Bryan McAnulty: Welcome to The Creator's Adventure, where we interview Creator's from around the world, hearing their stories about growing a business. How can you make time to do it all? It comes down to building good habits and breaking bad ones. Erica Rooney is going to show us today how she's able to be an executive coach, chief people officer, a wife, a mom, an entrepreneur, and a fitness fanatic, and make it all work.

Hey everyone. I'm Bryan McAnulty, the founder of Heights Platform. Let's start the show.

Hey everyone. We're here today with Erica Rooney. She is an executive coach and consultant, the Chief people officer at Blue Acorn ici, a wife, a mom, entrepreneur, and fitness fan. She is on a mission to help anyone break out of their sticky floors and bust through the glass ceiling to live a life filled with purpose, passion, and peace.

Erica, welcome to the show.

Erica Rooney: Awesome, Bryan. Thanks for having me.

Bryan McAnulty: Yeah, you're welcome. So my first question for you is something that we like to ask everybody. What would you say is the biggest thing that you did or that you are doing that has helped you achieve the freedom to do what you.

Erica Rooney: Oh gosh. It's probably not gonna be an answer that you would expect, but the thing that I did that has allowed me all of this freedom is actually to give up drinking to cut out the booze completely.

I know that might depress some people who are listening here, but the clarity that it gives your mind and the time that you have in the day, how much more productive you are, it's amazing. .

Bryan McAnulty: Interesting. Well, I don't know if it's gonna be more depressing for the audience, but I don't drink at all either,

Erica Rooney: Exactly. I mean, that's my honest to God answer. I've always been a goal getter. I've always been a get up and do it kind of person. But when I decided to quit drinking, I found so much more freedom. So there's the, there's the real answer.

Bryan McAnulty: Yeah. That's interesting. Yeah, I, I've never really was into drinking actually.

For me, it's just something that didn't even particularly interest me. And there was a really funny I think like a lot of people don't understand it, but there was a really funny video or something of some comedian I saw and he was telling the story of like, if you go up to somebody and you say like, oh, well like do you, do you want some water or something and say, oh, I don't really drink water.

Like they, they want a soda or something else. And it's like, whoa, what do you mean you don't drink water? But if the people won't, wouldn't question that actually. . And if you say like, oh, do you want something like a drink, like alcohol then? And you say, no, people are suddenly like you, you don't drink, you don't drink alcohol.

And like the joke that he said is he's like, what? You don't drink poison? Like what? Like no one would question not drinking water, but not drinking alcohol. It would be questioned.

Erica Rooney: I absolutely know what you're talking about. And it is so true. It's got such a stigma around it, and that's why I actually, I love to talk about it and that's such a cool question.

so many people are uncomfortable talking about it, but the benefits that you gain from not drinking are just huge.

Bryan McAnulty: Yeah, yeah, definitely. And I mean, if you, if you enjoy drinking, if you wanna do that, I think that's fine. But yeah, for, for me, you do. You, yeah. Yeah, for me, I, I don't prefer it. And, and I agree.

There is a lot of clarity in not doing, . Yeah. All right, awesome. So you're a coach to executives the chief people officer at Blue Acorn ici, and in addition to this, you're running your own business and working full-time while doing that, you're a mom of two wife fitness lover. So I'm thinking kind of the first question that might come to the mind of our audience is like, how do you do it all?

and we actually listened to an episode of your podcast and your, your podcast host as well where you talked about this. So can you share some of that with our audience as well?

Erica Rooney: This is the one question that when I start talking to people about all of the things that I'm doing, they're like, well, oh my God, how do you do it all?

And the real answer is, I don't. Right. And I know that seems kind of Yeah. Yeah. But like you've just listed all of this, right. But I use this one example just to showcase is that, you know, I've got two kids, a four-year-old and a seven-year-old. So we're very involved, very busy. My seven-year-old plays baseball and baseball.

