Roadmap to the Executive Suite

Embracing Work Life Balance and Self Care Intuition for Women Executives

April 15, 2021 Claudia Miller Season 1 Episode 11
Roadmap to the Executive Suite
Embracing Work Life Balance and Self Care Intuition for Women Executives
Show Notes Transcript


How can ambitious women or non-binary folks cope with all the pressures of life inside and outside work? Is there any chance of refreshing and reconnecting with personal life with all the hustles in hand?

In this podcast, we are glad to have Emily Schickli, a Self-care Intuition coach and founder of Mind Body Dharma. She will share with us her motivating and reflective views and ideas of how ambitious women can effectively reclaim their time, energy & power so they can live their most aligned lives. She will share her own negative experience at work and how she overcame it. She will also share some great tips and techniques to help women and executives overcome their own limiting beliefs and self-sabotage.

Are you ready to be more mindful of self-care and intuition? Then listen to this episode now!

In This Podcast We Talk About:

  • How she was able to develop her workshops to fit the varied needs of her clients.
  • What are her explanations about women’s dilemmas at work and the factors that affect how they achieve their career goals?
  •  How she overcame her own negative experiences at work.
  •  What creative tips and techniques she gives her clients to overcome their limiting beliefs and tendency to self-sabotage.

Connect With Emily:
IG:
@mindbodydharma
Website
Emily’s Intuitive To-Do List 3-Step Guide

Links Mentioned:
Roadmap to the Executive Suite
Get to know more about My 90-Day Job Offer Program here.
Application to Work With Claudia Miller.

About me:
I started my career like many people do: in an entry level role making around $35K a year, was the first to arrive and last to leave, putting a 110% into my job…But it wasn’t enough. 

I was consistently being passed up for promotions and realized I was being underpaid compared to my colleagues. 

I knew that in order to get ahead in my career and be able to make the money I wanted… to support the lifestyle I wanted…something had to change. 

So, I started investing in myself. I worked with a career coach, resume writer, read every career book that I could get my hands on, enrolled in career courses, and studied colleagues wo seemed to be crushing it in their careers. And after investing over $20,000 in resources, coaches, and books…and spending thousands of hours over five years…I realized that many of the common advice out there did NOT move the needle when it came to advancing your career! 

Instead, I handpicked and carefully selected what worked to create my now signature program, 90-Day Job Offer, that is unlike anything that is out there. I wish a program like this existed when I was going through my career advancement and salary negotiations. If so, it would have been a fraction of the cost and saved me over four years of frustration of trial-and-error. 

Since then, my clients have taken my ready-to-use resources to advance their careers in 90-days or less, and secured on average a 56% increase in salary (to date my clients have received $30,000 - $120,000 in additional earned income per year)!!

I help women in technology land fulfilling, high-paying jobs at a company that values and appreciates them. I’m on a mission to help women in tech collectively earn over a $1M in the next year. 

Will you join me?

Unknown:

This is roadmap to executive suite podcast, a place where we talk about accelerating your careers and how to get to the C suite all tailored to the ambitious woman. We're here to have fun, feel empowered and get actionable steps to get you closer to your dream job and salary, no matter where you are in your career. I'm your host, Claudia Miller, and I'm a career coach who helps ambitious women get the jobs they want, all while getting them up to $50,000 in salary increases. I've been featured in Forbes MSNBC, and a one of the top 23 Most Innovative career coaches of 2025 Business Insider. Welcome to the show, and let's get started.

Claudia Miller:

Well, I'm so excited to have for today's guest. Today I have Emily shigley, as she is a self care and intuition coach and the founder of Mind Body Dharma, with a master's in curriculum design and English from University of Chicago, and seven years of experience working in edtech. She's led workshops for companies like Google, Uber and course here on work life balance, and helps busy professional women who are done with the to do list overwhelm, reclaim their time, energy and personal power through her coaching programs. She loves to optimize science and energetics to help women reconnect with their intuition and create a bite sized self care routine so that they can live their most online lives. Through her signature program. Women have doubled their productivity and increase her energy by 186%. Helping them get promoted finish backburner projects and feel more present with their loved ones. When she's not helping women finally make self care doable. She's created her own Oracle deck and experimenting with gluten free baking. I'm happy to have you here, Emily.

