Erica: Welcome to Glass Ceilings and Sticky Floors, the podcast where we stop playing small, start calling things out, and actually do something about it.

I'm your host, Erica Rooney, executive coach, speaker, and a little bit of a movement maker. And I'm on a mission to get more women into positions of power and keep them there.

Because let's be honest, we've been told to lean in, but not too far. To speak up, but not too loudly. To be ambitious, but somehow still likable. And y'all, we're done doing that.

This is the space where we break it all down, the sticky floors, the ceilings, and the gaps that are shaping who gets ahead, especially in this next era of AI and leadership.

Some of it's mindset, some of it's burnout, and some of it is the system working exactly as it was designed. Either way, we're not staying stuck in it.

Each episode is your nudge to move. One decision, one shift, one bold step forward. No overhauls, y'all. No waiting until you feel ready, just real momentum.

So if you're ready to think bigger, move smarter, and build power on your own terms, you're in the right place. Let's smash the ceilings and close the gaps.

All right, y'all. You have worked hard. You have played by the rules. You have leaned in. You've climbed the ladder. You have grinded your ass off.

You've worked smarter, not harder, and you've done everything that you were told would get you to the top, and you are exhausted, you are stressed, and you feel guilty, and you wonder, "What the heck is wrong with me?"

Well, y'all, today's guest is here to tell us that, you know what? Nothing is wrong with us, but the game is rigged.

And so y'all, I am already just dialed in for this, but we have got Meghan French Dunbar, and she has spent over a decade interviewing more than 1,000 business leaders, from startup founders to multinational CEOs, and she's been studying what is broken about the way we work and what can we do about it.

And this cracked me up. It gave me a little giggle, but she calls this getting into good trouble, and she's been causing it ever since, y'all.

She is the co-founder of Conscious Company Magazine, the creator of the World Changing Women Summit, a TEDx speaker, a contributor to Forbes, Fast Company, all of the places.

She's the host of the podcast Unbehaved, and the author of the book that I wish every single woman who is listening to this podcast had on her desk right now, and her book is called This Isn't Working.

And y'all, that title, it says it all. So Meghan, welcome to the Glass Ceilings and Sticky Floors Podcast. How are you?

Meghan: Um, fabulous. I wish that I could carry you around with me everywhere, Erica, as my little hype woman. You're... That's the best introduction I've ever gotten. Thank you. Hey.

Erica: I love it, but I am just so pumped because I think the intro alone says it all. This topic is gonna resonate with so many people, and so I kinda wanna start with the book.

Are you good with that? Anywhere you want. All right. I mean, okay. It's called This Isn't Working, and I think the title alone says it all.

And, you know, maybe it's hitting you a little differently depending on where you're at in your career. But I would love to know, where were you at, Meghan, when you first realized that for yourself, not just as a researcher or a journalist, but what wasn't working for you?

Meghan: Yeah. It was, there were a lot of moments, and there wasn't a huge one that I got to when I had to do the book at this point, but the first one was suffering from a panic attack.

2017, I ran my own company. I was the CEO of Conscious Company Media. We had done an investment round. We're building employees, like the whole thing. We were doing the whole entrepreneur journey.

And I looked at our financials, and we had about maybe six months of runway left, and I was at the point where I either needed to go do another investment round, something miraculous had to change about our revenue, or we were gonna need to sell the company and/or go bankrupt.

And so all the pressure and stress of that particular moment, full-on panic attack on the middle of the floor. I remember my husband flying into the bedroom. I was in our guest room. We didn't have kids at the time. Our 85-pound dog is on his heels.

They're wrapping themselves around me on the floor, and they helped me through it, and the next day I got back up, dusted myself off, and went back to work because I had to, 'cause I'm the CEO of the company and I have employees and I have to just keep putting the mask on, and I just kept doing this.

And so I launched the World Changing Women Summit, as you mentioned there, which was, we had, you know, maybe 200-ish women every year who would come together for this big three-day gathering.

And behind closed doors, I would say 9 out of 10 women were where I was, which was chronic stress, anxiety, burnout. We were kind of wearing our busyness like a badge of honor, comparing how exhausted and overwhelmed and anxious we all were.