Is it like it goes until seven 30 or eight o'clock? Two or three nights a week? I am not here for that, right? Like I work all day. I get up at four 30 or five in the morning. I wanna be on the couch relaxing. I do not wanna. On a cold bleacher. Freezing my, you know what off. So I don't go to all of the games.

I just don't, I don't sign up to bring the snacks. I don't do any of that. I show up to two or three games, the important ones, the ones where they get the trophy, but the other ones, I give 'em a little kiss goodbye and boot 'em out the door, right? So I don't do it all. . And a big piece of it is relying on my tribe that I have around me, right?

Like not being the one who feels like I have to do it all, and really rating where am I getting quality versus quantity. So for example, I used to think that I needed to be the mom that picked him up from school every day and dropped him off and did all these things because I was the one, I'm the mom, I have to do it.

No you don't. No you don't. Right. So now I split these roles with another neighborhood parent and I split them with my husband and I split them with my mom. And I don't do it all that often. Guess what? He doesn't care. He really does not care. , he probably prefers it when other people pick him up. So it does on the surface look like I'm doing so many.

But in reality, I'm not. You cannot be all things to all people all the time. And as soon as you really accept that and you own that, you need to prioritize and put your efforts and your time where you are going to reap quality, not quantity. You're gonna be able to do more.

Bryan McAnulty: Yeah, that's, that's a great great answer.

I. Even, yeah. In business, but in personal life too. I like that you, you gave the example of how it works in your personal life. Cuz my wife and I we had a, a daughter this year our first child. And we've been thinking recently like, well, what can we do in our life? What, what's something that we don't have to do so we can focus on the important things?

And but yeah, it's so important to do that in business, but it's hard to do it both in business and personal life because you feel. , most people tend to feel like you care about your business, you care about your family, so you tend to feel that like, well, I have to be the one to do this thing. And I think that's a challenge a lot of people run into when it comes to learning.

Like what can you delegate to somebody else, whether that be an assistant, somebody you hire on your team, a contractor, somebody you hire to help around the house or do yard work or whatever it is. Learning where, what are the things that are super important, that are like non-negotiable for you to wanna do?

And what are the things that might seem challenging, but you actually can kind of let go of. . Well, and what can you automate? You know?

Erica Rooney: Mm-hmm. , I mean, there's so many amazing tools out there nowadays that make life for people like us, right? Entrepreneurs, Creator's, that make it so much easier. Yes, it is an investment.

Not all of them are huge investments though, you know, and if you spend a few dollars there, like what is your time worth? , you know, put a dollar amount on that. Put a dollar amount on what you feel an hour of your time is worth, and then ask yourself, should I be spending an hour editing this podcast or creating content or whatever it is, spell checking something for God's sake, you know?

Or should I outsource and automate all those things? , it's up to you. Yeah, definitely. I once heard a really good analogy too, that talked about. , Brian, if I told you you had all these balls in the air and you were not allowed to drop a single ball, you gotta keep 'em all. You got family, you got your job, you got your business, you got your podcast, you got all the things.

Some are made a rubber and some are made of glass. You know, which ones do you drop? Mm-hmm. The rubber ones, you know? So if that's a way of kind of looking at it and prioritizing of like, is this a ball that I could drop?

Bryan McAnulty: Yeah. Yeah. That's a, that's a great analogy. . Awesome. So one of the focuses then at your job as a coach and chief people officer is to help executives and leaders improve their personal and their work life.

Mainly by, well, at least one of the, one of the ways, by setting up powerful habits in their routine. So this is something I'd really like to go into some more detail about. I guess first of all, how would you define a.

Erica Rooney: Oh, it's the thing that you do every day, day in, day out, oftentimes, that you don't have to think about it, right?

Like brushing your teeth, but oftentimes that you have to make yourself do right? It's doing the things you don't wanna do too.

Bryan McAnulty: Cool. So how would you say that habits, like big or small, how can they affect your life in the big picture?