Unknown:

Thanks, Claudia. I'm super excited to be here, too.

Claudia Miller:

Yeah, so we actually met like a program that we're both part of.

Unknown:

And you know, what

Claudia Miller:

really caught my intention is you've done actually a lot of workshops, and you work with a lot of women in the tech space specifically, like mentioned, I mean, your bio with Google. So tell me a little bit more about, you know, what do you what kind of workshops Do you have? And like, how did you get started?

Unknown:

Yeah. So I love tailoring workshops to meet the needs of the different companies that I've worked with. So they are pretty varied. I'll start by saying that the first few that I did, are really focused on work life balance, because that's a huge pain point. For a lot of professionals, especially in the tech space, I actually am also a tech professional. So I get it, I've worked in the ad tech space, specifically for seven years. And work life balance is a huge challenge for people. In particular, with such a high pressured environment. They're feeling this internal need to continue to work long and longer hours. And so when I've done workshops we've focused in on how can you actually maximize your time that you do have outside of work? So we tend to think about work life balance, right as like, you work all day, and then you close your laptop, and you deserve the rest. But how can we reposition it as maybe thinking about ways to rest in the work day finding little moments for self care, so that you don't feel completely drained and exhausted at the end of the day? So that was one big topic that I focused on. I've done some other workshops to kind of more in the woo camp, so to speak. So how you can access your intuition, make more powerful decisions via your intuition. So really tapping into your own wisdom in order to choose effectively, whether that's projects or big life questions.

Claudia Miller:

That's amazing. I mean, when I was working, same thing, it's, it's just a lot to handle all at one time. And I know I've had a lot of audience guest speakers on the show where, you know, they're women executives, and they manage big teams, they have lots of projects, and especially as women, I feel like we always have more on our plates, you know, worrying about, you know, not just like our home, but like if we have partners, and especially women with kids, like there's just things added one thing after another and you know, I'm a big fan of list, and I always have a big to do list. So tell me a little bit more of like, why does this happen? How do we end up being in a place where we all of a sudden have so much to do and feel so much overwhelmed? Like, why do you think that is?

Unknown:

Yeah, this is a complicated question, Claudia, especially for women. I've noticed a few different patterns and I like to call them self sabotage patterns. And that's kind of a big scary word to throw out there. Because no one wants to be self sabotaging, right, especially your audience. We're ambitious. This women on that roadmap to the executive suite, right? So, when it comes to ambitious women, we oftentimes don't think of, well, how could I be self sabotaging? I'm focused on my goals. You know, I'm taking my career seriously, I'm doing the things that need to be done. But in reality, there are a lot of more subtle energies at play.

Claudia Miller:

Like, what kind of like subtle energies at play? Can you elaborate a little bit more?

Unknown:

Yeah. So have you ever heard of limiting beliefs before? I have? Yeah. So for our audience who may not be familiar, we have several layers of our mind. And this goes back to depth psychology from like Carl Jung, and Freud and all of those great teachers back in the day, in that we have our conscious mind. So this is what we're using constantly to make decisions, like, do I do the laundry? Or do I feed the kids or do I go back to work kind of thing. We also have our unconscious mind. So this is actually more recent studies in neuroscience have shown that we make 95% of our decisions of our behavior, based on unconscious beliefs and desires 95% of our human behavior is based on unconscious beliefs and desires. And this comes from Dr. Bruce Lipton's research. So what that means in practicality, is that, from childhood, we picked up stories about how we're supposed to be in the world, from our parents, from our siblings, teachers, peers, and a lot of that is just shown to us, it's not necessarily someone saying, Don't be this, don't be that, although there's plenty of that too, right. And as children, we start to internalize, oh, this is how I'm to be safe in the world. Because if I don't follow those rules, those guidelines of society, then maybe I won't be loved, maybe I won't be fed, maybe I won't be taken care of. And that's really scary for a small person. So over time, those narratives, those stories, those beliefs get replayed in our mind, so that they become so much a part of ourselves that we don't even think about them. So fast forward. You're an ambitious woman, you're going for that promotion, right? And maybe you even if you think consciously, I'm ambitious, I'm going to go for that promotion, you might unconsciously be playing small. So, for example, imposter syndrome, right? This is a huge thing, especially for women. Although men, more recent research has shown like Amy Cuddy's work that actually it doesn't affect one gender more than the other, which is really interesting, whole different topic. But impostor syndrome is really big, where you're not feeling good enough to ask for that raise. So even if you're like, Yes, I'm ambitious. Maybe you have a story that it's like, you'll get rewarded when the time is right. And so then you don't actually ask for that raise. Instead, you just assume well, I'll get that raise when I'm ready. So that's one way of like, how you might be playing small because of this unconscious belief.

