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. Welcome to the Glass Ceiling 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 exec, 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 it the paradoxes, being told to lean in but not too far, to speak up but not too loudly, be ambitious but not too ambitious.

Erica: Does that sound familiar? Y'all, we are 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 past 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 trailblazer in reimagining leadership, workplace culture, and the emotional toll of leading in today's world.

Erica: Daisy Auger-Domínguez is the author of Burnt Out to Lit Up, How to Reignite the Joy of Leading People, a powerful and timely guide for leaders navigating the complexities of modern work. With a career that spans powerhouse brands like Disney, Google, and Vice Media, Daisy has led transformative initiatives that put people first and make inclusion real, not just a buzzword. Now she's got a book. And in this book, she writes personal stories, research backed insights, and practical tools for leaders like you and me who are exhausted of just surviving and are actually ready to lead with purpose, humanity, and joy. From burnout to disconnection to revival and real connection, Daisy shows us how to lead teams and ourselves into something better.

Erica: So please welcome the brilliant, the bold, and the amazing, Daisy Auger-Domínguez. Daisy, how are you?

Daisy: Oh, I'm great, Erica. Thank you for the warm and exciting opening.

Erica: Oh, I am just so pumped to have you here because I love talking about burnout. I think it's been a big buzzword, and I think people haven't really understood what that true definition of burnout is. So, like, let's kick it off with what is burnout and maybe, like, what's not quite burnout? Maybe what's that buzzword edge that we all feel that we have, and what's the difference?

Daisy: Yeah. I love that question. And to your point, I like to cheekily say whenever I'm introducing this topic that I had no idea burnout was gonna have the moment that it's having at this moment when I started writing the book. I had gone through my own and others' cases of burnout and felt like it was time to write about it and to figure out how do we move beyond it. But to your point, we first have to figure out, are we in it?

Daisy: Right? Is this burnout? And burnout, as I write in my book, it's not getting tired because you're bummed out because you have to do three other projects that you weren't thinking about. It's not because the Wi-Fi goes out and the usual nuisances of working. Right?

Daisy: Burnout has been defined across three dimensions. The first is exhaustion and depletion. Right? That's that feeling that you have nothing left in the tank, that there's just like you can barely pick yourself up. There's that level of exhaustion.

Daisy: The second component is that sense of cynicism and detachment. I call it, like, losing your loving feeling for the things that you typically loved and enjoyed. Right? It's those colleagues that were usually the first ones to raise their hands and volunteer for projects, the ones that were usually cheery, all of a sudden just giving you side eyes every time you ask for something or ignoring you or looking the other way. Right?

Daisy: It's that sense that no matter what you put in front of me, I've seen this movie play out before, and I don't wanna do it anymore. And then the third dimension, it's a loss in effectiveness and efficiency. Right? That's when we're just not producing at our best capacity. And that, for many of us, is really hard to identify because many of us are just so prone to overfunctioning and overdoing that we just keep on putting one foot in front of the other and think that we're okay.

Daisy: And what we don't realize until, as it was in my case, until someone points it out, is that you're just not showing up as the best version of yourself, and therefore, you're not delivering to your highest capacity. And it is the combination of those three elements that define burnout. And burnout was categorized by the World Health Organization as a workplace phenomenon in 2019. So this isn't new. Right?

Daisy: For me, when I started researching this work, I thought it was something that happened after the pandemic. Right? We've been through so much. This is where burnout comes up. But our workplaces have been quietly burning us out for quite some time, and the attention to it is just starting to surface now because it's starting to become the word that we use.

Daisy: Right? The memes on social media. "I can't take it anymore." But it is a workplace phenomenon and a human phenomenon that is eating us alive.

Erica: I absolutely wanna talk about your breaking point, but I do have a quick question because the fact that you broke it down into those three things, right, the exhaustion, the cynicism, and the loss of efficiency. Is the loss of efficiency a choice, or is that just a piece of the burnout?