Erica Rooney: Oh man. In immeasurable ways, right? And you know, we can circle this back to drinking, right?

The first thing we talked about, if I have a glass of wine at the end of the day, every day I'm putting on, I don't know how many calories are in a glass of wine. 300, 200. Every day. You add that up to a week, add that up to an entire year. How many calories are you putting in your body, you know? , you said it first.

I was a fitness fanatic, so you'll hear me equate a lot of things to like nutrition and fitness, cuz that's where it all started for me was in health and wellness. But all of those little things add up over time. Right? Rome was not built in a day. We've heard that. But if you do that one thing, if you take that single step, you are making incremental progress.

And I think that's why habits are so challenging for people because. you. You see this end picture and you think it is so far. , you know, but the time is gonna pass anyways, so you might as well do the work every day. Do the small bits of work that add up to something big. You know, when I first started my podcast, I was like, oh, great, I have one episode, right?

And like 10 listeners, and it's my mom, you know, so great. But every day you, or every week you add that new episode, and then soon you have 50 and you have X amount of downloads and the progress is there, right? Like if you do the work, the everyday work, the results will. .

Bryan McAnulty: Yeah, definitely. Yeah. I think it's easy to be overwhelmed by that, that goal that seems so far off in the distance that it's paralyzing and you don't even begin the thing that, that should become that consistent habit.

Yeah. This is something I'm, I'm really passionate about myself because before our Heights Platform and what we do today, the first web application we built was actually a habit and goal track. and it's not available for people to sign up anymore. But it's something I still use myself. I've been using for over 10 years now.

And part of it was, part of my idea, I guess, behind the whole thing was that you have all these to-dos and things that you have to do, but then what about like the end goals that you have, because usually your goals are different from your to-dos. Mm-hmm. and your goals usually require, as you're saying, these habits to be formed for this consistent.

And so my thinking was like, how can I track better the things that I want to do on a daily basis, on a weekly basis and everything like that to to build good habits and move towards my goals?

Erica Rooney: It gives you a roadmap for execution. Yeah, exactly. If you say, I wanna read 12 books a year, you've gotta walk it back.

Right? That means one book a month, you know, okay, that means approximately how many pages a week. And so it helps you break it down into those bike size chunks because for someone who maybe isn't a reader, that goal seems ridiculous. Yeah. You know, if you say, I wanna run, 2023 miles in 2023, I'm not gonna go out and run 2000 miles, you know?

Right now. Like you've got to break it down into manageable bite size chunks. Yeah, exactly. Plus, we love that dopamine hit of checking that box on the habit tracker. .

Bryan McAnulty: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. . Yeah, so it's interesting though. So like the, the app that I built and, and my main focus was thinking about the, like the, I guess the positive habits and like the positive goals I could work towards.

But in the beginning of the, the show here, we were talking about the idea of getting rid of a negative habit of like drinking mm-hmm. . So in your opinion, how can somebody change their bad habits and then implement new positive ones?

Erica Rooney: I am a big fan of adding before subtract. . And what I mean by that is you start adding in the things that you want to do first, those positive habits, before you start removing the bad ones, right?

So for example, if you want to quit drinking and stop drinking altogether, you may say, but you also want to add in healthy fitness habits. You may say, you know what? Like, I'm gonna make the goal of waking up early tomorrow and working out, right? I'm going to get it done first thing in the morning. . But if I do that, like I really shouldn't drink the night before because then I'll be tired, I'll be hungover, I'll be groggy, I'll hit snooze and I'm not gonna wake up.

Right? So if we add in those healthy things before taking away. You start to kind of, those things start to fall off, right? Like if you actually do follow through with that and you work out and you feel good and you get that dopamine hit and then you're like, I'm gonna do this tomorrow. You know, so you go to bed feeling good, then you start seeing the positive benefits that start building up.

Right? And I always tell people too, it's the same with like giving up soda or giving up an unhealthy food. If you want to give up soda, don't just say, I can't. Have soda, right? Start replacing soda with something like water or something else, right? Tea, I don't know what, and say I'm gonna have X amount of glasses of water before I allow myself a soda.

