13. Breaking Through the Inner Glass Ceiling

Unlock the secrets to breaking through your own inner glass ceiling and step into your true potential. Join us on "No Cape Required" as we dive into the subtle yet powerful self-limiting behaviors that hold many women back, often without them even realizing it. Together with Dr. Stephanie Byerly, an expert obstetrical anesthesiologist and certified coach, we'll uncover the historical and social roots of these beliefs, and how they're perpetuated through societal conditioning. This isn't just about pointing out the barriers; it's about understanding them deeply so you can start to dismantle them.

We emphasize the added layers of difficulty faced by women of color, examining how internalized limiting beliefs and societal expectations create unique challenges. Dr. Byerly and I discuss practical mindset strategies that women can use to overcome these hurdles, even touching on how men's unconscious conditioning can play a role. Learn how to combat the power penalty and likability clause that often create internal conflicts for women aiming for leadership roles. This is more than just a conversation; it's a toolkit for personal and professional growth.

Finally, we provide you with actionable steps to shift your mindset, even if you're not ready for a coach. From free resources and thought exercises to journaling and reconnecting with your intuition, we cover it all. Dr. Byerly and I also delve into the importance of support systems like mentors, sponsors, and coaches, who can help you navigate these inner glass ceilings. This episode is packed with insights and strategies designed to help you redefine success on your own terms and achieve self-validation. Tune in and start your journey towards breaking free from the barriers that have been holding you back.

You can learn more about Dr. Byerly by visiting her website at https://www.stephaniebyerly.com/

Download 10 Ways to Shed Your Superwoman Cape

Dr. Dara would love to connect.
http://www.linkedin.com/in/drdararossi
https://www.instagram.com/drdararossi
https://www.facebook.com/drdararossi

Transcript

00:00 - Dr. Dara (Host)
Welcome to no Cape Required the podcast where we explore diverse experiences, challenges and triumphs of women in today's world in order to live and lead more authentically without that superwoman cape. Make sure you hit the follow button to get the latest episodes and if you're a regular listener, please consider leaving a review so that I can keep bringing you more of the conversations that you love. And if you're new to the show, welcome. I'm so glad you're here today. And what we're doing today is we're talking about the barriers that hinder women empowerment and really keep them stuck. You've probably heard of that term glass ceiling. It's been around a long time since, like the 1970s, and it's really used to describe social and discriminatory barriers that affect women's advancement. Now, a new term you may or may not have heard of is inner glass ceiling, which really refers to those self-limiting behaviors that may be holding you back or really keeping you stuck, both personally and professionally. These are behaviors that maybe you're not even aware of. Usually, that's what happens Women aren't even aware of these behaviors that are holding them down. Let me give you an example of that. As a coach, I focus on women empowerment and I've worked with so many women who failed to claim and share their achievements. They really assume that others can you know. They're aware of what's going on in their achievements, of what they've done, and they think that their accomplishments should just stand for themselves and they should be rewarded for their hard work. And this is very rarely the case, usually never happens. Women have to learn how to showcase the value that they bring to the table, so that's one of those glass ceiling behaviors that can really hinder women. So I want you to think about a friend or a colleague, or even maybe a family member who needs to hear more about this topic, and make sure you forward this podcast to them. They'll know that you really care about them. 

01:35
So I'm excited to introduce you to Dr Stephanie Byerly. Now I go by Dr Dara, but that's because I have a PhD. Now Dr Byerly is an obstetrical anesthesiologist and she's worked with women most of her entire career. She's an International Coaching Federation coach. She has all kinds of certificates around coaching and she can tell you more about that. But one of hers is really cool she is an advanced feminist, a coaching certification, advanced feminist in women-centered coaching as well. So she consistently writes articles addressing gender bias in the workplace, which was what's exciting about having her on today One of the many reasons, actually and she's got some unique skills that really named her to educate and coach leaders in organizations to promote women in leadership. So welcome, stephanie, I'm so glad you're here. Thank you. 

02:19 - Dr. Stephanie Byerly (Guest)
I'm so excited to be here, dara, and I love the title of your podcast Amazing. 