Daisy: It's a piece of it. I don't think any of it is a choice, quite frankly. It is your body quietly eroding. I think of burnout, and I share this often. It's like quiet messages that you constantly are overriding.

Daisy: Right? It is those of us who are, and I suspect those who are listening in, those of us who are overfunctioning, over performers, overdelivering folks, the high achieving set of us, we see the signals and we override them. Right?

Daisy: We know that we need to rest and we don't. We know that we were a little sloppy in that project, but we're just like, whatever gets it through to the next level. Right? We just keep on doing it. So they're not necessarily choices because we're so deeply depleted that we just can't see what we could normally when we are rested and replenished and showing up as the best version of ourselves.

Erica: That's so powerful. So dive in. Tell me what was your breaking point, and what made you say, like, this has gotta be a book?

Daisy: Oh my goodness. Well, I had several breaking points. So I'll be the first one to say that I'm one of the people who, like, the signals can,

Erica: see you're pressing

Daisy: the ignore button. And I'm like, nah, nah, nah. But I was a chief people officer at Vice Media during the pandemic, managed a global team over 20 countries, and didn't realize how not only was I burning out slowly and consistently, but I was also absorbing the burnout of everyone around me.

Daisy: Right? I was absorbing the burnout of my own team that I was so intent on keeping healthy and engaged and supported, but I was taking in all of their pain and their suffering. I was taking in the burnout of the executive leadership team, my peers, who I was coaching and managing and also trying to keep one foot in front of the other. And I was soaking in the burnout of the management level underneath and the employees underneath who, on any given basis, anyone that's in HR knows, you are the first line of defense for every complaint and every moment of pain and anguish. And all of those moral injuries, if you will, that you accumulate over time, they just were sucking me dry.

Daisy: And like we do, we advise our employees and senior leaders to have executive coaches. I had my own executive coach. And I felt like every time I would meet with her every two weeks, I would accumulate all of the pain and angst. And the minute I would get on a screen like this with her, I would just fall apart. Right?

Daisy: And everything I was holding in for the last two weeks, trying to keep it together, I would just fall apart. And she would mend me up. I would joke with her, she would put all the little Band-Aids on me and then send me back out. And one day, in a conversation with her where, again, I was going through all of the angst and pain and everything that was happening, she just looked at me and said, you know what you need to do.

Daisy: There is no more conversation about this. And there's nothing like having a mirror put in front of you, and having someone who loves you and knows you push you to really see yourself. And that's when I realized, not necessarily that I was burnt out, I didn't have the language for it at that point, Erica, but I knew that I had reached the end and that I needed to define my exit plan. And so that's what it became for me.

Daisy: It was, what does my exit look like? And, again, as an HR executive, having had to pick up the pieces from executives who had left abruptly and who had left messily, I wanted to do the opposite of that. Right? I wanted to have a graceful exit. I wanted to leave my team prepared.

Daisy: I wanted to find my replacement. I wanted to do all of that. And this allowed me somehow, because, of course, as with all things in life, there were twists and turns, this allowed me to design it. And in the design stage, my executive coach asked me three questions.

Daisy: Right? She was like, what do you want this time to be about for you? What needs to happen for you to be able to take this time, as in financially, the safety, think Maslow's hierarchy.

Daisy: And then the third is, what would you like to create and build in this moment? Right? What is it that's gonna be different about this? And in answering those questions, I realized I have another book in me. I've written my first book, Inclusion Revolution, and I felt like that was a modern management book, as is burnout, but it was a lot more standard practices on how to deliver and build inclusive workplaces.

Daisy: And I wanted this to be a bit more personal. And so I began the process of what does this book look like? And in that process, I also hired a book coach. Right? I believe in coaches.

Daisy: This is the HR leader in me. And as I was speaking and designing with my book coach, the question that kept on coming back was, what do you want to share? What is important to you? And after having been through this long protracted process of feeling exhausted, and I can walk you through the other elements of my burnout, after having walked through it, I realized, here's the thing.

