Hello, corporate badasses. Welcome to another episode of Maximize Your Career. I'm your host, Stacy Mayer. And super excited as always, to be here with you again this week.

So you don't hear me talk a ton on this podcast about the program that I offer called The Leadership Table. And today's episode was inspired by one of the corporate badasses inside of that group. And so, first of all, I want to set up a little bit of the work that we're doing inside of The Leadership Table.

So you hear me talk more about Executive Ahead of Time, but just a high level overview, this is the core foundational process that you learn and you get to work with me directly to set up the foundation for not only your next promotion, but also to have success once you get there. So we don't want women to just get promoted into higher level leadership positions to create more burnout, stress and overwhelm in our lives. Or to not have a real voice at the table. So everything that I'm teaching inside of Executive Ahead of Time is for you to be able to do both at the same time.

So once the women learn those principles, they want more. They're like: Oh, okay, I got my promotion. I've had success. Or perhaps I see the promotion on the horizon, but I want more tailored guidance from Stacy to really step into that executive role that I know that I am so not only capable of doing, but capable of being a total corporate badass in that role in the process.

So The Leadership Table is the six month program that I take women through after they have completed Executive Ahead of Time. And many of the women in The Leadership Table have been with me for one year, two years, three years, and beyond. Because the work that we're doing, it never ends. And once you have this level of support and women and coaching, guided coaching rom me, you start to realize: Oh those higher level executives at my company that all have a personal executive coach in their back pocket, maybe they're on to something. Maybe I need that, too. And so then you go out and you make it happen by joining us in The Leadership Table.

So we have one-on-one coaching. They get one-on-one coaching with me. And then you also get this exceptional, I think they're the best group of women on the planet. But, I might be a little bit biased but they are pretty awesome. And we get to meet with each other. And one of the things that will come up for women a lot of times when they do this work is the comment, the outburst, the frustration of "I don't even know why I'm doing this anymore. I don't even know what I want. I don't know why I keep pushing in this way."

And you've probably been there before. If you've had accolades and you've gotten promotions in the past and then you it doesn't the grass isn't greener on the other side and you're like: Wait a second. This isn't how I thought it would be. I'm ready to stop doing that. Whatever "that is". That's what we're going to talk about in today's episode.

So this entire episode, like I said, is inspired by that one single comment that was delivered at the end, we had 5 minutes left in our coaching call, and one woman raised her hand and said: I don't even know why I'm doing this anymore. And she's been working with me for almost a year. And I totally get it. I get it. And I'm like: Yeah, why are you doing it? That's a great place to start. So today's episode, we're going to talk about why we're doing it and what we're going to do differently. Because there is a reason why this frustration comes up. And I'm going to tell you about that now.

So what sort of led up to this is we were talking about my process called 15-Minute Ally Meetings. And if you didn't listen to the training with me and Jennifer Fisher, another corporate badass inside The Leadership Table, we hosted a conversation a couple of weeks ago now about this strategy in great detail. I talked about how I created it and all the fundamental pieces of the strategy. And then Jennifer talked about her experience actually using 15-Minute Ally Meetings to get herself into this higher level executive position and all of the influence that she has at her organization right now. So go to StacyMayer.com/BadassStrategy. And I've made that training available to you on instant download so you can check that out even if you weren't able to attend us live because it's literally a game changer. I'm so frickin excited about it.

So that's also gotten a lot of people and this corporate badass, in particular, thinking: I should really do these 15-Minute Ally Meetings.

Again, she's been working with me for a year. And some people start doing the 15-Minute Ally Meetings and they're like: Yep, I get it. Right out of the gate. They're comfortable with it, they're ready to go. And some people do them a year later. They finally get. The desire to push forward to do it. Now, everything that I teach has a double learning to it, a bonus learning as it were.

So on the surface, 15-Minute Ally Meetings are meant to develop our communication skills, build relationships, build trust with executive leadership. You start to learn how to communicate, how to manage up, so to speak, how to be a corporate badass in front of people that are two or three levels higher than you. How to ask for what you want. There's lots and lots of benefits to 15-Minute Ally Meetings. But the side learning, the bonus learning, it confronts your own: one perhaps insecurity, right? Why aren't you doing 15-Minute Ally Meetings? And in this case, it brought up for this woman. It brought up her desire for more. She was like: Why am I doing 15-Minute Ally Meetings? I don't even care if I get promoted. That was sort of the outburst all-in-all.

