Master Your Inner Self with Ryann Dowdy

Welcome, welcome, welcome to Shedding the Corporate Bitch podcast, where we are transforming corporate executives into the powerhouse leaders they're meant to be by helping them shed their challenges and overwhelm, along with any fears, insecurities, doubts, or negativities holding them back from creating riches in their work and life. My name is Bernadette Boas of Ball of Fire Coaching. And today our guests will address a key question when it comes to leadership. What is a conscious leader and how does it help me succeed in my work and life? My guest today is Ryan Dowdy of Be in the Room, a conscious leadership collective for women in business. And she's going to share right off the top what she's all about and all about her passions.

Yeah. So my name is Ryan Dowdy. I live in the suburbs of Kansas City, Missouri. I have 3 kiddos. I have a 17-year-old stepdaughter, a 3-year-old, and a 5-year-old. I had a 15-year corporate career before becoming an entrepreneur. My children are very much the catalyst that really, not so much leaving because of them, but kind of gave, like, gave me pause to look at life and business differently. So that was definitely the catalyst of that. So for me, Professionally, what am I passionate about? Very specifically, I work a lot with women. And for me, it's giving women a voice in the workplace, doing things like closing the wage gap, getting more women to come back to work that did not come back to work. Putting more money in the hands of more women is really something that I'm super passionate about. Personally, my kids are little, so we are in the quality time phase of life. Anytime I can get them outside, We love to play outside and hike, even though we live somewhere without mountains, and play and do all of the things. To me, that's like my favorite way. If I had downtime, it's, you know, throw on a hoodie and sweats and go get outside with the kids, bring the dog, get dirty, have fun and play. So that's kind of for fun around here.

Well, that's awesome because I, you know, being an entrepreneur myself, those kind of breaks. So does corporate professionals. But at the same time, yes, us entrepreneurs, we need to kind of like quiet the quiet the mind and just get out and have fun. So the one thing that I love about this conversation and the work that you do is you're very focused on conscious leadership.

Yes.

What does that mean and why should I care?

I'm going to start with why you should care and then I'm going to tell you what it means to me. So why should you care, really? And this is no secret to anybody listening to this podcast right now, right? Today's employee has spoken. They are not okay with the way that business is done today. They are not okay with the way they are treated. These days, how they are paid, how they're compensated, all of those different things, right? So whether it's, you know, the great resignation or quiet quitting or whatever you're seeing, that the challenges we're having in recruiting and putting right people in the right seats and people's frustration over the recruiting process is basically, you know, the world speaking and being like, it is broken and it is not, it is not serving me and I'm not going to tolerate anything that doesn't serve me. Which brings us to the definition of conscious leadership, because to me, conscious leadership is that human-first approach to leadership. Yeah, right. And it starts with our own self-awareness, right? The best way that we can lead other people is to first lead ourselves, right? To focus on things like personal responsibility and emotional intelligence and self-concept and, you know, all of those different things. Because to me, knowing, having that relationship with myself allows me to then be more aware of the other people around me. How can I serve those people in a better way? How can I elevate those people in a better way. So it's just really kind of stripping away the old school, authoritative, my way or the highway, there's one way to get a result style of leadership to a results-focused, human-focused, collaborative approach to leadership. Right.

And the fact that we're not robots, we are humans with a lot of inner junk and inner beauty. That we're bringing into the workplace. Would that be a fair assessment? 100%.

Yeah.

Yeah. So you also mentioned— you mentioned self-awareness, you mentioned emotional intelligence, but you also use a term I don't know that many people talk about, and that's self-concept. Right. So what did you mean by that?