Daisy: I know I'm not my best. I know that this has been the hardest time of my life, but I know there's another side to this. And I wanna help people see what's on the other side. And in that process, she kept on evoking words from me, and she's like, well, what does it look like? And that's where the word burnout came out.

Daisy: And I was just like, well, we're just burnt out. Alright? Like, we've got nothing in us, and she's like, okay, then what's next? And I was like, well, we just need to find, there's a light on the other side.

Daisy: Right? As leaders, our jobs are to take our teams to the other side, to show them what's ahead even when you can't see it. Even when it looks foggy, what does it look like? And so in that process, I said, it what it looks like is to find your light, is to find yourself again, and to lead the way that you want to lead and the way that you know your teams deserve to be led. That's what led me to the process of writing the book.

Daisy: But I should say, what my breaking point, and I had, like I said, several breaking points, but there were breaking points that were not easily discernible, because I just felt like, oh, I always have a cold, and I always get bronchitis. I just had COVID. Right?

Daisy: So I was diagnosed as having long term COVID, which I don't have. Right? I was like, but

Erica: But that was the easy answer.

Daisy: With the diagnosis. The doctors had no idea what to do with me. I kept on going to doctors and saying, every time I get a cold, I'm getting bronchitis. My neurologist looked at me one day after the third visit and said, Daisy, you're 50. You have asthma.

Daisy: Every time you get a cold, you're gonna get bronchitis. I'm sorry, that's the case. And I remember looking at him and saying, I refuse to believe that that is my next twenty, fifty years of my life, that that is what I should be expecting. I then also, being perimenopausal, was going through all of the weight shifts that happened, and I kept on getting really bloated.

Daisy: And then I would lose weight, and then I would get bloated again. And so I hired a nutritionist, and the nutritionist was the first wise person who decided to take my hormone levels. No one had thought of doing that. None of the entire medical team that I had been visiting for months had thought of, let's check her hormones. My nutritionist did and said, here's the thing, Daisy.

Daisy: For your age, your hormones should be at this mid range, but your hormones are at the bottom of all of this. And, as the curious person that I am, my first question was, well, okay, how does that happen? Right? Like, what is it?

Daisy: And she looked at me. I can never forget this. She just stared at me directly and said, it's chronic stress. It's sustained stress. And so I said, okay.

Daisy: And then, as the immigrant hardworking woman, I'm just like, so here's the thing. Stress is just normal. I live in stress. We all live in stress. You gotta tell me something better.

Daisy: What do I do to fix this? And she just looked at me and said, you've gotta fix your life. And then she offered other solutions. But her first response was, you've gotta fix your life.

Daisy: Chronic stress. I was like, you cannot continue at this pace. Right? But that was, Erica, six months before I decided to leave. So I wanna be very honest that I had the information in front of me.

Daisy: I knew what I had to do, and I had the incentives, plenty of incentives, for not just myself, for my family, for my teams, but I just kept on pushing through and pushing through until I reached that point, not physically alone, but also emotionally, not able to move past that and trying to figure out there's gotta be a better way. What does that look like?

Erica: And I think too, ambitious women, we always think that, okay, if I just get through this, if I just get through this, it'll be done, then I'll be able to breathe, then I can rest. But, I mean, especially HR leaders, that never happens. You get through one employee issue, three more come in the door, especially during that season of the world. Right?

Erica: And that season has continued to this day in the craziness that we live in.

Daisy: Nonstop. And you're carrying and absorbing everybody else's pains and traumas and anguish. And it is the job. Right, Erica? It is the job to hold space for others, but it is also part of the job to create space for your own healing, to create space for your own rest and replenishment.

Daisy: And I had not read that book yet. Right? I had not done that. And it wasn't until I started writing the book, and I left Vice Media, and after I left, I took what I call the radical sabbatical.

Daisy: And that was part of my design. Right? Part of my design was, I'm gonna name this, and I'm gonna be intentional about finding rest and calm and space and slowing things down. Right? I knew that I needed to find myself, and part of that was to write this book.

