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 and life that actually feels aligned, I'd love to welcome you inside HER Collective. You can learn more and join us at joinhercollective.com.

Because honestly, girl, you were never meant to do this alone. Welcome to the Glass Ceilings and Sticky Floors 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 out the paradoxes: being told to lean in, but not too far, to speak up but not too loudly, to be ambitious but not too ambitious.

Does that sound familiar? 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 glass ceilings once and for all. So if you are ready to rewrite the rules, own your power, and take your career and life to the next level, you're in the right place. Now, today's guest, y'all, we're gonna have to talk about this because you're gonna know from the jump that this is something different.

For the first time ever in the history of the Glass Ceilings and Sticky Floors podcast, I have invited a man on the show. I know. I know. This is bizarre. This is wild.

But when I met George, I really just wanted to bring him on the show even though he was a man, because he is someone who doesn't just talk about transformation. He lives it, he teaches it, and he helps others experience it too. So let me tell you about George Bryant. George is a visionary entrepreneur, a marketing expert, and the mind behind the mantra, relationships beat algorithms. So first of all, super intrigued about that, but he has built thousands of customer journeys.

More on that later. He's helped hundreds of humans reclaim their power, realign their purpose, and let go of the toxic patterns holding them back. He's worked with powerhouse brands like Men's Health, Women's Health, Onnit, and Vital Proteins. But what I love about George is how he shows up with heart. Literally, he helps people build businesses and live lives rooted in HEART.

H-E-A-R-T: honesty, empathy, authenticity, responsibility, and trust. So today, y'all, we're gonna do it. We're gonna invite our first-ever male guest, and we are gonna dive into the sticky floors that trap high-achieving women in burnout, misalignment, and people pleasing, and how George has helped them step into clarity, confidence, and self-leadership. So, George, oh my god. Come on.

Welcome that first man to the show. How's it going?

George: I am honored, and I would say it's now gonna be a new accolade of mine, that I am the honorary man in so many buckets. And I love adding another one, because even my girlfriend laughs. I'm just one of the girls, so I'm honored to be here. And just so everybody knows, my favorite color is pink, so I totally own it all day.

Erica: For all y'all listening, he's holding up the pink Stanley. So he is.

George: I am. I got pink suitcases, pink boots, pink shoes, pink Stanleys. So I'm truly honored to be here, and what a gift, after having you on my podcast too. So if people haven't listened to your show, it's so good.

Erica: That's right, guys. I did record an episode with George earlier, so you will have to check out his podcast to hear that. But, George, let's dive in, because I wanna talk about relationships beat algorithms. What does that mean when it comes to relationships with ourselves?

George: Oh, I love this. In the spirit of time, I could give a one-hour keynote on this, but I'm gonna hit it from the top down really quickly. I think one of the greatest gifts to our lifetime is the advent of technology, social media, being able to connect with people all over the world, but it's created this false illusion of relationships. And in the world of business and in the world of life, our job is to be tribal creatures that can communicate, connect, and build relationships with people.

And what I've noticed, being an entrepreneur for almost twenty years now, is that the one thing that tends to get thrown to the wayside is actual human connection. In the business aspect, it's understanding that there are people inside of our business. If we're in corporations or organizations, our team members are people. And people are not their job, their roles.

It's how they feel and what their life is like. I spend my time helping people bring humanity back into it, and this magical thing happens. When people feel HULA'd, heard, understood, loved, and accepted, magic starts to happen, because we bring together common ground. We bring together connection. We bring together empathy, and that's what real leadership boils down to.

So in the business aspect, it's understanding that yes, we have a business, and our job is to scale that business. We might even be inside of a business, using a team to help grow it. But each one of those people are people, and it's the most important thing, not the secondary thought. It's not what role can they perform, what's their job task, but what lights them up. How's their day doing?

How's their family doing? And in the lens of business, we forget about this, because it's transaction, transaction, transaction. And for all my corporate clients and all the women I've coached, and 80 to 85% of my clients are women, in that world it's, I'm only as valuable as my job. My value is only based on my performance, when all of us have intrinsic value that people forget about.