02:26 - Dr. Dara (Host)
Thank you. Thank you, kind of catchy, stephanie. I've had a hard time catching up and really coordinating this time to talk today, so we're going to give it all we can. Let's jump in, stephanie. Historically, I think, the socialization of women has been a challenge. Can you tell us about, like, where that started and how it contributes to the superwoman cape that many women are still wearing? 

02:49 - Dr. Stephanie Byerly (Guest)
Yeah, you know a lot of people don't understand that this really started when civilization started. Because if you think about caveman days, if you were a woman, obviously less powerful physically, you were not probably creating a lot of the structures that were being created back in caveman days. As far as the patriarchy, then if you were not liked, if you weren't a people pleaser, you were going to get kicked out of the cave and so it might've gotten eaten or, you know, frozen to death, all these horrible things. So it goes back to that and it's actually part of our DNA, part of our epigenetics, and what happens is through family of origin, growing up with the cultures of our family, growing up with the people around us, in school, especially now, what we see in social media and in the news all the time, there are these things pretty much that get sort of in our brain. 

03:34
There are these limiting beliefs that we think are true about us, that are constantly running in the background in our subconscious. So we're only conscious, they say, of 5% of our thoughts. The rest are unconscious, and there's this constant reel of how, as a woman, you're supposed to look, talk, act, how you're supposed to take care of everybody else. We're not good leaders, we're not good with money, all these things that are always playing in the background, so that when we try to do something different, there's an internal battle going on at all times. And I just want to mention from the beginning is that all of these areas that we're going to talk about for women of color, they're exponentially amplified. 

04:15 - Dr. Dara (Host)
Okay, so what I heard you say in that, just to make sure I've got it all this is genetics. We were born and bred to be people pleasers, to take care of the whole tribe, to take care of everybody, right? We ourselves are the last ones to get served, so to speak, and that we have these limiting beliefs which I'm sure you're going to talk about, but those lead to limiting behaviors because we believe it. Then that's how we're going to behave accordingly in there. So it's not our fault and we have to figure out ways to get around it. And if you are a woman, and a woman of color, you even have more challenges around this and being held back. 

04:50 - Dr. Stephanie Byerly (Guest)
Absolutely. And you know, men have been socialized a certain way as well. So if you're a man and you're socialized I'm not supposed to show my feelings or you have this unconscious gender bias that women are less than that. We're not good leaders. We're not good with money. We're not good with just making decisions. They don't even, most of the time, understand how they've been socialized and how that impacts women. 

05:14 - Dr. Dara (Host)
Wow, that's powerful, yeah, powerful. So I'm just wondering I know why I believe it and I work with women, but why do? Why would women seek out a woman-centered coach? 

05:24 - Dr. Stephanie Byerly (Guest)
So you can get a coach different types of coaching right. There's life coaching, executive coaching, all different types of coaching. In my opinion, if it doesn't start with mindset, I don't think it's always as successful because it isn't sustainable. So if you understand, as a woman from a woman-centered coach about these inner glass ceilings, as a woman from a woman-centered coach about these inner glass ceilings, so Dr Claire Zahmed, who I'm doing a year-long program with she is a PhD she talks about these 21 inner glass ceilings and these are things again that are formed at a young age and she has described 21 of them. 

05:58
They get internalized and we literally they're subconscious. But what happens is it's like a self-fulfilling prophecy. So if we believe, say in an area of leadership, that I'm not visible or I'm not enough, or for me it's I'm too much, we actually have the thoughts, we have the behavior, we suffer the consequences of that and then we shrink back. So it's like this self-fulfilling prophecy where we start creating the results to show evidence to our brain I am too much or I'm not enough, or I'm not visible. And so it's fascinating when you start to understand that pretty much every decision we make, every conversation we have, are based on what these inner glass ceilings are. 

06:41 - Dr. Dara (Host)
That's powerful, and all 21,. I don't know we'll get to those today, but I'm sure they can contact you to get more information about those. So you talked about mindset. So I'm curious, and I believe too that mindset is the key, right, but how do we change mindset? That is so difficult, because if we're one mindset to switch, you can't just say, okay, flick of the switch and I'm over here now. What do we do about that? 

