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, handling 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 a 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. Because honestly, girl, you were never meant to do this alone.

Erica: Have you ever accomplished something that you weren't so sure you could do? It's exciting. It's incredible. It's amazing. Success. It's kind of wonderful. Right? This is exactly what Laura Gassner Otting writes in her newest book, Wonderhell, where she talks about the happiness that success brings. But she also talks about the anxiety, the self doubt, the uncertainty that comes with the bigger goals. And she calls this Wonderhell. The journey starts in Imposter Town and cycles through others such as Doubtsville and Burnout City. But Laura gets real when she talks about the tsunami of emotions that we feel when we go through the unimaginable highs of success and the lows, the anxiety and the doubts that success can bring with it as well. And she asks this one question. Who are we when everything is stripped away? What is our definition of success? And how do you find the confidence to navigate Wonderhell?

Erica: Alright, Laura. I am so pumped to have you here today. You are a woman like none other that I have had on this podcast, so I know that all of my listeners are in for a treat today. First of all, I wanna congratulate you on your newest chart topper book, Wonderhell. And full disclosure, when I picked this up, I did not quite know what to expect. I wasn't even through the introduction when I was like, yes. This book is for me. She wrote it about me. Is she hiding in my house? So congrats and welcome.

Laura: Well, thank you. I will tell you the greatest compliment you can give an author is, I feel like you wrote this book for me, about me. Are you hiding in my house? When you sit down to write a book, everyone says, figure out who your avatar is. Figure out who your ideal reader is and write the book for her. Write the book for him. And you think about that person. And then when you realize that there's so many of those people out there, you're like, oh, finally, I'm not alone. Everybody writes the book they needed to write because they couldn't find it for themselves. And so I wrote this book because I found myself in this place in between who I was and who I thought I could become and not knowing how to manage all of the tsunami of emotions that were coming at me, and I'm just so relieved not to be alone anymore.

Erica: Oh my gosh. Well, it was almost like you articulated something that was going around in my head and in my heart, but that I couldn't quite articulate yet. And when I read it, when I read this, the space between your success and your next accomplishment, I was like, holy shit. That's it.

Laura: Well, it is. You know, it's a funny feeling because nobody really, like, we can't complain about being successful. Right? You're like, oh, boo hoo. I had some success. But the truth is whether you've just sold your first business or you've just sold your first tube of lipstick, that feeling where you're like, oh, I didn't know I could do that. Now that I have, what else can I do? That's kinda cool. And not in this bigger, better, faster way, like, crush it. Not in that kind of hustle porn sort of way, but just in this, I think it is really cool that as we go through life and we do things we didn't know we could do, we peel away layers of the onion and we're like, well, that's pretty neat. I didn't know I was that person. I thought that was just reserved for other people, and it turns out it was reserved for me. How cool is that? I love that feeling.

Erica: Oh, it's amazing. And I would love to take it back a couple years. Right? Maybe to the ripe old age of 25 when you drop out of law school. Because your story is so interesting, and I would just love to hear how we went from there to Wonderhell.

Laura: Well, I will tell you that it was the ripe old age of 21 where I dropped out of law school. It was even earlier. I didn't have a frontal lobe, you know, the part of your brain that dictates good sound logical decision making. And in fact, I had saved up money, literally changing bed pans in a hospital when I was in high school so I could travel to Europe. And I was backpacking through Europe, and I was in a hostel in Vienna. And this is so long ago. This is gonna age me. But I went down to the basement of the hostel, and there was, like, this row of payphones. Of course, I make the payphone call, dialing overseas after a certain hour so that the rates were lower. And I call my parents, and I'm like, I'm gonna drop out of law school. I was so afraid of my parents being upset with me that I did it from another continent where they couldn't find me because there were no cell phones there. There wasn't even the Internet. So it was just like I was just this anonymous voice calling from space.

Erica: Run away. Run away.

Laura: I hung up the phone, and I was like, okay. See you later. Bye. It was terrifying because I think we all go through life with these definitions of success that were handed to us by someone else. And for some of us, they are parents. And for some of us, they are teachers. And for some of us, they are bosses. And we go through life filling in all the check boxes on somebody else's path to somebody else's idea of somebody else's version of success. And then when we get there, we get to the top. We're like, well, the top of what? Is this all there is? Is this all I was meant for? There's gotta be more.