Yeah. So, so self-concept, the definition basically is the lens of which you see yourself. Right. So self-concept is essentially what do you think of you? So if you see yourself as an excellent leader, right, your self-concept is, I'm a great leader, right? If you see yourself as I'm a crappy leader or I don't know how to inspire people or people don't listen to me or I don't have anything valuable to share, why would somebody want to work for me? Why would somebody want to hire me as a leader? Right? If that's the way that you see yourself, then that is your self-concept. So self-concept is really your own conscious awareness or your, your own thoughts of yourself. What's really exciting about that though, Bernadette, is that can change, right? Once we're aware of it, we can change it. And I like to tell a specific example. So I grew up in sales and I was always like a top 20%er in the sales world. I was never like the top 5%. I never went on any corporate trips. I never won any president's clubs. And I fully believe that it had everything to do with my self-concept. I started on a sales team when I was 21-ish years old, maybe 22, all female sales staff, youngest woman by 15 years. And I stepped onto a team full of powerhouse women who were making a ton of money, who drove nice cars, who had all this experience. And I always saw myself as the baby. I was just the baby. I was just new. I was just trying to get by. And sadly, I wore that self-concept for way too long. Which brings me to like my President's Club. I wasn't a President's Club winner because I was new, right? I was the youngest. I was the least experienced. And I wore that Probably for a solid— I'm thinking when I started, for a solid 8 years, I wore that self-concept, which made me a solid B+ player. I never made an A player. I was a solid B+. I performed. I showed up because they inspired that in me. They were good at their job. So I'm like, I'm going to be good too, but I was never going to be as good as them. And so until I actually worked for an organization and had somebody look me in the face and be like, what are you doing with your life? You are selling yourself way too short, where I was like, oh gosh. What have I done? So it's pretty wild.

What provoked that? What provoked that person kind of sitting you down and saying, kind of, you know, you're not stepping up and you're not, you know, achieving what you're capable of?

It was actually interesting. I had just started working for a tech startup. Not at the time they weren't considered a tech startup, but now we would call them a martech startup, a marketing technology firm. And I had a corporate trainer come in and ride along with me. That's how kind of their new hire training was. You went you went to corporate, you sat through that training, and then eventually somebody came and spent time with you in the field because we— this is— I worked remote before it was cool back in 2011.

Yeah, me too.

Yeah. And I was just doing a ride-along day with a trainer and we did our morning appointments and we sat down over lunch and she literally just looked at me and she's like, I'm like, that's the best discovery and rapport, but I've ever seen. And I was like, oh, I was just doing what I was told. And then I, you know, she kind of pulled it out and I told her what I was doing and where I was and where I came from and all these different things. And she was like, oh my God, you are so underplaying your skills in just such a major way. So it was really interesting. She was a stranger.

Right, right. Well, sometimes it's easier to hear that from a stranger than it is from someone that, you know, you look up to or you know. Right. Yeah. So why? Well, first off, what were your emotions at that time? When she was kind of telling you, you're not, you know, you're not achieving what you could be achieving. And, you know, what was your attitude around receiving that type of feedback? Because a lot of people don't want to receive that type of feedback.

I was hungry for it. I, again, I think subconsciously, like, my, my intuition knew that I was playing small, but my brain couldn't catch up. So I was excited about that information, not offended. Um, because I was still in a place where I think I needed the external validation, right? I needed somebody else to see it in me before I could see it in me. So for me, it was like, oh really, I could do more? I could be more? Like, that's so interesting. Like, I was empowered and excited by that information.

Oh, nice. So when you— because I'm sure you do— when you come across, um, a client who, um, needs to be woken up, um, At what stage, I guess I'll first ask you, at what stage do they come to you? And then are they as open and receiving as you were when you start working with them?

Yeah. So Be in the Room is actually a women's conscious leadership collective. So we are essentially a community of sorts. So I'm not working in capacity with my clients like you are. Like somebody comes to me and says, hey, Ryan, help me solve this problem. I more bring together smart, successful women to have open and honest and vulnerable conversations. So most of them come to us with that awareness of, um, you know, either I'm not living up to my potential, or I'm trying to find a way to make my potential and my desires match up. I'm trying to get right with my ambition when other people aren't. So my people are probably in a space where they're aware that they're, they're different and they're special and they're in an exciting way, um, but they're not always 100% sure what to do with that information. That's usually where women come into our community of like, I know I don't think like everybody else, I know that my ambition and my goals are a little different than other people, but I don't know why or how.

And are they seeing that— are they coming in and they're seeing that as, um, what I'll call riches? Are they seeing it as benefits to themselves and they just need to figure out how to leverage them? Or are they walking in also with imposter syndrome or with other things that are really kind of pulling them down?

It's a both/and, right? Like, again, I think there's a little bit— they see the riches, they see the opportunity, and then they're like, who am I to do this type of thing? And I work with both entrepreneurs and, you know, women in the corporate space are both part of our community. And I think it's a little bit of both, right? It's the— again, it's the gut feeling of I'm meant for more, I can do more. And then the mind logic feeling of, but what if I can't? You know, but do I know enough? But, you know, am I good enough? But so I think it's a both/and for sure.

