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 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.

Erica: Because honestly, girl, you were never meant to do this alone. I want to start today by asking you a question. Are you the type of person that sees the glass as half empty or the person that sees the glass as half full? It seems that so many of us are just cruising along on autopilot reacting to life as it happens, whether that's good or bad. We're often stuck or frozen by negative thoughts, limiting beliefs.

Erica: We're complaining about a colleague or a spouse, and we are caught up in this victim mentality that, this always happens to me, and I get it. I have been there. But let me tell you something. We are failing to recognize the power of choice that lies within us. I'm your host, Erica Rooney, keynote speaker, executive coach, and chief people officer, and I'm here to tell you, from one woman to another, that you can't have it all, and that your mindset plays a huge piece in that. Now I like to think of myself as a glass half full kinda girl, and often I feel like my cup runneth over at times, but that's by choice. And we all have the power of choice. Life is gonna happen.

Erica: Good things, bad things, it's a roller coaster. You can be living the high life one day, everything go on your way, and bam, you get a flat tire. Your car dies. Your Internet goes out in the middle of a huge meeting. We're going to have our highs and we're gonna have our lows, and there isn't anything that's gonna change that.

Erica: And quite honestly, you shouldn't want that to change because we can't understand how great life can really be if we haven't had those bad days. But your power of choice, the power of how you respond to something is 100% within your control. And how you respond directly correlates to your state of mind. Mindsets are the beliefs that we hold about ourselves and our most basic qualities, like our personality, our talent, our skills, but it's also how we think about the world. It's that lens in which we see the world.

Erica: There are countless studies and research that has gone into the power of mindset. One in particular, I was super fascinated by in 2007. Found that if you had a belief that your intelligence was fixed, meaning you're born with it, can't change it, it is what it is, that over two years during junior high school, your grades remained flat. But if you believed that intelligence was malleable, you had the control to change it if you did the work. It actually projected this upward trajectory in your grades over those two years.

Erica: Now I believe in science, and science says that your mindset can determine your well-being and your achievements because our mindsets are responsible for our behavioral, physiological, and psychological responses. It influences where we give our attention, what we are motivated to do or not do, how we feel, how we expect to feel. The point is our power, the power of our mindsets is endless. I find it so interesting because there are so many types of minds. Right?

Erica: There's humble minds and curious minds. There are grateful minds and willing minds, positive minds, negative minds. There are those minds that always go in thinking the best case scenario, and then there are those who are always expecting the worst. I'm sure you've seen that firsthand. But I wanna focus on this because if you follow my work, you know that I believe in the power of a resilient, focused, and growth centered mind.

Erica: It's what drives success. Someone who doesn't give up. They're willing to try new things. It's my personal belief that this is how I was able to successfully change career paths and break through the glass ceiling. The truth of the matter is if I'm stuck, which does happen from time to time, the root cause is that my mindset isn't in the right place.

Erica: So you're probably sitting there thinking, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. This isn't rocket science. Duh.

Erica: What can you do about it? That is the hardest piece. And the answer is you gotta do the thought work. Thought work is the act of consciously paying attention to the thoughts that are going on in your head and then choosing to look at them differently. Adam Grant in his new book, Think Again, calls this rethinking.

Erica: I often refer to it as reframing, but the actual act of doing the work is called thought work. So I'll give a real life example. This is what's going on in the reading household right now. My son is struggling with reading class. Honestly, I'm impressed with his abilities so far, but it doesn't come easy to him.

Erica: So he just jumps on this I hate it bandwagon. And when we are doing work, he will often say, I'm not good at reading. I hate reading. Reading is so hard. He is so damn hard on himself.

Erica: And when I hear about honestly, it breaks my heart as a mama. I feel super defeated because I know that it's not true. I also know math is or sorry, reading is gonna get a lot harder in the future too. His thoughts though, are so vicious and self deprecating, and they're not helpful. So he continues this spiraling, and I have to get him to pause and take a deep breath.

Erica: And then we do the thought work. Because, y'all, we have a say in what we're thinking. Yes. Our thoughts are driven by previous experiences, society, culture, family, social work, you name it. I am also sure that part of the reason he says I'm not good at reading is because he's got friends that probably don't have issues with reading, and they probably rock it out in class.

Erica: So when he sees this, compares, internalizes, he is thinking, well, you know, my friend is really good at it. I can't read as fast as him, therefore, I am bad. But we have the power to influence how we see problems like this. If he could only stop believing everything that he thinks to be true and reframe it or rethink it, he just might experience a different outcome. I'll often ask him, do you think that this is hard because it's new?

Erica: Or why do you think that? So if we can get to the root of how thoughts form, we can think about it in a better way. By asking him if this is new, never seen before math, we reframe it from I am bad at math to math is hard because I haven't done it before. Now to prove my point, I ask him about riding a bike or hitting a home run. That used to be hard for him.

Erica: Now it's easy. I asked him, why did it get easy? Now in a snarky seven year old fashion, he probably will tell me because he's just good at those things. But the reason is it got easier because he did the work. And the more you do the work, the better you get.

Erica: As a keynote speaker, I used to get so nervous before going up on stage, and I had all these negative thoughts in my head that I wasn't good enough. I wasn't unique. I wasn't captivating. And then I pause, and I rethink it. And I reframe it to, is this nerves or is this excitement?

Erica: Do I feel this way because I care about my message? It gives me the power back. I also challenge my thoughts from past experiences. Hey, Erica. Do you remember that standing ovation you got at the Texas event?

Erica: Oh, yeah. You can do this. Thought work is lifelong and life changing. You are not gonna be able to take a limiting belief, a sticky floor, a negative thought, and change it forever. It takes practice.

Erica: That's why it's called thought work. Now over time, you'll recognize that you're in that moment of being stuck, and you'll be able to move forward faster and faster and faster. And you become focused more on achieving the outcome than being stuck in the swirl of negativity. And what is fabulous about the work of thought is that the more you do it, the better you get. The more positive you become, the better you treat yourself, the more compassionate you are, and you start to feel better.

Erica: You're happier, and you're more focused. We get to choose how we respond to what happens around us, and we get to choose the thoughts in our heads. You don't have to turn yourself into some ray of sunshine, positive pollock pocket if that's not who you are. Let's be real. Some of us will never be like Elle Woods in real life, but we can recognize when our thoughts are no longer serving us.

Erica: What do I mean by that? I mean, if you get a flat tire, you don't have to be all super cheery about everything happens for a reason. This is a great experience because there's nothing glamorous about being stuck on the side of the road and having to change a flat tire, unless you are just one of those rare people that loves doing car work. But you can choose how you respond. So instead of letting that one flat tire ruin your day, make you late, etcetera, you can look at it through a different lens.

Erica: You could be grateful that while you have a flat tire, at least it's at the end of the day, so you're not running late to work. You can chalk that up too. Well, I knew the tread was running thin, so this is gonna force me to take it to the shop this weekend and knock it out. I'm gonna get it done. It doesn't have to be a glowing ray of sunshine.

Erica: It just has to be a simple reframe. Having the ability to control if you view the glass as half full or half empty can really change the outcome of your day, your week, your happiness, and your success in life. So let me ask you again. Is your cup half full? And if not, how can we reframe that?

Erica: Now I hope you enjoyed this podcast. And if you did, please make sure that you rate, review, and subscribe it because it does help another woman hear the message when she needs it most. And I personally thank you for that.