The Power of Women Who Hype Each Other

So welcome to Dawn of a New Era, the Billionaire Brain Podcast with myself, Dawn McGruer, and I am joined by a very special guest, Erin Gallagher, today. Now, I first met Erin—we were trying to figure this out—but I'm thinking it was at some point this year at another women's event. And I actually bought her a book when she was talking on stage, and it got delivered back to the UK, and I read it literally in a day, and I loved every minute. You've got to get it.

It's called iWomen. Now, the reason that I wanted to invite Erin on today's podcast is I want to talk about what changes when we actually stop treating another woman's success as a threat. And this is something that even in 2026, we hear about this whole, like, you know, collaboration over competition. And honestly, this is not my experience.

This really is not my experience. I really felt when I started my own business that I was going to meet this most amazing network of female founders who would be the most supportive people around me, who would cheer me on because they all knew what it was like. And this is not the story I was met with. So, Erin, please tell us a little bit about how you came to be involved in writing this book and a little bit about you and your story.

Thank you, Dawn. I'm so happy to be with you. And yes, I feel like we've been in person probably a couple of times. Yes.

Right? When you're in this space of women who want to do things differently and want to approach founding a business, running a business another way, you find each other. And so for me, you know, I spent 15 years in corporate working inside of agencies, running marketing and communications. And what was hard was I felt like the system itself just was not allowing women in the most senior positions to thrive at that level.

You only saw a few, and when that message was there only a few spots, inherently there is competition. Because if 10 of you are going for one spot and 10 men are going for nine, it's a little bit of a different vibe. It's a little bit of a different vibe. And so when we don't see ourselves in those most senior positions across Fortune 500 companies and female-founded businesses and other, you know, entrepreneurial endeavors, then we really do have that competitive edge to all of our interactions when it comes to business.

So I was just tired of it. I didn't feel like I could do the work that was necessary to address this inside of that system. And so I left corporate America in 2019 to found my first company with two other women called Have Her Back. And the entire premise there was, let's go work with the Fortune 500 companies to make them more equitable, to make them actually focus on bringing more women and people of color and, most importantly, women of color into those positions of senior leadership and allowing them to thrive when they're there, not setting them up to fail.

And so I did that. I did that work for two and a half years, and we grew that company from nothing, from an idea to being named one of Fast Company's World's Most Innovative Companies two years later. So that was great, right? But you work with Fortune 500 companies that are stuck in an old way.

You again, the speed with which the change was happening was not what I wanted to be involved in. And so I left to found my own company. And so I'm now in my fourth year of solopreneurship, which is its own beast. Yes.

You know, when you are, right, when you are, when you take back the control and the agency and the autonomy that often is born from a Sort of reaction to not having it inside of so many of those systems, you can easily confuse autonomy with solitary, like being solitary. And when you accuse—well, yeah, that too—when you confuse autonomy with solitude, it's a lonely experience. And so I think that's so much of what you've been talking about, Dawn, is how do we bring women out of that, where they've almost overcorrected and said, If I can't trust anyone, then I'm going to do it all alone. But now I actually am not resourced.

And so that's a problem in a different way. So how do we get these women back in rooms with one another to say, If my success does not detract from yours, how could we actually support one another? And the idea of hype, for me, why Hype Women became—like, my company name evolved over the past four years, and then I wrote the book Hype Women, and I have a podcast, Hype Women. The idea of hype was not this frivolous, I'm standing here with a pom-pom saying, You are doing great.

Keep going. It is an idea that hype is a transfer of capital: human, social, financial, political, and spiritual. And so if we can really view it that way, and women can transfer capital back and forth to one another, that is how we start to build an entirely new ecosystem. Yeah.

And you talk about women reclaiming their power, but what I'm really interested in is that moment before that happens. So where do you see highly successful women Still unconsciously giving their power away, even when from the outside they look incredibly, you know, accomplished and like they know what they're doing. I mean, I see this all the time. So it all goes back to childhood, where we were taught to be the good girl.