07:01 - Dr. Stephanie Byerly (Guest)
So that's the magic about the life coaching piece. And when we talk about the thought model, that term was coined by Brooke Castillo of the life coach school If we think about something happens to us which we call a circumstance, for instance, you get a text message and the text message says this and you don't add any adjectives. That's exactly what it says. That's a circumstance. And then we have thoughts about that and everyone's going to have a different thought about it based on what your inner dialogue is. And this also goes back to like survival and brain safety and all these things. But have you ever gotten a text message and you have misinterpreted it? So you read the text message, you had these automatic, usually negative thoughts and from the negative thoughts we have a feeling or an emotion and from that we have behaviors, inactions, actions that cause results. So it's really starting to understand how your brain is working. We have, they say, 60,000 thoughts a day. That's nutty when you think about it, wow, 60,. Some people say 90,000, but let's just use 60,000. 95% of them are unconscious or subconscious. So it's this constant inner dialogue that's going on, and for women it's usually self-criticism, self-doubt. We're on this hamster wheel, we're hyper-functioning, we never feel enough. But if we really are conscious of 5%, 3,000 thoughts a day I'm not really sure if that's the case too, but half are always negative and half are going to be positive. But our brain has this negativity bias, and so every day, when we wake up, our default brain is our caveman brain that thinks they'll live in a cave, we're going to starve, we're going to freeze, to death, we're going to have pain, and so we're automatically focusing on the same negative thoughts every day, and part of it is because our brain is deciding if we're safe or not. So what happens is our brain is building up stories and evidence to try to get certainty about whether we're safe or not safe, and this whole cascade continues from there. And so and if you've had trauma, I just want to mention that as well that that takes this to a whole nother level, because your nervous system vibrates at a very different level and you're always looking for the face eating bear, when actually there may be a bunny with a flower in its mouth, but we're always looking for, we're scanning for, danger at a different level. But when we start to understand what our brain is doing and we start to understand that most of the stories that we think are true are not true, and it's our brain has created these stories to decide if we're safe. And so have you ever heard? 

09:22
In Buddhism they say we're not our thoughts. We're really not our thoughts. If we have 60,000 thoughts today, we're the watcher of our thoughts. So if we can slow down non-judgmentally that's the key here out of curiosity and non-judgment, we slow down and see what my brain's doing here and what usually what happens is when you start to realize that, you're like wow, and it gives you, though, a sense where I can actually start to get control of some things, when I slow down and realize what my brain is doing. 

09:49 - Dr. Dara (Host)
So what I hear you saying is this is the new saber tooth tiger right, Our phone, our computer, this constant connection, and our brains can't tell the difference between a threat with an email or text and a threat of a tiger chasing us. 

10:02 - Dr. Stephanie Byerly (Guest)
Absolutely, because our brain is going to process social threat and physical threat the same way, it's going to go down the same exact pathways and each of us does a different reaction. So you may do fight, you may do flight, you may do freeze, or you may do fawn or submit, and that pretty much got decided by the time you were seven, based on what happened to you as a kid, and you don't have a choice in the way that your body responds. But when you start to understand why you're showing up the way you are, that's when you can start to get control of all of this. 

10:33 - Dr. Dara (Host)
So it takes some deep inner work, right? We have to understand first what our mindset is right. We have to understand that before we can move and process and change and look for evidence the other way. 

10:43 - Dr. Stephanie Byerly (Guest)
Absolutely, and we have to through coaching. You know, we know coaching is like what's happening right now and how do we want our future to be, versus therapy, where we're going back in time and saying, well, why am I this way? We're not going there with coaching, we're going what's happening now. Let's figure out what's holding you back and we'll figure out how to move forward to become the best version of you. 

11:01 - Dr. Dara (Host)
Yeah, I love that. I often tell folks that coaching is about forward moving. It's about looking forward and therapy is about looking back. Now, there's nothing wrong with that, but looking back and therapy is great for a lot of people, right, but we want to see how we move forward. So, speaking of that, because I talked about women, you know barriers holding women down. What are some of the really specific barriers that particularly women in leadership are facing? 