And even, being a Marine for thirteen years, I think the blessing in leadership I got in that position was that I couldn't hire and fire anybody. Whoever I had was mine, and we had a ragtag crew that belonged in prison and a circus at the same time. But our job was to create unity together, to be able to accomplish a mission, and that comes down to knowing people and connecting with people, to play to their strengths and help them with their weaknesses. So for me, it's understanding that we're gonna keep living in this technologically advanced world. There's gonna be more connection.

There's the rise of AI, but nothing will ever replace human-to-human connection, and it shouldn't be an afterthought. It should be the first thought.

Erica: So powerful. And you said something that really hit me, that people are not their role. You said that, and you coupled it with bringing the human back. Where I'm going with this question, because I know from my own personal experience working with my clients, is that women, and especially ambitious women, tie so much of their worth and their value up in their role and their job title. I actually had someone ask me the question of who is Erica Rooney outside of being a speaker and an author.

And I said, oh, I'm a mother, I'm a wife. And he was like, no, besides those roles. And I was like, whoa. What do you mean? It took me a long time to peel that back and dig down.

I love that exercise, but my question for you, George, is: how can high-achieving women who have attached themselves so deeply to these different titles, whether that's a C-level title or the title of wife, mom, partner, how do we detach from that and get back to the human of who we are?

George: That's a great question, and kudos to whoever asked you that, because it's my favorite thing to do. I had an event a couple of months ago, primarily women, and I had everybody introduce themselves. Everybody went around: I'm a mom, I'm a wife, I'm an entrepreneur. And I was like, great, wrong, F for all of you.

I said, I wanna know who you are. And I think the answer to that question, I can best answer through the mistakes I see people making. When we get ambitious, and it's so funny, my partner has a podcast with that word in the title, and she coaches women. I live in this world of high-achieving women. We end up, by default and accident, not by intention, picking up all these identities.

So when we have a moment of downtime, we're like, I'm gonna go to work, I'm gonna excel at my career, I'm gonna go do X, Y, and Z. And we end up sacrificing the sacred space with ourselves. We fill every moment with high performance, fill out the calendar, fill out the schedule. And what it does, by proxy, is it basically creates that as our identity. We see this with women and men.

I'm going through this right now. My son's getting older, and I don't live with him anymore full time. I had this identity as a father, but really what I had was codependency on my son. Because I don't have an eight-year-old twenty-four seven now, it's half and half, dictating my every minute and need, and all of a sudden I'm sitting on the couch and I'm uncomfortable. I'm like, why am I uncomfortable just being?

And it's because I've accidentally embodied these identities. One of the easiest ways to start finding this, and no one likes this when I say it, is to start dating yourself. Dating yourself means intentionally creating space to be in a relationship with yourself, without a phone, without an agenda, without music. When I assign this to my clients, the first thing I have them do is ask, what do you really love and enjoy? Where do you feel peace?

Someone says, oh, I go sit by the lake. I say, great. Leave your phone in the house. Leave your notebook in the house. Leave your music in the house.

Just go sit and practice being. No agenda. If you think of anything, you can't write it down. If you have a crazy idea, you can't write it down. If you find yourself ruminating or thinking, come back to your breath or your presence, and actually start flexing the muscle of being, because we're not supposed to go twenty-four seven, three sixty-five. It starts by creating the space.

The second thing we do is start to actually have that honest conversation with ourselves, the one he asked you about: who are you? I'll start with, oh, I'm an entrepreneur, I'm a coach, I help people scale business. Nope. Who am I? Oh, I'm a dad, I'm a blank. Nope. Who am I?

Meaning: if you were erased from the world and everything went away, all your needs were met, there was no other human being, you didn't have to do anything and perform, who would you be in that moment? It took me a couple of months with a former coach, and I ended up landing on, I'm a loving, passionate, and trusting man. That's who I am. It's what I embody, what I value, and what I measure my worth on, whether I'm embodying those principles.

We start to actually ask ourselves the questions with curiosity and not judgment about who we are intrinsically. Am I a man of integrity? Am I a family man? Am I a loving person? As I went through my day, did I scoff at people or judge people when they walked by? Did somebody ask me a question and I immediately jumped to judgment instead of curiosity? I start to be really curious about who I am as a person, but it only comes by creating space.