Yeah. The good girl is an identity around which every other role in our life organizes. It is the organizing principle. And so if we are taught from childhood to be a good girl, and that means following the rules, doing what I'm told, seeking others' approval, understanding our value and our worth through external validation, not in our own knowing or our own, like, belief of self, but instead, I am being given accolades by my teacher, I get stickers, and then, you know, then my coach, right, then my parents, and then my boss, and all of a sudden everything is about outsourcing our power and allowing other people to tell us.

If the good girl is the organizing principle, it doesn't matter, Dawn, if you are the CEO of a Fortune 10 company, because you will still come back to what you were taught that says it is still everyone else's opinion about whether or not you are worthy. You will still not know whether or not you're making the right choice unless someone else approves and tells you that you are. And the other piece of the good girl that's not just about rule following is that what we learn from a very young age is that other people's deficits are our responsibility. I love that, yes.

And so when you, when you, my boss, are incapable of doing something, don't worry, I got you. I will cover the ground necessary to make sure you still look good. And I won't do it because you asked me to. I'll do it because I believe it is my role.

Put that in every other role we play, whether it's as a spouse, as a mother, as a friend, as a founder, as a daughter, we view other people's deficits as our responsibility. And so when you do that, your power is completely being siphoned by every single thing around you in your life. And there's this fascinating psychology around watching other women get the opportunity or the money or the visibility that we want. So why can another woman's success feel threatening, and how do we rewire that response from comparison to expansion?

Yeah. When you are jealous of another person, when you—because again, I think, like, feeling threatened is absolutely the right language. And then when we kind of go one layer deeper, it's like, well, I'm feeling threatened because I really am jealous of what she's achieving. And then if we go one layer under that, the jealousy is actually telling me that it's something that I want.

So whether it's jealousy or envy, which are two different things, jealousy is, I want what you have, which can be a motivator, right? Hey, wow, Dawn's doing incredibly well. Like, that is—that's what I want too, so I want to figure out how to get there. Inspiration.

Yeah. Inspiration, right? Inspiration, then motivation. Envy is darker.

Envy is, I don't want you to have what you have, right? And that comes from a lot of all of those other messages that say, when she gets that, you don't get it. And so that's how we start to create this divide between women, because it's no longer, you have something amazing that I want and I want to work hard to get it. It's, you have something that I don't want you to have because your success feels like my failure.

But when we are looking at, like, what is that feeling of jealousy, of, like, of wanting what something someone else has, it is truly, it is your body's way of telling you this is a desire. And so if we can pause in those moments where we have that mean thought of, wow, how many podcasts...

Downloads do you have? All of a sudden, why am I feeling angry? Why do I want to unfollow her? Why am I muting her?

Like, what is happening in my body? Instead of us going immediately to that and then screenshotting it and then texting it to our friend and being like, There's no way. There's no way she has 20,000. She's lying, right?

Then we start this mean girl shit with each other. If we pause in that moment and say, Okay, what is happening here? Why am I having this feeling? Do I want a podcast?

Is that what's going on here? Okay, so what if instead of me talking shit about her and then silencing her and removing her from my purview, what if I reach out and say, That's amazing. How did you do that? I want to do that too.

Can I talk to you? When we actually change the behavior, that is how we start to rewire our brains. It's not just a, like, pathologize your way out of this. Just try to think differently.

That doesn't work. You have to actually embody it and take a different action. So if the action initially is, I'm blocking her, I'm unfollowing, and I'm texting a screenshot and talking shit, what if the new action is, I like the post, I comment on it and say, Congratulations, that's amazing. I share it and say, If you aren't following this podcast, you should.

