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 Ceilings and Sticky Floor podcast. The podcast where we get real about the challenges that 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 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? 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.

Erica: Alright, ladies. Quick question before we even kick it off today. I wanna know how many of you are simply phenomenal at showing up for everyone else in your life. I'm talking your in laws, your partner, your kids, your colleagues, your friends, your neighbors, your community, your church, everyone, but you are absolute trash at showing up for yourself. This is just a quick little vibe check here.

Erica: Right? You keep the meetings moving. You remember the birthdays. You hit the deadlines. You answer text.

Erica: Like, you are so good. You're reliable and trusted and capable. But yet all those promises that you make to yourself, like, I'm gonna work out tomorrow, or I'm gonna write fifteen minutes in my journal every day, or maybe that boundary that you were like, yes. No more emails after 6PM, and you swore you'd hold that boundary. And the thing that you said that mattered ghosted.

Erica: Now listen. If that hit a little close to home, if it stung a little bit, hello? This episode is for you. Because before you start spiraling, right, just bear with me. This isn't an episode where I'm gonna tell you to do more or try harder or hustle harder. This is not a just set your alarm fifteen minutes earlier and have your green celery juice kinda situation. This is about why you keep disappearing on yourself, and it's also about how do you stop without setting yourself up for failure again and again. So here's how this episode was born. I was supposed to deliver and run a live training on this exact topic.

Erica: And the morning of this topic, y'all, North Carolina had an ice storm. The kids' school closed. They also had a fever, and it was simply chaos in the house. And in that moment, I had one of those moments, you know, where my brain was just like, you know what, Erica? Everybody would totally understand if you canceled.

Erica: It's snowing. You got sick kids. Like, it would totally make sense. And you know what? They probably already got those things going on too.

Erica: They would love it if you canceled and postponed. But then I caught myself y'all because I had already told myself that I really wanted to show up twice a month every month for q one in this community. I already made that commitment. It was quiet. It was internally.

Erica: I didn't post it anywhere. I didn't make a big loud declaration about it. But then that irony of canceling a session that was called stop self ghosting because life got inconvenient, y'all absolutely not. And that's the thing. Self ghosting doesn't happen in these often big dramatic ways like we might think it does.

Erica: Right? It happens in a very quiet and reasonable and very, very valid logical excuse kinda way. And over time, that gap between what you intended to do, the person you want to be, and what you're actually doing, the person you want to become, that's where your confidence starts just eroding away. And so let me say this clearly. You're not someone who's bad at follow through.

Erica: You're not lazy. You're not undisciplined. Right? You didn't get to where you are today just by sheer luck and by accident. The issue that we have, especially highly ambitious women, it's not an issue of motivation, but it's an issue of self trust.

Erica: And that's because trust, like, the trust that you have with yourself or with anyone else, quite honestly, it's not built on good intentions. Right? It's built on actual evidence. And right now, a lot of women have accepted accidental evidence that says, yeah. I say these things, but I don't always follow through.

Erica: And that's not because you don't care, but it's because you keep making promises to this version of yourself who just apparently always has the best day every day. Right? You make this promise to yourself, and it's like you're a woman who doesn't have kids or a job and always gets a great night's sleep and has unlimited bandwidth. Right? But that woman doesn't exist.

Erica: She is absolutely fictional. And you know what? That woman, I love her. Bless her. She does CrossFit six days a week and journals for forty five minutes.

Erica: Okay? We love her, but that is not real. And this is where I want to lovingly call you out. Right? I call myself out.

Erica: I'm a call you out too. You don't fail because you're aiming low. You are failing because you set these goals and these unrealistic expectations like nothing else exists in your life. Now let me say that again. You fail because you aim like nothing else exists in your life.

Erica: You sit down on a Sunday, maybe you map out these goals, or maybe this was back in December when you had, you know, all this motivation about what the New Year would bring. I'm not sure. Right? But then life shows up. Maybe a meeting runs late.

Erica: Maybe your nervous system is completely shot. Maybe a kid gets sick. Someone needs you, and you don't adjust. Right? You simply just ghost yourself.

Erica: You disappear on all the little commitments you said you were gonna make. And then you get shameful about that with yourself, and you say things like, I'm gonna start again on Monday, or I'll start, you know, over when the snow clears or when the kids aren't sick, or I'm gonna wait for the Chinese New Year. And that cycle just repeats. So is that does that sound familiar? Like, I know it hits home for me.

Erica: So we are going to change the rules, not all of them, but just the ones that are out there that are really sabotaging you. And this is the one that matters the most. I want you to move forward by only making clean agreements to yourself. Now you might be like, okay, Erica. Cool.

