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. Have you ever heard of the upper limit problem? It's a concept that was made popular by author Gay Hendricks, and he wrote the book The Big Leap, which I just finished, and it basically says that each person has a threshold for how much success, love, and abundance they believe they deserve. Now when they hit this threshold, they subconsciously sabotage themselves to prevent going beyond that limit, which keeps them stuck in their zone of comfort instead of being in their zone of genius. And this got me thinking of all those glass ceilings that we place on our own lives, all the things that we think we can achieve, and the things we think we're not capable of.

Erica: But I've got my own twist on this upper limit problem and how we can shatter that ceiling once and for all. You are listening to the Glass Ceiling and Sticky Floor podcast, the podcast that will empower you to shatter the limiting beliefs and toxic behaviors to uncover infinite possibilities so you can live your best life. I'm Erica Rooney, and I'm on a mission to bring more women into positions of power and keep them there. I'm obsessed with all things growth and abundance, and I'm here to talk you through the tried and true secrets to get you to level up your career and your life. We talk about the hard stuff here, imposter syndrome, perfectionism, fear, and burnout.

Erica: So pull up a seat, pop in an earbud, and let's dive in. When people ask me about my HR career and how I got into HR, my answer is always, always, always the same. And that's that I never thought I would be in HR. It was never on my radar. But you know what else was never on my radar?

Erica: Being a c level leader, being an executive, actually having a voice and a seat at the table. I never once dreamed that I could be someone in that level of a position. I always saw myself as a doer. I always deemed that level of success and abundance for other people, not people like me. First of all, what does that even mean?

Erica: This like me. And quite literally, though, I used to think and I would have the idea of who am I to be that successful, to make that much money. That was something that I believed in my core. Now it's just so hard to pinpoint and describe, but the truth is that the core belief seeped into everything that I did. I just never believed that I was that type of person to be able to have an experience that level of success.

Erica: Now Gay Hendricks says that everyone has a thermostat setting for how much good they allow themselves to experience. So when something positive happens that pushes them beyond that setting like getting into the sea level, they would then engage in behaviors that might bring them back down to their perceived limit. These behaviors, they could be subtle like procrastination, creating messy conflict in your relationships, or even getting sick according to Hendrix. Too long didn't read, the upper limit problem is essentially about fear and limiting beliefs and how that holds people back from achieving their full potential. So I sat down and I thought about how this might show up in my own life.

Erica: And when I became an executive, y'all, that is when my drinking really took off. Yes. There were other factors that played into this. Factors like, really, that drinking had always been a part of my family culture and ever present in my home. And reflecting back, I always had been a messy drinker with sprinkles of time when I tricked myself into believing that I wasn't addicted to an addictive substance.

Erica: But that's where I disagree with Hendricks. I don't believe this idea that, well, I am now an executive, so I guess I have to sabotage my life in all the other areas. That just doesn't fly with me. I subscribe more to what is called reality therapy and choice therapy, which was developed by William Glasser. And these concepts suggest that behavior is chosen as a way to fulfill one's needs.

Erica: It wasn't this subconscious self sabotage due to an upper limit, but rather it was just me making choices, bad choices in this instance, but choices to protect myself. Now I've talked about this on the pod, so stick with me, but I was stressed out to the max. And throughout my life, I had observed and learned subconsciously that if you drink when you have a stressful day, you'll relax. I also observed that you drink to celebrate, you drink to mourn, you drink to socialize. Basically, I learned that there was never not a reason to drink.

Erica: So in keeping with this line of the thermostat analogy, the heat was turned all the way up on the stress, So why not turn that up on my drinking since I learned that if you drink, it minimizes and numbs out your stress. But when I peeled back the onion through my snap method, stop, name, ask, and answer, and pivot my thoughts and beliefs, I was able to recognize these false beliefs about what my drinking was actually doing to my stress levels. Shameless plug here, but if you want more on my snap method and busting limiting beliefs, you're gonna have to read my upcoming book glass ceilings and sticky floors. But it wasn't that I had hit this level of success in my career that I thought I would never obtain that led me to drink more. No.

Erica: No. No. It was digging deep into my core beliefs about how to relieve stress and then changing those negative patterns and establishing new ones. Now when I think of the upper limit problem, here is how I see it. We all place ceilings on what we believe is possible for our lives, and we probably do not explore it deeply enough.

Erica: But here's how I see it. When we see someone incredible and amazing like Taylor Swift or Oprah, we think we could never be famous. We could never be that successful. We could never be that abundant and make that much money. That's reserved for special people, not me.

Erica: We just don't think maybe because we don't see in our everyday lives that we that you, that I could reach that level of success. But here's why I love using Taylor Swift and Oprah as an example. Everything about them was ordinary. Let's take a look at Oprah. Before she was a media mogul and a billionaire, she faced rejection after rejection after rejection.

Erica: One being that she was actually fired from her job as a co anchor on an evening news because she was too emotionally invested in her stories. Y'all, say what? I think that most people would agree that her ability to connect and be so empathetic is what does make her so successful. And then take a look at Taylor Swift. She also faced multiple rejections from her labels.