Laura: And so I dropped out of law school. I joined a presidential campaign. I dropped out of law school because I joined the presidential campaign, and that unknown southern governor ended up in the White House, Bill Clinton. And I ended up in the White House. And I was volunteering, and I eventually got a paid job there. And I helped create AmeriCorps, this national service program that more than a million and a half young people have served in. And after four years of doing that, I went to my boss who was the guy who actually ran the '92 campaign, and I was like, Eli, I wanna get back on the campaign trail. And he said to me in the way that only a father figure mentor can do, he was like, Laura, you're kinda too old to get back on a campaign bus and eat cold pizza and sleep on high school gymnasium floors. At that point, I was the ripe old age of 25, which is like dog years in the campaign world. I might as well have been 703. And he goes, so you're kinda too old for that, and you're kinda too young to be the domestic policy adviser. So you should go talk to my friend Arnie Miller. And Arnie runs Isaacson Miller, the largest search firm in the country that does specifically nonprofit, university, mission driven, foundation type work. They'll find you a job. You'll hide out for four years in some nonprofit, and then you'll come back in a meaty job on the Gore campaign. I was like, great. I'll go do it.

Laura: And within five minutes of talking to Arnie, I realized that his office was in Boston. And the guy that I was dating, who I thought was the one, we've been married for twenty five years, so I was on to something. He was about to move to Boston, and I was like, well, I should just come work for you. And Arnie's like, yeah. You should. And I was like, great. What do you do? And I became a headhunter. And so my career sort of follows a lot of stories just like this where I was not doing a thing I liked, so I decided to do anything else. Or I was like, I can't do this thing. So what else is out there? And I think a lot of times we write our stories in reverse to make them sound strategic and intentional and planful, and mine was anything but. And what I learned in twenty years of doing executive search, stewarding thousands of people through massive moments of career shift and upheaval in their organizations, is that the most interesting people, actually the only interesting people, are the ones who have had left turns and right turns and u turns. And so when I tell my story, I am very intentional about telling about how nonintentional it's been. And that if we just continue to do interesting things with interesting people, interesting opportunities arise, even the ones that we never expected would be there.

Erica: And take you down paths you would have never explored on your own.

Laura: 100%. I mean, I'm a firm believer that there is an adventure around every corner if you just look hard enough. And, you know, most decisions we make are not fatal. There's this bit that I do in my talk where I'm like, failure is not finale. It's fulcrum. It's the place where you grow and you learn and you iterate and you change. And there was a day that I was giving this talk, and there was an astronaut literally sitting in the front row. And I was like, failure is not finale. It's fulcrum, except for you, sir. But for the rest of us, right, as long as there's blood in your veins and oxygen in your lungs, we can come back. The stories that we tell at dinner parties are not the stories of our unbridled successes. They're the stories of when we failed and we face planted and we figured it out. We picked ourselves back up. Those are the stories that make us interesting. Those are the stories that are the tapestry of our lives. And without them, we're really freaking boring. So all the lessons that we've learned and all of the growth that we've had have all come from following paths that we didn't expect to see and just figuring out what's there along the way and seeing what we're made of when we get there.

Erica: So here's my question. How do you harness the confidence, find the confidence, to go down that path that you've never been down, you don't know where it's gonna lead, and you have no idea what you're doing?

Laura: Oh, well, you don't. You don't find the confidence. No. People have these ideas that confidence, people are just born confident. Nobody's born confident. I mean, I don't know. Maybe some people are born confident. They say seventy percent of people have imposter syndrome, and the other thirty percent have Dunning Kruger. Like, they should have imposter syndrome, but they don't. So I don't think that people come into the world confident. I think that confidence comes from competence.

Laura: So I've now run five marathons. I'm training for my sixth. I ran the first mile of my life when I turned 40. Like, of my life. I was never an athlete. I was never coordinated even. I was just terrible. But when I turned 39, I walked into my kid's school, and the head of my kid's school was standing there. And she's a 65 year old woman named Ellen, and Ellen looked fine. I was like, what is going on? You look strong. You look vital. You look fit. You're, like, glowing from within. I was like, what's his name? You got a new man in your life? What's happening? And she was like, I do got a new man in my life, and his name is Mike, coach Mike.

