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.

Erica: What's up listeners? Welcome to the very first episode of the podcast from now to next, episode one. I am super excited to be here with you today. Super excited to start off this podcast podcast with all of you guys, but I wanted to start it off right. And I wanted to give you guys a little bit of background about me and about what this podcast is and what you're gonna hear throughout all of the episodes.

Erica: But I am calling this one glass ceilings and sticky floors, and I'll get into that. But to start it off, I'll tell you a little bit about myself. I'm Erica Rooney. I am a C suite executive in HR. I am a certified executive coach, certified personal trainer.

Erica: I'm a wife. I'm a mom with two little kids, a fitness fanatic. You know, I love to travel around the world. Gosh, but at the same time, I love to just sit on my couch in my pajamas and watch movies with my kids. But I spend a lot of my time working with people and growing and developing them and coaching them on how to get from where they are now to where they want to go next.

Erica: But something that I have seen and I have noticed, especially with women is that it is not that we can't break through glass ceilings. It is that we are stuck in our own sticky ass floor. And what do I mean by that? What is a sticky ass floor guys? So a sticky floor could be perfectionism.

Erica: It could be imposter syndrome. It could be systemic issues like racism, sexism, ageism. It's that feeling that whatever you do, it's not going to be good enough. It's that feeling that you're not pretty enough, smart enough, qualified enough. It's drinking too much wine on a Wednesday to dull the edges of a hard day.

Erica: It's depression, it's anxiety. It's working like you don't have kids, but having to parent, like you don't have a job. It's feeling tethered by responsibilities and financial restraint. And it is that paralyzing sense of overwhelm and burnout. What I have found is that these are the sticky floors that are holding women back from breaking through the glass ceilings of their lives.

Erica: Now, I don't want you to think of a glass ceiling just in that corporate C suite type lingo. I want you to think about it as it relates to the context of your life. So what is that barrier that is keeping you from living that joyful, successful, and fulfilling life, whatever that is for you? Maybe that's being a badass boss of a fortune 500 company. Maybe it's running your own yoga studio in a small, quiet town in Montana.

Erica: Shoot. It could be living out of an RV and traveling the world with your children or starting your own business. But whatever your dream is for you, that big hairy, scary, audacious goal, that's your glass ceiling. And when we talk about sticky floors, I feel like as women, we are constantly working through different sticky floors. So I want you to kind of think about what is that sticky floor for you.

Erica: And I can tell you for me, it's been a lot of different things and at different times in my life. So I've gone through periods of time where I've struggled with high functioning anxiety and depression that has kept me from really growing and advancing and excelling. I've gone through moments in time where I have leaned way too heavily on wine to, to get through stressful times in my life. And that has helped me back. Definitely imposter syndrome, you know, and, and the struggle of just being a bad ass in the boardroom to being the kind of mom that I wanna be all at the same time.

Erica: And sometimes it's even a combination of all of those things. But what has helped me is knowing that I'm not alone in this. And that's why I wanna do this podcast because we will be talking with these awesome empowering women who have taken a beat. They've figured out their sticky floor and they have become unstuck. But I want to start with a few different statistics just to, to talk about it.

Erica: But a KPMG study showed that seventy five percent of female executives report having personally experienced imposter syndrome at certain points in their career. Most of the people who answer that survey, eighty five percent believe that this is commonly experienced by women in corporate America. And I'll tell you that if I were surveyed, I would definitely check that box. And nearly half of executive women say that their feeling of imposter syndrome is a result of never expecting to reach the level of success that they have achieved. So I want to let that settle in for a moment and I'm going to repeat it, but nearly half of those survey respondents said that their feelings of imposter syndrome were a direct result of never expecting to reach the level of success that they have achieved.

Erica: Wow. Now when you look at alcohol use in women, studies show that countless women have used alcohol as a form of stress relief saying that it quote unquote takes the edge off. It makes it easier to deal with your kids. It numbs out the stress of the day. It lets you check out, right?

Erica: Who can't identify with that? But the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development suggests that the more successful you are, the more you drink. And historically, while men do drink more, the number of women who experience alcohol use disorder or problematic drinking are on the rise, and it's actually converging with the rates of men. I don't want to be a tee totaling podcast here, but I think that with the, the rise of alcohol use within women, especially successful women should really be taken note of because the overuse and abuse of alcohol is so prevalent in our culture, both in corporate America and in mommy circles that it is creeping in, and it is really keeping us from being our best selves. So this might not be a sticky floor for you.

Erica: That's awesome, but it is definitely the sticky floor for a large portion of women out there. But I don't wanna forget either about anxiety and depression. Anxiety disorders are the most common mental illness in The United States, which affects over forty million adults over the age of 18. That's wild to y'all. So the point here with all of my statistics about imposter syndrome and women and alcohol and depression and anxiety, it's not to depress you further or make you feel hopeless, but it's really just showing that there are other women and people out there who are going through the same things that we are.

Erica: And many of these people are now on the other side of these sticky floors. Right? So it's not always that glass ceiling. That's holding us back from reaching our greatest potential. It is our own sticky floor.

Erica: It is what we are doing to ourselves. So the point of this podcast from now to next is to show you that there are women out there who have figured out how to get unstuck from a sticky floors. They have found that solvent to dissolve the gunk. Right? So in all of the episodes going forward, you know, we will be talking with other women who have gone through the gunk.

Erica: They've come out on the other side. We're gonna talk to them about their struggles and their setbacks, but we are also going to talk about and focus on what got them through. In between these sessions, I'm also gonna be hosting little mini soaps that I call stepping stones, and that's where I'm gonna dig into some of the facts and the science about these sticky floors. So we'll talk more about the numbers with imposter syndromes. We'll look at different views of imposter syndrome, things like that.

Erica: We're gonna talk about how you can develop effective strategies to move through barriers and develop resilience. We will explore how you can cultivate the courage to let go of the bullshit that's holding you back. And we're going to discover how you can develop those tactical tools and daily practices to incorporate into your life that will help you go farther than you have ever imagined. Because I want you guys to all take a moment and just think about what is on the other side of that glass ceiling that you are staring out of. When you can get yourself unstuck from that sticky floor, you are going to be living the life that you have wanted this whole time.

Erica: There are infinite possibilities out there. We've just got to get ourselves there. So ladies, it's time to step it up. Thanks for listening.