Claudia Miller:

Okay, so it sounds like there's I mean, there's a lot of factors influencing whether we may or may not realize them, especially with like, solid, you mentioned those narratives that we have, and I know some, you know, my clients that I've worked with, they'll say, you know, I feel like I need to pay my dues, and and pay my dues in order for me to move to a next promotion. Or, you know, I need to be able to, I need to learn more like, even though they've been in the job for five, seven years, like I need to know more in order for me to get to the next level. And it's just like, well, when is enough enough? So I definitely understand like, where that's coming from. So, you know, from like, what you're mentioning. So we have like these limiting beliefs narratives, they may be preventing an almost self sabotaging us from moving to the next step in their careers. So if we find ourselves in this situation, like, what can we do?

Unknown:

Yeah, so I loved how you said this in a previous episode. So like the shout out listeners, if you have not listened to the episode, I believe it was called embracing your role as a woman executive that was gold. So you said, hope is not a strategy. I'm gonna repeat that hope is not a strategy. So when we're hoping to get to the executive suite or get that promotion, become a senior, whatever that goal is, we have to back that up, not just with the practical job related details, but in every aspect of your life. And that applies to limiting beliefs as well that applies to self sabotage. So some of the other two areas that I see women self sabotage, I'm gonna mention those quickly before I share are some ways to overcome them is working too hard? And I know we all know this, right? Like, you can't afford to burn out if you're ambitious. And also, on the flip side, we tend to or not necessarily on the flip side, but we tend to burn out when we're ambitious, because we're taking responsibility for other people's work. We're like, Oh, don't worry, I'll do that. Because when we do more than we're more important. And that's a limiting belief, busy does not equal important. But we often think it does, you can imagine, right? Like, we've all seen this archetype of the executive that rushes in, and they have all the papers, and they're super busy, and you can't find time with them. And so then we think we see that and we're like, oh, we need to be busy, too. We need to be like that. But in reality, that's actually self sabotage. Because if you're overworking, you're developing an unhealthy pattern, that then imagine when you are promoted, you have even less time to work on these things. So it's really key at this point, as you're progressing in your career to start to take a pause, take a step back, figure out, do I actually need to work more? Or do I need to take this project on? Or am I doing that? Because I feel like I'm not good enough with what I'm currently doing? Sounds great. Yeah. Yeah. Right, like, so. If I were to distill it down, like how do you stop self sabotaging? It's really taking that pause. So identifying, am I playing small in some areas? And conversely, am I playing too big in some areas, right? Am I working too hard. And the third thing that I want to mention that we don't often think about is, are you getting caught up in the gossip or the venting? Because, you know, we all need to vent to some extent, because we have frustrations that come up at work. And most of us know not to vent at work, right, or in front of senior leaders who might be evaluating performance down the line. But we still will vent to our best friend. And I'm not saying that's not a bad thing. It's a very human thing. But the challenge with that the self sabotage that comes in there is that negative energy begets more negative energy. So when you're venting about a colleague, or a situation or a project, then when you go back to work, you see the negatives. So a strategy for that is, what can you do on your own to release that pent up energy? Instead of venting. So things like going for a walk, right dancing and outputting, your favorite song, just like moving your body, getting it out? Maybe journaling? There are a lot of different techniques that you can use to develop your anti self sabotage strategies, so to speak. Okay.