That's the one thing that happens with high achievers: we try to do our way into being. The amount of women who tell me, tell me what book I need to read so I can master the book, give me the checklist to go execute, I want a better relationship, tell me how and what specifically I need to do, when in actuality the answer, the path we're looking for, is internal. What we need to do is create the space to tune into whatever anybody calls it. Could be your intuition, your inner wisdom. For me, it's God.

It's creating the space to hear, and then trusting that voice that comes. But it's not something we can do. It comes from the process of not doing, and being. So it's surrendering to these moments. Maybe you have a really good self-care ritual and you love getting your nails done, or you love going on car rides.

I say, amazing, go on your car ride down the coast, but do it in silence. Or go get your nails done, but leave your phone in the car. Start to create pockets of space that allow us to reflect, to process, to get to what we'd consider empty. The best example I give, and every high-achieving woman will resonate with this: if you've ever gotten a massage, I can tell you verbatim what it was like on the table.

The first idea is, God, I need a massage, I need to relax. So you schedule it. The moment you schedule it, you start negotiating with yourself about when you can move it or change it, because you have too many things in your schedule. But you're like, nope, I already paid, I made the deposit, I'm going to get on the table. Then you get to the table and you're like, alright, can I ask her to shorten it? I only have thirty minutes, I got X, Y, and Z to do.

And then eventually you get on the table, and you're like, alright, well, I'm here, I paid, I committed. So she starts working, and your brain is like, okay, when I'm done, I gotta do this, I gotta do this, I gotta do this. We all get to this list of, remember to do this, the moment you get done, write this down in your phone, do this. And then this magical thing happens, where you run out of rumination and you empty your brain, and then magically you end up relaxed. Maybe you're snoring, you fall asleep, and there's this beautiful peace.

Right at the end, you stand up, you feel refreshed, you feel alive. You're not remembering any of those things you were ruminating on. You're like, god, I'm so glad I did that. And without writing anything down, without remembering, throughout the day or the next couple of days, every idea that was important came up, and your unconscious reminded you to do them, because you actually created that space. But what we do is we try to do our way into all of these solutions, instead of actually just pausing and stopping.

It's an incredible question, and it's deeply loaded, because it requires work. It's like a muscle, and none of us, you're an incredible speaker, you're an incredible author, but you weren't born that way. You trained it. You worked it. You developed a muscle. You keep practicing.

I heard Sadhguru say this in an interview with Mike Tyson. He said the funniest thing about humans is that we get issued this vehicle, but we never take the time to read the owner's manual. And the owner's manual doesn't come from outside of us. It comes by creating the space to tune inside of us. That could be breath work, meditation, journaling, free writing, but it's actually intentionally creating the space to allow ourselves to explore that relationship. I know that was a long-winded answer, but that's the best I could unpack it.

Erica: So here's my next question for you, which you're probably gonna giggle at, because my question is, great, so how do I start doing that? Do I do a values exercise? What is it? I know that's a hundred percent not what you're telling me to do, but that is where my brain goes.

I know my brain goes there, so is everyone else who's listening.

George: I love the question, it's actually really good, because what we're really talking about at a deep level is masculine and feminine energy. Masculine, by definition, is the creation of time and space with structure. Feminine is, when it's in that structure, I'm allowed to feel and to process and to do things. So how we begin is by intentionally creating some structure to allow that space.

It could be every morning, setting fifteen minutes aside and being committed to that fifteen minutes, but within that fifteen minutes, allowing yourself to do whatever you want without an agenda. There's nowhere to get to, there's no finish line, no performance grade, no KPI on it. It's actually allowing yourself to create that space. Some of us do it unintentionally, oh, I have my morning coffee, I always get my tea in the morning, I do this stretching, but we become a byproduct of the routine and end up not present in it.

It becomes muscle memory where we're not really flexing it. So the first step is to actually start creating space. Maybe once a week for an hour. You schedule it in your calendar, which gives you the structure, and you protect that, but then within that hour it's not what am I gonna do, what am I gonna achieve, it's what does my heart feel like doing, or what do I feel like?

Maybe it's sitting on the couch and reflecting, maybe going for a walk outside. The answer is you start creating the space to fill, and in that space you don't have an agenda. You start to explore the things that come up. You might have something come up where, like, I'm massively uncomfortable not doing something right now.