11:25 - Dr. Stephanie Byerly (Guest)
So Dr Zammett talks about the 21 inner glass ceilings, but the three that are the most prominent are I'm not enough, I'm not visible and I'm alone, and for me, though, I have the I'm too much pattern. What I want to reflect back on, though really quickly, is, again, these were all set in place by the time you were seven years old, all these patterns that we show up in. So I'm too much in a control freak because of the traumas that I had as a kid and a need for control, and that's sort of how this all gets perpetuated. So, again, this is non-judgment. How did all this actually happen? So you know, there are the real, very real outer glass ceilings for women in leadership, and those include things like getting paid less, getting promoted less. Certainly in medicine, as a physician, we get less papers published For me as a woman physician, I get called a nurse, I get called by my first name, even if I introduce myself as Dr Byron. They'll be like where's the doctor? You know things like this In the corporate world, again, same make less promoted less, get judged more harshly in all arenas. 

12:27
And women, there's this thing called the power penalty. So when you step into a role that's thought of more as a masculine role. People automatically start to judge you like. Well, who does she think she is stepping out of her box? And men and women do that to women. There's also this thing called the likability clause. So we want to be liked. Back from the caveman days. As soon as you step into a leadership role, you're automatically disliked. So in our brain there's this double bind we want to be liked, but we want to ascend into a leadership role. So there's this constant internal war going on in our brain that we don't even understand and we're constantly again being judged more harshly. So we're trying to be more and more perfect and most of the time what we're doing is running ourselves ragged, trying to make sure everybody else on the team is happy, and we're miserable. And when we finally start to realize we have no control over other people as long as we're showing up the way we want to be showing up, and so you know we get judged more harshly. 

13:24
To say, if you're aggressive or more outspoken, like I am, you called all the words that we know right the B word you just better. You know, calm down, I am woman, hear me roar. So what happens? Those things happen to us and then we shrink and we and these are like trauma responses actually, that are back from the beginning of time Women who were outspoken or aggressive. They oftentimes got put back in their little box and so again, this gets transmitted through family of origin, through genetics. So it's very, very complicated. 

13:57
But the piece about, say, men and how they're socialized if a man will talk over me in a meeting when I'm presenting an idea that I had and then just repeats what I say, I really have to realize that he's doing that because he's been socialized to believe that I don't know what the heck I'm talking about. I will say to that person thank you, dr So-and-so, for reiterating what I just said. I'm really glad you thought that was such a great idea. And when you do that, they don't even believe, they have no clue most of the time, and then they think, oh my gosh, I have a wife or I have a daughter or I have a sister and what have I been doing to women, you know? So it's very complicated, but we have to get a hold of what our brains are doing, first with these inner glass ceilings, because it's amazing how we play it out. We actually make it happen. 

14:42 - Dr. Dara (Host)
I was thinking about this as I was preparing for this podcast and just kind of get my mind around it, and I was thinking about the glass ceiling, which I said you know, it's been around since the 70s. I'm thinking, gosh, we've made so much progress and we have right, the barriers are still there, but we've made a lot of progress. There's still so many less women in senior leadership roles and CEO, you know, in the C-suite. But I was working with a woman, a female leader, yesterday and she said to me I'm stuck in this role, I'm in. And I said what do you mean? She said, well, I took some time off when I had my child and I chose to do that, but just an extended time, not the six weeks that they gave me. I wanted just a little more time at home. So I did, and I was on a leadership trajectory, just going forward. 

15:22
But when I came back, cut, yeah, and I said, oh gosh, how long has that been? Because you know, let's start talking. She said 10 years, 10 years. I cannot get back on the leadership path now. It was kind of like an X in. You know, an X on my file, if you will, there's a mark now. No, no, she had a baby, she took off and I'm like this really, this still really happens, right for women. So we have those. We still have to deal with all these inner in the inner glass ceiling and all these that we are holding ourselves back as well. 

15:50 - Dr. Stephanie Byerly (Guest)
Dr Zamet says that 80% of what's holding women back now are these, are these inner glass ceilings? There's obviously, again, like we keep saying, there are these true outer glass ceilings, but when you start to deal with your own inner glass ceilings, you become very empowered. So, whatever situation that you're actually in, you show up very, very differently and you know when you, when you start to realize again nonjudgmentally, how you've been creating your own reality with these inner glass ceilings, and then there's actually a structured way through the coaching, to actually break through those into a growth pathway. It's liberating, it's. It's just remarkable how different you feel and again you actually get that sense that this can be different. I do have to put some work into it, but to become great you have to grow yourself to be great. 

