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.

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 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. Welcome to the Glass Ceilings and Sticky Floor 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 the paradoxes, 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. 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 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. Today's guest is a powerful advocate for sustainable success, helping high achieving professionals reclaim their well-being and thrive without sacrificing their careers.

Charlene Giselle is a high performance coach and the visionary founder of the Charlene Giselle Coaching Method. Now, she was a former big law litigator, and she intimately understands the pressures that are faced by elite professionals. She now dedicates her experience to empowering individuals and organizations in burnout prevention, stress resilience, and sustained career performance. Charlene, thank you for coming to the podcast. How are you today?

Charlène: Erica, this is most likely the best intro I've ever heard, so I'm just going to call my podcast manager and make sure that's the bio we use forever and ever. That was brilliant.

Erica: Copy and paste. Take it right out there. But you are calling us from across the pond. It is like Friday night, so you are super dedicated. I can't thank you enough for showing up today.

Charlène: I love spending my Friday night with you, Eric Ellis. Let's have a glass of wine. Oh my gosh.

Erica: I love it. She says her Fridays are for The US, so I'm here for it. But, Sharlene, let's jump in. You had this transition from a high pressure, big law litigation career to a high performance coach, and that's incredibly insightful. What was that pivotal moment that led you to really shift your focus to burnout prevention and sustainable performance?

Charlène: Great question, Erica. Honestly, it was a breakdown. I really felt like I hit rock bottom at one point. And it's not your traditional story of I worked so much that I hated what I did. I actually was totally obsessed with it.

I like to think of work relationship a little bit like a relationship with a man. And I was dancing with what you could describe with a super, super toxic relationship with my work. It was a excessive type of love, a love where it's everything. But I did not care about my health. I didn't care about anything else that was happening in my personal life at the time.

I was super obsessed and to the point where when I was diagnosed with insomnia, my literal first train of thought was, Oh, more all nighters. I can build more hours. I don't need to sleep. Then I got this heartbreaking divorce and family breakdown. And again, my thinking was, I can work more.

No one's waiting for me at home now. So you've got all those hours to work more. And the fact is, Erica, as you know, as we know, that is not a sustainable mindset. Right? It's a sort of obsession.

And frankly, it's work work obsessed behavior where you're addicted. So I like to think of work a bit like a substance.

Erica: I I resonate with that a lot because I remember just diving in to work all the time, and it it almost consumes you. And I think when you're young and you're just starting out and you're not married, you don't have kids, you're not doing anything, you don't recognize how those patterns already start to kinda lay the groundwork for how you're going to act as you climb up the ladder when the responsibilities and the expectations only become more intense. And then you grow and you have relationships. And like you said, you got divorced, and we don't see how this obsession with what we were taught to be a good thing. Right?

It's good to be ambitious. It's good to be, you know, focused on your work and everything. So I'd love to hear how did you how did you find the courage to take that first step out of that?

Charlène: Big kick. Big kick. It wasn't so much a first step. It was a big kick. And it's actually a bit of a sad story, but it happened on a Monday morning when my mother called in the office while I was at work, which was really unusual.

She knew better not to call at work. My father, who was my inspiration to become an attorney and to work as hard as I did, had a burnout driven heart attack on his way to work. And, honestly, Erica, with hindsight, I'm so ashamed to tell you what I'm about to share, but, genuinely, I was so destroyed by the news, but I thought he would want me to keep on working. You know, I had that speed second where I thought, what's the right thing to do? Just jump on a flight and leave work or stay and do what I do?

And I thought, well, I do what I do because my dad inspired me to do what I do, and I genuinely think that if he could talk right now, of course, he couldn't. He was undergoing heart surgery. He wouldn't want me to work, so I chose to work. And now, of course, it's been over a decade, and I can see how that was not a rational decision, but in that in that moment, I stayed, and and it was awful because I was so worried, and I loved my father so much. But then on Friday, my mom called again and said, you know, sweetie, this time, we don't think he's gonna make the night, so you really got to fly home.