Laura: And then Ellen proceeds to drag me to the dirtiest, dankest, dustiest basement gym at a community center that you've ever seen, and we do forty five minutes of calisthenics. And at the end of which, coach Mike invites us to the opportunity to run a mile. And it took me six weeks to run that first mile. Six weeks to actually be able to do it without having to stop and literally lean over and hurl. But at the end of it, I was so hopped up on endorphins that I was like, you know, if I string three of those together, I could do a 5K. So I signed up for a 5K, and six weeks later, I did my first 5K. And I say did, not ran, because, let's be clear, it was not running. But I did it. And at the end of that, all hopped up on endorphins, I was like, if I could string two of those together, I could do a 10K. And I live in Boston, and you know where this is going, home of one of the major marathons of the world. Two years later, there I was running my very first marathon.

Laura: Now if you had said to me the day that I walked into school and saw Ellen, if you can dream it, you can do it. Dream. You could run a marathon. I could never have dreamed that was possible. I wouldn't have had the confidence to dream that, but I had the competence to show up every single day at that boot camp until eventually I ran a mile. And then I had the competence to say, okay. I ran the mile. Here's how I keep going. And confidence for running five and now almost six marathons comes from the competence of putting one foot in front of the other over and over and over again. So you see this path that's interesting. You put one foot in front of the next. And if you can't do something, then you stop, and you figure out, well, who do I ask, and what do I learn, and what TED talk should I watch, and what podcast should I listen to, and what kind of mentoring should I get? And then it helps put the foot in front of the next foot and the next foot. And we just keep going, proving to ourselves over and over again that what got you here won't get you there, but what got you here is enough to build a foundation so that you can figure out how to get to there.

Erica: Health and wellness is one of my core values, and I always talk about my ability, right, the competence to work through those hard moments in the gym, on the treadmill, wherever, and how that relates to how I show up in the working world because I know that I can do those hard things. And it's so crazy to me how directly correlated those are when you're talking about building skills and building muscle, and I'm like, it is the same damn thing. So I love that you use this story of running marathons, and I love that you share that you did that first mile at age 40 because people think, well, I'm 40. If I didn't do it by now, it ain't gonna happen. You know?

Laura: Yeah. Absolutely. I told the story on stage on Tuesday in front of 1,100 people. And in the book signing line, did people wanna talk about being limitless? Did people wanna talk about Wonderhell? No. They wanna talk about that mile. They were like, you've inspired me. People are like, the pandemic. My friend, Eric King, calls it the pandemic. I gained this weight. I'm not happy and whatever. And they're like, I'm gonna go run a mile tomorrow. And I'm like, don't go run a mile. Go run for five minutes. And then the next day, go run for ten minutes. And the next day, go run for fourteen minutes. Just every day, the only person you have to beat is yourself from yesterday. That's it. That's it. That's all we need to do. Just keep going.

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 the great 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 handle your own sticky floor moments, and a whole lot of inspiration to keep you climbing. This isn't just a book. It's your road map to success, confidence, and freedom. Grab your copy of Glass Ceilings and Sticky Floors today at www.ericaandersonrooney.com. 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.

Erica: Well, what I love so much about your book is it correlates so much to what we talk about on this podcast, which are all the things that keep us stuck. Right? In our sticky floors, and that's how we coin it on this show here. But you have Imposter Town. You have Doubtsville. You have Burnout City. Right? All of those, I was like, oh, that's me. That's me. Which one of these showed up for you the most in your career so far?

Laura: Well, I mean, it's like, what moment in time? You know? So my first book, Limitless, is a very linear path. Here's what we all want. Here's why we're not getting it. Here's the solution of how we should do it, and then here's specific tips on how to change yourself, your career, your workforce to get there. Easy. Right? Wonderhell was tricky because when we're in this moment in between who we were yesterday and who we just realized we can become tomorrow, we are hit with the tsunami of emotions that come at us. And for some of us, it's imposter syndrome. For some of us, it's doubt. It's uncertainty. It's exhaustion. It's burnout. It's all of these things. And I could not figure out a way to present all of these emotions in a linear path.

Laura: And so the book, as you know, is written like a theme park. Right? So there's these three towns, Imposter Town, Doubtsville, and Burnout City, and then each one of the towns has five rides, each of which evoke the emotion. So, like, the roller coaster, dealing with uncertainty. Bumper cars, getting pushed off track, dealing with perfection. The Gravitron, when the bottom drops out. The Imaginarium, dreaming bigger about yourself. I really kind of presented it as this choose your own adventure. So I've had people reach out to me and say, I started on the whack a mole chapter because I feel so overwhelmed with all the things coming at me, and I don't know how to prioritize. And I think that's so cool.

