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 and 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. Welcome to the Glass Ceiling and Sticky Floor podcast, the podcast where we get real about the challenges that women face in work, life, and leadership. I'm your host, Erica Rooney, HR executive, keynote speaker, and executive coach, and I'm on a mission to get more women into positions of power and keep them there. This is the space where we call out the paradoxes, being told to lean in but not too far, to speak up but not too loudly, be ambitious but not too ambitious. Does that sound familiar?

Erica: Yeah. We're over all that. Here, we break down the sticky floors that keep us stuck, from imposter syndrome and perfectionism to burnout and fear, and give you real strategies to shatter those glass ceilings once and for all. So if you're ready to rewrite the rules, own your power, and take your career and life to the next level, you're in the right place. Now y'all, today's guest is a powerful force for positive change.

Erica: She is a multiple time best selling author and a wellness expert who blends psychology, philosophy, and humor to help people live their happiest, most successful lives. Karen Salomon is the founder of notsalmon.com and the author of so many books, y'all. I can't even count them, but her most recent one, which I'm most excited about, is called Your To Die for Life: How to Maximize Joy and Minimize Regret Before Your Time Runs Out. Y'all, what I love best is that she has a unique no-BS approach to neuroplasticity, cognitive behavioral therapy, and positive psychology. So please welcome Karen to the podcast.

Erica: Karen, how are you?

Karen: Great. It is so great to be here. I love your podcast. I love how you're helping women, and I'm happy to be here and be a part of it.

Erica: Me too. Let's dive in, because you have this journey from high stakes advertising to becoming a best selling author and wellness expert, and that's just fascinating to me. What was the moment that inspired you to shift your focus from branding products to helping people brand their lives for happiness?

Karen: Well, I was in advertising. That was my first career, and I was in it for about a decade, and I was doing very well. I was rising up very quickly. I won a Clio my first year in advertising, which is sort of like the Emmy's in advertising, you know?

Karen: And then I was a senior VP creative director in my late 20s, and I was not happy. First of all, they had us working so hard, we had this joke at the last agency I was at, that our boss would say, "If you can't come in on Saturday, don't bother coming in on Sunday," because he made us work full weekends. And the politics were so bad, so much backstabbing, that I used to joke I couldn't drink a glass of water without it spurting out the knife holes in my back.

Karen: A lot of it was because I was a young girl rising up, a senior VP woman. This was back in the 1990s. So I kept threatening to quit, and my parents kept talking me out of it. They kept saying, "How can you quit? You're doing so well." And I kept saying, well, that's how I can quit. Ironically, if I was doing badly at this I wouldn't have the guts to quit, but I figured whatever I'm doing right here that's making me rise up quickly in advertising, if I applied it to what I really wanted, which was writing books, then maybe I'll do well there too. So I quit, to my parents' horror, and started to write books, and those became bestsellers and sold to the movies and everything.

Karen: And this you might find interesting, because I have written so many books it's hard to keep track. But I was giving seminars to a lot of women, at women's organizations, about how to pursue and snag your passions, your dream career. My agent called me and I was just about to go up to give a seminar, and I said to her as a joke, "I have to go, I have to give my How to Succeed in Business Without a Penis seminar," because there's a play in New York, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, and I just said that as a throwaway joke. She said, "Oh my gosh, Karen, you have to write a book with that title." She talked me into it, and I did, and I have a bestselling book published in the 1990s with that title. I broke down exactly what you're talking about, but back in those days, in my way, and one of my main things was: a woman doesn't need a penis to succeed, just balls.

Erica: Karen, I saw that and I just started cackling. It was so beautifully said.

Karen: Right? It feels like it's part of your vibe and what you're doing.

Erica: Yes. Absolutely. I love it. What's the favorite book you've written? I've gotta just jump in, is that the one?

Karen: I mean, it's hard to play favorites. It's so funny, before we went on I told you we have two dogs, and my son's always asking me to pick a favorite. I'm like, I don't wanna pick favorites, you know? But if I had to pick a favorite, it would be the new one, of course. I mean that truly, because I feel like my new one is my most personal, bravest book yet. But before the new one, it might have been my book How to Be Happy, Damn It, which was a big best seller also, and definitely a real passion project book too.

Erica: Oh my gosh, I didn't mean to cut you off. Keep going.