And is that the biggest challenge women are having when it comes to leadership? Is it that self-doubt, or what might it be that you find?

I definitely think it's self-doubt for sure. I think the biggest challenge I think that women are having in leadership is that there are no there are no good examples of women in leadership of which to build our careers upon. Um, you know, so many women, they see the example that they were in, they know that they don't like it, uh, they know that they don't want to do that, they don't want to create that, but they haven't seen a model of how to do it differently. I think that's the biggest challenge women in leadership have today.

But are they looking, or do they feel that they only have to look toward other women that practice that, or are they not even finding it in the men that that they're being led by?

I think it's both.

Really?

Yeah. Wow. Wow.

I'm shocked only because I guess then I even— even the gentleman that kind of fired me and created everything that I'm doing today. Yeah. He, you know, to me was just somebody that, you know, I felt drove, you know, kind of some, some optimal leadership. And so I was always grateful that I had him and took full responsibility for my part in it.

Right.

But so if that is— if that— oh gosh, that's— that hit the fact that they don't have the people to look toward. So how do you— so how does your collective and what— because I know you also talk about leadership principles.

Yep.

And so how do you leverage what it is that you know and what your other experts know to really help them, especially if from a distance, help them to kind of address this self-doubt, even the lack of awareness?

Right. So we start with— so we have what we call our Leadership Learning Library. So there's an entire library of education. My Self-Leadership Principles program is in there. All of our strategic advisors, even the peer-led education is all housed in there.

Right.

So if you are some, you know, so there's educational resources to go and listen on demand. But a lot of what we do is driving conversations, is having conversations like these. The reason that I know that they don't have examples of good leadership is we had what we call collaboration events. And so everybody hops on Zoom and we put everybody in small Zoom rooms and we give them a topic to talk about. And Bernadette Boas, one day the question was about leadership, like describe the best leader you ever had and why. And overwhelmingly the answer was there's really not a lot of people in my career that were directly leaders to me. That I want to emulate. And many times there were people in the ecosystem, right?

Right.

Somebody else I worked for, or a colleague, or somebody who ran a different department, or a mentor from college, or something, right? So it's not like I've never seen it done well, but a lot of them were like, I've never, you know, I've never worked for somebody that I felt did it well. So that was actually when I realized that I was like, oh gosh, this is not just a problem, like you said, that there aren't enough women in leadership roles. There's not enough conscious leaders in leadership roles.

Yeah. And what do you think is kind of the top priority? Hmm, how do I want to say this? So of conscious leadership, what is that one thing that if someone could get a grasp on and even start working on it with little tweaks, it, you know, is it that self-awareness? Is it the self-concept, which I love that whole thing? Is it their emotional intelligence? What is it?

I think it starts with self-awareness, right? Because we can't, we can't craft the self-concept or the emotional intelligence until we have the self-awareness.

Okay, so if the women that come to you are already self-aware, there's this, right? That isn't that what I understood?

On their way, they're on their way.

Okay, so you probably run across a lot of, of women and men sure, that have 0% of self-awareness, right? Okay, so what do you do to crack that nut? Because that's a big, hard, stubborn nut. Uh, what does your collective help them do in that regard?

Um, honest answer is I don't think you're super attractive to me, or to me or my community, if you don't have that level of self-awareness, because you don't know it's broken, right? It's the whole idea of you're not even problem aware. You might come across, you know, be in the room, you might wind up on our sales page or in our Facebook group or following us on Instagram or following us on TikTok. And you might be like, that's interesting, but it probably doesn't scratch an itch for you because you don't even know there's a problem, right? This is— I put my marketing hat on for a moment, right? Like there's, there's problem aware and solution aware. You know, our people are problem aware. But to ask me the question, if I were to lead someone, or to be in a situation where I realized that somebody had zero self-awareness, that is kind of where I would start is that conversation of, you know, in order to be the best leader— and I say this probably a dozen times a day— is like, we have to lead ourselves first before we can lead others. Like, where do you think your biggest opportunity for awareness is within you?

Right.

Because it always starts with self-reflection, right? Right. You're going to sit here and you're going to tell me Sally is lazy and Joe sucks and like, tell me what's wrong with your team, you know, which is oftentimes where we start, right? I'm going back to kind of my corporate experience. It was always somebody else's fault. And it's like, okay, cool, let's take everybody else out of the equation. Let's start with you. What's your biggest opportunity for improvement, for connection, for to make a change? So it's always about that self-reflection. And again, not with judgment. I'm not judging you. I'm not telling you to stop blaming everybody else. I'm like, let's look in the mirror for a second, right? Like, we can't control Sue, Sarah, Johnny, and Billy, but we can control us, so let's start there.