16:40 - Dr. Dara (Host)
Right and anything worthwhile is. You know it's going to be a little challenging, right? As we hear, challenging, yeah. So can you take us through just a little bit of what that, what that's like to work on these, these inner glass ceilings, if it's women centered coaching, and how we can focus what do you do with women? 

16:55 - Dr. Stephanie Byerly (Guest)
So I combine my life coaching and my trauma coaching with this women centered coaching and also the feminist coaching, which is a little different, as well as the women centered coaching, and put it all together. 

17:06
And so what I usually start out with with my clients is you know, let's teach you the life coaching piece first, and I want you to start observing how what's going on with your thoughts is creating basically your reality, and so to start looking at situations very differently, understanding how your brain is working. 

17:23
And then we talk about what is the vision that you want to work on for coaching right now and there may be more vision, you know later, more areas you want to work on your coaching outcome, but what is the most urgent need right now? And we work through that and we define it into a pretty, a very defined sort of topic, and it may change a little as we go through, but we start with a very specific topic and then we work towards what are your inner glass ceilings? And there's usually three in every area of our life. They're all different, and so we start looking at those and going through an observation period of really understanding how we've operationalized it in our life. Again, non-judgmentally, because what? Let me just say really quickly that women do guilt and shame, so we make shame. 

18:06
We do that so well. We do 80% more than men and boys, and what that means, though, is we make it about our identity. So, say, if I did a lecture, or the lecture didn't go very well and maybe I didn't do enough research or spend enough time, you know, researching the audience, I'm not going to make that about oh, I didn't do enough work for this topic. I'm going to make it mean that I'm bad at this, and that's what we do, and, again, that's that inner. We have to understand that we live in shame, lack and isolation, because we think women shouldn't be asking for any help, we should just know everything. 

18:36
And talk to ourselves horribly right, we wouldn't say that to a friend or another colleague like oh, you really bombed that you stink. 

18:44 - Dr. Dara (Host)
You'd say well, maybe you didn't know your audience or, you know, did you get enough research? What would you do differently? We don't do that with ourselves, we do it with others. So we show more compassion than we do with ourselves. 

18:54 - Dr. Stephanie Byerly (Guest)
And that's one reason why we're great leaders as well, because we show everybody else compassion and we're a mentor to everybody else. But we work through the inner glass ceilings and then we work through the breakthrough stage, which is really about how do we start breaking through these inner glass ceilings, how do we start instituting new behaviors? Because at women it's the level of identity. So we have to change our behaviors or we have to learn more skills. There's a lot of different things that we plan together, that we start doing, and then we have to get to a growth pathway and that is really how you're going to get the resources you need to become successful. We start in some of the coaching sessions. 

19:30
So how did it go last week? What you were going to work on? Did you work on that? What was the challenge? What was the benefit? What can we work on this week to get you more into this new story? So we have to break out of the old story which is keeping us stuck in shame, lack and isolation. We've lost our connection to, sort of, our intuition, the universe, you know, all the things that women are really connected. To break through those things, to get to the growth pathway and even though your vision may have been in one area of your life, when you start realizing how this all works, everything starts to shift in all the areas of your life. 

20:05 - Dr. Dara (Host)
Oh, that's super cool and you know, I am definitely a, an advocate and I think everybody needs a coach male, female, everybody needs a coach. I have a coach, you may have a coach right and it really helps us get to that transformation piece right and and be sustainable change. But say, say at my listeners right now that they're like, well, I'm not ready for a coach, I'm not ready to do that, what? What are some steps that they can take right now, wherever they are, to help them start observing what's going on? 

20:34 - Dr. Stephanie Byerly (Guest)
So there are so many resources that are available that are, you know, free resources. Certainly, you know, youtube has some great resources, but if you want to just sort of start learning about your mindset and how that starts to affect you, I would definitely, you know, look up great thinkers who talk about mindset, and I'm trying to think who would be some of the best ones to look up, because, again, youtube or going to their website and you really start to understand. The life coach school podcast would be awesome, because that really and I would start at the beginning, where Brooke Castillo talks about the thought model and her thought model is based on cognitive behavioral therapy a lot of different resources. Eckhart Tolle is also an amazing resource, and Byron Katie. 