A lot of people struggling from undiagnosed physical health issues. And this just was normal. It seemed like par for the course, right? Like, this is the price of success or something.

So I ended up, I had my first child in June of 2019, and so we did eventually sell the company. I stayed on as CEO, so we had a parent company, and so I'd taken maternity leave, and I got back from maternity leave in late 2019 and had no gas left in the tank.

Five years of running my own business, doing the whole thing and then adding in the child and the sleepless nights and all the things, I essentially looked at my team and was like, "They deserve better than I can give them."

So I resigned on February 1st of 2020, and my last day was March 13th. For any of you who might remember that moment in history, four days later, we were in global lockdown.

And I had a nine-month-old, full-time CEO to full-time mom. And so this gets to the genesis of the book, which is after two years of... It was just kind of a black hole.

I don't even know. Two years of soul searching and therapy and all sorts of things, and another child, I popped back up in 2022 and really wanted to work again.

I have ADHD. I'm an entrepreneur. I'm a creator. I love building things, so I really wanted to do that and feed that side of my soul again, and was wondering, "Is there a way to do this without destroying myself?"

And so that was the seed of the book, and the more I started talking about it, the more I realized that other people were particularly interested in this, in what would happen if we didn't just swallow the script that we have to destroy ourselves in the name of success.

And because I'd interviewed over 1,000 people with Conscious Company magazine and we had the World Changing Women Summit and all the things, I had met people on the journey, CEOs, thought leaders, people who had what we would consider to be traditional levels of success, but they weren't burnt out.

They seemed grounded and peaceful and like they were thriving. And so I went to them and said, "What are you... Are you built differently or are you doing something differently? That's the first thing we need to figure out, right? Because if they're just built differently, then we're all screwed."

Turns out they were doing things differently. They all had a pretty common playbook that was leadership stuff, kind of individual things that they were doing, workplace stuff and mindset stuff.

I interviewed almost 100 more people for the book, and to a T, they were all doing similar things. And so fortunately, otherwise my thesis for the book would've been thrown away, but that's the very long answer of where the book came from. Personal trauma turned into maybe I can figure out how to do this in a better way.

Erica: I mean, that really dials into the make your mess part of your message kind of thinking, and it's really what spurred my whole book, too, in putting all that together. So that really resonates with me.

But all right, let's talk about some of these commonalities that you found, right? You said there was workplace stuff. There was mindset stuff. Let's dive into both.

I would love to hear, starting with the mindset, like, what was one of the top one or two practices that these people are doing that keeps them so grounded?

Meghan: The biggest thing, and it's fairly meta, is that their definition of success, the way that they think about what success is, was different.

And for anyone nowadays, when you say, "Tell me what your definition of success is," a lot of people can't really name what that looks like, but when you look at how you set your professional goals, they're often the next title, the promotion, the bigger salary, the new...

You know, we're looking for a certain level. We just try to go linearly up the path and accrue more and more and more extrinsic motivation, things like title, wealth, salary, influence, achievement, accomplishment, all the things. And we don't have a stopping point.

We don't have a marker of what enough is besides the age of 65, at which point maybe we can retire and do the things that we actually want to do.

So all of these women, they had a different way that they looked at success, which was based on intrinsic motivators, which when you look at some of the key ones, purpose, having meaning, making a positive impact on the world.

The second being growth or mastery, where they actually pursued things that they loved learning about, things that lit them up, things that they were interested in.

And the third being autonomy. They built their lives so they were not built completely around their work. Their work was built to fit into their life, and they had autonomy to cultivate a greater quality of life.

And yes, their work was a priority, it wasn't the priority. They focused on nurturing and cultivating the things that matter.

And once I understood this, then I dug into the research on all of it, and there's research supporting every single element of this.

Everything from, people looking at the University of Rochester, I believe, studied college kids who had ideas of success that were based on extrinsic motivation and those with intrinsic motivation, and then they looked at them way later in their career.

And regardless of the level of success that they had, the folks that focused solely on extrinsic motivation had lower levels of life satisfaction than they did in college and higher levels of stress and depression, and those with the intrinsically motivated ideas of success had greater levels of life satisfaction and lower levels of depression and stress.