Karen: It's okay, I'm caffeinated, if you didn't cut me off I'd still be talking. But I don't even know, I might have just naturally ended there. I kinda felt like I wanted to do that as part of my background. And a lot of what I do, I'll segue this way: after I wrote the business book and it did well, I went to LA and started writing TV shows and movies, and then I was reading self help books, and I always loved psychology, and I was ripping off the covers because I was embarrassed to read self help books. Then I'd wanna give them to friends, like, "oh my gosh, you must read this book," but I thought it was insulting, you know? So the marketing chick in me thought there should be self help for people who wouldn't be caught dead doing self help, and self help you could give to a friend as a gift and they're not gonna punch you because the book looks kinda cool.

Karen: And that's how I wrote How to Be Happy, Damn It, which my agent thought I was nuts for writing because it had the word "damn it" in the title. This was in the 1990s, and back then nobody put naughty words in book titles, especially not personal development titles. Now dammit doesn't even sound like a naughty word. But back then, they thought, what is she doing? We did it anyway, and it became a big bestseller. And that book was in an Eminem video, the musician. He liked the cover and the title, so you see the camera pan past him and he's reading the book with the bright orange cover. It sold like 250,000 copies and went on. I did more books after that in that genre: feisty humor with lots of research that can really help you, but fun to read.

Erica: I love that, and how cool that it's in an Eminem video, such a fun little thing. Oh my goodness. So what I love most about your work is how heavily rooted it is in neuroplasticity, science, and positive psychology. My question for you is, how can women who often feel stuck in patterns of self doubt and imposter syndrome use these scientific principles to literally rewire their brains and break free from what I like to call the sticky floors?

Karen: Okay, well, I have a couple things. One is in my new book, but it's also been in other books. I'll start with a simple one I've written about a lot: if you want to change your behavior, because I'm actually seen as a leading behavioral change expert, that's one of the things I love, I'm kind of a research geek, you cannot just stop the behavior. You have to do what I call a stop and swap. And here's why.

Karen: As mentioned, I have dogs, and one of them is a naughty dog, Pablo the dachshund, and he's always chewing sneakers or slippers or whatever. If I wanted to get him to stop chewing the forbidden thing, I'd have to give him an okay thing to replace it with.

Erica: Something to chew.

Karen: Yeah, replacing it. Here's why: in his head, he's probably anxious, and that's why he's chewing. He has this urge to chew on something. If you just take away the forbidden thing and don't replace it, he's gonna keep going back because he still has that urge. You have to replace it with the bone. Well, we humans are like that when we're in anxiety, stress, or imposter syndrome. We have something in our brains that just wants to chew on something, and if you just say "stop thinking that thought, stop having imposter syndrome," and you don't replace it with a reframed thought, you're gonna keep going back to that low self esteem thought. So you have to do a stop and a swap so your brain has something else to chew on. Instead of thinking "nobody likes me," think "the right people like me." Instead of "I'll never succeed," think "everything has its process, I must trust the process." So you do a stop and a swap so your brain has something else to chew on.

Erica: No, I love this. I recently did a VIP day with a keynote director up in New York City, and after he reviewed some of my antics on stage, he said, "okay, I don't want you to do this anymore, but here's the thing," and he taught me exactly what you're saying. He said you never wanna think "don't do this, don't do this," because then you're only gonna be doing it. Instead, you've got to replace that action with another action. So instead of saying "stop flinging my hands everywhere," it could be "stand with presence" or "ground yourself." You just gave me that beautiful light bulb moment: it's a stop and swap.

Karen: It's a stop and swap. And I have a couple little quick ones too, like one-word mantras. One of them is just the word "next." I'm here in New York, land of like a million delis, and whenever you're at the deli, you take a number and the guy yells, "Next! Next!" So if you're thinking a thought that's not contributing to your emotional well-being, you tell yourself, because humor works and also sharp words work, a simple sharp word, "next." You tell yourself "next," and you replace it with a positive thought or a positive habit you can do. Sometimes just doing a habit that's positive helps you get out of that thought, especially if it's a habit that fills you with strong self esteem, because we believe we're as happy as our actions are, and you need to do actions you're proud of. So if you do an action you're proud of, "next," what's the next habit you can do, that can also get your neuroplasticity going in the right direction.

Erica: To really rewire. I love the idea of just moving that thought along. That's amazing. Next. Next. Get to the next one. Oh my gosh. Alright, Karen, how did you know to pull in all of this humor? Are you just naturally hysterical? Why is it such an effective tool for navigating these challenging emotions, and how are you so good at it?