What I've found is the fastest path to this relationship with ourselves is to go at it with curiosity and just ask questions. When did I decide that I have to be doing something in every minute of every day? What could I be doing differently in this moment? When did I decide I'm not allowed to rest? When did I decide my needs were not important? When did I decide I couldn't rest and relax? When did I decide I should feel guilty about taking time for myself?

We start to go in with questions, no agenda, and it really is just about creating and honoring that space. Inside of that, you might realize, I don't know who I am as a woman. I'm a CEO, I've achieved this, I've sold all those companies, amazing. But the dangerous part is there's going to be a time in our life where those things carry no value whatsoever. And then what we end up with is not liking the reflection we see in the mirror, because we never took the time to ask the deeper questions.

So really, in the lens of performance and doing, you create the space and the structure, but you allow yourself to flow freely inside of it, and you get to trust yourself.

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, 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 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 [confirm book link]. 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. I love it, because it gives me something to do without really giving me a lot to do.

But George, I wanna take a left turn, because you talk a lot about alignment and the nervous system, and I am super interested in all this nervous system work and regulating it, because I've started doing some of the practices myself, and I see the benefits, I see the change. So how do you help clients rebuild safety and trust in themselves before they hit burnout or misalignment?

George: What a great question. One of the things I say all the time is that our perspective is the difference between our prison and our power. When we're living our life, when we go to work and we're in a board meeting, and this meeting is a nightmare because X happened and Y happened, the event itself is neutral.

There's no emotional charge on it whatsoever. It's just a fact on paper, a subjective truth. Client A left, we lost the funding, that keynote canceled. That, as an event itself, just exists as an event. Where we tend to lose the game is when we become reactive to that event and we make up stories about it, fears about it, and create anxiety around it.

But really, the only thing that's subjective is our relationship to it, and that dictates our result. Our relationship to it is dictated by our perspective, and our perspective can only shift when we flex a muscle or practice something different. There's this conversation that everyone thinks that when you do personal development or awareness work, or modalities and healing modalities like breath work or therapy, the triggers go away.

The triggers don't ever go away. What happens after them changes. You might have a moment where your nervous system's dysregulated because you got a bad phone call, and it used to last a week, self-sabotaging behaviors like ruminating, not sleeping at night. But the more you flex that muscle, you go, oh, this has happened before, interesting feeling in my body, I remember what I did last time, so I'm gonna do A, B, and C, and it shortens the gap to response. That's a muscle we practice.

So to answer your question, regulating our nervous system is our responsibility, but controlling the world around us is a lose-lose game, because we can't. What we can control is our relationship to it, through connection to our body. For high-performance women and high-achieving women, the one thing I see happen all the time is they don't honor the feelings they're having.

They're like, oh, I'm not allowed to feel sad, I'm not allowed to feel angry, I don't have time to feel this anxiety, I don't have time to do ABC. And it gets stuffed down over and over until the littlest thing, like our son comes and asks a really easy question, and then we end up in a bucket of tears, crying for forty-five minutes, and it doesn't match the situation. That's because it was just looking for a release valve. So the first thing is understanding that the world is going to happen, and our job is to build the muscle to control our response to the world, not allow the world to create a reaction out of us, which comes down to regulating your nervous system, and to the owner's manual of our body. One of the first things we have to do is have that relationship with our body, which is creating space and intentional time.

The second thing is we have to have access to things that actually help regulate our nervous system, which we all do. For every woman listening, imagine a moment where a situation happened that was not ideal and you started spiraling. Business is struggling, or I just lost my job, or my relationship's in the pooper. It's this giant thing of, I don't know how I'm gonna get through this, I don't know how I'm gonna get through this.

It creates this massive overwhelm, and eventually it's enough that you go do something to reset your nervous system. You might be like, screw it, I'm going to the gym. Screw it, I'm going for a run. You know what, I'm just gonna go sit in the backyard and breathe for a minute. We all have these coping mechanisms.