Right, right. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And to master their inner self— yeah, uh, you know, is that, is that a series of questions? Is that a series of feedback? Is that a series of different activities that you would put someone through? And let's assume they have a little bit of self-awareness because they know at least they want different or new or bigger or better?

Yeah, so the self-leadership principles, there's 6 of them. So we start with self-trust, personal responsibility, self-awareness, self-concept, growth mindset, and emotional intelligence and growth mindset. So there's 6, and that's where I would start, right? I would start at the top of— with self-trust, right? Learning to trust yourself, learning to tune in. And so most of the time it's education and then workshops. Like, I wind up giving people a lot of homework Because a lot of it is self-reflection. So it's bringing awareness to the thing, right? This, you know, I hate to use the word problem because problem feels yucky, right? But this opportunity for improvement, like sit down and think about it. So it's a lot of reflection. It's a lot of typically journaling, like writing it all out. Or, you know, I've hosted group sessions before where across the board, right? Talk. I say this, how does that make you feel? Right? I say that. How does that make you feel? You have to have— feel safe in those environments to have those conversations, which is why sometimes it's a one-on-one job. But it's a lot of homework around how self-aware are you? What are your strengths? What are your weaknesses? You know, what beliefs are yours? What beliefs did you borrow from other people? You know, why have you created the same circumstance over and over and over again? Right? It's the whole idea of like, wherever you go, there you are. So people oftentimes, you know, they're like, I'll just get a new job. Right? Like, this place isn't working for me, I'll go get a new job. But if you find yourself creating patterns and everywhere you are you have the same problem, at some point in time there's a common denominator, and it's not the job.

Yes, yes, yes, yes. Now, you— but you mentioned self-trust. So why— what is it that's preventing someone, especially— I would expect that, you know, whether entrepreneurial or corporate You know, these, these women are kind of down the line. They're, you know, they're advanced, they're seasoned, they're expert. And so what is it that they're not trusting themselves with or about?

Everything. Uh, you know, most of the time, so many of us have created success that is not our definition of success.

Hmm.

My entire story starts with, you know, I did everything right in life. You know, I went to college, I, you know, I graduated high school, went to college, got a degree, climbed the ladder, got an MBA, got married, had kids, did all the things, you know, wound up sitting in my pretty corner office and was not fulfilled or happy in any way, shape, or form. I had just followed the prescribed version of success, right? Because, you know, self-trust is staying true to you, right? Looking after your own needs, your own safety. And so, so often as we start to climb the corporate ladder, we're not given a lot of choices, right? It's like, well, do this or this. So we just do that and don't often stop to think about, do I want this? Does this feel good to me? Right? Like, do I like the way the company I work for treats its people? No, but I feel like I don't have other choice. Right? Like, that's a fracture in self-trust.

Yeah.

You're aware that you don't like the way that people are being treated, but you're not doing anything to change it.

Right, right.

That's not staying true to you. Right? You're— you have a superior who's asking you to do something that doesn't feel good to you, right? To fire that person, hire that person, write that person up, do this, shove this initiative down your people's throat even though it's completely different than the one from last week, right? That's not staying true to you, right?

And how do they see that? How do they see that as, um, a lack of self-trust in themselves as opposed to that they just don't like something and yes, they're not taking action on it.

Yeah, I think that it goes back to— honest answer is like, it's that alignment. If you dread going to work more than— more days than not, like there's probably something broken. You know, if you hate your job, if you are consistently, you know, being asked to do things that you don't enjoy or treat people the way that you don't want to, like that to me, Like your body is telling you whether you're listening to it or not, right? And it might even show up unfortunately as illness and burnout and all these other things. But if like you're going to work every day and it weighs 800 pounds, like something is broken.

Yes, I, I dealt with that for the public the last year and a half that I was in corporate. Yeah, I just like basically laid on my couch. I was miserable. I just didn't want to do anything, right? Uh, I'm not sure that I would have looked at it though, that I'm not trusting myself, that I deserve better and different and newer. So that's a— that's very interesting. Um, okay, so from all of those 6, and I'm going to ask you to repeat it because you talk very fast.