21:22
So the work, the work by Byron Katie- where you have the four questions, which really makes you slow down and realize is this for sure? True? Is there another way to look at this? Could there be another truth? Who would I be without this thought? And you really start to see, holy cow. You know, I'm having these automatic thoughts which are causing these results which I don't really want to get anymore. 

21:46 - Dr. Dara (Host)
Right, oh, and I love the work and I'm just going to add to that, like just in journaling and reflecting, particularly about when something happens, when you have this, would you say, the text message, would you call that a situation? 

21:56 - Dr. Stephanie Byerly (Guest)
That's a circumstance A circumstance. 

21:58 - Dr. Dara (Host)
So this circumstance happens and you react a certain way, to start collecting and journaling on that. What happened, what were your thoughts, what were your feelings? Was that emotion going on? And then how did you respond? And then I add to that what would you do differently then? If you could do a do-over, how would you want to respond? So I just do that to bring about awareness, to help them bring about awareness. It's not mine, it's you know. This is the work is all about the client, right? They have to bring their own awareness to themselves to be able to make that change. 

22:28 - Dr. Stephanie Byerly (Guest)
Yeah, and they have to be curious about. Okay, is this a fact or is this a story? Again, understanding that our brain creates stories, because think about if you get an email from your boss on Friday that says we need to meet Monday and there's no agenda over the entire and it's always on a Friday afternoon, right the weekend your brain is going to build stories and stories, and stories, and I'm going to be fired. 

22:51 - Dr. Dara (Host)
He hates my work, yeah. 

22:53 - Dr. Stephanie Byerly (Guest)
Right, and so your brain is doing that, though, to try to decide if you're safe or not. And so, monday, you go in and they're like oh, we want to promote you, you know. So it's a combination of all the limiting beliefs. It's the combination of this, you know, the safety that our brain is looking for. So, again, it is not simple, and that's why you need a coach, in my opinion, who can teach you all these different pieces. So, first, you understand I'm not broken. Second, you understand nothing's gone wrong. This is, all, you know, changeable. And third, there's a way to get control of your life, and there's a way to get on a path that you want to be on, but you need somebody else to help you figure that out, because, as you said, if you get a coach who doesn't have a coach, I would be worried, because, even as coaches, we can't see our own minds sometimes, and my coach will say to me is that thought serving you well? And I'm like no. 

23:44 - Dr. Dara (Host)
Nope, chunk it. Yeah, one of the questions I love to ask when my clients are telling the story boy. This is a great narrative they have going on. It's so simple and I think so many coaches use this. But just what else could be true? 

23:57
If you just get in that curious mindset and say what else could be true, start jotting those down and see maybe it's this or that, and just to get out of that, you know we ruminate, we just go over the same thought and thought and thought and thought and thought and we've got to be jolted out of that. So I love that question and anything else about the inner glass ceiling or anything about coaching women, because I want to move on to our passion and there's a lot of talk around this finding your passion. If you, you know, if you work at your passion, you'll never work a day in your life and that sort of thing. So I want to move to that. But before we do anything else about the glass ceiling or coaching women, any of that, when you talk about the shame and lack and isolation. 

24:35 - Dr. Stephanie Byerly (Guest)
What's really important to know is with when we talk about lack, that has to do with the fact that we've gotten really disconnected from a higher power and our intuition. The higher power it may be a deity or maybe nature, it may be energy, but when we think that we're it, that there's nothing else that we're connected to, that's a really isolating, scary place that we come from and it also really makes us think that the world is out to get us like. You know what are my thoughts about myself and others and the world when we talk about all of this. You know that's another big piece of this. To then start working on the inner glass ceilings is to understand. You know, what's been put in place. Just being a woman, if you're walking around, you know, as we all are socialized to believe we've been put on this planet to procreate and then you can't get pregnant. What are you making that mean about you? You? 

25:26 - Dr. Dara (Host)
make it mean you're a failure and that you're useless. 