Erica: What's a clean agreement? A clean agreement is a promise that you can actually keep inside of the life that you are currently living. I'm a say that again. A clean agreement is a promise that you can actually keep inside the life you are currently living. Not your ideal life where no kid gets sick, no boss hands you a last minute project that's super urgent on a Friday night at 06:00, but your real life.

Erica: And this is how you know it's a clean agreement. You can answer four things without thinking too hard. You can answer when it happens, where it happens, how long it takes, and what counts as done. Okay? What is the success measure?

Erica: And if you can't answer those questions, your brain already doesn't trust it, and neither do you. So if you're sitting there and you're saying, I'm gonna work out more. I'm gonna focus on myself. I'm gonna write in the cracks of my day when I have time, y'all, those are some really great vibes, and I'm here for them, but they're not agreements. Okay?

Erica: And vibes, all those feel good vibes, they're very easy to ghost. So I'm gonna give you one of my favorite examples that I use all the time. If I told you that I needed $100 and you only had $20 to give me, I would be insane if I ripped it up in front of you, and I was like, no. Thanks. Come back when you have the full amount.

Erica: Like, absolutely not. I would take the $20. But for some reason, when it comes to ourselves, right, if we don't have the hour, the full hour for a workout, we just say like, oh, can't do it. It's not gonna happen. Never mind.

Erica: If we don't have the thirty minutes allocated to write, we don't write at all. We fill it with mindless scrolling. And if we can't do it perfectly, we ghost. And what I wanna say to you right now that really matters is that the minimum counts. If you give me that $20, I am $20 closer to my goal.

Erica: Right? Honestly, the minimum, when it's done consistently, that's what builds trust. So here are the rules if you're writing them down, if you're driving them, you know, just internalize them. But the first rule is clean agreements only. Those are the promises that fit your real life.

Erica: The second rule is that consistency beats intensity. Right? This is the version that you can repeat over and over and over, and that is more impressive than a version that looks good one time. So let let me give you a little fitness analogy. Right?

Erica: If you were to go out and run a marathon today, 26 miles, versus if you were to run one mile 26 times, which version do you think you can trust more? It's the consistent one. You got 26 miles either way, but consistency over time is what builds trust. And then the third rule that I've got for you when it comes to stop ghosting yourself is that you have to fix it fast. This is where so many women, myself included, often fall off because if we miss one day, we consider it a total failure.

Erica: Absolutely not. We're not doing that anymore. If you miss a day, you pick it back up where you left off and you get going. There's no restarting. There's no punishing yourself.

Erica: There's no guilting yourself. There's no dramatic, I messed up monologues. Just repair it and then move on. Okay? So many times we're into all of these streaks where we have to do it every single day or else we have to start over.

Erica: Right? What is it? The ninety days hard. If you miss one day, you have to start all the way over the beginning. Y'all that is complete and utter nonsense.

Erica: If you get to day 87 and you forget to take a selfie, that doesn't negate everything you've done on all of the other days. You fix it and you move on, and that is what self trust looks like. So alright. Here's where you're not gonna ghost yourself again. I want you to make one clean agreement today.

Erica: Just one. We're not doing every little bit of your life, but just one, and we're gonna use this format. I will do x on y date for however many minutes, and minimum success looks like this. And then you just write it out. That's it.

Erica: So for example, I'll use a workout one because that's super simple. I will work out on Tuesdays for fifteen minutes, and the minimum success looks like me getting dressed and going to the gym. That's it. And I know that doesn't seem like a lot, like just getting dressed and going to the gym. But, honestly, if you set that as your minimum and you get to the gym, like, you have done the hardest part.

Erica: You have done it. And so whatever you do from there, you've hit your goal. Right? Now here's the important part. I want you to send me that clean agreement.

Erica: I want you to DM me on LinkedIn, send it to me on Instagram, because also when you make it visible and when you have accountability, you start to take it seriously. And listen, you also never know what kind of surprises I have up my sleeve for the women who do actually follow through. But more importantly, I want you to stop ghosting on yourself. You don't need more discipline. You don't need to hustle, but you do need agreements that you make with yourself that you can trust.

Erica: And that woman that you're becoming, y'all, she can't ghost herself. She shows up even when it's messy, even when it's not perfect. And y'all, that's how everything changes. Alright. If today's conversation lit a fire under you, here's your next move.

Erica: Don't keep it to yourself. Alright? Share this episode with a friend. Please drop a review, and let's keep the conversation going. Remember, your potential is limitless as long as you stop self ghosting.

Erica: But the only thing standing in your way right now are those sticky floors. And guess what? You have the power to break through them. So go out there, take up some dang space, and let's shatter some ceilings together.