And here's what's going on for her. And through our coaching, I revealed this even more. So I'm not just making this up. But basically. I think it's such a great teaching moment for all of you to reflect on, if you have those moments of: what the heck? I don't even know why I'm doing this. It doesn't matter. Then this is a great, great time for you to examine what's on the other side. What is it that you're really rejecting with that comment? So for most of you listening, you have built your career to be successful. You're not listening to this podcast called Maximize Your Career because you want to have a mediocre career. And this didn't start at age 45. It started when you were 12 years old, let's get real with ourselves here. Let's get real. We have wanted to be in a position of power and influence since we were 12 years old. I think that's important to get honest with ourselves and to kind of own that piece of ourselves, because as women, we're taught not to be powerful and influential, literally. We're so supposed to take care of everybody else. But yet there was that that yearning inside, that desire to be influential and successful from a very young age.

There's a meme that goes around, I think it comes from Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In book or something where it was like: I'm not bossy. I just have great leadership potential. And Sheryl Sandberg talks very openly in Lean In about being told that she was bossy as a young girl and how that sort of hampers down our desire to be influential and powerful. But we still have that desire. And so what did we do? We turned it into hard work. Because we made it the acceptable things that we could do to be powerful and influential. So what does that equate to, especially for women? Education. Education is totally accepted, even for women. And now we're opening up the STEM fields for young women and my daughter and she's being exposed to engineering and she's six frickin years old. Now we're sort of saying education is an acceptable way to be influential and powerful. And for us women who have that desire to be a corporate badass, we're like: Heck yeah, sign me up. Because that's the acceptable way I can go to school. I can get my education. This is also the reason and I don't have the exact statistics right in front of me, but there are there are a lot of statistics about women in business and how it falls off about the senior management level. So when we look at the number of women versus men in corporations. It's about 50/50. We'll have a certain number of women that hold engineering level roles, individual contributor type roles, these early level of roles, and then they start to fall off at the management level. So once we get into VP, SVP, C-suite executives, the numbers are much, much lower. The percentage of men is way higher. And it drops off significantly. And that's because it's unacceptable. It is unacceptable for you to step into your power and influence as a woman in a leadership more assertive, quote unquote, bossy way. When we're getting educated, we're hiding. We are literally hiding behind the work. So the work speaks for itself. The work is out in front of us. It's okay. And in every parent, every person around us will give us flowers on graduation day. They will chant our praises on our wedding day. They'll say that they're so proud of this accomplishment, that we got our PhD or whatever that might be under the guise of education. But when it comes to leadership, which has a certain amount of individuality to it and assertion and power and influence, that's when we notice the kickback. That's when we get that pushback against us.

So I'm sharing all of this with you to see that this is not just the way that we are. It's not like something we did that we focus on our hard work to get ahead. It's also what is acceptable from a societal standpoint. That hard work equals promotions and that's acceptable. So for this particular woman, she said up until this point in her career, it's been all about the promotions. All about the titles and the accolades and like going, going, going, going, do more, do more. She said ever since she was 12 years old, she applied for a job when she was 12 years old. And the only reason that she didn't get it is because her mom was like: You're too young to work. You have your whole life ahead of you to work. You don't need to work right now. So she always had this ambition, and she's always been go, go, go, go, go, go, go. And so in that moment when she said: I don't want to do this anymore. I'm like: don't do it. Stop. Don't do it anymore. Exactly. That is what we are rejecting.