25:29 - Dr. Stephanie Byerly (Guest)
So leveling the playing field with the women-centered coaching, the feminist coaching, just all of it, the mindset, the trauma, to help women understand what's been going on in their brain, that they had no idea. 

25:40 - Dr. Dara (Host)
So just to kind of wrap up, where we are here, it's not our fault. We were born this way, right? I mean from day one, right. With humans, we're trying to protect ourselves. We're looking for negative. That's what we're geared towards because we want to stay alive. So that's just inbred in us and that you can get help. Coaches can really help you with this. They can help you uncover what's holding you back right, so that you can and this is key that you can find the success that you want. Success to you may not be running a multimillion dollar company. That may not be your path to success. It may look different and it does look different for everybody. So you know we can't let society tell us what success looks like. We have to discover that. 

26:23 - Dr. Stephanie Byerly (Guest)
Well, did I get all that right? Yes, and part of the issue is too is there's this expectation gap? So we don't even know what we're even capable of, because we've sort of been kept in this box by ourselves and other men and women have lower expectations of women than they do of men, and so until we start uncovering these things, we don't even know what our potential is or what we may really want to do. 

26:49 - Dr. Dara (Host)
Oh, this is powerful stuff. I love it, I love it. I love it too. We could talk all night Speaking of you know what we really want to do. How do we uncover, you know, or create that spark and figure out what our true purpose is and what we do want to do? 

27:03 - Dr. Stephanie Byerly (Guest)
So a big piece of this is that we've become disconnected from our feminine power and for a lot of reasons. You know, there's a lot of characteristics that women have that we've kept, but a lot of male characteristics, male energies, have also been taken on. So just think about this If you were connected to a higher source, connected to your intuition, and listen to those little voices inside of you and you also used the more masculine qualities that we've taken on, which we need as well, which are strategy, goal, orientation, you see something, you go for it, you know. Problem solving, yes. What if we incorporated those together to be doing it from a different lens, from a lens of who we truly are and why we're really on this planet. 

27:52
Because women and this is so interesting the Dalai Lama says that Western women are potentially what is going to save our planet Because we always want to help and take care of people, but we truly want to do it on a huge scale. We always are wanting to nurture that's part of that's a feminine characteristics, but it gets beat out of us when we're in these very male structured sort of environments which, again, we need. But it sort of has to be the balance and they. You know they talk about now that leadership. Successful, effective leadership means men and women taking on female leadership characteristics, because we're the best communicators, we save companies that are going bankrupt. We create diverse teams because we need different people at the table, who look different than we do, who bring different perspectives. Women are great at making sure their team has well-being and we create very safe working environments for people. So we have these great qualities and that those qualities need to be really amplified through all leaders. 

28:58 - Dr. Dara (Host)
You took the words right out of mouth. I was just thinking that, as we're having the conversation, because I've read a lot of research. I love to geek out on this, but I read a lot of research because I work with emotional intelligence a lot right, I have assessments and work in that realm and women score higher on the emotional intelligence that really matter in leadership empathy, connection, communication, all of those that are very strong skills that help leaders, right, and yet we don't have enough women in leadership roles where they're able to share those and to mentor others Absolutely. 

29:31 - Dr. Stephanie Byerly (Guest)
And because, if you think about it, there's so many women that are in very senior leadership roles that are not sort of they've lost a lot of those characteristics, so there's not a lot of women in those roles that can be mentors and sponsors for women, because women are over-mentored and under-sponsored, men are over-sponsored, but the you know the issue goes back to, though we have all these qualities but what we do is we run ourselves ragged and we still think we're not good enough and we're not perfect enough. So we take care of everybody else but not ourselves, and part of breaking through these inner glass ceilings is setting boundaries from an empowered place of no, I don't have to be answering emails 24-7. I don't have to be putting out fires 24-7. Because we do that? Because we're trying to prove to ourselves that we're enough, we're worthy, and we've got to stop getting out of trying to get validation from external things and not self-validation and self-authorship and self-leadership. 

30:29 - Dr. Dara (Host)
You brought up something that I want to clarify real quick, because you said mentor and sponsor, and then we've talked about a coach, right? So a coach helps you look forward, helps you find out where you are and where you want to go, and then helps you uncover those skills and behaviors you need to get there, right? What about a mentor and a sponsor? Let's just clarify for the audience what we're talking about. 