I do.

Um, and I— which is awesome. Uh, but at the same time, I really want our listeners to, you know, kind of grasp them.

So you have self-trust, personal responsibility, self-awareness, self-concept, emotional intelligence, and growth mindset.

Where would accountability fit in?

Probably self-trust. Okay, but go ahead.

No, no, go ahead.

Somewhere in the top 3, right? I find that the top 3— self, self-trust, personal responsibility, and self-awareness— they tend to overlap. And the reason I separate them is because it's important. Self-trust is realizing, you know, again, that, that can, like, staying true to you, right? Personal responsibility is owning your role in creating the life of your dreams. And then self-awareness is understanding how you work, right? Like, what are the inner workings of you? And so oftentimes these are things that come up in, like, you know, the DISC or the Enneagram or Myers-Briggs, right? Like, that's kind of self-awareness is like, oh, that's why I always do that. Right? But self-trust is like, am I even being true to me? Am I doing work that I want to do? Am I working for a company that I support? Do I work for people that I like? Like, what am I doing with my life? Right? Right. And then personal responsibility is then owning— it's my job to fix it. If I don't like it, I'm the only one who can fix it. And then self-awareness is how do I make sure that I don't just take myself and pick it up and put it in another organization and create the same disaster? And I think accountability is in all of those things.

Accountabilities and all of those things. Yes, because— okay, yes, because one needs to know about themselves and needs to kind of dig into who they really are and what they want and what they don't want, right? And then they need to see if it lines up with what they're actually doing, trusting themselves. Huh?

So for most of us, the answer is no.

Yeah. That we don't— it doesn't line up to what we really want. So that sounds like one needs to paint a vision for themselves, like one needs to know kind of what vision they have for themselves, for the work, for their life. And, you know, then you can bring in the ecosystem. What tools, or what do you do to help them with that?

I love that question. It's so funny. So the self-leadership principles have been kind of a labor of love over the past 10 months. And like, you are putting my puzzle pieces together in a beautiful way, Bernadette, which just makes my heart so happy. So we talk— when I start with— when I teach the self-leadership principles, or we have an ebook that we could easily share with your audience as well of all 6 self-leadership principles, there is a foundation. And the foundation is Decide, gratitude, and appreciation, right? So if anybody is sitting in a place where there is, you know, sitting in a place where they're unhappy, the first thing they have to do is make a decision, right? So there's a series of exercises and questions and all this different stuff around what do you want, right? Like, how do you want to spend your time? What kind of work do you want to do? How many hours a week do you want to work? Like, what's fun for you? What do you want to do on the weekends? You want to be present at home with your kid? Like, what does that look like for you? And so when we start with painting that picture, pressure about making a decision about what we want. Because again, so often we just let society tell us what the next step is, or we let the company we work for know what the next step is. It's like, cool, here's where you are, the next step up is this, and the next step up is this. And we never stop to think, do we want that? And that's actually what took me off of the, the corporate path, was I knew what my next step was in my corporate career. Like, I knew I was sitting at a director level to get into senior director, VP, and eventually the C-suite. I knew what that took and I didn't want it. I was like, that's just not the way that I want to live my life. But I had to first make that decision that I don't want that because they're going to tell me what the next step is and I'm going to hit it because I always hit it. And do I want it? And the answer was no. And that's when I started looking for something different. And I did not go looking for entrepreneurship. I just thought I needed to be in a different industry or to do something different. So we start with making a decision about what you do want through just a series of questions and creativity and brainstorming and imagination and just playing again. Like, when was the last time, like, you sat down and asked yourself, like, wave the magic wand? What does it look like?

Yeah. And that is so much fun.

So fun.

So fun.

And then we talk a lot about gratitude and appreciation because oftentimes what happens when a situation breaks, we can only see what's wrong.

Yes.

You can only see it's broken. This company is broken. This career path is broken. The industry I chose, like all the things. And we have to start with gratitude and appreciation in our heart, right? Like for me, I— the way that those are different to me is like gratitude is a way of being and appreciation is little things that happen along the way, right? So to me, living in a state of gratitude that I'm so grateful, you know, that I ever made it to the level of my corporate career that I did because it showed me, you know, all these other opportunities that are available to me that I think had I tried earlier, you know, it would have worked, right? And I so appreciate the people that I met along the way who encouraged me, asked questions. That woman who was like, what are you doing with your life? Like, you're grossly underutilizing your skills. So to me, that's the foundation is making a decision about what you actually want, you know, taking time in gratitude, cultivating that kind of state of being, that emotional state of gratitude, and then spending a lot of time, you know, appreciating the things that you do have, because it's really easy to get focused on, you know, what we don't have, all those different things.