So today's episode, I really want you to see that what we are rejecting is the go, go, go, go, go. We are inside of Executive Ahead of Time, The Leadership Table, being a corporate badass, listening to this podcast, whatever you're doing inside of my world of corporate badasses, inside my vision of doubling the number of women in the C-suite each year, what I am doing is I'm creating a new way of being for each and every one of us as women. We are rejecting go, go, go, go, go. We are rejecting having power over other people. That person that has to climb and crawl and scratch and pull their way to the top and leave everybody in their wake. We are rejecting making more and more money so that we can keep it all to ourselves and treat everybody else like crap. That's what's being presented to us from an influential standpoint. If you keep climbing that's what's going to happen at those higher levels. And we're we're saying no to that. And so that part of her that said, I don't even know why I'm doing this anymore. I'm quitting. Not quitting, but I just can't do this. Is saying: I can't only care about the promotion anymore. And to that, I say please don't. I mean, yes. I agree with you. Don't care about the promotion anymore. We have to reject that. We have to reject hiding behind hard work and accolades and climbing, climbing, climbing. Clawing our way to the top. Because what we really crave, what we actually want as women, is what that 12 year old wanted. That 12 year old did not care about the title and the accolades. That 12 year old ambitious woman that decided to sign up for Harvard at age 18. She wanted influence. But what society was showing her is that education and climbing and crawling was the way that it was acceptable, was the way for her to go.

So now what we're being asked to do as female leaders to create this level of actual influence and power at the top, is we're being asked to step into our authentic power. Now really think about what that means. Your authentic power. I'll continue with this example for this woman. She is so unbelievably powerful, beyond imagination. And everybody in the group would agree to that. And I'm not just saying it's because of her. All of the women inside of The Leadership Table deserve to be there. They are actually corporate badasses. They are such badasses. They have influence. They are incredibly powerful and capable of doing very, very high levels of leadership. They are authentically powerful. That's actually their truer self. That is their truer nature that is closest to who they really, really are. And look at yourself. Really think about it. When you truly feel more like yourself, are you a bumbling idiot? Are you hiding behind your education? Or are you owning it? Are you owning your space? Are you saying: Hey, I want a raise, I want equal pay. Is that more authentic?

Going back to the example of the 15-Minute Ally Meetings, is it more authentically powerful for you to say to the CEO: I would like to have 15-minutes with you, and be willing to come into that conversation and just listen, learn, talk to, and not have to come in and be like: I just want you to know all these things that are happening over here. Because again, going into the conversation in that way is having power over him, even. You're asserting yourself over him? No. When we are truly authentically powerful, we don't give two shits. We sit back, we listen, we ask questions. We strive for more, not because we have to prove something to ourselves and our family and everybody else in the world. But because that's who we are. So, yes, I want you to reject it all. I want you to reject this power play where we have to climb our way to the top, where we have to hide behind our education, where we're not able to be individualistic as leaders, to be able to show up as who we really are. This corporate badass, this authentically powerful self. I want you to reject all of it. I want you to question. I want you to say: why am I really doing this? Because the answer that lies on the other side is everything. Why are you really doing this? Why? Why? What is it that you want? Some of the women are like: You know what? I would like to retire early. What I want is I want to be on a board seat. And one of the ways I can be on a board seat is to be an SVP or a C-suite leader. I want to give back to my community. I want to have unlimited funds so that I can pour money into other people. I want to be a leader so that I can inspire other women, so that I can change my organization, so that I can bring more diversity and inclusion straight from the top. I can create that. I can stop wishing that it would happen. And I go in there and I do it. I want to be an executive leader because I want to personally bring empathy to The Leadership Table. Because I don't see a lot of it. But I haven't. And the way that I'm going to be able to bring that empathy and that compassion to The Leadership Table is to step into my authentic power and to say: you know what? I reject the idea of having power over others. And I am a person. I am a woman, who has power with other people. There is enough room for all of us at the top. And I'm going to lift up and be and bring up everybody along with me.

So this woman inside The Leadership Table, yes, reject it. Reject all of that. And then ask yourself, what is it that I really, really want and see what's on the other side. See that power. See that light and run towards it as fast as you can because it is right there and it is yours for the taking.

If you're listening to this podcast episode and you're like: what? I'm ready. I'm ready for The Leadership Table. I'm ready. It starts with Executive Ahead of Time. We get in there, we figure out what it is that we really want. What's that change that we're really meant to be making in the corporate world or in our own lives or whatever that might be? And we're rejecting all of the rest. Join us ExecutiveAheadOfTime.com. Enrollment is open and we would love to invite you in. We have a coaching call this week.

Alright my friends. Take care and I'll see you next week. Bye!