And so this was a commonality across a lot of these leaders was they didn't solely base their idea of success on extrinsic motivation and really focused on intentional curation of purpose, passion, and quality of life. So that was one of the bigger ones.

Erica: It makes me kinda laugh 'cause I identify so much with that, and I'm like, "Oh, that was 100% me," like always chasing, always climbing.

I've told this story before, but it's like I was going to get my PhD in college, not for any logical reason, but simply because it was the best level degree you could get. You have to get the best thing that exists.

And there was no other reason than I just wanted to be called Doctor. So why aren't you calling me Dr. Erica, you know? And thankfully, I had a very great mentor who kinda steered me away from that and helped me realize that that wasn't necessary.

But this whole idea about we don't build our life around our work, we build our work around our life, to me, I love that, and it sounds great in theory, I suppose.

But I think it's challenging, and I would love to hear your thoughts on how we can do better about that, because when I think about how our society is set up, for anyone who's working in corporate America, it's a traditional 9:00 to 5:00, plus you're filling in hours outside answering emails, maybe taking a global call or traveling, and that seems like a really tall order.

It seems like an impossible ask. So do you have any steps or guidelines to how do you actually do the opposite? How do you build your work around your life?

Meghan: Yeah. This is one of the things that I talk to the most with people because I do workshops at, like, Coach and Kate Spade, and so these are women working at publicly traded organizations, and it's very stressful.

And when I'm talking to them all the way down to someone who's running their own business, everyone has different issues that they're dealing with when it comes to what is making it so that they feel like their work has to be the priority.

But the thing that I always pull people back to is, like, coming all the way back to building an ideal life statement.

If you were to reimagine your life based on ideal, how much time you wanna spend with your friends, your family, your kids, cultivating your mental and physical health, all the things.

Just putting that on paper and then comparing what you are currently doing with your ideal life statement. And if there is a way to make them work, more power to you. And more often than not, they are not simpatico. They do not align, and there's no way to make that happen without making some changes.

And so, like, I was speaking with a CEO last year. She had been the CEO of a pretty decent sized organization in New York, and I said, "What's next?"

She said, "I'm looking at a CEO role, but it needs to be at a bigger organization." And I was like, "Why? Because you just, for the last 25 minutes, talked to me about the fact that in the role you were just at for the last 15 years, you were overwhelmed, stressed, on the road constantly.

Didn't have time for your three kids. You were talking to me about how it wasn't sustainable, and now you're saying that you want a bigger, better role. What is why?"

And she said, "Because I'm worried about judgment." And I was like, "Judgment from who? Who are these people that are judging you besides maybe yourself?"

And this idea that it has to stay on a linear progression of always bigger, always better. And so when you come back to a place of writing an ideal life statement, a part of that is identifying what is enough.

And this is a practice, my husband and I have done it, and it is really hard because we live in a society with social media and all the things that we're taking in all the time, where we are constantly fed stories about our worth being defined by our power and influence and title and status and money and all the things.

So my husband and I, we live in a 1,400 square foot house in Boulder, and this feels like enough for us. We have an idea of what our financial needs are for us to live a decent life, going out twice a week, going on a vacation.

We have that, and we have enough what we want to save. And then both of us are our own business owners, and we have made the decision as a couple, if it comes to...

He's a renewable energy attorney. If he gets to the point where he is about to take on a case that's gonna make it so he is compromising time with our children, the answer is no. He gives that to an associate.

If I'm about to take on a consulting contract that's gonna make it so that I'm away from my kids too much, the answer is no, because that is a way for us to make sure that we hold the line and stay true to what we value as a family, but also what our idea of enough is.

And so, "What do people who are in corporate America do?" And I'm like, "Well, you quit your job and define enough," and that is a very privileged thing to be able to say.

And a lot of the people that I've found who've made a transition from corporate America towards something that looks more sustainable and more aligned with the life that they really want to live, where they're not so overwhelmed and stressed, without having to just quit and start their own thing, is looking at, for the types of companies that are run by the types of people that I talked about.

Because a lot of these people have built workplaces that don't drive people into the ground. They've built workplaces that make people's lives better instead of worse, that people actually enjoy going to work for.