Karen: Oh, well, thank you. I love both psychology and humor, and I grew up that way. I am a person who has naturally loved humor. When I was a kid, my mom used to pick up my dad from the train station at the end of the day, and I would go with her, because there was a magazine store right across the street. I would go in and grab two magazines, one was Psychology Today and one was Mad Magazine, a funny magazine. So I kind of joke that if you put Psychology Magazine and Mad Magazine in a blender and press frappe, you would get my books, because I'm just naturally drawn to humor. In fact, my very first book was a funny novel, and back then I hung out with comedians in New York. We played poker together in the East Village, I knew Jon Stewart and Marc Maron, and we'd play poker together. I gave Jon Stewart my novel to read and he said he loved it, he said "I think you should be a stand up comic." Back then he was on his way to being famous, not wildly famous yet, and I said to him, "Jon, I am a stockbroker's daughter and I see you as a stock that's going up. I want you to commit to that quote on a piece of paper so I can say Jon Stewart says I could be a stand up comic." He agreed, and he gave me an official blurb from Jon Stewart saying I'm funny enough to be a stand up comic.

Erica: On your website, girl, I saw it on the website. I would be putting that on a headstone too. Oh my gosh. Karen, you do a lot of work with this bounce back psychology, all about bouncing back from adversity. Do you have any key strategies from your bounce back philosophy that women facing a tough time, a career setback, or a professional disappointment could apply so they can start regaining that momentum?

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 navigate your own sticky floor moments, and a whole lot of inspiration to keep you climbing. This isn't just a book, it's your roadmap to success, confidence, and freedom. Grab your copy of Glass Ceilings and Sticky Floors today at www.ericaandersonrooney.com. Whether you're in the boardroom, the classroom, or just starting out, this book is for you, because no one deserves to stay stuck, no one deserves to feel small, and you have glass ceilings to shatter. Let's do this.

Karen: Again, I have so many, it's hard to choose, but the one I'm thinking about, and it's almost another version of a stop and swap but different: if you ask depressing questions, you will get depressing answers. Like, "why does this always happen to me," "why didn't I," "what if I had." There are no happy answers to that. You have to stop them and swap them for happier questions, like "what did I learn from this," "how can I grow from this," "how can this be a bridge to something else." I talk about this in my new book, Your To Die For Life, about making sure you don't have beliefs that are permanent and pervasive, which comes from the positive psychology school, Martin Seligman, where you find yourself saying the word "always" or "never." "This always happens to me." "I never." Anytime you hear one of those words, you know there's gonna be a depressed person on the other end of them. I coach people, and whenever somebody comes to me already in a state of deep overwhelm or sadness, I poke around and try to find their "always" and "never," because that can really put you in a state of lack of hope, lack of change. Then I help them let go of that permanent, pervasive story and come up with another one, and I have a bunch of tools for that in my new book.

Erica: Do you think a lot of people have that always-and-never thing going on?

Karen: I think they do. Usually it comes from something deeper, a strong challenge or a childhood programming thing. So I help people dig around in there and figure out what led to their "always."

Erica: I love it. The visuals going on in my head, you in a deep dark tunnel with a flashlight sorting through trauma boxes. It's a hysterical visual for me. But...

Karen: I see myself sort of as a psychological detective. People tell me their stories, and I'm looking around for the smoking gun. Okay, what caused this?

Erica: And then what are some of the steps once you find that, that you do to get rid of it or get it out of the way, so it can be addressed and we can put the lid on it and move on? How do you do that?

Karen: Okay, well, my new book, Your To Die For Life, gets into this a lot, because one of my main beliefs about why we are here on this planet, and we're gonna take this in a whole other direction, is that we are here to learn lessons to help us grow into our best possible selves.

Erica: Can I pause for a second? So growing up, we were very nondenominational, but my mother has always told me she believes you come into this life, every life, with a lesson to learn, and if you don't learn that lesson, you come back to the next life trying to learn it even more. It's true.

Karen: I totally agree with you.

Erica: I love this. Keep going, Karen.