Laura: So it's kinda hard to answer that question because the truth is at any given moment of my career, there were different experiences that I had depending on what it was. So, you know, walking into the White House at 22 years old with all these fancy Ivy Leaguers, and I'm like, hello. Go state school. I had a lot of imposter syndrome. Right? Or when I had young kids and I was launching my first business, the whack a mole, everything was coming at me. Everything felt important. I couldn't figure out how to prioritize it. Or the Gravitron, when the bottom dropped out when the pandemic happened. All of the different times.

Laura: But I would say that the one thing that has been universal for the 100 different glass ceiling shatterers, Olympic medalists, startup unicorns who I interviewed for the book, and for me in my own life has been this, the first chapter that I start the book with in Imposter Town, I started with the Imaginarium, which is where you walk in thinking you're somebody. And by the time you experience it all, you walk out realizing that you're somebody completely different. And that feeling of, I know that there's more inside of me. I just don't quite know how to get there. I'm not even sure if I believe it. I don't even know who to surround myself with. If those people who are surrounding me now see it or if there are other people. I don't know how to get there and what to do and what the first step is, but I know I just feel this energy inside of me that there can be, should be, might be more. I think that's something that so many of us have felt at different times, and then we get it sort of squashed down by other people around us or by the realities of economics or by global pandemic or what it might be.

Erica: Yeah. You actually talk about burning bridges. And this stuck out to me because I have been the queen of saying don't burn bridges. Don't burn bridges. And then you go in there and you say, I am a fan.

Laura: Yes. I do. There's a point in the book where I'm like, this might be a good time to give you my very unpopular opinion that I am a big fan of burning bridges. It takes me a very long time to get to a point where I need to burn the bridge. But once I am there, it is done. I am carrying the torch. There are people in our lives who just don't belong there, and some of them are there because they've always been there. Maybe you got a friend from high school who trolls you, everything you post on social media, or you run into people who are kinda like their smile's in the front, but their knife's in the back. You know? They're a little competitive, and they see your rise only through the lens of their own stagnation. And maybe they're people who do belong there because they love you, but they don't belong in the conversation you're having with them.

Laura: So I love my parents. My parents are wonderful human beings, but they don't know what I'm capable of doing because the last time I lived in the same house as them, I was 17 years old. I didn't have that frontal lobe. And so when I told them I was dropping out of law school or starting my own business or selling that business and becoming a public speaker, they were like, are you sure you should do that? Are you sure? They didn't want me to get hurt. So why am I asking my parents for career advice? That's crazy. They actually came to the speech I gave on Tuesday, and as I mentioned, it was eleven hundred people, and the client had a book on the seat for every single attendee there, which was incredible. And as we're leaving, my parents who had never seen me speak before, my mom's like, so they buy your books and that's how they pay you? They pay you with books? And I'm like, no. They pay me with money, mom. And because they pay me so much money, I throw in books for all their attendees. And she was like, oh. She had no concept.

Laura: So if I were to ask my mom, do you think I should become a public speaker? She'd be like, well, are you sure? Can you support yourself that way? What are the economics? She doesn't know. So there are times where there are people in our lives who are actively causing us harm, actively causing us harm because they are not happy for us, because they are jealous of us, because they're giving us bad advice, and we need to get rid of those people. Then there are people where we just need to distance the bridge. We need to extend the bridge a little bit longer because I love my parents. I want them to come see me. I want them to cheer for me, but they're not gonna be part of my public speaker mastermind. They just don't belong there, and that's okay.

Erica: Yeah. And they're not gonna be the people that you go to if you're like, I'm thinking about doing this new big crazy thing that I don't know how it's gonna work out, because as you said, it's in their core to protect you.

Laura: Yes. Yes. And they're like, you shouldn't do that. That's really scary. And what they really mean for a lot of people we run into is, I shouldn't do that. I'm too scared. Or for your parents, you shouldn't do that. I'm scared. You'll get hurt. And I love them. They carry us in their hearts, but they don't know our hearts. They want what's best for us, but they don't know what we can do.

Erica: Yeah. And I think too that there's a lot of different types of people. There are people like you and me who are like, I have no idea where this is gonna go, but I'm just gonna try it. And then there are people who are perfectly happy being those individual contributors coming to work, punching in nine to five, and the world takes all kinds. Like, those people are very important. But you can't have a conversation about, I'm gonna go do this big crazy thing where I'm gonna write a book and give keynote speeches for a living, to someone who's living in a completely different world. There's no bridge there.