Then you might not even end up wanting that soda. But one thing I said there that I also wanna go back to is the mindset shift of the can'ts. You know, I'm sure you've heard this, like when you tell yourself you can't have, so. , you are giving the ownership of that away. You are taking the control away from yourself, and people hate that.

It's very uncomfortable, right? I don't say I can't drink. I can drink if I want to. I just choose not to. I don't drink just like I don't smoke, just like I don't skydive. It's a personal choice. Right. But that's a big piece of it. When people put this can't, I can't eat that candy, I'm on a diet. Right. Those are the people that are gonna dive headfirst into the candy.

Mm-hmm. . So it's a huge mindset shift.

Bryan McAnulty: Yeah. I, I think that's definitely important. So I'm curious, like, what would you say is a positive habit? We, we've talked about a negative habit. What's like a positive habit that, that you formed, that you felt was really important for. .

Erica Rooney: I think one that was really important for me after, especially after having kids, was.

reading, like I have always been a huge reader, but after you have kids and they run you ragged all day, , and then they get older and they wanna stay up later than you do. Like I literally was not reading, but I was still buying books left and right, you know. So one of the things that I have implemented in my life is when I wake up and I'm drinking my first water of the day, I sit down and I read for the first 20 or 30 minutes, and that is the very first thing that I do.

My kids are not awake. The house is quiet. It is my time and I am making way through all of the books that I've wanted to read, you know, but over the last, I don't know, five or six years when I've had kids, it's just gone downhill. And I've let that slip off, you know? So that's something that I've recently implemented that has really been adding to my life.

Bryan McAnulty: Cool. And , would you say like when you're, when you're thinking about this for yourself of like something you wanna accomplish or something you wanna form as a habit? For me at least, like, I like to separate things into like, well, these are things I would wanna do every day, every week, at least once a month.

Is it similar for you or is it more so just like, what's something that I can focus every day? Like how, how would you get started on it? If you decide, this is a habit I want to do, would you try to do it every day right away? How would that.

Erica Rooney: I think it depends on the habit, right? I think for the most part, like let's say waking up early, if you're not a morning person, you know, you don't need, you could sleep in on the weekends.

It's okay, you know, if you miss a day, it's not about perfection, right? It's about progress, and I think that's where a lot of people get delayed when it comes to building healthy habits and changing their lifestyle as they think like, well, I fell off, like I can't ever do it again. You know? . So I really try to have people shoot for that 80 20 rule, right?

So if you can get it done 80% of the time, it's okay. You know, it would not, if you wanna be a runner, be a runner, but it's not healthy for you to run every day. You will blow your knees out over time, right. If you want to. Be a healthy, you know, person eating lettuce all the time, whatever. Sure. Go eat lettuce.

But like you can have that pound cake too at the end of the day. I'm like you Brian, though. I have a habit tracker. I love checking things off every day, but I am a big believer in not letting yourself get caught up in the obsession of perfectionism. Yeah. You know, and I think that's a really hard challenge is people, when they struggle one day or two days and it throws off their whole week, like they just give it up and they say, well, screw it.

I can't do it anymore. Like, I don't let myself get dis discouraged by that.

Bryan McAnulty: Yeah. I, I think that's an important point because like, the way I look at it is say like, you know, like life happens. There's, there's things that are going to come up. It's going to be hard to be perfect in it. It, it's not really that important.

The important part is the consistency is like improving or or staying where you want it over time in general.

Erica Rooney: Absolutely. I always tell people like, if you walk outside and you find out that you have a flat tire, do you just say, dang it, and slash the other three, no, you do not like you. Just, that'd be a lot of wasted money, you know?

Yeah. It sucks. Yes, you, it throws you off. You gotta take your car and still can't use it, but you're not gonna go slash all three of your tires.