Daisy: What I didn't realize, Erica, was that in the writing, I would heal myself. There was an intellectual element of, okay, this will be helpful, but it was the actual full physical and spiritual experience of learning about burnout. Right? Understanding the medical implications, the medical solutions, and then understanding and seeking the practices and the elements of finding yourself and centering yourself that, quite frankly, before I started writing my book, a lot of the mantras, a lot of the practices that I share, I would be the first person to side eye. I would be the first person to say, not me.

Daisy: My people don't do that. Just like you said. Right? Let me just power through this, and I'll take a nap. Right?

Daisy: But as I rested and as I wrote and as I processed this book, it just came out of me. I wrote the book in less than five months, and my editor, my publisher, would remind me all the time. I was like, remember, this is the max of words in your contract, you don't go over them. And my book coach, Bethany Saltman, she was amazing.

Daisy: I would meet with her every two weeks. She would tease me. She's like, Daisy, most of my clients, I need to ask them to give me more. With you it's the opposite.

Daisy: I was learning so much and putting so much of it into paper, building my own pharmacy so I could hopefully build a pharmacy for others.

Erica: Was it hard for you to slow down and take that radical sabbatical? 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?

Erica: It's time to shatter those limiting beliefs and toxic behaviors to uncover infinite possibilities. 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.

Erica: 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.

Daisy: Oh my gosh, it was the hardest thing. I mean, as any ambitious, overfunctioning woman leader, I had to structure it. Right? I had to define it.

Daisy: And I had taken a sabbatical a couple of years earlier, and one of the lessons that I learned, and I will say in full transparency, I took the sabbatical, it was fantastic, and then I went back to my old habits right away. Right? So when I started this sabbatical, I remembered I wanna do only three things a day. That is all I will allow myself to schedule.

Daisy: Because otherwise, I don't know about you, Erica, but I would say this at the beginning of every workday. I was like, oh, let's make sure that I have breaks in between today, whatnot. And then someone would come in the office. Do you have 15? Do you have ten minutes? Do you have only five minutes of your time?

Daisy: I'm like, sure, sure, sure. And by the end of the day, sometimes my assistant would have to remind me. I was like, you need to go to the bathroom.

Daisy: Right? Like, you need to take a break. So I designed my days and what I called my threes. If I already had, let's say, a breakfast, a lunch meeting, a writing project, and you wanted time, I was like, oh, well, you know what?

Daisy: My next spot is this. So I structured it very much like the executive that I am. But then I also scheduled and researched, sort of, not just a spa weekend, but retreats. I went on some really beautiful retreats. I went on an Ayurvedic retreat with my husband in Europe.

Daisy: I don't recommend an Ayurvedic retreat in Europe when there's pasta all around you and you're eating mush, but it was really beautiful, really wonderful. It was a time for us to connect. I went on an HR summit, which was all about HR and practice, but it was like the most zen HR summit I had ever been to, in California. Super chill. I went on a retreat with women, which was a retreat to focus on your heart, and it was really beautiful.

Daisy: So I structured those moments. I had to build structure so that I didn't go into the constant rehustle. Right? There's the hustle of the work. There's also the hustle of life.

Daisy: And I had to really pause and say, I want no hustle in any part of my life. I have said this. And I will say, the writing of the book, and I've had a weekly LinkedIn post that I would write called radical sabbatical chronicles. And I wrote it because the day I left Vice, I wrote our goodbye notes to the company, as we do. And usually you say what you're off to do, but I was off to take my radical sabbatical.

Daisy: So I wrote that in my note. And, of course, our comms people were like, can you write something else? I was like, no, I will leave here with the same integrity and honesty that I have always shown. And that's what I'm gonna do.

Daisy: I'm gonna take a radical sabbatical. Of course, the minute it went out, the note got leaked, and I started getting calls from reporters and people wanting to know what the hell this radical sabbatical was about. And so the next day, I said, you know what? I'm gonna own my story. It's already been too long of other people deciding to write what this evil HR person is, this privileged HR person, all of these things.