Those are the same coping mechanisms we can use proactively every day, to train the resiliency of that muscle, so that when those things happen, they don't take control of the driver's wheel. We keep our hand on the wheel, but we're in control. Things like breath work, ice baths, breathing, yoga, movement, dance, our favorite song. It's any modality we use and have access to that changes our state, but really what they're doing is also changing our perspective. They bring us back into our body, and it says, okay, I understand this is happening to the world and in the world, but I'm still driving my body.

So we state-change in any of those modalities, and then we allow ourselves to feel the feeling. I do this all the time. I gave a keynote last week, and in the middle of it I was telling a story, and it made me really sad, and all I was thinking about was my son. So I stopped and cried in front of everybody, for about forty-five seconds. I didn't tell them why.

I just cried, and when I was done, I said, okay, I feel better, alright, let's get back to the talk. Everyone's like, what just happened? I said, oh, I was just feeling my feelings, I had to let it out for a minute. Immediately, when I feel it and process it, it allows me to come back to center. So understanding this in our nervous system is understanding that the things we do internally dictate the perspective we have externally.

The reason I use the example of a bad day is because in your situation, it feels like a bad day. But if I grabbed somebody from the outside, they'd look at it and see opportunity, not an obstacle, and the only difference is their perspective. The difference is they're not inside the pill bottle, or inside the washing machine, experiencing it. So the first step is for us to remove ourselves from that, reset our nervous system, and then go back in, which is the reactive part. Proactively, these are the things we practice every day, so that we have, quote unquote, control of our nervous system.

If we take the practices we love, that help us when things go bad, and bring them proactively into our day to day, then when those situations happen, we adjust a whole lot quicker, because we have an awareness of it and we let ourselves feel our feelings. Does that make sense?

Erica: Absolutely. And I'm glad you talked about taking that moment to stop and recognize what's going on with the body. You know my SNAP method.

George: I do. I love the SNAP method. It's on a sticky note on my wall. I wrote it down.

Erica: And the S is the very first thing: stop and take note of what's going on, because I have a friend who always says, you cannot unring a bell. And when you actually take the time to stop, even if it's just like, okay, whoa, that was weird, I'm gonna dig in and explore that later, you can do that. But so often we just rush right past it. George, I think from my perspective, I don't think it's I'm not allowed to feel these feelings, but a lot of it is, I don't have time to feel these feelings.

I don't have time to be angry about this. I just gotta get to the problem. What I will tell you is I've seen moments in my life and my marriage where I've been quick to say, no, I don't have time to deal with this, we just have to fix the problem. And what that does is put my husband on the defensive, because then he's like, no, no, you're not listening. So I also, as a very ambitious, go-getter, onto-the-next kind of person, have to recognize sometimes that I gotta slow down, take a breath, and allow for those feelings. Now, I don't know that I'm gonna be bold and brave enough to cry for forty-five seconds on stage.

George: I'll get you, I'll get you.

Erica: But I feel you, I see that. But let's talk about this HEART framework, because I teased it in the beginning, but I want you to break it down for us and explain how it shows up in personal growth, not just business.

George: Yeah, it's a great question. The one note I wanna make on your previous point is that you don't have time not to. Because no matter what,

Erica: I know this.

George: And I really do. This. I think for everybody listening, it's really important, because all it's doing is delaying the process that's going to happen, but increasing the amount of pain that's going to come the longer it's delayed. I joke with people, and I use a stinky fish analogy: if you buy a fish and put it on the front seat of your car, and it slides under the seat and you forget about it, if you take it out on day one, totally fine, just a quick air freshener. You forget about it for weeks, and at that point it's eroding your carpet and destroying it.

You leave it for a month, and it's got a hole in the floorboard of your car, and any longer than that, you have to bring it to the salvage yard and get a new one. These moments operate the same way. The longer they're unexpressed, because we don't have the time, the deeper they build into us, and they get in the way of us having the results we want. I wanted to share that, because you nailed it with your husband example, but you don't have time not to. When it comes to HEART, it's bringing humanity back into business.

When people see HEART, they see empathy, authenticity, relationships, and trust. None of those are with other people first. The H is our heart, actually being connected to it, honoring ourselves and our feelings. Then it's having empathy for ourselves, because high-performance people tend to be very self-critical.