Right, right. Well, and the gratitude too is even being grateful that you are stuck, that you are learning, that you are making mistakes, that you are, you know, you know, kind of, yeah, doing what everybody goes through, and that is the highs and the lows. And being grateful for all of that because it's making you who you are.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

To me, like, the feeling of stuck is, is the feeling of something is wrong, or something just needs to be—

something's asking you to work on shifting. Not necessarily wrong, but just not in the right place, perhaps.

But like, most of us live in this low level of, you know, fight or flight all of the time, right? Our nervous systems are so stimulated all of the time that we don't, we don't notice when we feel off. So to me, the feeling, the feeling of stuck is your body's way of telling you, your, your heart's way of telling you something has gone wrong here. Um, so that's again, not something fundamentally wrong, but it's like, it's, it's your body's way of like trying to get your attention because it doesn't know how else to get your attention because we're so, we're so disconnected, unfortunately.

Right, right. No, it's so true. It's so true. Okay, so you mentioned, and I want to make sure, and that's why I brought up your website again, because you mentioned that there is an ebook on the principles.

Yes.

Just can you kind of share that about that again so we can make clear where they can go to beintheroom.org for it?

Yeah, absolutely. I want to make sure that it is— it's on our homepage. Yes, it is. There is. If you go to beintheroom.org, there is all, all 6 leadership principles and then the ebook itself is on there. So you can absolutely check that out. So go to beintheroom.org, about halfway down that front page, it breaks down all 6. And then there's a little button that you can go and download the ebook for yourself. It's, it's not too long of a read, but it does. I then give you the homework, right? Like I tell you what to think about, give you the questions. Um, so there really is some chance for some self-reflection there, right?

And yes, an initial self-awareness in kind of a complementary tool that then someone can say, okay, wait a minute, I like this whole idea of a conscious collective.

Yes.

And, you know, coming together with other women who I can feel safe with because they're obviously struggling with some of the same things I'm struggling with, right? And therefore join in. Yes, into that collective conscious. I love that. I absolutely love that. So, okay, so apart from that, someone's, someone's learning, they're, they're tapping into their, you know, to, to their self.

Yeah.

Um, how does one define their self-concept? Is it part of the vision? Is, you know, it, does it come out of, you know, that initial self-awareness reflection even emotional intelligence, and then working into, you know, building their self-concept of who they want to be?

Yeah. So the self-concept, the self-concept is a moving document. It's funny, I just gave it, delivered a keynote last week talking about self-concept, and I gave them a homework assignment. And what I like to do, and I'm going to give this to all of you, this is a lot of fun. And you'll see this if you download the ebook, you'll see it in the ebook, where I give you the homework assignment of the X version of your name. So maybe you are— you have your eye on the chief marketing officer position, right? So maybe it's, you know, Chief Marketing Officer Bernadette Boas, right? And then it's— you start really scripting out who is she, right? What does she do? How does she spend her time? How does she show up? What's important to her? What do people think about her? What does she think about herself? How does she spend her time? All of those different things. And again, there's a whole series of questions that I ask you inside of the ebook to really start scripting out that person. Because what we oftentimes don't realize is we say we want the chief marketing officer job, but if we think about how we're actually showing up, it's like marketing coordinator, right? But we think like, okay, well, but I've got the years and I've got the experience and I'm climbing the ladder. It logically should happen. But if your self-concept is still in, in the season of coordinator where you're waiting for somebody to tell you what to do, or you're acting in that like service role instead of the decision maker role, right? When we really start to script out who that version of ourselves is, we oftentimes will find, oh shit, this is how I'm showing up and that's why I don't have what I want, right? That's why it's taking me this long to get to the chief marketing officer job because I'm over here acting like a marketing coordinator. Right. Think about what do we think of that person who sits in that seat, who does that thing, right? We're not showing up that way at all. And I can give you a more real-life example that might help kind of pull this down. So I love to share this story because it's about my sister. God love her. My sister is divorced and she's dating and she's dating this guy and it's been on again and off again for like a year and he's not her guy and she knows it. So I asked her one time, a friend of mine actually did, we're like, do you want 'You see yourself like getting remarried or being in a committed relationship?' And she said yes. And I was like, 'Aha, there's our problem,' right? You, you say you want to get married and you say you want a long-term relationship, but you're tolerating this guy, right? Like, where else are we doing that in our careers, right? We say that we want to climb the ladder, we say we want this role, we want more responsibility, we want more money, we want this, this, and this, but we're over here tolerating something entirely different. Those two things don't align, our self-concept is off.