Daisy: I'm gonna write my own story. So I posted that I was taking a radical sabbatical to try and find myself again, to rest and replenish. And then I hit send and I braced myself, like, I'm gonna get so much hate mail. And it was the opposite. Erica, so many positive responses, not just on LinkedIn directly, but personal DMs, people calling and going, hey, Daisy.

Daisy: I'm so glad you wrote this. So I had to take a forced sabbatical. Right? I was laid off, and it was the best thing that happened to me. Right?

Daisy: Or, I'll never forget the male executive, a good friend who was also laid off, and he was like, I don't know what to do. What am I gonna do, Daisy? And I was like, oh, I don't know. You live ten minutes from the beach, and you've got two teenage sons. Spend time with them.

Daisy: Right? Rest with them. And so that inspired me to write this weekly note. Whenever people would reach out to me, I'd talk about here's what other people are doing in a sabbatical, or here's what I learned. And, again, that writing was my structure, but it never felt forced.

Daisy: I always wanted it to be about, is this creatively centering me and energizing me? And if it's not, again, hold myself responsible for what I said I was gonna do. And I said I was going to rest and heal, and I still got a lot of healing to do. So that was what that process was like.

Erica: Ugh, that's, I love it. It mirrors a little bit of my burnout story and my exit story, and I did what I called a life by design. And that was like, I had spent my life trying to straddle this line of being an executive and being a mother. And so my kids would come home after school, and I had one hand

Daisy: on homework, correcting math

Erica: problems and the other hand on Slack messages. And it's like, nobody is winning there. And so when I finally exited corporate and went out on my own, I was like, I am not gonna do anything after 02:30 because that's when my kids get home. And just the amount of pressure that alone relieves is just, you can't put a price point on it. You know?

Erica: It's incredible. So I encourage everyone, listening to your story, listening to my story, think about what do you want your life to look like. And also think about what is gonna matter in the end. You know? Nobody's gonna remember if I sent a Slack message at 05:04, but my kids are gonna remember if I helped them with their homework.

Daisy: Absolutely. And I love what you're sharing because I think for many of us, we go into this default mode of operating. Right? Our operating model is, I've gotta work. I've gotta do these hours.

Daisy: I've gotta be on demand, and I'm at work, I'm with my kids, and because of the way technology and our world has

Erica: Produce, produce, produce.

Daisy: Sleeping, everything just gets mushed together. We can design differently. Right? We can design it. We have a lot more agency over our lives.

Daisy: Even those of us who are tied to a job. Right? Even those of us who have multiple sets of responsibilities, children, older parents, whatever that looks like, we can still carve out the time to design the lives that we're meant to have. And for those of us who get to have the gifts, because it is a gift to be able to take that time off. And by the way, I just wrote a piece, I'm a contributor at Forbes, and I just wrote a piece about career pauses and how strategic they are.

Daisy: Right? It's a strategic move. And I was really intent on making sure that the reader knew, this doesn't have to be a one year sabbatical. This doesn't have to be a six month sabbatical.

Daisy: Right? But it is about how you design it. Right? And it is about how you think and process the idea of, for me, it's my mantra and my question is, how will I continue to protect what I uncovered? Right?

Daisy: You go through the process of uncovering and figuring things out. And for me, it was figuring out what my health looked like, what my triggers were, my past personal and professional traumas, because, by the way, we carry burnout from job to job. And sometimes we just think it's just a moment type of thing. I was like, no, this is, we have been carrying it and sustaining it for so long, and it has been eating away at us for quite a long time.

Daisy: And once I discovered that, I have tons of Post-its in my office, and I would just remind myself, I've learned this. How will I continue to protect this? Because I have uncovered this about me. How will I continue to protect it so I don't go back to my same patterns, so that I don't build again another hamster wheel that is good for nobody, including, and you mentioned your children, my husband, my daughter, my friends, the first people who suffer when we're suffering. Right?

Daisy: They are the ones. They suffer when we don't show up for them the way that they deserve to be shown up for. They suffer because they love us, and they see us debilitated. They see us falling into other versions. And they suffer because they live with us. They're around us.