Bryan McAnulty: Yeah. Yeah. So even, even further than that, like to, to what you're saying, like it would be like saying like, I'm gonna slash my tires and now I have to quit my job.

I can't go to work anymore. Can't

Erica Rooney: get to work anymore, can't do anything. You know, it's all downhill from here, you know, so that's one big thing that I encourage people is like, especially like we're talking right now, it's right around the holidays. Like you enjoyed yourself on Thanksgiving. Don't, you know, go, oh, woe is me.

Like everything is done until the holiday season is over. You know, because I'm going to holiday parties and I got all this stuff going on. It's about finding that balance, you know, and living in that 80 20 world.

Bryan McAnulty: Yeah. So one of the hardest things I think about having a new habit in your, your daily life is this consistency.

How long would you say it takes for our brain to learn a new habit and. What's a, a good way to help somebody find a motivation to kind of implement it even though the results may not be, I. .

Erica Rooney: So for me personally, and I'm not a neuroscientist, I know there's a lot of studies out there on how long a habit takes to form and everybody says 30 days.

I truly think it takes a little longer than that because I think people, for it to really stick, they need to start reaping those benefits and seeing those benefits. Mm-hmm. and if you're living in this 80 20 world, I personally don't think those benefits necessarily. after 30 days necessarily. Right. Some of them, you may see those positive changes right away and be all in, but some of the harder things when you're doing the work and it's not so pleasant.

I, I personally think it takes a little bit longer than 30 days, like maybe six to eight weeks. Right.

Bryan McAnulty: Yeah. Yeah. That's a great point. I think like, because in business too, like everyone watching this, hopefully you're thinking of like what's a positive habit you could have as an entrepreneur. and yeah.

When it comes to business, the, the length of the time that you have to be consistent is generally gonna be longer than just what it takes for you to form the habit. Because like, you gave an example of the podcast before, so you can't say, I'm gonna do a podcast, I'm gonna do an an episode a week, and then I'm gonna stop after two months.

You know, you should try at least a year before you, maybe it's gonna take that long before you start seeing results.

Erica Rooney: Absolutely. And, and putting in the work. Right? And I think when it comes to business and being an entrepreneur, it's not just about the habits per se, but it is about your daily systems, right?

Where you sit down and you're, and I guess same thing, habits, right? This is what I do on Mondays for my business. I sit down and I map out my content for the week. On Tuesday is my creative time. That's where I block out four hours to really focus on. X, you know, and then on Fridays, that's when I dive in and I respond to everybody.

Whatever your system is, you really have to have that nailed down to a T to be successful and see kind of the growth and the return that you want. Cuz otherwise you suffer from what I call is ping pong brain, where you're just like all over the place. So forming the habit of having a system and sticking with the system is.

Bryan McAnulty: Yeah. Yeah. I think that's super important because it's really easy to become busy and, and do things all day long and, and tell everyone, well, I'm super busy with my work, whatever it is. But if you sit down and dissect that, or you're actually working towards your goal of whatever that is, like if you want to go and, and launch this new online course, did you actually do something that would make progress to that every single day, or were you just answering other people's emails or something like that and not actually making progress?

Yeah. I think a good example of like a habit for that is like setting aside a small amount of time per day to work on what is that? .

Erica Rooney: Absolutely. And I think it's important to note that like when you were an entrepreneur and you were in business, the work is never done, right? There is always something more to do.

There's no nine to five, you're not closing your laptop up and walking away. Like there's always more to do. And one of the habits that I think you need to be successful entrepreneur is being able to turn it off at some point at the end of the day, whatever that point is for you, and resting and taking that mental break so that you don't lead to burnout.

Bryan McAnulty: Yeah, definitely. What, what I like to do, I think like something that was a, a big eye-opener for me early on was at first I kind of thought like, you know what? I can respond to an email, I can respond to a customer right away because I'm an entrepreneur. So like I can get back to them immediately, even if it's at night.