So tolerating could also be, I guess, tolerating not doing anything, like not stretching, not asking for special assignments, or, you know, going beyond, you know, and therefore you're tolerating where you are right now and not projecting and working into who you want to be.

Exactly.

Yeah, I could see that easily from, from what many, many women, um, do. But that triggered a question you mentioned earlier— quiet quitting. Yeah. Okay, so, um, I would just love your thoughts because obviously you've probably in your collective had conversations about it, but quiet quitting, you know, you— I hear and observe that, that the people that advocate for it, right, are seeing it as, well, we just want more blend. I'll call it blend versus balance in our life. And like you said at the very beginning, they're tired of the way they're treated, the way they're paid, the way, you know, they're nurtured and developed, or lack thereof.

Sure.

Um, and the people on the other side, the naysayers of quiet quitting, says people are lazy.

Right.

And they don't work to exceed. And yet, is it your, you know, understanding and belief that to, to, to reach your self-concept, you know, say you're working in the coordinator and you want to be a C-level. Yeah. And yet you're not willing to exceed and go beyond and work outside the constraints or the, or the framework of what your job and your hours are, that's never going to allow you to achieve your goals. Does that make sense?

It does, but that is not what I'm saying at all, because again, it's, it's an energetic thing. Because I do think it also— so there's a few things you said in there that I think are really important, and I love this conversation. One, not everybody wants it, right? So the people like, person's lazy, they're not willing to go above and beyond. Because that person doesn't want it. If that person like does not want to climb the ladder and they want to do exactly what is in their job description and they want to work their exact 40 hours and they want to go home, they should be able to do so without judgment. Right, right.

Agreed.

But I also believe that if you are the type of person that's going to occur, like there is a difference between self-concept and being taken advantage of because quiet quitting is about we will no longer be taken advantage of. It will no longer be okay for, for it to be demanded that I go above and beyond, even if I don't really want to.

Right.

Like that to me is what quiet quitting is. Quiet quitting is not being lazy. Quiet quitting is this is the job that you hired me to do and I'm going to do it. The person who wants to climb the ladder is going to do the job that they were hired to do, but they are going to do it in a way of excellence. Right. They are going to do it in a way that I still think that you could work 40 hours a week and be respected and not be taken advantage of and climb the ladder. Right. If the only way to get from coordinator to C-suite is to be taken advantage of and to work for free, then I'm out too.

Right. Right.

Right. No. But if I can work and I can work hard and I can put myself in situations and I can raise my hand and I can ask questions and I can find a mentor and I can network and I can do all of these things within the confines of my job that never, that never equate to being taken advantage of because I think quiet quitting is about being taken advantage of, not about not working hard to climb the ladder.

Right. I love that. I mean, that's real simple. Quiet quitting equals being taken advantage of. I mean, that I think from this whole conversation that I had kind of ears in on, it wasn't my piece, but I just found it very interesting, the dynamics between the two camps, so to speak.

Because again, think about it, in its, in its very nature, it is manipulation. If you want to climb the ladder, you can't do the job we hired you to do. You have to do your job and two other people's job for free in order to be able to do that.

Right, right.

It's true. That's manipulation. Yeah, clear as day.

Yeah, no, I love that. I mean, that makes it very simple and not boil the ocean, as someone just expressed to me the other day. It keeps it really, really simple. So thank you for, you know, thank you for welcoming that question. But what would you, with the, with the aspirations and the goals and the desires that you have for your women within your collective?

Yes.

What would you leave them with as far as, you know, 1, 2, 3 things they could be doing right now to help them move toward understanding their inner self and leveraging that to really become a powerhouse leader?

Yes, I love that question. So the first part is you have to define success for yourself. Do not let anybody else define success for you. And again, I'll give you a specific example. There's a woman in— be in the room— who is, um, she's at the vice— she's at the VP level in her career, and she has had multiple opportunities to continue to climb. She has chosen not to because she has two small children and she doesn't want to. She's well-paid, she's good at her job, she works from home, she has a lot of flexibility, she can be present with her kids. And so for right now, that is her version of success. When her kids get older, will she make a different choice? Maybe.