Laura: There isn't. And, you know, what I write about in Limitless is we gotta stop giving votes in our lives to people who shouldn't have voices. And a lot of times, those votes that we're giving are also to our younger versions of ourselves who are still injured, are still hurt, are still uncertain, are still full of doubt. And I think that's why in addition to burning the bridges, we've gotta figure out who we're gonna put in our sidecar. Right? Like, we're all going through life with a pile of people around us, and I think we have to intentionally turn up the volume on the ones who see what we're made of and turn down the volume on the ones that either don't see it, don't recognize it, don't wanna recognize it, right, or who aren't actually helping push the cycle along.

Laura: There are studies that show that people who say I am a smoker are less likely to quit smoking than people who say I smoke. Because I am a smoker is an identity, and I smoke is a habit. Right? So if you've never met me before and you see me standing outside of a restaurant smoking, you're gonna just see that. You don't know that I've been doing it for twenty years. You don't know that I've been doing it for twenty days. You don't know that this is the first cigarette I've ever had. And so when I say to you, I smoke and I wanna quit, you'll be like, awesome. I can help you do it. Right? But if there are people in your life who see you and what they see is, she is a smoker, they've already identified you, they put you in a box, and that's where you will live forever and ever and ever. In my parents' mind, I am still the kid who comes home late from curfew with the volume on the radio turned all the way up and the gas tank all the way down. So when I say to them, I'm getting in front of 1,100 people to give the speech, they're like, you are? How are you gonna do that? It's like they can't even imagine that.

Laura: So I just think we have to make sure that the people who are around us are not just the ones who see what we do, but who see what we can do. And I think that's really key. To go back to the marathon story, when I signed up for that very first marathon, I was part of a charity group and they had a coach. And the first day we all got together, the coach gave this very inspiring talk, and I went up to him afterwards. And I was like, coach Rick, I don't know if I can do this. I mean, I've only run a 10K. I'm signed up for a half marathon in two weeks, but I don't know. I've never run that. I've only run 10 miles before in my life. And he looked at me with the intensity of Yoda, and he was just like, you can do this. I believe in you, and I'm gonna help. And I literally looked back at him, and I went, I can do this. You believe in me, and you're gonna help. And he was like, yes. And then he moved on to the next person, and I was like, okay. And from that moment on, I never had a single doubt that I could run a marathon because I had somebody who looked at me and saw my potential, not just my current. She saw my future. And I think we have to be really careful to make sure that we have those voices because those voices drown out the other ones, especially the ones that are inside of our own head.

Erica: That's so true. That's such a good point. And I'd love to talk about your trip through Burnout City. Because burnout is such a hot topic right now, and I feel it is so prevalent everywhere we look because even though COVID is lifting, right, and we're getting back to our new normal, people are still feeling those feelings of burnout, and that hasn't gone away. What does that look like for you?

Laura: Well, I mean, my story of the pandemic is a little different than most. You know, I make my living getting on planes and going to events and speaking on stages, and there were no planes and no events and no stages. So I had to completely reimagine my entire career right after I had just reimagined my entire career. So in 2016, I sold my executive search firm to the team of women who helped me build it. And I was raising money for Hillary and was asked to consider being the head of presidential personnel, the person who does all the cabinet secretaries and ambassadors and all those big deal jobs. And I didn't really want the job, but you know, if you get asked, you say yes. She didn't make it to the White House, so I didn't make it to the White House.

Laura: And then I ended up giving my very first talk of my life, a TEDx talk, and that got a little bit of attention, and I got offered to go speak somewhere for money. And I was like, wait. I've just spent twenty years in recruiting where I am in deliverables. At the end of a project, they give you a three inch three ring binder with papers and reports, and I just go and talk for forty five minutes and you pay me money? Tell me more about this job. It's amazing. So I spent 2017 and 2018 reinventing myself as somebody who was speaking, realizing that the people who are getting paid real money all had books. I was like, I gotta get me one of them. So I spent 2018 and 2019 writing and then releasing Limitless. And I was first getting going, and I was figuring it out. And I was on the road all the time, and then boom, the pandemic. So it was like I just felt like I got punched in the face after I'd already gotten kicked in the head in that moment.