And so looking for purpose-driven organizations that aren't toxic workplaces, that aren't cutthroat, that aren't short-term profit at all cost maximization, is often a great answer.

Rose Macario was a fabulous example of this. She was a CFO of a publicly traded company, one of the first women of a Fortune 500 company CFO. And she made the, quote, "downgrade" to go over to Patagonia because they were mission-driven, and ultimately ended up being their CEO and ran Patagonia for years.

And then when her passion took her elsewhere, she left to start a venture capital firm. But she talked to me about when you actually audit your life through the lens of what you want and don't have the story of it having to be linear, bigger, better, and actually look for organizations that would allow you to work in a way that you want to. Everyone can change their circumstances.

Erica: Well, everyone can change their circumstances, and while you've been talking, I've been running all of these different scenarios through my head, right?

And I'm thinking, "This is great advice if you're young and you don't have kids and all these financial responsibilities." And I was like, "Okay, what advice would I give that person?"

I'm thinking, figure out now what enough is. If you know what enough is from a title standpoint, from a home you're living in standpoint, from a dollars standpoint, then once you hit that target, make it so you don't ever see that money again and it just goes into savings.

Live by your enough means, and then you can take all that money later and retire at, I don't know, 45, 50. Do something great with it.

But I'm also imagining the person who is 45, they are a C-level leader or an SVP or the breadwinner of their family, and they can't afford the privilege of starting a business and walking away.

And I say that because this resonates so much with me because I was, and I still am kinda that person who's always going for the next thing. And it is so hard to unwind for that.

It was easy for me because it felt like leaving corporate and starting my own business was a step up even though it meant temporarily I'd be making less money. It still felt like a growth step.

But what if you're somebody who's that breadwinner responsible for all of those things, and you're kind of glued into some of these realities, right?

If you have a mortgage and kids in a private school and a car payment, you cannot just hope and pray that your business is gonna do well. And so how can you start to unwind from that? Almost work it backwards because you do have enough now, which you may be married to, you may be not.

You might have to create a long-term plan or something to downsize or pull your kids out of private school. I don't know, but what advice do you give to people who are more at that stage of life?

Meghan: Yeah. So there's the, you know, you can find a similarly positioned job at a mission-driven company. Torani Syrups is one of my favorites in the country. Eileen Fisher. I mean, there's a lot of fabulous companies, so there's that as an option.

Number two is, and I had to ask, I asked a lot of the women who I talked to about this because I felt similarly because the advice of like, "Just quit and do your own thing," is so hard to actually do.

So, one of the women I talked to, Akaya Windwood, she's like a sage. She talked to me about, essentially, what you were just saying, is very long-term planning, which is she said, "Think about how you can stay in your role in a good way for a specific amount of time."

So make it eight months that you're just like, "How do I be here in the best way possible? How do I optimize my time here?" While you start building the plan, saving a little bit here and there, figuring out what you need to be able to make a transition.

Because very rarely does the ability to change a company happen, where you're continually telling yourself the story that somehow it's gonna get better if it's already really rough.

Erica: I'm gonna give you a news flash. It's not. I'm a chief people officer, girl. I've looked for these things. You don't change the toxic culture. You exit stage left.

Meghan: Yeah. And if that feels really hard, it doesn't have to be this month or in the next six months. Build yourself a timeline, look at what else is available to you, and that also feels like, "Okay, cool. More work on me as an overly busy, overwhelmed human being." And it can be 10 minutes a night of just looking at what else is available out there.

I also brought up the, one of the women I interviewed for the book, Elaine Dino, she was a partner at a big global consulting firm, and she started getting really interested in purpose-driven business.

And because she was at a consulting firm, she got to just start working with their clients that were a little bit more purpose driven. And then she started a purpose-driven company newsletter inside her organization, which ultimately became a purpose community.

And so she was building this internal structure at the existing job she was already at, where she was getting to explore things and learn things.

She took her own initiative and piloted an entire study on purpose-driven organizations, and it added value to the firm, and then it also built a place so that she could exit at some point with her own unique perspective and value and clients that she had worked with and relationships.