30:48 - Dr. Stephanie Byerly (Guest)
So a mentor is usually someone who's in the field that you aspire to be in, and they're usually somebody older. Generally, they look like you, you aspire to be like them, and so they guide you, but they tell you what to do, whereas in coaching it's more of. We don't really give advice, right, we assume the client already has all the information. We just help, kind of pull it out. Sponsorship, though, is when a person above you can get opportunities for you. Like they make a phone call and say, hey, you need to interview this person for this job, she would be a great fit. And so, again, women get undersponsored, over-mentored. Women get mentored about their personal lives, like how do you balance family and work? We need that, but, but we also need, you know, career mentorship. The other piece of it is is that women are cut out of a lot of networking things where they could be sponsored, like playing golf or all the things where these deals are made between you know the majority of men, and we get cut out of those situations a lot, so we lose. 

31:48 - Dr. Dara (Host)
How do we get back in? How do we get, how do we get sponsors? Then, if we're under sponsored, what are the things we can do? 

32:00 - Dr. Stephanie Byerly (Guest)
Well, we can look to more women leaders, and it may even be women leaders that are not in your organization but aspire to be in, you know, say, a larger organization and whatever you're doing, or getting connected to local leadership groups or national leadership groups, and even going out of your local environment. 

32:14 - Dr. Dara (Host)
And also, though, asking that's what I was going to say. Yes, or a sponsor, yes. 

32:19 - Dr. Stephanie Byerly (Guest)
We don't ask because we're afraid of the response and we're afraid we're going to get shot back down or, in our own brain, we think we're not enough to even ask for it and we don't deserve it. And this whole you know imposter syndrome, that's a whole nother you know situation. But, yeah, we have to ask, but we have to feel empowered to ask. We have to understand that women do not get good feedback and so that when we get feedback, it might be terrible feedback, but we have to be able to understand the playing field and we have to be very self-aware, because we're not very self-aware Most women are not, most people are not but we have to know how we're showing up and intent versus impact, because sometimes we're running ourselves ragged, we're burned out and we're reactive and you know things like this and you know we have to start to understand how we're showing up based on our thoughts, cause it's all based on our thoughts. 

33:08 - Dr. Dara (Host)
And I just want to point out we're talking about some generalities here, like women don't get good feedback. Okay, this, this is statistically. I mean. We, we look at research. I'm sure you do too. We look at research that says, consistently, women don't get as good feedback as their male counterparts, right, so so we're talking to generalities, but we also look at research to say this is really what's happening here. Great, well, you know what I can't believe. We're almost to the end. It's been so good and we could keep going. What do you want to leave the audience with today, stephanie? 

33:44 - Dr. Stephanie Byerly (Guest)
What I want to leave them with is if you're a woman, please get a coach that understands feminist coaching, women-centered coaching, because it's very different than coaching a man. They have, yeah, you know, they struggle with some of the same things that we do, but not nearly to the extent that we do. So if you have a coach that just tells you oh, just change your thoughts, you know, when you've got this internal battle going on in your brain and you don't understand it, that's not necessarily going to be effective long-term. So please get a coach who can help you, someone who understands all this, so that you can stop sort of being miserable. 

34:12
You know, women now, although we've gained so much equity, equality, all these, you know things we're more miserable than we've ever been. More women are on antidepressants. 90% of women have horrible relationships with their bodies. We're living alone, we're isolating, we're exhausted. We're exhausted, exhausted, to the burnout point, yes, and we're like I didn't sign up for this. This is not what it's supposed to be. Yeah, please get a coach. It doesn't have to be this way. 

34:38 - Dr. Dara (Host)
Yes and get a coach. And you know, if you've tried it before and you're like that didn't work or you start working the coach and they're not quite right, you know you've got to find one that you're compatible with right. This is going to be a very close relationship so that you can make this transformation. So thank you so much for that. I put your contact information in our show notes so that our listeners can get in touch with you. And again, listeners, if you have someone that is struggling and they've got some barriers and you can recognize these limiting beliefs that they have in this inner glass ceiling, please share this podcast with them and thank you so much for joining us.