And then I reach out to you and say, How did you do it? We have to make different choices in order to rewire our brains. Yeah, I love this because I always talk about sowing a seed of goodness into the world each day because we get so engrossed in our own journey and what we're doing that we forget about our own gratitude, but we also forget why we're doing things. And we are supposed to be in this social online community where people have become voyeurs.

And what is the point of being on social media if you don't treat it like being at an event? If you can't behave in the way that you would in person, don't do it at all. So I say to people, I watch them scroll endlessly past. So I'm like, would you walk into an event and walk past all of these people and ignore all of these messages?

You know, you wouldn't. So what would be the harm if you want something that you give that too? You know, comment, like it, share it. I see people watch my stories, but do they celebrate?

No. So, I mean, you built this Hype Woman sort of community. It's all around the idea of this collective wealth. You know, what do you think we misunderstand about wealth when we are treating it purely as sort of money rather than the human, the social, the financial, and even the spiritual capital?

Because this seems to be the essence that we've lost in our day-to-day life that, you know, I'm totally up for changing. Absolutely. Yes. I think when we hear the word wealth, we think money.

And wealth is just one part, like our financial capital is just one part of wealth. Wealth is a much more amorphous and layered asset. I think that because we are in such a capitalist society, of course, you are told that the metric to measure whether or not you are successful in your business is what is your profit? What is your revenue?

It's not how many lives did you change? How did you grow as a person in your first year of founding and running a company? Those types of metrics are not either measured or they are not Given validity. And that is because we are operating inside of a very, you know, masculine container and patriarchal system that prizes all of that sort of, like, those hard numbers, the very analytical side of things.

And we are not allowing the feminine, which is not women versus men. This is about energy, and it's about the way you run your business. You have to have both. You can't just be purely, like, a feminine leader because then, like, you don't have, like, any structure.

You don't have any container, and, like, you're creating without any direction. Sitting and manifesting with no action. Sitting and manifesting, right? And, like, and also just, like, and maybe overgiving without, like, understanding about reciprocity.

And so you have to have a balance between them. But when our society rewards money and it tells you, Hey, guess what? The greatest thing you can do in the company you founded, you can leave it, exit it, right? Get rid of it, sell it off.

When that's the message, it changes the way that you build your business. Yeah. And you all of a sudden are building it not because it's the way you believe it should be built, or even because it's the original mission or vision that you had. It's because you are looking at an external validator that tells you you need to meet certain criteria in order to do it.

And so I think we have to start saying, Is scale actually for everyone? Yeah. Right? Is scaling and exiting actually the best indicator of success?

I do not believe it is. I think there are certain things you just can't scale. They have to be done in a more of a one-to-one way, and they have to be done. With the human side of things at the center of it, not the sort of mechanical and online way of looking at it.

So I think some of it comes down to how do we define success? Yeah, and relative, surely. Like it is person and what their hopes and dreams are. Like not everybody wakes up every day and thinks that I need a million-dollar, a billion-dollar exit, whatever.

You know, the world would be a very boring place. I mean, I think what's interesting is when you've spoken about building a life that looks successful but doesn't necessarily feel like yours. For women who have achieved the title, which many have, and the income and all of the status, and we see it in all of the rooms, how does she recognize when ambition has quietly become self-abandonment? Because that is something that, again, you know, I meet hundreds of women, and it's like there's a detachment, and they are isolated from what success actually is.

Yeah, I think that, I think it's an identity. We've confused identities, which are roles that we play in our life, as like our true essence and who we are. And so an identity is a role that you consent to on a daily basis with your actions. And so if your identity is ambitious founder, and you have defined it a certain way, you will take action every day that supports that, and you will— Forget yourself kind of underneath it all, because you are, you're showing up to perform.

You're performing the role. So, Dawn, what I am seeing now everywhere, especially with women who are in their 40s and 50s and 60s and 70s, is like a lot of us are going through an identity crisis. Yeah, for sure. And it's not the identity crisis in, like, the traditional definition of, like, I don't know who I am.

