Reclaiming the Fire in Your Belly (eBook)

It’s not who you are that holds you back;
it’s who you think you’re not.

—Denis Waitley

I sat on the sofa in tears, wondering, How am I going to pay the people on my team? We were doomed.

My company had been in business for two years when, overnight, the entire enterprise fell apart, like a demolished building crumbling to the ground. When the pandemic hit in 2020, every organization shut down its spend on consulting from providers like mine.

At the McGuckin Group, I was responsible for the livelihoods of five full-time, senior-level employees. They had bills to pay and mouths to feed. I couldn’t let them and their families down. I can’t let our clients down either, I thought. We worked with CEOs who were pulling their hair out, trying to figure out how to continue their own businesses.

It took me forty-eight hours to move from panic to solution mode. We are not going to operate from a scarcity mentality, I decided. We’re going to operate from an abundance mentality. We’re going to wrap ourselves around our clients. We’re going to deliver value, even though they’re not paying us for it.

During our executive assessments, we ask our clients questions that start with the frame “What would have to be true…?” Staring at the ceiling in my living room, I asked myself, “What would have to be true for this business to survive COVID?” I came up with two answers:

1. I need my employees on the other side of this crisis. I have to take care of them.
2. I need my clients on the other side of this, too. I have to take care of them.

My employees and my clients were stressed to their breaking point; this wasn’t the time to abandon them. Given their budgets at that moment, our clients weren’t able to engage us officially, but I determined that we could still help them.

One of my superpowers is that I’m not afraid to ask for help. I went to my team and said, “This is a big problem, but we’re going to get through it. I think this is how we tackle it. What do you think?” They immediately started throwing out ideas regarding how we could help our clients. “We can start doing webinars,” one of them suggested. “Let’s buy a video conferencing license for a thousand people.” They flew into action.

We started holding webinars for our clients, free of charge. I paid my employees’ salaries from my own pocket because I had such a strong belief that we were here for the long term and this period was just a blip.

We are not going down, I told myself. My strong internal locus of control took over. I believed in myself and my staff to get the business through this challenging time. I couldn’t fake it; if I didn’t fully believe we could do it, no one else would either. I embraced authenticity, despite the short-term sacrifice. We never once asked our clients to buy anything. We simply said, “We’re here. How can we help you?” Within six to twelve months, clients started picking up the phone again to hire us.

I didn’t furlough a single person on my team. Nobody took a pay cut. Everybody got a bonus. I took care of my employees, and I knew they would take care of our clients in return.

Everything comes down to mindset. We could have given up. I could have shut down the business, leaving team members and clients to fend for themselves. Many large organizations were furloughing people or cutting their salaries. My own husband’s salary decreased by 25 percent. Still, I bucked the trend, in service of my larger vision. Yes, I was running a startup, not making one red cent, but I refused to reduce employee salaries.

I chose to shift from a scarcity mindset to an abundance mindset. That choice created an entirely different level of loyalty and trust in the organization. Our business fell to the ground for a time, but by the following year, we grew 300 percent—because we had built trusting relationships.

House Rule Number One

My experience during the pandemic helps shed light on the power of mindset to vault you forward—or bring you down. But before we move into identifying the most problematic mindsets of women leaders that hold them back, I want to offer some context about my communication style. You’ll read more about this in Chapter 8, but one of the very first things we did as we were building WOTW was to determine our “house rules.”

Spend more than a few minutes talking to me and you are likely to experience me as direct and passionate…with an edge. I challenge the status quo, at an individual and organizational level. My voice and influence are the driving force for WOTW, and we have distilled these characteristics into our number one house rule: we are truth-tellers.

Speaking honestly takes confidence and courage, and it has to be done with candor and care. Effective truth-telling comes down to the nature of the relationship I have with the person receiving that truth. If they know I’m coming from a place of love or betterment, that I have a vested interest in their success, and that I’m trying to help them grow in their career, they’ll receive my feedback differently than if they perceive me as attacking them.

I hope you will openly receive some of the hard truths in this book by keeping that framing in mind.

Identifying Patterns and Themes

Over the course of my thirty years in business, I have come to understand that the biggest obstacle holding women back in their lives and careers is their mindset. Mindset, in its simplest definition, is the way we think about ourselves and the world around us. Mindsets can be learned over time. They can result from societal impacts. They can be born out of experiences.

I’m a pattern-finder by nature. I’m also a prolific notetaker, with notebooks dating back decades. When I looked through them in January 2022 as we launched WOTW, I began to recognize patterns in my behavior over time. The symptoms and the manifestations of those symptoms became obvious, and a theme emerged. I started to link, label, and name the mindsets I recognized in myself, which created the foundation of our curriculum at WOTW and the content in this book. Now, when I coach female executives, I apply the framework I uncovered in order to help them produce a tangible goal or result.

For example, during a recent coaching call, a leader expressed that she felt like she needed to be more assertive. She felt like she was not getting her point across when she spoke, but she couldn’t quite put her finger on what to do about it. I could see the issue immediately. I suggested labeling it with the following statements:

• I need to manage my stakeholders more strategically.
• I need to develop my influencing skills.
• I need to do so with authenticity.

As soon as I said that, she said, “Yes, that’s it!” This framing allowed her to get more specific regarding exactly what she needed to be doing and where to focus her time and attention.

Through my coaching work, I have learned that systematizing the way we think about a behavior, problem, or mindset—what I call “linking and labeling”—immediately opens space and creates a course of action for next steps to take. By recognizing our mindset and patterns, we can understand how a particular mindset leads to a particular result.

Whether with my clients or in my personal life, I’m always trying to identify patterns and themes. The McGuckin Group has become known for this ability. Because we are uniquely positioned to speak with many women across a broad swath of industries and have access to substantial amounts of data, we can very quickly get to patterns and themes. Once we can see a pattern, we are able to name it, highlight it, and ultimately change it.

Mindset Shifts Required

A mindset many women leaders have is: “If I just work hard enough, surely I’ll get noticed.” If they continue with this mindset long enough, it results in frustration over not being recognized, which leads to stress and eventually burnout. When I identify this trajectory to an audience of women, I’ll see them nodding their heads. Then I’ll say, “What if, instead of the ‘I just have to work hard’ mindset, you shift to a strategic mindset? What if you lift your gaze from the ground, scan the environment, and make choices about what you’re going to work hard on?” They respond, “I’ve never thought about it that way. That makes complete sense.” They gain a new perspective, which they can now start applying.

In my organization, we tend to hear the same things over and over again from women: “I feel overwhelmed,” “I’ve lost my spark,” “It’s really hard for me to get out of bed,” or “I don’t feel valued at work.” Those feelings are the manifestations of overwhelm or burnout at work.

While that connection might seem apparent from the outside, it’s hard to read the label when you’re inside the bottle—even for some of us who know the rules, like me. It’s challenging to be your own physician. However, when I was able to take a step back and hear somebody else name what I had been feeling, it helped me get out of the bottle and connect the dots.

I am not a psychiatrist, nor do I work in the medical field, but I’ve always been very curious about it....