I didn't do this, I could have failed at this, I could have done better at this. We use words with shame, fault, blame, and guilt attached, and we end up exacerbating our own trauma. I tell people: if you've ever raised a child, we know that when a five-year-old doesn't color in the lines, the worst thing we'd say is, you suck at coloring, how dare you color, why did you color like that? We would never. But when we're speaking to our inner child, we do that, and expect a positive result.

So it's having a heart, self-love. For five years, the background of my iPhone was a photo of me at five years old, because I was the most critical one. I was a Marine, I was a high performer, I overcame all this trauma, and I would be really mean to myself, but I didn't know how to have empathy with myself. So I changed the background of my phone, and every time I'd be angry at myself, I couldn't be, because I imagined me being my son. So it's taking our heart and love for ourselves, having empathy for ourselves, and then expressing ourselves authentically.

If I ask you how your morning is, please don't lie and tell me great. I'd rather you tell me you got a flat tire, spilled your coffee, and got in a fight with your spouse, but you're choosing to go anyway, because that's authentic. Authenticity is the most resonant currency for human beings. It's been scientifically studied that it's the number one needle-mover to be authentic. If you take heart for yourself, empathy for yourself, communicate about yourself, and express it authentically, those are the foundations that create actual relationships. And when you build actual relationships, that's what builds trust.

We do this with clients, team members, coworkers, friends. If we're having dinner, and I come to see your husband, because I love him based on what you told me about our first podcast, I don't wanna talk about the weather. I wanna talk about your day, what keeps you up at night, and how can I help, where can we relate. But in order to build that relationship, it requires that I have awareness of myself in those first three buckets, that I know where my heart is. I'm going through a pretty big divorce right now, and my heart hurts a lot. I don't live with my son all the time. I see him half the time.

But I can feel that and honor it, have empathy for myself and my son and my ex. Then I can express those feelings authentically, not from a place of judgment, just from a place of, this is how I feel. I can share that with people, which builds actual relationships, and those relationships build trust. We've come into this world where it's an instant gratification society. It's swipe left, swipe right, send another message, how many people can I go to dinner with, an Irish hello and Irish goodbye.

We're lacking depth. But that depth is a requirement for us to function as human beings. Bringing those principles into business, teams, and friendships is what creates the depth we all crave. The mistake people make is thinking everybody else is going to do it, when it's actually an invitation for us to bring it to the table and invite other people to meet us at that depth.

Erica: I love all that. We do this exercise at dinner with the kids. We're in that era where it's sports a lot of the nights, so the times we can sit down and eat as a family during the week, we have this card deck, I found it on Amazon, kid cards that ask the best questions I would never think to ask my kids or even my husband.

We all play and deal them out, and read the question and answer it. One of the questions was, what's the best thing about being you? Another was, what's something in this family that doesn't feel fair? If my seven-year-old pulls that, it's not fair that my son, who's a lot older than her, got to ride in the front seat.

But it gets these really interesting answers from them, and between me and my husband. So if you're bored and don't know how to do this, make it a game.

Make it fun.

George: I love that. I truthfully do the same thing. There's a company I use called How Deep Will You Go, and they have three levels: icebreakers, confessions, and going deep.

Erica: Confessions. Oh.

George: Yeah, at every event, every dinner, when I start team meetings, when I'm catching up with friends. We were at dinner the other night, and we pulled them out. They're great conversation starters, because they create this divergent thinking and authentic answers that create connection. In teams, it's the best thing.

Even in our team meetings, when I run my team, we don't start the meeting for five minutes, because the first thing I ask everybody is a minimum two-word authentic check-in, meaning tell me two words to describe how you authentically feel in this moment, no judgment. It could be exhausted, or I don't wanna be here, or I'm nervous about this meeting. What it creates is solid ground for us to have connection around, and it takes two minutes. Those are the places we practice it, and I love that you do this for your kids.

Here's what I've realized about business, life, and performance. We're all just little kids screaming for the approval of our parents. If we just took the way we communicate and create those moments with our kids and brought them into our team, our customers, and our coworkers, we'd have the depth and safety we crave without the need for it to all be performance-based. But it requires that we create that connection, because without it, the only thing we have is features and benefits. If you don't know me as a person, the only thing you can measure me on is my performance.