Erica: And she came from a normal family and grew up on a Christmas tree farm for God's sakes. Now I learned that little tidbit from a t swift obsessed daughter, but I digress. They told her she was too young, that no one would listen to a teeny bop play country music, and she even had a very significant pivotal moment when she had to leave this very famous record company called RCA Records at the age of 14 because they did not believe in her enough to release an album with her own songs. And to steal a line from Pretty Woman y'all big mistake. Huge, right?

Erica: So what is it about these two incredible women that are different from you and me? Well simply put they didn't put an upper limit on their dreams. They didn't allow for rejection to stop them. They knew and they believed in their bones that they had something amazing to share with the world and they were not going to give up. Now when I look at it and where it differs from Hendricks' approach to this upper limit problem is not that we achieve success lower abundance in one area and then sabotage another, but rather that we are lacking the ability to truly believe in ourselves and in our bones that we are made for more.

Erica: Maybe you just can't see it yet. Maybe you don't even know what that is yet. But here's the thing, success is not achieved overnight. Neither Oprah or Taylor Swift woke up famous, but they started believing in themselves one step at a time. One very tangible example I wanna share with you that's personal is about money because I kicked my career off making something like $50.00 a year.

Erica: I was barely able to pay my bills and I would often have to choose between eating Chipotle at night or a bottle of $2 chuck, which is some cheap ass wine from Trader Joe's if you don't know. But back then, like twenty years ago, I had on my vision board a cutout of $80,000 because I thought that if I could make $80,000, I would really have made it. Look at that upper limit y'all. I didn't even believe that I was capable of making six figures. That just seemed too audacious to even put on a damn vision board.

Erica: Now I do make six figures in my corporate career, and guess what? It's a number that my college grad self would have never believed possible. So sometimes it's about one step at a time, one jump at a time. You build the confidence, you prove to yourself through grit, through resilience, through trust in yourself step by step. So sometimes it isn't about not putting that ceiling on what is possible, although that would be the ultimate goal, but it's about proving to yourself day in and day out step by step that you can do the damn thing.

Erica: It's about getting comfortable with being uncomfortable. With each new job I took and each promotion where I had to negotiate my salary, I was as uncomfortable as hell. Every single time doubting that they would pay me this new level of money, always worrying that they would reject my offer. And you know what? They never did.

Erica: Shit. One time, I countered and they came back above my counter by $10,000 to even secure the deal. If that doesn't tell you I wasn't dreaming big enough, I don't know what does. But it's about believing in yourself one step at a time and with each step raising that glass ceiling a little more raising your upper limits. If you're a person that believes in your bones from the jump that you are made for unlimited greatness success love and abundance shit I want you on this podcast because we all need to learn from you but if you're more like me where maybe you can't feel or see that Oprah level of success yet, we take it one step at a time.

Erica: And with each step, we raise the ceiling. We raise the upper limit. We raise the bar because here's the deal. If you consistently raise the bar with each level of success love and abundance guess what? You learn that there is no limit.

Erica: That limit or ceiling it's just what you see today but tomorrow you might be able to see a little more and then a little more and then a little more. Now this is the exercise that I want you to do to prove to you how this works. I want you to go back in time to a moment when you remembered the first big dream you had. I shared with you on my vision board with the $80,000 on it, right, where I would have made it financially if I was making $80,000 a year. That vision board also had a beautiful kitchen with a big island and pictures of tropical vacations.

Erica: Guess what? I worked for and chased those dreams, and I got every damn thing on that board and more. And after that, a new board was formed. A new dream was formed. So go back in time with me.

Erica: Remember that first big dream and ask yourself, what have I already accomplished that I never thought I was capable of? Is it career success? Is it working in a field that you love when you always thought that you were doomed to have a job that you hated? Is it finding mad, crazy, passionate love? Or maybe it's a new level of financial freedom that you never thought possible.

Erica: Whatever that is, go back in time and reflect. You already know I'm a huge believer in journaling. So free flow, write it all out, but reflect is to keep that memory close to your heart and every time you find yourself in a moment of doubt, in a moment of lacking, in a moment of scarcity, I want you to remember that the upper limit problem really is a glass ceiling problem. And I want you to remember that you are the only one to put that ceiling on your dreams, and you have the power to shatter that ceiling at any moment in time. You and only you.

Erica: I want you to recognize that it's normal. It is totally, totally normal for you to put those ceilings up. But the Oprah's and the Taylor Swifts of the world, they don't just stare up at them. They work towards shattering them, banging against those glass ceilings with the sledgehammer of resilience, of grit, and trusting themselves that they have the power to shatter the glass. Thank you for listening and tuning in.

Erica: If you haven't already dropped that five star review, do it today. It truly helps it land in the hands of the woman that needs to hear it the most. And don't forget, jump over to my socials too, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and even TikTok. I dropped some really great freebies over there so you do not want to miss out. And until next time, friends, remember, the only ceilings that exist are are the ones we place over ourselves.

Erica: Let's smash through them together.