So now she has her own consulting group working with purpose-driven organizations. That's what she ended up ultimately doing, but it took years of internal building, I guess I'm getting to.

Erica: Yeah, I think when I think through a lot of what I was struggling with when it was in corporate America, multiple six figures, full-on burnout all the time, living teetering on the edge every day, you know?

It's like, who could pull me back for just a smidgen? And I think the hardest thing, and I mean, it's just you have to break your own bad habits, right?

And like, not checking Slack, not looking at email at the end of the day. I cannot tell you how many times I added and deleted my work email from my personal cellphone, and that's on me, you know?

And I think the biggest thing to call out for a lot of people who are listening is that we put these standards and expectations on ourselves, and sometimes they're okay and they work with your life, and that's great. But if it doesn't anymore, you have to set those boundaries and rules for you, and you actually gotta stick to 'em.

Meghan: That, I literally wrote something, there's a line in the book about you cannot expect people to respect your boundaries if you don't respect them yourself. Yes.

And also, we are always modeling for everyone around us, regardless of what your title is, you are modeling to your colleagues what is expected in the workplace. So if you're sending emails at 2 o'clock in the morning, you're pressuring other people to feel that way, too.

I don't have my work email on my phone any longer. I was one of the first. I don't have Slack. I have nothing, no way to access anything work-related on my phone. And I just had to build that boundary for myself.

I don't check. I stop every day work at 3:00, and I pick up my kids and I hang out with my kids, and I don't check anything after 3 o'clock. That's just a boundary that I have to have.

And the more that you respect your own boundaries, the more other people respect them, and then you can also model healthy workplace behavior, so then they might start enjoying and respecting their boundaries as well, so.

Erica: Yeah, I think that's so huge, and I did something similar when I left corporate. I block my calendar every day after 2 o'clock because it's carpool pickup.

And there will be days where there are shades of gray, and sometimes things bleed in, but for the most part, and I will say it's gotten easier over time, is holding the boundary because at first it felt like there's just not enough time in the day.

But what you realize, and I think for me the biggest, I don't wanna call it realization, but it was like a really sunk in kinda moment. It's like I knew it, but I really sunk in, and that was I am still doing all the things that I wanna do, right, with these boundaries. I'm still making the money that I wanna make with these boundaries.

What I am not able to do, Meghan, is do it at the speed of which I want to do. And I think the speed traps all of us so much because we live in this need for, like, more, more, more, now, now, now.

And so I almost have to recognize in my own head that you're going, you're walking that path, but you are not sprinting the path. And just accepting that and knowing that it's going to take more time is just the reality, and that makes it okay. That makes it easier to hold a boundary.

Meghan: Yeah. I struggle with the same thing. Whenever I visit a city for a talk or whatever, I often host women's dinners because I just love being in meaningful conversation with awesome women.

And I did one in New York some month ago, and we had a dinner conversation about when you're living a more purposeful sense of ambition, it is so hard to slow down because you just wanna scale the thing, be...

And especially if you're doing meaningful work that you care about and you're really passionate about, like I'm so passionate about what I talk about, and I could probably have more social media followers and more this and more that.

It is just the compassion for yourself and this gentle, intentional slowing down. It is hard, especially when we're dialed and we're conditioned for more, more, more, more, more. And it is like taking a breath and being a little bit more intentional. It is okay.

Erica: Yes. Oh, I'm loving this conversation because, what, we're in May now. Okay, this'll probably drop either later in May or early June, but my mantra for the year, I don't just do a word of the year.

Inside HER Collective, we have a mantra that really kinda follows how do we want to feel and what do we wanna really believe in this year. And mine was, "What is meant for me cannot miss me."

And so my word is inevitable, and that was something that really centered me and grounded me in this concept of the need for speed and chasing all the things because we always think we're gonna be missing out on something.

If I don't go to that networking dinner, if I don't send this email today, all of these things are gonna happen. And so it's just this very, call it woo-woo belief, I don't know, but it's grounding me and it's keeping me centered, and that is what is meant for me cannot miss me.

But how do we get these women to quit being the damn bottlenecks of their own life?