Claudia Miller:

So that way, you know, this happens like in the workplace, like you mentioned. So like, you're saying, like, let's just say someone is on a meeting, somebody says something, maybe they shouldn't have wanted to try to throw you under the bus, or whatever that may be. So if someone's experiencing that currently, you know, instead of calling a friend or at this time, a lot of us are working from home or probably venting to our partners, like, employee this person that this again, are you all believe what this person just said to me during this meeting? So you're saying is instead of doing that, because we're putting out negative energy, and all of a sudden, we think of the workplace is in the negative format. So instead of it was just a one time, it was a situation, but it's not everything? So in order for us to prevent that from becoming too negative, is saying, You know what, I'm just gonna go take a walk. It's nice outside, it's now spring, let me go for a walk. And then I'll come back and continue with my work. And that way, I'm not releasing or making my work environment negative. It's just a situation that happened and we move forward. Is that correct?

Unknown:

Yeah. 100%. And I've been there, right. Like I've been in a situation where it was a toxic environment I was working in nonprofit back in the day before transitioning into the tech industry. And there's just a lot of social politics going on. And it's hard when you're spending so much time at work. And you're passionate about the mission and you want to move it forward. You want to grow your own career, that you get invested, like your personal identity becomes enmeshed with the work. But when that happens, any feedback that comes back at you, whether that's like direct feedback, or just circumstantial or the politics of it all, it becomes personal. And I've definitely been there where it was like, suddenly my self worth was tied to how much productivity you know how productive I was. was how many approvals that I got on various projects, the social support, but then that only perpetuates that feeling of not enoughness, which then makes you want to vent more. And then when you vent more, right, you get more negative energy, and it just is the cycle.

Claudia Miller:

Yeah, one of the things that I've noticed too, it's like, kind of like to mention, like, even with promotions, so I got passed up for a promotion. And, you know, once I talked to clients, I'm like, Okay, well, how did your conversation go with the manager? When you told them originally, and how long ago was that? And then they'll say, Well, I actually never told my manager, I wanted the promotion. You know, I've been doing this job. For years, I've been working really hard. I just thought that I'm the see more senior, my team so that I thought that I was going to be the next one, getting the promotion, and I just got passed up for it. So it's important with that communication style, but also making sure that you stay optimistic, you know, managers are not mind reader's. And they don't always know everything that you do. We don't even remember what we did three months ago, let alone your manager or even like 12 months ago, and what you've been doing, you know, past these 12 months, so always having those conversations with them, but also making sure that you stayed optimistic and that you're doing your part, making sure that you're not the one feeding into the negative, you're not doing the work gossip. Because eventually you never know like, those people might be the one saying, you know, who do you recommend, or they might be your next manager. And then afterwards, it's just a small world, especially like in the workplace. And especially when you're in the same industry as well, like, you tend to see the same people over and over again, even if you move like different companies. So I really liked that feedback. And kind of like that tip of, you know, just walking out, although some people might, might end up running marathons, depending how toxic but like, there's different ways of releasing that anger and making a turn into a positive and then kind of helping you move, keep moving forward with your day to day. Alright, so I really liked that feedback. So you know, what other things they have you seen that? Where women are professionals tend to sabotage themselves in other ways. I like the whole now working negatively about the workplace. What are other some examples?

Unknown:

Yeah. So with the category of playing small, I've noticed there are three specific mindset challenges that a lot of women encounter, one of them is imposter syndrome, which we talked about. And the second one is this idea of like an overactive inner critic. So, depending on again, childhood experiences, or past work experiences, a lot of women have taken on this like negative voice inside their heads, right. And so this could be you are working on a project, and suddenly you hear in your head, or maybe you see the words, however, it kind of intuitively comes through for you to not go for that or to not do that, or don't send that email or Oh, even after you've sent the email, the second guessing the spiral of oh, crap, I should have said this. And then they're going to think this and just kind of getting into this thought spiral. So that's a big category that I see a lot of women struggling with. And one of the exercises that I like to do is actually borrowed from creative writing. So in second grade, I've been a creative writer. And that was my original career path, before pivoting and going into education, technology, and coaching eventually. So what you can do is, and this is really fun, I do this with my clients, if you get a journal out, and imagine before you start writing, just kind of take a moment, maybe close your eyes. Imagine what this voice looks like. So if you think of like a cartoon, or like a caricature of like a street artist, right? Can you imagine your inner critic in the most preposterous way possible. And for those Harry Potter fans out there, shout out. If you imagine there's a scene in Harry Potter, where unlike, stay with me, everybody, if you're not a fan, there's a scene in Harry Potter, where one of the professor's has a creature in a closet that will take the shape of whatever the person before it fears the most. And the only way to beat this particular creature or monster, is by imagining them into something ridiculous. And then laughing at that, and then it disappears. So this is essentially the idea behind transforming your inner critic. So in your mind, imagine this disembodied voice, make it as separate from you as possible. Because the power of the inner critic is that we think it's ourselves. We think it's our higher power. We think it's our intuition. But if actually just fear. And so when we separate our own identity from that, by turning it into grandmother with green skin, and like a super long nose, and maybe like a clown hat or something, you know, something completely strange, we are able to see, oh, that's not me. That's not true. And so after you do this imagining, go ahead, and depending on your creative faculties, you can write it out, or maybe even draw it out. And at any time moving forward, you hear that inner critic, imagine that character saying those things to you. And suddenly, you know, you walk by the mirror, and it's not, I hate my body. It's that creature saying, I hate my body. And you're like, No, you know, or like at work, you're in that meeting, and you speak up and you've voiced an opinion, you hear the inner critic, say, like, you shouldn't have said that that's not your place. You can be like, yeah, it is. Right, you can create a little bit of play there, which takes the fear out of the situation. It kind

Claudia Miller:

of kind of reminds me of, you know, like, in the cartoons where they have like, the little angel and like, into your ear, but all of a sudden, it's like, you know, kind of like so kind of imagining something like that. But it's like a very ridiculous kind of looking caricature, like you mentioned that way, they're speaking to it, and they're just trying to sabotage you. But they're not they're doing with your best interest. That's a really great exercise I'm going to try to do I'm not the best drawer, but I'll definitely do my best. Well, yeah, this is really great. To be frank, Emily, I feel like I already learned so much this with everything that you've been talking. Can you tell me a little bit more like how do you work with clients like for some of your clients that come to you?

Unknown:

Yeah, so I predominantly work out with women who are busy, they're professionals. And they're struggling with either work life balance, burnout, the things that we're talking about self sabotage, right. And the first thing that we do together, I do a lot of private coaching. So I have a couple of different containers, I do have some group programs as well. But I really love working with people private one on one. So the first thing we do is actually look at your time. And I mentioned this at the beginning as a workshop topic, right. And the reason why I start with time, is because when you're ambitious, you're busy. And it can be hard, even if you say yes, I'm going to invest in myself, both in terms of energy, money and time, to work with a coach to actually find that time in your schedule to do the work. And so this is the first thing we do is take a deep dive into how you're spending your time, how you feel about spending your time, which is like where the magic happens. And if there are any opportunities to optimize. So I have a marketing background. It's kind of like looking at your time like a funnel. For those of you who are marketing familiar. So how's your energy coming in? Right at the beginning of the day, where's your energy coming in? How is it getting distributed? Where are you spending it? And how are you feeling about spending it? What's the emotion behind that. And from there, we create a building block. So this is where the self care routine comes in. A bite sized self care routine. So like, even 25 minutes of your time to work on these things. shift your mindset, create healthy patterns for yourself, practice boundaries, take a moment to breathe and walk around the block, right all of these different things. And so we build that together, as I'm empowering you and teaching you different tools from multiple disciplines. So from my corporate background, from a psychology research, I've done like habits, psychology, from Eastern practices, so meditation, movement, breathwork, all of those really wonderful things together to help you look at yourself on the whole. So not just mind, but also body emotions, spirit, all of those great things.