And when I flew, he was in the intensive care unit. And as I walked in, he had, you know, shocked to see me. And he actually had a stroke right before me. So for anyone who's witnessed a stroke, it's a very, shocking situation to witness. It's very debilitating, and the person looks totally different.

And for me, it was sort of a moment where I feel like I saw my future, and, you know, this hero was still successful on paper, but literally fighting for his life. And we didn't know at this point that he was going to survive. And that life or death moment totally shift the vision I had of success, and this idea dawned on me that success can only be success if it's sustainable. And what does it all matter if you're not even gonna be around to survive your success?

Erica: That story, it really I'm so glad your father turned out to be okay after that, but goodness gracious, Charlene. That is that is intense. Oh my gosh. Okay. So you've you've taken this step.

You've found the courage. You even developed your own coaching method. So can you talk to me about the core principles of your coaching method and how it uniquely helps high achieving women prevent and recover from burnout? Sure.

Charlène: Of course. We'd love to. So we may have a bit of an eat, pray, love moment here, but I wanna say first that, a, I hadn't read the book, I hadn't watched the movie, and I did not understand the reference when people said that to me, but generally. So here it comes. And, yes, it does involve a Brazilian man.

Of course. It always does. So, the story is that, actually, when I was navigating my divorce, and that was my divorce from my ex husband, who is Brazilian, I decided to actually do a bit of a new sort of lifeblood. I wanted to do a tabula rasa, you know, just leave the heels, leave the corporate etiquette, leave the fancy apartment, leave the shiny career. And I went all the way to India to live in an ashram, so quite a quite a a dramatic transition, and I actually became a meditation teacher.

So I spent three months in, Hare Krishna ashram living with my gurus. And it was quite a steep transition to go from high heels corporate litigator at an American law firm to being in an ashram meditating all day long. I can assure you it was not as glamorous as it sounds. It did involve finding a snake underneath my bed at one point, sweating more than I ever thought a human being can sweat in a lifetime. It was hard.

It was uncomfortable. It was difficult. It was challenging. But it was everything I needed in that moment because, frankly, I had just done so much that was status driven and financial security and promotion. You know, a lot of my girlfriends in their 20 were thinking about getting pregnant.

I was thinking about getting promoted. Like, I'm being really honest. I wasn't, you know, being that sort of girly, babysitting 20 type of women. I was just seeking the next promotion, the next promotion. That was all I ever wanted was just to get promoted.

The price you pay for that is you haven't even reached your thirties yet, and you're totally broken. Right? Your health has deteriorated. You have multiple chronic conditions. Your hurt, your your back hurts, your insomniac, and you haven't even blown 30 candles.

That's quite worrying. But that's really the state I was in. So I took a deep dove and I looked at all the blind spots that I had. I had no meditation practice. My body was a wreck.

I didn't look after my physical health very well. My diet was inconsistent. My weight was a total yo yo machine. I'm sure many ladies would relate to that. And clearly, I had a bad pattern of toxic relationship both at work, but in my personal life.

So I really addressed all those blocks one by one and took my journey even further, became a yin yoga teacher, and then I became a clinical hypnotherapist because I wanted to add a layer of credibility and science to the well-being front. Not saying that meditation and yoga is not credible. It's ancestral practice. And there is, you know, thousands of years of wisdom behind it. But what I do know for a fact, working with large organization, if you come in as a yoga teacher and as a meditation teacher with a background from, you know, India or Bali or Nepal, as I did, that's maybe gone like a little bit of that corporate credibility that is required.

So I wanted to come in with some clinical background, which is why I chose to become a clinical hypnotherapist, which means that I can work with general anxiety disorder, insomnia, stress, burnout, etcetera, and I want you to be a burnout ambassador.

