kids right now. We just don't even know it.

Jennie: We don't know what it is. We'll pay for it later. Exactly. It's so true. And we have no idea what our kids' lives are gonna be like.

Erica: Well, where can we find you? Where can we buy your book, Corporate Rehab? How can people get in touch with you?

Jennie: Yeah. The best way to do it is to go to my website. It's corporate-rehab.com. I've got leadership coaching packages for women. We've got a lot of speaking and training events for companies.

Jennie: So always happy to talk about those a little bit more, and you can buy the book right on the website as well, or it's on Amazon. So would love to hear from you and be in touch for sure.

Erica: Perfect. Thank you, Jennie.

Jennie: Thanks so much, Erica. Appreciate it.

Erica: Hey. Real quick before you go. I am on a mission to get 105 star reviews by my one hundredth episode. Will you help me out? The reason this is so important is because the more reviews that we have, the farther this podcast spreads, and the quicker it can get into the hands of the woman that needs to hear it most.

Erica: So before you click out and move on to that next episode, do me a favor. Scroll down, tap the five star button, and leave me a quick review. Thank you so much.