Claudia Miller:

That's amazing. And I'm sure that your customers, our clients afterwards feel amazing. Can you tell me a little bit more of like, maybe your most noteworthy, like clients that have like a very positive ending result that comes to mind?

Unknown:

Yeah, so because I work with a lot of women in tech, and they're oftentimes more left brain to start. I like to take basically an NPS survey. So a net promoter survey, but I do it with specific key metrics in mind. So that way, I can track people's progress and It's really, really powerful to have a number behind something that's so intangible, like energy, right? How do you quantify that? So the first thing I do when I work with someone is ask on a scale from one to 10. You know, how would you rate your ability to optimize your time and manage your time? Same thing for energy, same thing for balance. And there's this one client, she is working with a therapist working with a nutritionist, taking a night school classes to do her master's degree and working full time. Wow. Can you imagine? Yeah, yeah. And she was a senior level, right? So really amazing work going on. But she was really struggling with time. And energy, because she was feeling that burnout, that lack of passion, because of all of these things, and there was some misalignment in her current workplace. So through our work together, she increased her energy by 300% 300%. Can you imagine like, wow, like, that has been incredible. And she's not unique either. You know, there's another woman I worked with, who's an executive at a big tech company, and she said, she got the best marks on her promotion review that she's ever received. It's kind of unreal. She got like, 95 out of 100. Yeah, and also got promoted in our work together. So even though you might think, especially if you're very left brain, you're like, what is energy work? Like, you know, what does that have to do? Or like, self sabotage? What does that have to do with my career, but it actually has so much to do with it. Because when you prioritize yourself, it creates an amazing ripple effect. It's a keystone habit. You know, it helps you really become your best self so that you can get that promotion.

Claudia Miller:

I love that. Yeah, I feel like, I always need more energy. I might probably start working with him looking into that. But yeah, thanks so much, Emily, for everything that you've shared with us today. You know, if there's other weeds listeners out there that want to reach out to you, how can they connect with you? You know, what is the best way?

Unknown:

Yeah. So I would recommend that people start with my intuitive to do list three step guide. So one of the big things we talked about at the beginning was this idea of overwhelm, right? So there's so many things you even mentioned that yourself, I'm no stranger to like having way too many to do lists, right. And so the key with this guide is that it helps you in a three step process, put everything that's in your mind to distracting you and pulling you in different directions out on paper, and then gives you a tool to radically prioritize. And I love this one, because it does what I personally enjoy doing, combining task management techniques, from corporate, plus the intuition piece from Eastern tradition. So it really does address both aspects of yourself and gives you a tool like a very tangible tool to start to feel less overwhelmed, and actually accomplish more things.

Claudia Miller:

Okay. And where can they find this? What is the best way for them to reach out

Unknown:

to you? Yeah, so I can share it and maybe put it in the show notes for you. Thanks, Claudia. And then if you want to connect, you know, I'm most active on Instagram. So you can find me at Mind Body Dharma on Instagram. And I love connecting with people there. So feel free to send me a DM if you have questions about this episode, or you want to nerd out about sabotage or selfcare, burnout, that kind of thing. And then of course, you can also find me on my website.

Claudia Miller:

Perfect. And I'll make sure to include all the links links in the show notes there. But thanks so much, Emily for coming today and sharing but there's so much knowledge of you know how to help. You know, a lot of us work with like the journalists, the overwhelm the self sabotage the imposter syndrome. I think you've given us some digestible concrete tips. And that way we can utilize, when of course, you know, to some of the listeners out there if you use any of these tips, and they find it very helpful. If you want to hear all about it. I would I'm sure Emily does, too. We want to make sure that we know how to inhale, learn a little bit more about it. So please do share with us. So thanks again for coming in Emily and sharing all your expertise with us.

Unknown:

Yeah, it was absolutely my pleasure. And just like a quick shout out this podcast is so amazing and so packed with so many tips. So if you love this episode, like go back, listen to some other ones because there's gold in each episode. Thank you so much, Emily. Take care you too. Thanks for listening. And if you liked this episode, you can go to our website roadmap to the executive suite.com For show notes and sign up to get alerts all new episodes will be posted every Thursday talk to you next week