Erica: A burnout ambassador. I've never heard that term before, but I love it. You need to trademark that. Alright, girl. So burnout in my world is a huge sticky floor, and sticky floors are those limiting beliefs, toxic behaviors that keep people stuck, and that hits so many ambitious women.

So I wanna ask you, what are some of those subtle signs or maybe the deeper roots of burnout that go unnoticed? Because I know for me, it was so easy to shove those signs away and pretend like they weren't happening, but I also think it was because I wasn't aware of them. So what are those cell signs or deeper roots that go unnoticed, and what kind of strategies should we use to to address them?

Charlène: Such a great question. So I'll address them in turn. The first part of your question is when your behaviors are changing. So the one thing that I would love to invite our listeners to do is to audit their current set of behavior and audits them against their different version of self. So we all work with multiple versions according to the seasons of life we're in.

I like to think of, like, version a, version b, version b being your burnt out version. So that version, I want you to think about that woman right now, the one that's broken, suffering, depressed, struggling, put on weight, drinking to soothe her stress away, on the brink of a divorce, or in a terrible heartbreaking type of relationship. Right. I wanna talk to her. She wasn't always like that.

She didn't always feel like that. There used to be a a point when she was motivated and brilliant, and she had those sexy high heels that were hurting like hell. I wanna talk to that woman. Right? So I want you to take a moment and remember her.

Remember what she used to do for fun. Remember how she used to interact with the world. Can you remember her passions? Can you remember the things that made her tick? Can you remember how she used to hang out with her girlfriends and she had so much energy and she was the life of the party?

Okay. Now I want you to take a deep breath, take a pose, and think about your version b, the one that's currently burnt out, the one that's currently struggling. What are the shifts in behavior you can see with your version a, the shiny, brilliant, motivated, professional that you used to be, And version b, still brilliant, still the same amazing woman, but suffering, really struggling. Well, it may be that you're drinking more than you used to. It may be that you're soothing and numbing with food.

It may be that you're soothing and numbing with whatever substance that you can get your hand on to numb the stress away. What are you doing by way of small habits and behavior shifts that are actually just taking some of this shine off just because you're looking to take the edge off? Those will be really good question to us because a lot of the time, we don't see that all those habits really deteriorate our health, our mental landscape, and physical landscape.

Erica: Well, I'll tell you right here, right now, Charlene, that was absolutely me. It was like the drinking slowly increased, but it was such a slow moderate increase that I didn't recognize it. And then what I once loved, which was fitness, almost became my punishment and my proof that it wasn't a problem, that the increased drinking wasn't a problem. Because if I could still get up and work out or run, then it wasn't that bad. And when I finally was able to take a step back and and look at those patterns and and the mindset shifts was when I was like, okay.

This is not right. I'm using the wine to cope, to cover up, and I'm trying to fake myself out that everything's okay. And when I actually started removing those things that were covering it up, and, yeah, it sucked. You gotta deal with what's underneath all that. But then you start to feel that version of woman a again.

Charlène: Exactly. Yeah. I love how you I love how you said that. And I think sometimes we just don't connect the dots between the a's and the b's. Right?

We think that there is version from the past that we're never never gonna get again, and the future is gonna suck forever and forever. Right? So that's very binary thinking. And the burnt out brain becomes binary. So anyone listening right now who feels like you're in that dark phase, you're in the version b, and that's gonna suck forever.

If nothing else, I want you to know that that's just not the case, that your burnt out brain is wired for black or white. Like, it doesn't see nuances. It doesn't see shades of gray. I'm not trying to make any sexual references to any movies, but it literally cannot see shades of grays. And, actually, it's in those nuances, it's in those shades that there is the future hope that you can go back to your version, and that will take radical courage, like you recognizing that, actually, maybe there were a couple of excessive wines, and maybe they were masked by your ability to still show up and be fit.