Daisy: And so for me, it's easier to advocate for others than for myself. I was like, it's thinking about how do I wanna show up for my now almost 17 year old daughter, so that she doesn't repeat the same patterns?

Erica: Oh my gosh. That makes me think about a comment that my own mother said to me the other day, and I'm very fortunate, she lives right around the corner from me. But she said to me, and this was maybe a couple months ago, so I've been fully out of corporate now for about seven or eight months.

Erica: And she said, I feel like the old Erica is finally back. Oh. And it, like, broke my heart, but made me so happy in the first place because I didn't even realize how that was permeating out to the people who were closest to me. You know? And you talk about how it's so much easier to stand up for others and advocate for others, and it's like, here I was unintentionally causing other people hurt because they could see how I was hurting, and I wasn't breaking the cycle.

Erica: So it's like when you think about all of those things, it makes me emotional because I'm very fortunate. My kids are younger right now, they're seven and 10, so I have a lot more time that I can write that ship and show them what being an ambitious, successful, and balanced wife, mom, and partner looks like. I love this idea of rested ambition or rested hustle.

Erica: I haven't fully worked it out yet, but we can do both. You know?

Daisy: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. When I launched the book last year, it was interesting, most of the finance companies that I would talk to, when they would be prepping me, they would always kind of come in and say, you're not gonna tell people not to work. Right?

Daisy: And I'm like, no, no, no. That's not my message at all. And I say this often.

Daisy: There's a place for hustle in our careers. There's a place for grinding. Right? There's a place for getting things done. It's just not supposed to be sustained.

Daisy: Right? There are end of quarter crunches. There are midyear and end of year moments where it's hustle, hustle, get this done. There's a lot of great energy that can be derived from that when you're working in synergy with teams who are collaborating.

Daisy: But then you also have to create that space to breathe. Right? That space to celebrate the wins. That space to recognize what went wrong, what could have been done better, and that space to say, hey, let's take just a day or two to come back to ourselves, and then we'll come back as a team.

Daisy: And for me, it wasn't just my family that was feeling it, but so was my team. And I share this story in the book. It was when one of my team members, my number two, we were having our regular one on one, and I always gave them space, we had agenda items, but I always gave space to just, what's going on in life. Right?

Daisy: What is happening? Let's connect here. And she paused and said, you know, I need to ask you something. I don't know how to ask you. And that immediately

Daisy: sent alarms down my body because I prided myself in creating a space where my team could share. And I said, okay, well, fine. She said, so we're really worried about you, Daisy. And I came from such a place of love.

Daisy: And I was just like, okay. She's like, and it's not just us. The junior team members are worried. They're like, you're always sick. You're not as connected.

Daisy: You're locked up in your office. And my office was sort of 20 rows away, the way that I was structured in an old warehouse. And so I made a point of several times during the day of coming to the far reaches. As an HR team, we were always in the corner so that all the confidential stuff would stay.

Daisy: I was like, we're always in the corner, so all the confidential stuff would stay. But I would always make the rounds, and I would always come in and spend time with the team, and I was doing that less and less. And my excuse was, we're busy, we're going through so many crunches.

Daisy: But I just wasn't showing up for them. And I wasn't modeling for these more junior, early career professionals what it looked like to lead the way that I wanted to show to my team. Right? The way that they had already experienced.

Daisy: Right? If they had experienced me differently, then it might have been, right, just kinda like, this is who she is. But they had experienced me differently. They knew I was warm.

Daisy: They knew I was engaging. They knew I was connected to them. And so as she's speaking to me, Erica, I remember that mental calculation you're making of how much do I share, what is safe, how do I not wanna freak her out. And then halfway through, she was looking at me with these really caring eyes, and I just sort of started crying.

Daisy: And I looked at her and said, okay, you know what? I'm not alright. Things are not alright right now.

Daisy: And she, as my number two, knew a lot of the operational challenges that we're going through. But emotionally, I was like, I'm not alright, but I'm gonna be okay. And thank you so much, I really, really appreciate this. And that was the day, right, that I went home, and it was a couple days later that I had my check-in with my executive coach when I was like, you know what?