Karen: So the book is about Your To Die For Life, and I'm just gonna drop this in and then go back to what we're talking about. It's about the power of mortality awareness, recognizing that our time here is fleeting, and that mortality awareness is not morbid, it's motivating if you use it rightly. If you understand that mortality awareness creates urgency, and urgency sparks action. Otherwise we just stay on autopilot. I call that having a near life experience. A lot of us are having near life experiences. A near life experience is, let's say, you're on your phone so much, you're just swiping, swiping, swiping, you're not fully in your life, you're near your life, you're life-adjacent. Or you're at dinner with a loved one and they're pouring their heart out to you about something, and your mind is elsewhere, worrying about the future or regretting the past, but again, you're not in your life. Or you keep putting things off to "someday," "later I will." That's a near life experience too, because you're not in your life. So I help people, even though it's a book about death, it's really a book about living a meaningful life, a bolder life, a more authentic life, which helps people be braver and pursue the career they want, and unstick themselves from the sticky floors, because you realize your fear of "I'm afraid to" gets trumped by your fear of "what if I get to the end of my life and didn't live it fully." So you swap your fears for the fear of not wanting the top regrets of the dying. I wanna overload those regrets, not the fears. One of the first things I do with people in the book and in coaching is have them write their eulogy. I make it easy: in the book I have a fill-in-the-blanks eulogy, a Mad Libs eulogy, and you just fill in the blanks. A little spoiler alert: a lot of the blanks are core values. We write five-year business plans, "this is where I wanna be in five years," but we don't write life mission statements, and a eulogy is kind of like a life mission statement. One of the main things about your eulogy comes from Aristotle. He says you don't know if you've lived a good life until you're on your deathbed, and that you should begin every project with the end in mind, including that gigantic project called your life. Envision how you want to feel about your life on your deathbed, then reverse engineer it and start doing those habits now. So you can look at current you and aspirational eulogy you, and figure out the bridge habits you need to get there. Aristotle said something that really touched me: the reason so many people are unhappy in their lives is they have the wrong end goal. They think their goal is to become the richest person on the planet, the sexiest person on the planet, have the most YouTube followers. He really believed the purpose of life is to learn lessons that help you grow into your best possible self. That's what I think we're here for, and it helps you live a meaningful life. A lot of that comes from embracing key core values, and if you live that way every day, you can get what you want in your life.

Erica: I love that. What life lessons do you think you've been meant to learn in this life?

Karen: I definitely believe this. I wrote Your To Die For Life when my dad died. When he died, it was obviously sad for all the obvious reasons, but one of the things it highlighted for me was that I did not have kids at the time, and my dad would never get to see me as a mom or meet my kids. His death was like an alarm clock, and I kept saying "oh, I'll have a family someday," and I realized I was working too hard. Then I went down the research rabbit hole, which is what I do because I love psychology and figuring out what's happening, why am I suddenly so awake after my dad died. There's a whole area of research around mortality awareness, that it wakes people up to live braver. I looked at the top regrets of the dying, and a lot of them are "I wish I hadn't worked so hard," and I was working very hard, which is sometimes hard to notice when you love what you do, but then you don't have balance. Also "I wish I had lived more true to myself," "I wish I had allowed myself to be happier." There's a whole mess of these regrets of the dying. So I reverse engineered those on purpose, and decided it was time to move forward with a family. My dad's death woke me up more than my biological clock did. I wound up meeting somebody and had a child. My father died on August 27th, and four years later, on August 27th, my son was born. The day my dad died is my son's birthday. A lot of changes happened, and that's what inspired me to write this book.

Erica: Oh, I cannot wait to get my hands on it, Karen. It's gonna be so good. I have another question, I wanna talk about boundaries, especially since we've been talking about working so much. A lot of the women who listen to this podcast are super ambitious, they're stuck in that hustle culture, and I know they feel like saying no is a professional risk. How does your philosophy with emotional management empower women to set firm boundaries, protect their energy, and protect their sanity, without sacrificing career trajectory?

Karen: Well, actually, core values, I can bring it back to my new book too. I have people in the book and my clients write a prompt every morning that helps them get into the right mindset to deal with whatever they have to deal with that day: "who do I need to become to get everything I want in my life," or "who do I need to become to speak up more," "who do I need to become to stop fighting with my partner," "who do I need to become to become president of a company." And the answer is usually, as always, a core value. Whatever the core value is can change: "I need to be stronger," "I need to be braver," "I need to be more communicative," "I need to be more patient," "I need to be more confident." Then what you do is create what's called an identity-based statement. There's a lot of research around this. Have you heard of identity-based statements?

Erica: No, I'm sitting on the edge of my seat, girl.