Laura: At the same time, my health started to fail. And by 2021, I had been diagnosed with an autoimmune disease that was so rare that only eight hundred people in the entirety of three hundred and thirty million in the United States have ever had it. And I didn't know if I was gonna see 2022. So this question of, who are we in these moments when everything gets pulled away and we get perspective, became a gift to me. So when I was sitting in that doctor's office with the IV in my arm for the first biologic chemotherapy infusion, I signed up for another marathon. I didn't know if I was gonna be able to run it, but I was like, I could barely walk at that point. I was like, I'm either gonna be able to do 26.2 if this works, or I'm gonna be six feet under if it doesn't, and there's really nothing in between.

Laura: And I knew, what did I care about in my life? I was a mother. I was a wife. I was a daughter. I was a sister. Number one. Number two, I had found an identity after running this first mile in 2011 and then running my first marathon in 2012 as an athlete. I started lifting weights. I became a masters competitive rower. I found this new person inside of me that I didn't even know existed. And I also was a writer. I'm a person who expresses my feelings and my emotions and my ideas and my causes through words. And in that moment, everything else fell away and nothing else mattered. I was like, mother, sister, daughter, wife, athlete, writer. Everything I do is going to be around these things. And so I ended up dealing with this uncertainty and the world falling apart and my health falling apart by just bringing it back to what actually matters.

Laura: And I think a lot of times when we're in burnout, it's not that we're too exhausted by doing too much. It's that we're too exhausted by doing too much of what actually doesn't matter to us. And so I really sort of pulled it back, and I was like, this is it. This is all I'm doing. And I write in the book about Carey Lohrenz, who is the first female F-14 fighter pilot in the US Navy. And what she does is she figures out, what's in her span of control? When you're landing a billion dollar aircraft on a tiny postage stamp of an aircraft carrier in rollicking seas, you can only focus on three things, and that's it. And she said when the pandemic happened, she was like, family, finances, fitness. If it's not family, finances, fitness, it does not belong on my calendar. It's not even entering my mind. And for me, it was family, athleticism, and writing. So in a way, that's family, finances, fitness. I think in those moments when it's all too much, we have to figure out what actually really matters.

Erica: Yeah. This theme keeps coming up for me this week, and it is taking life inventory. Really taking stock of all of the things that are most important and putting those at the top of the priority list.

Laura: Yes. Oh, I love it. Yes. And it's hard. And I think a lot of people feel this, like, I have to say yes to all these things because I'm so important. The truth is we're really not that important. Right? Like, if you're running out of your kid's school and another parent is running in and they're like, oh my gosh. Erica, the head of the PTA just had an emergency. We need somebody to chair the bake sale tomorrow. Can you do it? And you're like, oh, okay. They're not asking you because they spent time and they researched and they searched you out and they're recruiting you as the most qualified person. They're doing it because you were the closest proximate heartbeat. That's it. And I think a lot of times we say yes just because we're asked, and we have to figure out a better way to ask, who are we, and does it actually matter? And will it get us closer to reaching our goals if we do the thing?

Erica: Yeah. I tell everybody being in HR that everyone is replaceable all the way up to the CEO. Right? The company still runs and business doesn't stop. And if you need to sit something out, it's gonna keep going. The world will keep turning. And I know that's not fantastic, but the world keeps turning.

Laura: Yeah. You know, the graveyard is filled with indispensable people. Right? Like, it's filled. And, you know, the best piece of advice I ever got in my life, and it was professional advice, but it actually ended up being professional and personal advice, was, you're just not that important. And at the time I got the advice, I was like, what are you talking about? I'm so important. I'm important to my family, to my community, to my clients, to my friends, to the school, to every. And she was like, no. You're not. She's like, no. You're not.

Laura: And she said, tell me about your day. And I was like, well, I work out in the morning, and I have a babysitter take the kids to school because morning time is garbage time. The kids are cranky. We're all in a rush. It's never good. So I just don't do that. And then I come back, and I work, and I'm super creative in the morning, and I do my client meetings, and then I pick up my kids from school three days a week. Four if I can. Always more than two, but never five because, you know, a cameo appearance is always better than a starring role. And I was like, these are the ways that I do it. And I take my kids to the playground, then I held up my phone. And I think at the time, it was like a Palm Treo, which tells you how long ago it was. And I was like, but I'm always still in the office because I've got my phone.