Ah, right? Help. I need a self-help book that tells me who I am. It's not that.

It's that women no longer want to be who we had to become. And so the identity crisis is, hold on, ambitious founder fucking sucks. I don't want to be this anymore. This is no longer how I want to live my life, and I have been told that this is right.

I don't want to be selfless mother. I don't want to be dutiful wife. I don't want to be obedient daughter, fill in the blank, whatever it is, tireless worker, loyal friend. And what that doesn't mean is that you have to blow everything up and end everything.

It doesn't mean that. It can, but I think what it means more than anything is that you can renegotiate. You can renegotiate the contract. So when you entered into the contract, whether it was with yourself or with another person, to play that role, to assume that identity, and to perform it on a daily basis, and the terms have changed because you have.

You originally signed this contract 10 years ago, 5 years ago, 3 years ago. It doesn't mean you have to completely void it and tear it up and burn it. But it does mean that you get to sit across the table, whether it is from another person or from a mirror, and say, What do I consent to now? Because my consent is not permanent.

If I am consenting to something today that I no longer consent to because I was different when I came into this agreement, now I get to look at my life in a very different way, and I get to regain a lot of that power. When we look at women, though, as a whole, and we look at the founder society, one of the things that just keeps coming back to me all of the time in these rooms is being kind.

Not nice. And there's a big difference for me where, you know, it's like walking up to a woman and saying, Oh, you know, you've got something in your teeth. That's kind. Being nice is ignoring it, you know, and moving past.

I feel like there's an elevation that needs to happen in society somewhere where we go back to what is kindness to each other. And when you meet groups of women, I do feel that there's a superficial niceness that's there where people are overly zealous with what you're doing, and you can just feel it. You can feel that there's an underlying mean girl energy because as soon as your back is turned, they'll be back talking about you. How do we evolve and move from this kind of niceness to just bringing back to the fundamentals of what kind actually is?

You cannot be kind to another woman if you're not kind to yourself. Such a good point. So if your, right, if your internal monologue, if your self-talk is you hate yourself, you look at yourself in the mirror, you criticize yourself, you look at a post you did, it didn't perform, it was stupid, I shouldn't have done that, right, and you're constantly comparing, that transfers over to other women that you're going to interact with and engage with. And so what I have found is this is less about, in order to do this, Dawn, this is going to be less about, let's get groups of women together and let's teach them how to interact with each other.

No, no, no, no. Women need to spend some time with themselves. Yes. And to really figure out what's underneath so much of this and to understand, like...

Where that self-hatred is coming from. Because once we can do that, that is when you can be compassionate. That's when you can say, Hey, there's something in your teeth. Yeah.

And I, right, and I'm telling you that because I would want that to be said to me. And I'm not, I'm not like hiding behind, I don't want to make you uncomfortable, which is why I'm going to say nothing. But it's, it is like, it is really about, it's not just about like, treat other people how you want to be treated. It's not the golden rule, it's the platinum rule.

Treat other people how they want to be treated. And so exactly what you just said, Dawn, when you're in these rooms of a bunch of female founders, and oftentimes people are overly zealous and overly familiar with you at first, they're not actually asking any questions. They're not curious about what you're doing. They're telling you what they think about what you've done.

And if we spend a lot less time talking and more time asking and listening, I think that we would, we would just be in a different place. Yeah. And I truly believe that when you go into a room, you are like a magnet. You start to attract how you are presenting yourself, and how you're presenting yourself is how you feel.

I know that in my thirties, I felt different to now in my forties. At 47, quite honestly, I couldn't give a shit. I've done the work. You know, I feel very contented.

I feel very much in control of my thoughts and feelings, and I can pull myself back and put myself in check because none of us are perfect. We all have the capacity to make people think and feel or do things that are not incongruent to how we want to be perceived. If there was one thing that you could tell somebody from the book... That really would give them an epiphany moment or make them want to go and buy it, because I love the book, please go and buy it.