Karen: So research shows you need to have an identity of who you want to be in order to do the habit. We do that subconsciously. If you walk around thinking "I am a sloppy person," you will be a sloppy person. If you think "I am an athletic person," you're gonna do the habits of an athletic person. If you think "I'm a non-athletic person," you're gonna not go to the gym. Our identity is the puppet master of our habits. They've shown that if you connect your identity first with a habit, you're more likely to do it. They did a research study with two different groups of people, trying to get them to vote. One group they used clever, snazzy taglines and jingles, "go vote, go vote." The other group, they tried to change their identities and got them to view themselves as voters. The group that saw themselves with the identity of voters showed up at the polls three times more than the group that got the snazzy taglines. When you think about that, it does make sense. If you see yourself as "I'm definitely Republican" or "I'm definitely Democrat," you're more likely to show up at the polls. So if you think of yourself as "I am a brave person," you speak up more. "I am a self-loving person," you protect your boundaries. What happens is it creates cognitive dissonance if you wanna be associated with that core value and you're not doing it. I'll tell you exactly how that happened for me. With this book, about death awareness, my agent did not want to do the book. I'd been trying to sell her this book since my dad passed away, and she said, "Death? No, no, nobody wants to read about death, you write books about happy, how can you write a book about death?" So I kept telling her about the book because it was a real passion project, because I've seen how much it helped my life and the lives of my clients. I finally called her up a couple years ago and said, "I really wanna do this book about death." She said, "No, do another happiness book." I got off the phone and remembered how, twenty five years before, my agent at that time told me she didn't want to do How to Be Happy, Damn It, that she didn't want the word "dammit" in the title, and she couldn't view the book. Back then I said, "You know what, I believe in this book," and left her and did the book anyway. When this agent was telling me "oh no, I don't think so," I thought: "well, I guess I used to be feisty, I guess I used to be brave, I guess I used to be ballsier, when I was younger." And then I thought, "wait a minute, I am feisty." I re-owned those core values, wanting to view myself that way, and the cognitive dissonance, "what do you mean I'm not feisty, what do you mean I'm not ballsy, that's who I am," made me say, "you know what, I love you, I believe in this book, I'm going," and I found another agent, sold it to a publishing house, and here we are speaking on this podcast.

Erica: I love it. That's the story. Let me tell you why this resonates so much with me: I always thought core values for people were fluff, stupid, too woo-woo, because my trade is HR, and I'm like, those are for business cultures, you put them on the wall and say "we're collaborative," blah blah blah. It wasn't until I really started looking into it that I decided to do the exercise for myself, and it was so helpful when I was launching my business, because I picked one of my core values as courage, and the other as growth. Whenever I hit those moments, like "do I wanna start a podcast, am I gonna write a book," I would ask myself, "is this what a courageous person would do?" You obviously know the answer, but that would help me ground and center so I could go do the thing. If you don't take the time to figure out what your core values are, you're just making shit decisions that will take your life anywhere, and then you get to the end of your life, Karen, filled with regrets.

Karen: Exactly. That's what I've helped people do. And in the book, I say you should not only write a to-do list in the morning, but what I call a "to die list." It's not a bucket list, it's more like a to-do-what-matters-most list, because I think to-do lists have a fatal flaw: they're there to boost your productivity, but they don't really help you live a more meaningful life. The things that create a meaningful life are sometimes left off your to-do list. Nobody's gonna get up at your funeral and read your LinkedIn profile. Nobody's gonna get up at your funeral and read your Google Calendar, "she never missed a dentist appointment." You know what they're gonna do at your funeral? They're gonna tell beautiful stories about you, and each of those stories is gonna have a core value in it. "She was always so loving, I remember when I was sick she brought me soup." "Oh, she was such a great listener." "I remember when I was going through my divorce, she sat there." "She was so patient." "She was so supportive." All the stories people tell about you are about something to do with a core value and living a more meaningful life. That's what I help people do.

Erica: I love it, I think that's so beautiful, Karen, and I'm so excited for the book. I'm gonna buy it for my mom and my mother-in-law and everyone I know, I can't wait to get my hands on it. What's next for you? Is there another book in the works, a new project, what's going on?

Karen: Well, right now I do coaching with people, and I have something called closure classes where I help them let go of things. I have Legacy Lab where I help them figure out what their legacies are. And I have Life Review Therapy, where they figure out what the patterns are in their lives and how to make sure they're aimed in the right direction. So those are some of the things I do to help people, and I love it. Helping people live a more meaningful life is helping me have a more meaningful life.

Erica: I was gonna say it's the most purpose-filled work there is. Oh my gosh. Karen, thank you so much for joining us today. If today's conversation lit a fire under you, here's the next move: don't keep it to yourself, share this episode with a friend, drop a review, let's keep the conversation going. Hey, how about you go out there and snag this book, Your To Die For Life. I am so happy that you're here, but please remember that your potential is limitless, and the only thing standing in your way are those sticky floors. But you have the power to break through them. So go out there, take up some space, and let's shatter some damn ceilings together. Karen, thank you.

Karen: Thank you so much.