Right.

But so often, again, this goes back to like quiet quitting and the manipulation. It's like, well, if you don't take advantage of this position now or this promotion or this opportunity, are you ever going to get it right? And so I see this both in the corporate world and the entrepreneur world, right? Some women being driven to build businesses bigger than they really desire based on the season of life that they're in. But then also in the corporate career where it's like, well, you have to want to climb. Like, what do you mean you don't want to climb? Or, you know, judgment on either side. So I think the first one is define your definition of success. And this is where the self-trust comes in, right? Like really anchor that into you. For me, this is what a successful career would look like. Yeah. And spending time to define that for you, not based on society, not based on your industry, not based on the company you work for. Not based on your sister or your girlfriend or your husband or anybody else's opinion of success, but your own. So that's kind of the first one. The second one is make time for you. And this is not like bubble baths and pedicures. This is like— and if that's your jam, you do you. You know, the most important relationship that you have is the one with yourself and the one with your creator, as far as I'm concerned. Right? You are the person that you spend the most time with is that voice in your head. And if you are not taking any time to nurture that relationship, that's part of the problem. Right. And we do this as women all the time. We put everybody else first. Right. It's the job and the kids and the spouse and the partner and the volunteering and the this and the that and the expectations and yada, yada, yada. And, you know, at the end of the day, we have enough time to like maybe take our makeup off and pour ourselves into bed. Reverse that. Right. Like, what is it? And I mentioned before, you asked me what I was passionate about. It's being outside. That is my me time. I don't care if it's walking my dog for 10 minutes. That time where nobody needs anything from me at all. And my son consistently, mommy, can I come with you? I'm like, no. No, because I need to breathe for 10 minutes without you. You're going to talk to me. He's 5, right? You're going to talk my ear off for the next 10 minutes. So no, sir, you cannot come with me. But really working on that relationship with you. So define success for yourself. Spend time with yourself, work on that relationship with yourself. And then the final one is like, if you've not done any kind of personality testing, I don't care what it is. I don't endorse any one particular one. I don't care. But it's such an interesting way to understand yourself from the outside looking in. You know, if you read like— I remember I took the DiSC a million years ago, but I took it recently in the past few years and learning like I'm a high D, high I, learning what that is and how I'm motivated and what that means. And then on top of that, learning that only 3% of the population are high Ds blew my mind and changed so many things about like the way I showed up, not just in my career, but like at home with my family and everything else. So if you haven't done that, like go take the Enneagram or something. There's plenty of free tests on the internet, right? But really, it's going to explain to you probably why some of the things that you do are that way. And for me, I find a lot of comfort in that, like, oh shoot, I'm not broken. I'm not, you know, or, or I am the 3%. And that's why most people don't understand my crazy. Right. But it gives you a little bit of peace in that moment.

No, I absolutely agree. I do a lot of DiSC work and assessment work and, and whatnot in my practice. And you're absolutely right. You know, that it's a beginning stage, too, of self-awareness for many people, especially in the corporate world, if they don't have any. Yeah.

Totally.

Well, this has been awesome. I am so happy that you, that you joined us. And I want to remind everybody that you can go and— is, is it called anything in particular or just the, the 6 leadership principles?

Oh, the self-leadership principles. Okay. So you can go to bernadetteboas.org, about halfway down the page. It actually has them numbered, all 6 of them, big red numbers, and then a little button for you to go download the entire ebook.

Yeah. And, and do that. I mean, start your start your self-awareness, self-reflection, self-concept journey right now. And then check into her Collective Conscious— or Conscious Collective, um, because it could be the act— the perfect community for you to really kind of get where you want to go. And, uh, so thank you, Ryan, so much for being here. I so appreciate it. You're welcome. Wasn't Ryan amazing? What are you walking away with when it comes to our discussion around conscious leadership and the inner self-work you could be doing in order to really maximize your leadership in your work and life, or what questions are coming up based on anything that we might have discussed. If you ever need to talk and want to share and collaborate on your goals, challenges, and next steps, then feel free to book some time with me at coachmebernadette.com/discoverycall, and let me help you create the riches in your work and life you deserve. Talk to you soon, everyone.