What would it be? What was the chapter or the part that really connected with you when you wrote it? Oh, here's what's coming to me first, without me overthinking this. And it's because a friend of mine said that when she—she was actually listening to the book on audio, and she was taking her dog for a walk, and she said when she heard this line, she, like, yelled.

And her dog freaked out and was like, What's going on? Right? And she said it started to actually change her brain chemistry. It was the chapter about burning bridges.

Yes. And so I think, like, again, if we go back to this idea that if the good girl is the archetype around which we organize our entire life, we are taught don't burn bridges, which means we keep people who are toxic and unhealthy in our lives, whether it's personal or professional, because we have this weird thing that says, But what if I might need them one day? And so when you start to recognize that, no, you can actually see something for what it is. If a person treats you a certain way and it becomes habit, and you've communicated what you need and they don't respect it, it is no longer your responsibility to carry that deficit.

And when you begin to free yourself from those things, what that does is it opens up more time, more space, more energy for you to receive and to go towards what is actually best and right for you. So I think this, you know, just this idea of like, don't burn bridges, that has taught women that you don't matter enough. You don't matter enough to trust your knowing around this particular situation, person, instance. And when you are told over and over again that what you experienced didn't happen, that that's not what they meant, that you're too sensitive, when you're told that over and over and over again, you stop trusting yourself.

And that is why we seek others to tell us what we are, who we are, what is right, what is success. When we start to reclaim that knowing and we say, no, that is what happened. That is my experience. I'm standing firm on that.

All of a sudden, Dawn, we start trusting ourselves again, and then no one, no one can mess with us. And that is why the patriarchy is terrified of women trusting ourselves, because when we do, all this shit is going to go away. Like we're going to stop. Like if we own 85% of consumer buying power, we could shut this entire thing down tomorrow if we wanted to.

But we don't trust ourselves enough to do it. So, I mean, I guess there's a certain amount of work here where it's about us setting our own boundaries and us owning our own power and taking control and spinning the equilibrium around us and putting out the energy to receive back. So there's a lot of work that we can do individually that brings our communities together, that changes the way that people are thinking. If there was one piece of advice in terms of What we can do today, like what can be the first change that someone can, like, listen to this podcast and go, Do you know what?

I'm going to make a change now. What would it be? We are in a world that is so obsessed with optimization. Obsessed.

We are told to optimize everything. Wear an Oura Ring, optimize your sleep. You know, wear a Fitbit, optimize your steps. Use ChatGPT to optimize every single piece of your business, right?

And so when we are optimizing everything, we are unable to be present. And so if we can truly hear, presence cannot be optimized. And we think about that when we look at the course of our day and we honestly take a look at the calendar, whether we are meeting a friend for coffee, we're participating in a podcast, we are in a business meeting, we're speaking on a panel, we're going to our kids' pickup, whatever it looks like. If we try to stop optimizing and instead to be present, that brings us back into our body.

Because we, I think so many of us, especially women, because we've gone through a lot in this lifetime, we've become incredibly good at disassociating from our bodies. Like, Hey, I don't feel good about this. This does not feel right, but I'm going to do it because I got to get it done. And we just, we override, we override our intuition, we override our nervous system because we're like, It has to get done.

And if we stopped doing that, we would make different choices. And so, and you know, the visual that you just, that you gave where it's like you come into a room of female founders, and I cannot—this is what I watch for every time when I'm talking with women at an event. Are they looking at me when they are talking to me, or are they looking over my shoulder? Because the women, the women who you're talking to where they've asked you a question and they're scanning for someone better, they're scanning for someone who's going to have a better conversation, it completely disintegrates any connection that's happening right there.

Because again, they are trying to optimize, and they're like, I don't know if you're good enough yet, so I need to make sure that I'm checking.

And when that happens, I'm like, you know what? I'm going to grab a coffee. I'll see you later. I'm like, yeah, I'm like, I don't need this.