Meghan: Well, here's the other thing that a lot of the women that I interviewed did, is they thought about optimizing their leadership instead of piling 20 productivity hacks on and trying to get the most done.

It wasn't about optimizing the amount of things they were doing. It was about optimizing the quality of their being. Cultivating the conditions inside and outside of the workplace for you to be able to show up as your highest and best self.

And if you don't even know what your highest and best self is anymore, that's a whole other conversation, because a lot of us are so overwhelmed that we can't even imagine what that looks like.

But one of the statistics right now is that 70% of people say that their manager or boss has as much or more of an impact on their mental health than their spouse does.

So if you are someone who is managing people or has a team, anyone who is reporting to you, you have a tremendous responsibility to the people's mental health who are with you on a day-to-day basis.

And if you are showing up stressed and overwhelmed and exhausted and angry and fear-based and thinking things are coming from a sense of scarcity, they're going to feel that, and it's going to go home to their families and their friends and their communities.

For those who actually show up intentionally and are grounded, compassionate, present, attentive, they're not just changing the quality of their own being, which changes how they feel on a day-to-day basis, but they're positively impacting pretty much everyone they come across in the workplace.

So, I don't even remember what the question was. Holy ADHD, but...

Erica: I mean, hey, girl, that stat just stopped me in my tracks, though. I didn't... I mean, but it makes total sense.

And, you know, I was thinking about this actually at the very beginning when we were talking about just work and our identity and so much is centered around that.

It's because we do spend so much time at work, and then we leave work, and we can't even separate ourselves from it mentally. We're not even showing up for our spouse.

So I'm not shocked by that, but I had never heard it before, so it kinda stopped me in my tracks. And really, that's some food for thought, right? How are you showing up for your people? What is that ripple effect?

My friend Chris Rollins, he's a leadership keynote speaker, and he always talks about that ripple effect, and it's a ripple effect in your workplace but also in your own home and for your own life.

Oh my gosh. Okay. Meghan, I feel like you and I could chat for 27 days on all of these things. We could have a 30-day series podcast.

Meghan: I'm coming to Raleigh.

Erica: We're gonna do it. Coming to Raleigh. We're gonna do it live.

But one of my favorite questions to ask is, I call it my last question, best question, and that is if you were to go back to the Meghan who is full out on the floor, having the panic attack, and then dusting herself back off and getting back up to work like ain't nothing just happened, which is the woman we've all been, what piece of advice would you give her today?

Meghan: Hmm. It's interesting, 'cause I wouldn't change anything about the journey, 'cause it's gotten me where I am right now. And it didn't have to be as painful as it was.

So I would tell her that she is not broken, that it is not her fault, that the way that the system is built is making her feel this way, and that she is worthy and whole just as she is in the absence of achievement.

Erica: I love that. And, I mean, I know you're a parent. You got boys, girls, what do you have? I have an almost 7-year-old boy and a 4-year-old girl.

Okay. So you are right where I was three years ago. Now, I've got an almost 11-year-old, he'll be 11 this month, and an eight-year-old, and she just turned eight. So we've got that three-year age difference, and what I see in them is that us, as parents, the generation we are, we are really instilling a lot more of this idea that have it all, do it all, be it all is not it all it's cracked up to be.

And I'm hopeful then, because we all learn more as we go, and this is society, and we're doing the best we can, that maybe they don't become so identity attached to a career-driven kinda mentality.

But, you know, I think we're all moving in the right direction, Meghan. And I think that piece of advice that you left is amazing, and I think it's also what we should be giving our kids today.

Because that would've been a game-changer, I think, for so many of us early on in our careers, right? So I appreciate you, I appreciate the conversation, and the book, y'all, This Isn't Working, we know that to be true, but let's go out, get the book and read it so that you can feel seen, heard, understood, and you get all of Meghan's tips and tricks.

Meghan, thank you so much for joining us today. Where can people find you if they want to hear more?

Meghan: I think I'm the only Meghan French Dunbar in existence, so meghanfrenchdunbar.com. LinkedIn, I'm very active over there. And my podcast, Unbehaved. So those are the main places.

Erica: Unbehaved, yes. Let's all go be unbehaved. I'm here for it. Meghan, thank you so much.

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