Laura: And she looked at me. She was like, what? She was like, okay. You're not with your kids, and you're not in your office, and all of them know it, and you're not that important. And if you cannot leave your phone in the trunk and take your kids to the park for an hour, either you're a micromanager or nobody cares in your company as much about anything as you do. So you got some problems there. And she's like, and by the way, everybody needs some time to take it down a notch, to relax. She's like, it doesn't actually matter. She's like, your kids will know that you're not there with them. You have to figure out who you are that important to. There are moments with some of your clients, with some of your staff where you are that important and you better be there. And there are moments with your family where you are that important and you better be there, but you're not that important to all the people all the time. Figure out where you are that important and double down there and forget about everything else. And it was liberating advice, to be honest. It was life changing.

Erica: Yeah. The hardest thing and the most rewarding thing I've ever done was remove all of the notifications from my phone that were related to work.

Laura: Yes. Yes.

Erica: But I mean, it was this, like, physical, visceral, like.

Laura: Yes.

Erica: I was deleting the app. So I was like, this app. But you do it, and then you just realize, you know what? I can detach a little bit and focus on those things that matter.

Laura: Yes. Yeah. It is. I was at a friend's house, like, fifteen years ago, and my phone kept dinging. And he was like, why does your phone keep dinging? I'm like, oh, they're just notifications of work emails. And he's like, have you ever opened up your inbox to not find emails there? And I was like, no. And he goes, and how often do you open your inbox? I'm like, I don't know. Every five minutes. He's like, so you know there's always gonna be one there. You can turn off the notifications now. And I was like, oh, right.

Erica: It's a good way to flip the script. Your email box will never be at zero. Just know.

Laura: But yeah. And by the way, unless your job description is inbox zero achiever, then you shouldn't be getting to inbox zero anyway. It doesn't actually matter. It doesn't actually matter. And I'm saying that now on the tail end of the last few months of book launch where my inbox is such chaos. And I spent three days, three days of plane time over the course of the last few weeks going through my inbox and just triaging and just being brutal, just being so brutal and emptying the thing. And my assistant sent me a text. She's like, what is happening in your inbox? I've never seen this, but what is happening? And I said, I can't even see straight. I don't even know what's in there. I'm so worried that there's, like, a big deal that I'm missing or something. I just don't know.

Laura: And I ended up actually getting my email all the way down to, like, three emails in my entire inbox, and it wasn't very satisfying. Not because I didn't get it to zero, but because it didn't actually matter. I woke up the next day and there were 12 more, and then there was 15 more in an hour. It's like a Sisyphean task. It doesn't actually matter. So, yeah, I guess you could just, do you really wanna get to inbox zero? Take your entire inbox, create a folder that says second inbox, stick it all in there, and look at your inbox zero, and it won't feel very good, so it doesn't actually matter.

Erica: I love that. Now the one question that I always end all of my podcasts with is, if you could go back to the 21 year old Laura who is calling her parents from a different country, unknowing of all of the things, of all of the Wonderhells that you're going to experience, what is the one piece of advice you would give her?

Laura: If she was listening to me on a podcast that was recorded over the Internet that she was listening to on her cell phone, none of those things existed when I was 21. So what I would say to her is, even if you know who you are, which by the way, you don't and nobody else does, the world around you is going to change so very much that it doesn't even actually matter.

Erica: I love that.

Laura: Like, we just, like, be open. You just never know. The advice I give to people is what I started this conversation with, that if you just keep doing interesting things with interesting people, interesting opportunities arise. And you have absolutely no idea how the story is going to turn out. You cannot possibly know because even if you know yourself, you don't know what other things, like, who would have predicted a global pandemic? Right? We don't know what the world has in store, so all the best laid plans are useless. So you gotta write them in pencil and just be open to interesting opportunities with interesting people.

Erica: I love it. And where can people find you?

Laura: So my name is Laura Gassner Otting. All my good friends call me LGO. So I'm at hey, h e y, hey LGO on all the socials. And you can pick up Wonderhell now at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, bookshop.org if you wanna support your local independent bookstores, and really anywhere books are sold.

Erica: And it is an amazing read. I think I read through it in, I don't know, maybe two days. It was so good. But, Laura, thank you so much for your time.

Laura: Thank you. I really appreciate it.

Erica: I'm so glad that you tuned in today. If you enjoyed this episode and want more content just like this, make sure that you connect with me on LinkedIn and Instagram. Send me a message, and let's connect.