Like, we're either having a 30-second to two-minute conversation and you're here with me, or we can keep walking. Yeah. And so people feel that. If you think you're getting away with it, you're not.

If you think that your kids are, they believe that you're listening to them when you're looking at your phone, you're not getting away with it. If you are on a call with your team and they can tell that you're typing and you're sending an email, like, you're not getting away with it. So we have to stop trying to optimize every minute of our lives and actually be in the present moment. Yeah, I agree.

I watch this all the time at events, and I am fascinated because if someone does it to me, I just walk off. I don't even explain now because I'm just thinking, well, why not? They're not listening anyway. What happens is that people have a sort of feeling of this is how they should behave, but it's not congruent to their natural behavior, so it just doesn't appear.

And I would rather go into a room and connect with five people than have, you know, surface kind of like, you know, this, this, this, this, this, and this. If there was a time that you see in the coming year, you know, what's the mission and vision that you hope for? Like, where do you want things to go? People reading the book, what's the next stage of the movement?

Yeah, the next stage of the movement is renegotiating the contracts in our lives. I think that so many women who read Hype Women came to me and said, Okay, now I get it. Now I know what's happened. Now, what do I do?

And so that's honestly what's next. It's the next book that I'm writing is about how do we renegotiate these contracts? Because it's, I don't want to sit inside of my now 12-year marriage and say, this isn't working the way that we originally entered into it. We didn't know what it was going to be like to have kids.

We didn't know what it was going to be like for me to not be in corporate anymore. And so we're just, we're just like plugging along, and we're kind of pissed at each other all the time. And there's this, like, we've turned into just like co-parents and like, and so do I sit here and go, I just got to get them off to high school or to college and then I'm going to leave? A lot of women do that, and I understand why they do it.

Or do I sit down with my husband and say, I need to renegotiate this contract. This ain't working, and I don't actually want to phone in the next eight years of my life. Here's what has to change. So when we can have these conversations with the people that we have an identity with—I'm a wife, I'm a mother, I'm a friend, I'm a founder, I'm a coworker, whatever it looks like—if we can actually have these conversations and say, hey, I know we entered into this a year ago, two years ago, 20 years ago, and it looked this way.

I'm different now. So here's what I need. Here are my expectations. Where do you stand?

Because what's going to happen, Dawn, is not every one of these conversations is going to go like— not everyone's going to say, Oh, great, thanks for letting me know. Let me shift. Some people are going to say, I like you better that other way. Yes, so thanks, but no thanks.

Thanks, but no thanks, right? Some people are going to say, Too fucking bad. Like, there's going to be a lot of ways. But guess what?

None of it is actually about you. It's about them. And so when you can become healthfully detached from other people's experience of you. You walk through the world much lighter.

So even in our example of being at a women's conference where women are looking over your shoulder when you are talking to them, five years ago, I would have taken that personally. Yeah. I would have said, I'm not interesting enough. I don't matter enough.

I would have honestly probably upped my performance in the conversation and flexed. Like, it's amazing to me. I'll say to someone, this happens all the time. Oh, what do you do?

Oh, you know, I have my own company. I wrote a book. Oh, that's cool. They're like, yeah, everyone, you probably fucking published it.

Like, you went to, like, Kinko's and, like, cool, okay? So then I watch them. I watch them, because then I say, Yeah, Jamie Lee Curtis wrote my foreword, and they're like, Oh my God. What is the book called?

And I'm like, Now I'm interested. Yeah. I'm like, yeah. So I always pay attention.

Are they listening? Are they curious? Are they interested in who I am, or are they desiring proximity to power through me? Yeah, the social climb is there.

Right? If you think you can get something from me and that is what keeps you here, this will not be a reciprocal relationship. Yeah. And so that is honestly, the reclaiming of our power comes from renegotiating the contracts of the roles and the identities that we play, and also from being healthfully detached from other people's experience of us.

