Say it out loud. The reason you give yourself for why you have not gone after the thing you actually want. I bet it sounds completely reasonable. This is the episode that started this whole show, recorded in April 2022 under a different name, and it is where I first said the thing that became my entire body of work. It is usually not the glass ceiling holding you back. It is your own sticky floor.

Back then the show was called From Now to Next. I was a wife, a mom of two, a Chief People Officer, an entrepreneur, and a fitness fanatic, and in my line of work I watched the same thing happen to woman after woman. Smart, capable, driven women who were stuck. Not because someone above them slammed a door, but because of what they were standing in. And I want to be clear about something I said in this trailer and still mean every word of. This is not just conjecture. This is my story. I may be living my best life now, but it was not always that way.

So what is a sticky floor? It is the belief or the behavior you built yourself that keeps you in place, long before any ceiling ever gets the chance to stop you. In this episode I name three kinds. Limiting beliefs, the ones that sound like no one is going to pay me that much money to do this job, or I do not have the right qualifications, or I am not tall enough, thin enough, pretty enough. Toxic and self sabotaging behaviors, and yes, I said hello wine Wednesdays out loud. And deadbeat relationships that no longer serve you and keep you from living your best life.

That qualifications one has a receipt. An internal review at Hewlett-Packard found that men apply for a job when they meet about 60% of the qualifications, while women wait until they meet 100% of them. Tara Sophia Mohr later wrote about that finding in Harvard Business Review, and here is the part that gets me. When she surveyed hundreds of professionals about why they did not apply, hardly any of them said they doubted they could do the job. The most common answer was that they did not think they would get hired, so why waste the effort. That is a sticky floor talking, and it sounds so practical you would never think to argue with it.

I am not asking you to pretend the ceiling is not real. It is. LeanIn.Org and McKinsey's Women in the Workplace 2025 study found that for every 100 men promoted to manager, only 93 women are promoted, and just 60 Black women. That is a structure, and structures take all of us to move. But the floor is the part you can get your hands on this week. Every episode of this show since this one has been a woman who did exactly that, who got out of her own way, cleaned up her sticky floor, and told the truth about the mistakes she made getting there. If you are ready to go from your now to your next, start here.