If you don't know me as a person, the only thing you can make assumptions about is how I showed up in this meeting. And we haven't created the space for humanity, and I think that's one of the biggest missing pieces right now.

Erica: I love that. Oh my gosh, so incredible. George, if someone is listening right now and they are feeling totally lost, in burnout and misalignment, in a totally deregulated nervous system, what's the first thing you'd have them do that's not gonna totally derail their day or feel super overwhelming?

George: This is the hardest one. No one's gonna like me for this, because it's the one thing you take for granted every day, and the moment you no longer have it, you wish you had it back. It's called breathing. Most of us don't breathe. We talk, we fill space, we take shallow breaths, but there's so much power in breathing, because it brings you back to your body.

I have an alarm on my phone that goes off three times a day, reminding me to breathe. All I do for one minute is stop everything I'm doing, and do one minute of intentional breathing. It doesn't matter if you're following a process. It means the only thing I'm doing right now is having gratitude for my breath. You'll notice that when something bad or scary happens in our life, the first thing our body does is gasp for breath.

There's a reason. It's built into our bodies, and it brings presence and joy. I'm also a breath work teacher, but it's the little ones, and it's actually breathing. That's step one. Step two is state changing.

If you're in a moment, burnt out, stressed, or even in a meeting you just wanna run out of, you can at any moment bring presence to your breath. Breathing puts you back in the driver's seat of your body and emotions. It doesn't matter if the feeling goes away, it's an acknowledgment of the feeling. The second thing is to state change, meaning when and if possible, get up. If you're on the laptop and get a bad email, take a breath, then get up and go somewhere else.

Go for a five-minute walk. Go put your face in cold water. Go put on your favorite song, but actually change the state of your body to change your perspective. Because changing that perspective leads to the third step, which is, now that this has happened, or now that I'm feeling this way, what am I going to do differently than I did before, to remediate this or bring it into a different perspective. We take these micro bites of action.

Breathing is the number one thing we always forget about. We do this in team meetings too. I make everybody close their eyes and breathe. I had a woman have me on her podcast yesterday, and she said, when we start the podcast, I'm gonna tell you to close your eyes, and we're gonna breathe in silence for a minute. It was the best thing I've ever done. I said, this is the best way to start a podcast.

Everyone listening is hearing nothing except our deep breaths, but I felt so calm and so clear. So breathing is it. There are tools you can use. Box breathing is one: four in, four hold, four out, four hold. There are ones I do sometimes when I'm really triggered or tired, where I'll do intranasal breathing.

I'll plug one nostril, take two breaths in, two breaths out, and switch, and it's like a cup of coffee. Or it's just saying, hey, I'm breathing, and I'm gonna breathe in and breathe out. What you're doing is bringing yourself back to your body. I hate it because it's so simple, but it's also so effective, because when kids get hurt and they're screaming and wailing, what's typically the first thing we tell them to do as a parent?

Erica: Breathe.

George: Breathe. Right? Well, we as adults, who live in this overstimulated, performance-based world, it's the one thing we forget to do, and it's the thing that brings us life every day. But because our bodies do it by default, we take it for granted. If you've ever drowned, which I have, or run out of oxygen or gotten close, you beg for it and scream for it.

You just wanna be able to breathe again. Breathing is the number one, most powerful tool and modality that everybody has access to, anytime, anywhere, at any moment's notice.

Erica: Oh my gosh, incredible. And it's free. We all got it.

George: It's free.

Erica: George, if people want to connect with you, find you, hear your podcast, where can they do that?

George: The best place is the pinkest website in the world, because my website is pink. I'm proud of it, I love it. It's mindofgeorge.com, and my podcast is on there.

My Instagram is on there, and Erica knows this, I have a heart of service. Even if I said anything today and you have a question about it, I can support you in it. Just DM me on Instagram and ask, I will personally respond. I will make book recommendations. I probably have a podcast episode about that or two. No matter what, you all need to go listen to the episode I did with Erica. That's me putting my foot down.

But it's mindofgeorge.com, and everything's linked there.

Erica: Oh my gosh, I was gonna say the same thing. If you do nothing else, just go listen to that podcast after this one. Get the double dose.

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You have the power to break through them. So go out there, take up space, and let's shatter some ceilings together. Thanks.