I love this. I can't wait to see you in person again. I know, right? We're gonna be like this.

We're gonna be, like, zoned into each other. Totally. But the thing is this, I feel like when I go into rooms, like, I am not the loudest person. I'm quite quiet.

But I like to have deep connections, and I always have this thing where when I meet someone, I want to meet with purpose. So I'm like, well, what do I want them to think? What do I want them to feel? And what do I want to do with this conversation?

Like, what is the purpose? Because I think we have lost the art and purpose of communication. And, you know, small talk for me is just, like, futile. I can't.

I just can't. And I don't think I ever tell people what I do in a room. And I play a game called boomerang, and we'll have to play this when we meet each other. I mean, the 25,000 people listening to this now, but, you know, I sow a seed of a conversation and I see how quickly it takes to come back to me.

I can't. I just love it. So I put little things, I put gems into the room, and then I see who comes back and tells me. Oh, I love that.

Boomeranging. And I love connecting people as well. So I always, always love to go into a room and think it's kind of like a catalyst. If you can connect five with a five, it's like the six degrees of separation, and we kind of go from there.

And I know I've been to a good event if I talk to people afterwards, you know, and I connect on a deeper level. And I stopped using email about three years ago, and now I just, I love talking to people. But it's such a difference to have that communication rather than this to-and-fro text kind of thing. I can't cope with it.

So I need to hear someone's voice to kind of hear how they're feeling and what they're doing. So for me, like, I live on WhatsApp. That's like my place. If people want to find out then about Erin and her movement and what is happening and buy the book, where can we find you?

HypeWomen.com has all of the information. It has my, sort of my—there's a section of it that's called The Studio, and that's sort of the publishing home of Hype Women. It's where you can link to buy my book.

You can read my latest essays. You can sort of understand the philosophy that I have and connect with me on the different social media properties. But I totally agree with you, Dawn. Like, I have really pulled back from social lately because it has become such a problematic place, and when our— It is, right?

When our identity is wrapped up in what the algorithm deems is worthy, we're in trouble. We're in deep trouble. And so I just, I'm not living there anymore. I'm really trying to, like, be in person, be connected, have the conversation, and not try to, like, make an assumption about what someone meant when they wrote something.

Because often when you receive, whether it's an email or a text or a comment, you are meeting it with your own, like, lived experience, and that changes the context. And so intent, right, intent and impact get incredibly muddied when you're not having a face-to-face conversation with someone and you don't pick up on the social cues of it. So that's, I'm really trying to be way more in person than online. And I wanted to point something out, Don.

You talked a lot throughout this conversation about sowing the seeds. And I am so, so interested in this idea right now of planting seeds. I talked about it in my book, you know, about this idea that my whole life I thought my worth was proven through the harvest, right? What do I have to show for it?

Because if I don't have something to show for it, then none of this was worth it. But when your goal is proof of harvest, you will go along and keep planting more and more and more and more seeds because you're like, why isn't it happening fast enough? And then you start digging up the seeds. Are they still there?

Nothing has sprouted through. And when you think about in nature how this works, you can't rush it. You can plant the seed, but you have to let it grow. And there are lots of things that have to happen.

It doesn't mean that all of us sit there and go, Here's what I want. I'm just going to sit at home and hope it happens. But it does mean that we have to shift our mindset and say, I plant the seed, but my ecosystem produces the harvest. Yeah.

It's like intent, isn't it? It's the intent for the impact, for the legacy. Yeah.

There has to be a reason behind everything. And I always think that we can have an intention that comes from ego, or if we look at our natural state, which is peace, love, and joy, that's where we sit. Those intentions always feel better. They always flow better.

And I always tell people that if you're thinking, are you doing the right thing? Just think, which place is it coming from? Is it the ego, or is it from our peace, love, and joy? And I honestly believe that when it comes from peace, love, and joy, and this is like hyping other women, that those are the connections, those are the friendships, those are the relationships that grow and flow, and they just naturally evolve into bigger and better things.