Daisy: It's not just that I'm not feeling it. It's that my team is now hurting. And that is what I take such pride in. And if I can't keep this team together during one of the hardest moments of our professional careers, then I would not only have failed myself, but I would have failed them. And that's not the kind of leader I wanna be.

Daisy: And that was one of those big moments. Right? It was combined with my husband and my daughter just kind of always looking at me, just taking care of me. My husband would feed me sometimes. My husband would remind me to eat.

Daisy: Right? It was those moments, but it was that combination of finally holding up a mirror and going, this is not the life I want to live, and this is not the leader I want to be. That's what inspired me to write, to research, and eventually to find healing in all of it.

Erica: Oh my gosh, what a gift, what a gift. And I wanna take a little bit of a left turn because you talk about tactical joy, and your book is just filled with all of these actual actionable tools. And I would love for you to share maybe one or two of your favorite tactics or practices that maybe someone who is burned out could try this week for just a little lift up.

Daisy: Yeah. Like I said earlier, I was not a fan of mantras before I started writing my book, but I went to a retreat where we had an instructor of tapping, emotional freedom technique. And every morning, we would do tapping and include little mantras saying things like, I'm safe, I deserve to be here, I'm a big deal.

Daisy: Right? Just all of these lovely moments. And, again, the first day, I was like, what's happening, this is not for me. And by the second or third day, I was just like, oh, this, this is just, I'm here.

Daisy: I'm fully embodied. This works for me. And these mantras, I'm feeling them. I am really living them. And so I share throughout the book.

Daisy: I share many practices because the truth is we all learn differently. Right? We're all told to meditate. I'm a terrible meditator. Right?

Daisy: I have too many monkeys in my head, but breath work, which I'll talk about next, really works for me. And these acupressure points, this EFT tapping really helped me, because it wasn't just the tapping, but it was the intentionality of finding language that meant something for me. So I shared throughout the book. At the end of each chapter, like a good HR executive, I offer scripts, because we tend to write scripts for everybody to help make sure that they get out of their own way, make sure that people are intentional in their conversations. And I wanted to offer scripts and tips for people to find what works for them.

Daisy: And so throughout the book, there are many chapters where I offer different scripts. And for me, the mantra that I use in the morning when I start is my mantra of gratitude. Right? What am I grateful for? And I'm grateful for three things.

Daisy: I pick three things every morning right before I get out of bed. What am I grateful for? What am I excited about that day, and what do I want to do? And that's become a mantra for me, and it helps me focus. But the other mantras that I recommend for folks to think about, you don't have to think of them as mantras.

Daisy: Right? Just think of them as reflection questions. And I offer a lot of reflection questions. It's like, what truly lights me up? Right?

Daisy: When I am at my best, what are the conditions around me? What does it look like? What do I, when I think about my ambition, instead of thinking about it in a negative way,

Daisy: well, how can I think about ambition as showing up as the best version of myself? And if I could allow myself to be that, what needs to happen? Right? What are the conditions that need to exist? Right?

Daisy: So it's asking ourselves those questions. And it's not asking myself, am I burnt out? But it's asking myself, what does it look like when I show up as my best self? Right? And also asking ourselves, what are the things that energize us, and what are the things that deplete us?

Daisy: Right? When we are honest with ourselves, and I will tell you, the honest truth is that the first time you ask yourself, you may get some answers. But keep on asking it. Right? Keep on asking it because you will continue to work through it, and you will have those moments of, this is what energizes me.

Daisy: This is what depletes me. This is what inspires me. And if any of that is missing, then this is what I need to do. So that's the mantras and the reflection piece. The second practice that I shared several times throughout the book is breath work.

Daisy: Breath work has been life changing for me. As you can see, I talk fast, I live fast, I walk fast. Right?

Daisy: No amount of sabbaticals and burnout

Erica: No radical sabbatical is gonna slow you down.