But again, what I would love to point out in what you said, which is why this story is so significant, is that what you were doing was masking. You were masking an underlying pretty serious issue with the performance mask, with, but here, I'm still showing up. I'm still I'm still myself. And so to our listener, I would like to say, like, what is your mask? Because on Monday morning, when you see your boss and you're shining and you're wearing your beautiful dress and you have all your gorgeous makeup on, like, have you just cried two hours before?

Have you just going to cry in the toilet two hours later and nobody sees? Like, that's the mask, and it's a really heavy one.

Erica: It really is, and I think it's so easy for women to just switch those masks on and off. And also, too, from being a parent to a spouse and how you're supposed to act in all of those different worlds. And it's got me thinking about the next question, which I wanted to ask you. And, you know, we've heard this a million times. Put the oxygen mask on yourself before you put it on anybody else.

We know this in our brains. Right? But I think we're hardwired to believe that if we're gonna be successful, we have to sacrifice our personal well-being first. Right? Like, that goes to the end of the line.

That's the last priority to tackle. So how do you help your clients face just that challenge and then integrate stress resilience and self care?

Charlène: Such a good question. So I like to think of it as a foundation piece. So it's a little bit like if you were trying to build a pyramid, I'm not trying to make an architect out of you, but, you know, you know, instinctively that you would need a pretty solid foundation. Right? Otherwise, your pyramid is just not gonna stand the test of time.

So why don't we actually take a step back? And instead of thinking, well, I've gotta do this. I've gotta stay fit. I've gotta do this. I've gotta do that, which is more to do.

And I think that can be overwhelming to say, like, you actually have to have a super solid foundation. Like, my foundation was really wonky, so no wonder I burnt out. You know, I was not looking after my body. I was neglecting movement. The only kind of running was running to the coffee machine and back to my desk, I was literally holding my pee in, I was not drinking water because I thought if I drink water, I need to stop billing so that I'm losing a six minutes increment because I time my time to go to the loo.

It's just not healthy thinking, right? So if you look at yourself as and this is going to sound tough, but if you look at yourself as a person who loves to do what you do, you need to learn to do it with moderation. Like, the things you really hold true true in your life and you really love, including your career, you've gotta learn to use with moderation. Otherwise, that love is going to be cut short really soon and not to be too morbid, but I deal with what I call the three d's, you know, the d for divorces, super common. So clients calling me, my marriage is hanging by a thread.

Either the husband's about to leave, like, mine my relationship totally blew up, or they wanna leave their husband because they're not spending time with them, they've become estranged, the d for diagnosis, all kinds of diagnosis, mental diagnosis, physical diagnosis, and then the d for for death. You know, like my experience, seeing somebody struggle between life or death or having somebody actually die in the office. I know this is quite grim, but that does happen. I've had it happen on a Monday morning. A man had a heart attack literally at the entrance of the company walking in on a Monday. So, I mean, it does happen.

Erica: There you go. You know, that man could have been my father. Right? So, you know, this this is the two of us, and there's just two of us, and we have those stories. Like, one of my friend's boss literally died in front of him.

Charlène: Right. Like, that's it. He dropped dead in the office. So this story, they're not there to scare you. They're just they're just a reality check.

So if you think about all of this and you think, right, I have to be super strategic, and I think as women, because we love and we care so hard, and I'm not, you know, trying to pigeonhole anything, but sometimes we want to give so much and we wanna do so good by the company, by the team, we wanna be brilliant, we wanna please we wanna succeed. We almost forget to be strategic in the sense of long term sustainable planning, and I put myself in that bucket. I made that mistake. I was not thinking about my long term success. I was not asking myself the question, am I doing everything I need to do to sustain that pace?

Of course, that pace was totally unsustainable, but I got a kick out of doing so much work. I remember when I got my stats and I was we had a word for it, like overutilized by X amount. So 160, 170%, which is insane. That means that you're working so much. Instead of thinking, right, that doesn't sound very healthy.