It's like less trying and more being, as you say, like being present and just reconnecting to ourselves, because we forget that our natural state is not over here. It's just peace, love, and joy, and that's where we started. You know, everything else was laid on. Sometimes we need to layer off and get back to the basics.

That's right. Like, who are we when we stop performing? And I think it's exactly what you're saying, right? When you stop performing, it's who you are at your essence, and you start to look around at the people in your life and the roles that you play, and you say, Wow, this is a lot of performing, and I'm pretty tired.

So you're exactly right. Like, we've got to strip it back down, and we have to have the hard conversation with ourselves about what is really going on. I feel like this is the perfect opener for my favorite part of the podcast, which is stripping it back down, looking at, like, you know, the good, the bad, and the ugly. What was the most embarrassing thing that's ever happened to you?

Oh my God, Dawn. Like, I mean, I'm sort of like, can we pick a category? Because, like, I've got so many of them. You know?

So, you know what's interesting? Here are the two that came to me without me thinking about, like, is that really the worst? Is that really the most embarrassing? Does that really represent what I'm trying to represent when I think about that?

If I am not thinking about any of that, okay, I go back to a moment when I was inside of the agency world, and I was like 27 years old, and I was in charge of running this internal program where we took all of the client work that we had done over the course of the year, and every team submitted their campaigns, and it was a competition of, like, who had the best healthcare campaign, who had the best, you know, social media campaign, who had the most impact, whatever, like all of these categories. And it was a massive undertaking for an internal program that, in some ways, like, kind of was just a lot of navel-gazing. But there was a lot of pressure, and it was on me, and I didn't have a team, and I didn't have resources, and I was overextended. And so the morning of the presentation, where the CEO is sitting right there, the vice chair, and we are going through this, and we're pulling up, and the winner of—we pull it up, and it's like, it's the completely wrong category.

It's like the wrong winner for, like, three slides in a row, okay? And I'm sitting there like, oh my God. And this is a global—like, this was before Zoom, so whatever the hell we were using, this was a global call where in our 27 offices around the world, everyone is watching, and it's like that came up, and it was like, oh, that was supposed to be in two from now. And my vice chair, the most senior woman in our organization, whips her head around and looks at me, and it's like her vibe was very much Miranda Priestly from Devil Wears Prada.

She goes, What is happening? Okay? And I was like, Oh. And it just kept getting worse and worse.

And so we got, somehow we got through it, and I was like, This is mortifying. I am like, I am undone. I am clearly not capable of this. And so we get—and our CEO was just like a really kind man—and so we get to the end of the presentation, and he says to everyone, I just want to give a round of applause to Erin.

And I'm like, Oh my God, this is like— He goes, he goes, he said, I left last night at like nine o'clock, and he's like, She was still here working on this. And I said, I said, Obviously not long enough, you know? And so, like, for so long, why that was so embarrassing for me was that I was like, I'm not good enough. I failed.

I embarrassed my bosses. I did not achieve what people expected of me. And so that was why it was embarrassing. And now, as a 44-year-old woman, what I see that as, you were so under-resourced.

It has to fall through the cracks sometimes for people to pay attention. Well, it changed your perspective, though. I mean— Right, right. Because this was like something I carried as like this humiliating moment.

And if I did it now, I literally in the moment would have been like, This is what you get when you hire one person to do 12 people's jobs. So— It's just a whole different—it's like every 10 years, it's a different perspective that we get, isn't it? Oh yeah. Literally, I could literally sit here and chat forever.

So we will say goodbye to our listeners, but thank you so much for sharing this. And guys, go and buy the book. Literally, I got mine on Amazon. Go and visit the website.

Go and connect with Erin. She is a superstar. So thank you so much for joining us today on the podcast. Thank you, Dawn.