Daisy: Right. But I have learned that it is good for me to slow down. And the way that I slow down is through breath work. Right? And for me, it can be just cyclic sighing.

Daisy: Right? It's just the breathing again and then letting go. Box breathing. Right? The four step, take a breath.

Daisy: Four steps. Let it go for four. Take another one for four. Let it go for four. Right?

Daisy: There's tons of them. I offer a bunch of them throughout the book. But the point is that it helps regulate yourself, and it helps send cues to your parasympathetic nervous system that you're safe, that things are okay. And the third one, the one that I share every time that I talk about the book and burnout, is a tip that I learned from my good friend Shauna, and it is rubbing your thumb and your forefinger together really slowly and really feeling the ridges of your fingers. It's a little signal that goes to your parasympathetic nervous system.

Daisy: It just slows you down. And if you are a professional on video, the best thing is that you can put it underneath and nobody knows you're doing it. If you are in a board meeting and a moment of tension arises, or you are delivering a tough conversation, you can do it underneath the table and nobody knows you're doing it, but it is helping regulate. It is helping bring you back to yourself, and it helps you not only show up as a better version of yourself, but it also helps your health. It helps your well-being.

Daisy: It helps you calm all those cortisol levels that tend to accumulate over time, and take control and allows you to bring your own agency back. So that's a few of the examples.

Erica: Oh my god, I love it. And, if you're watching us on video, you'll see that we're both doing it, and we both have on our Oura rings, which measure all of our stress and anxiety.

Daisy: I love data. I love data.

Erica: And that's the thing. And, not to take a left turn onto the Oura ring, but I was able to monitor my stress levels in corporate versus leaving corporate, and I spend much more time in a rested and engaged state than ever before. And the science is there. It shows you right behind this lovely little ring.

Erica: Oh my gosh, Daisy, what is next for you? You've written this book. You've sparked important conversations. What is next for you and your mission?

Daisy: Oh my goodness. Well, my mission has always been to transform workplaces so that they can work for everyone. And so I am speaking, moderating, commentating on all things burnout and work, wellness. The moment that we're living in right now, of such deep uncertainty, and just this brittleness that we're all facing. And so I'm spending a lot of time working with boards and as an adviser and as a consultant, working with organizations to think about how do you build the systems, not just the wellness systems that you need, because you need that.

Daisy: But, really, how do you build the work systems that allow you to tap into the best capacity of your teams, create environments for everybody to thrive, to deliver on outcomes, because at the end of the day, that is what we have to deliver on, and to do it in a way that maintains the well-being and connection and joy of your teams. Because we don't talk enough about joy at work. And so my writing, my speaking, my advisory work, it's allowing me to bring all of that together, and it's allowing me to bring my two decades of HR executive experience to how do we build not just HR teams, but organizations and teams across the board that operate at a higher capacity. Even in moments of deep uncertainty and worry and concern, you can still operate at a high level, and you can still do it while maintaining your well-being and your sense of safety. But you need to have the right support structures to do that, and the right mindset and behavioral shifts in organizations.

Erica: Oh my gosh, I love that. I can't wait to follow what you're gonna do next and where that's gonna show up. But for everyone listening, where can they find you? Where can they learn more about you?

Daisy: Yes. My community is LinkedIn. So you can find me on LinkedIn. I'm on Instagram. I am a Forbes contributor.

Daisy: I write a biweekly column on all things work, careers, and leadership. And you can always find me and ask me questions, send me ideas. Let's build workplaces that work for everyone and find our joy and our light,

Erica: along with it. And don't get burnt out in the process. Oh my gosh, Daisy, thank you so much for joining us on the Glass Ceilings and Sticky Floors podcast. I absolutely love this conversation.

Erica: It was so much fun, so high energy, and so impactful. So thank you.

Daisy: Oh, thank you for having me, Erica. I'm so appreciative.

Erica: Amazing. Now if today's conversation lit a fire under you, here is your next move. Don't keep it to yourself. Share this episode with a friend. Drop a review.

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