How much am I not sleeping? How much am I not moving? I just used to think, How much more can I do next month? You know, like, roll up my sleeve and let's do this. Now, if you're hearing this and thinking that sounds like me, like, ambition, of course, is a gift, but I can assure you, if not kept at bay can be a curse because it will destroy that career you love, it will destroy that marriage you're in, and it will destroy your health.

So if you wanna continue to do what you do and love doing what you do, you've gotta learn to do it moderately, just like drinking your wine.

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.

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.

It's your roadmap 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 this leads me to the next question, which is, especially as, like, women leaders in corporate.

Mhmm. We're already up against so much, and we're already having to prove ourselves in so many different ways. It almost feels impossible to have to tame that piece of us. Because if we do that, then we might not get promoted or we might not get the, you know, the recognition we deserve. And so how how do we make sure that we're amplifying our voices in the corporate world, we're showing up with authority, but we are putting our own needs first all the time?

Charlène: Yeah. I think that's a really great question. And in my experience working in the field of psychology, that's actually a limited belief. It's not very often that that turns out to be true. So this fear, if I set a boundary, if I tell my boss that I'm not working past eleven on a Friday night as the case might be, for example, I'm gonna lose that promotion, I'm not gonna get my bonus.

Oftentimes, that is not true. Oftentimes, that's just what you think is going to happen because you're catastrophizing. But the truth is, you have a superpower, a super gift within the organization that only you have. And what your boss values is not necessarily whether or not you're gonna pick up the work at 11PM, which is going to be mediocre at best because nobody does the most amazing piece of work at 11PM on a Friday. But instead, what your boss really values and loves is that unique skill that you have, that creation power, that ideation, the way you interact with your team, the way you are really confident, the way you show up in a meeting, the way you can win a new client.

So those are valuable skills. Now those skills will actually be elevated when you're well slept, well fed, and well moved. That's just as simple. So you have to again, it comes back to being strategic, and you have to crash this limited belief. Because this notion of let me give my blood, my sweat, and my tears for the organization in the hope that I get back the promotion, the reward, etcetera, is actually just an erroneous mindset.

It's the mindset that will get you burnt out for sure. What you need to think instead is, what else those super powerful skills that only I have that this organization can greatly benefit from, that I can showcase, and I can embody, and I can role model to grow a culture that actually becomes better and better. Within my company, every day I wake up and I wonder, what value can I embody that can inspire others to become? Right? You wanna be that person, and I think that's super empowering.

So this notion that you just need to work harder, that's that's the mindset that gets you burnt out. Instead, just make sure that you embody the vol value you wanna see at a cultural level within the organization.

Erica: Can we just say y'all that the I hope y'all are listening because number one, I'm cracking up over here. We had to have this woman come all the way over from the other side of the pond to call me out on my own limiting beliefs, but in the best way. But that's why I love talking about this because sometimes you need someone else to really show you that mirror of that limiting belief. And I know, Charlene, that's something I struggle with is, like, I've gotta do more, especially as an entrepreneur and a founder. So I'm just very grateful that you pointed that out because I was like, man, she is right.

I gotta tap back into that, into that embodying the culture that I wanna have within my own company and that I wanna bring. So, anyways, I had to point that out because we all struggle with them. But what I wanna ask you about next is for people who are always driven by those external achievements, because I know I was. I was very I didn't realize it until later, but I was very focused on how much money I was making and what my title was, and I was very, very proud of that. And what I know as an HR professional, what I have seen is when you remove those things and you take that away from people, it can be very challenging to deal with.

So how do you guide people, I guess, to kinda separate themselves from that identity? Like, in The US, it's always like, hey. What do you do for a living? You know? And so people are so that's the first thing they say.

You know? And I just wonder how do you kinda untie and unravel that?

Charlène: Yes. So it may be a controversial answer, but I think the answer should be or could be you don't have to. What do I mean by that? I'm ambitious, and I think I will always be ambitious. And I'm also driven by money, and I don't think that's a bad thing, but I can be driven by money and health status.

I just added another status that didn't matter to me before that matters to me now. The only kind of status that I was chasing was the corporate one, the money, the promotion, etcetera. Now I have multiple status that I'm chasing. So, yes, I wanna be a great CEO, a great founder. Yes.

I wanna have financial security. But I've learned that I also wanna have a really high health status. And if I do anything to pursue my career status that would compromise my health status, I've learned that's not worth it. So if you have multiple status that you're chasing or if the status is be a good wife or be a good mom. Right.

Whatever the case might be. Like, clearly, that was not something that was important enough in my marriage. Number one, surprise, surprise, ex husband. Right. Infosys ex.

Now, in my current marriage, I'm really happy to be remarried. My value, my role as a wife, and I value the time with my husband so, so very much. So it's become something that is of equal importance. Now you could say, oh, that sounds like a lot. How do you manage all of that?

And how do you prioritize? I'd learned to not trust myself. What do I mean by that? I put systems in place that are totally bulletproof. So, for example, if I wanna be intentional with my husband and I know we have, like, a nice little date, I genuinely put it in the calendar and I send him an invitation and it says little date or champagne date or intimacy date or whatever we're gonna do.

Go to the opera, go to the ballet. And then I would also have my meeting with a potential investor or with my most important clients or with my podcast. So I treat things like that of equal importance, but I also have my morning run into my diary because my health status is a status that is important to me. So the thing is that if you don't know how to juggle all of this, it's maybe that you haven't looked at your work values versus your personal values. I'll be totally honest with you, Erica, and that's why I love the work that you do is because I only had work ethic driven value.

Back when I burnt out, what the what I valued and what motivated me was success, ambition, recognition, leadership, etcetera. But I actually didn't have a good audit or a good handle on my personal values, fun, pleasure, health, wellness, rest, creativity. None of that. Right? So what you don't value, you don't do.

If you really wanna value those thing, you need to actually act those things. So you need to give them the same status as you do your client meeting. So I say, and it may sound really transactional, but I think it's quite healthy. I treat my rents, my dates with my husband and my client meetings with the same level of importance.

Erica: I love that. And, you know, that's something that, like, we know it in our minds, but actually solidifying it and putting it in your calendar as a date at just like you would with the CEO or your VP or your your team that you're meeting with or your client. You're going to have it in there and you're not going to cancel it. So prioritizing that as well. So I love that.

Sherlyn, I'm so glad that you took the time to come on this show, but I love to wrap up with this one question. And that is if you had to go back to the very first version of you in those high heels burnt out, this is your pre India trip, all of that, we're in marriage number one, what is the piece of advice you would give her today?

Charlène: That's such a good question. There is a part of me that wants to say I wouldn't change anything just so that I can get to be the coach that I've become. But I'm not going to give you that answer because I don't think that would be the most constructive answer. I would honestly just let her see beyond the little office. Right?

Like, I think we get really obsessed with the shiny objects, and my shiny object was my career. I was so proud that I got that job. And I would just whisper into her ear, because you love that job so much, the only way you're gonna keep it is if you do it with moderation. And what you're doing right now, sweetie, is no moderation. It's obsessive.

It's addicted. It's actually not healthy at all. So if you want to endure, if you want to last a distance, back off. And on your way to work today, pop into the gym. After work today, make sure you go and have a good night's sleep.

And at the weekend, just spend time with the people you love because they're the one that are gonna stick around beyond this career.

Erica: That is beautiful, Charlene. Thank you so much. Now if today's conversation lit a fire under you, here's the next move. Don't keep it to yourself. Share this episode with a friend, drop a review, and let's keep the conversation going.

I want you to remember that your potential is limitless, and the only thing standing in your way are those sticky floor. But you have the power to break through them. So go out there, take up space, and let's shatter some ceilings together.