If I'm still working at night, I can get back to them. They'll appreciate that. But the reality is that was such a distraction from working on what I actually needed to do. . And so by simply saying like, okay, it's, it's 6:00 PM I'm done, the emails for the day, and then being able to have that time if, because personally I liked working later in the evening, and so being able to then have that time to know I don't have to do an email now I can focus on the more creative things in my business was super powerful.

Erica Rooney: Yeah. At the end of the day, that's gonna give. a bigger impact and a bigger return on investment. Right. Than, than having that instantaneous response anyways. Exactly.

Bryan McAnulty: So one thing we saw you talking about in a podcast episode, I think we kind of touched on it already, is the idea of habit stacking. Is that what you were kind of talking about?

Of like taking something maybe you don't wanna do or, and combine it with a habit you do wanna do, can, can you go into that a little bit? .

Erica Rooney: Yeah. So I love the idea of habit stacking, right? Because it's kind of this buildup, this one thing leads to another, leads to another, and yeah, I did talk a little bit about that in the beginning, but we'll talk a, you know, I'll relay it to my life, right?

So one of my good habits is I go to bed at a decent hour every night. I go to bed at nine o'clock. I don't bring my phone with me, right? Those are two habits that I put together. The first one is actually getting my button. By a decent hour, and the second one was not flipping through TikTok until the end of time, because you absolutely can fall down the TikTok rabbit hole and never come out.

Right? So I had to change that habit. So the first habit was getting to bed at a decent time, then it was not bringing my phone with me, right? So then I started getting a good night's sleep. So that next habit, that layered on top was waking up early, taking the time. Now you just heard, I added in that habit of reading.

Now that I'm reading and I'm accomplishing that and I'm feeling good and I've got my routine, then I start doing the working out right. Then I started getting really tight cuz I was working out so much. So I was like, I've gotta start incorporating stretching. So then I started stretching, which also benefited my workouts and all of those things just build right then because I was feeling so good from the working out, I was like, I really want to eat a lot healthier, right?

And then I want my kids to eat healthier so that they see all of this as well. So my habit stacking also included habit stacking for my family and how that kind of went down. And now my. eat the way I eat. You know, they eat whole foods, healthy foods, things like that. They go to bed at a decent time. We read books together.

But it's all building those incremental little things on top of each other that just start to roll into a big routine. Right. And that's what makes it that, you know, mindless habit to where it's not so much work for me to do all of these things anymore because it just happens. It just goes into play.

Yeah. Which I think is so key for like true lasting. .

Bryan McAnulty: Yeah. Yeah. I like that. And I, I think if someone's listening to this and feeling intimidated or, or, or overwhelmed of, of all of that , then I, I would suggest that like the, the goal and like, and Erica, like what you've reached as you said, like you feel better now doing all of that to, to say, I'm gonna start, I'm gonna do all of those things immediately.

And to hear them listed out may sound like, okay, well that's too many habits. I, I don't even know if I want that. And if you, if you don't, that's fine. . If you start doing those things, eventually you feel better by doing that. We all, we all wanna feel better. That's the goal, right? So even though though it may feel intimidating, if you can stack it on like that, you'll, you'll end up with the same end result that you're after of feeling better.

Erica Rooney: So, and I would say if you feel intimidated that that's totally normal. I do a lot. I know , but everybody can do something right. And that's the point of it is doing something. That works with your life and your schedule. You don't need to be Eric Rooney. That's okay. .

Bryan McAnulty: Cool. So any other tips or something maybe like mistakes people make when they're trying to start a new habit?

Or what if, what would you say to somebody who says, like, like, this all sounds great, but I really just don't have time to, to add a new habit to my life? Or, or something like this.

Erica Rooney: Number one, for anybody who says they don't have time, I want them to pull out their phone and I want them to go to look in that one app or section of their phone.

That tells you how much time you spend on social media a day, because you absolutely have time to do one small thing, right? It can be 10 minutes of meditating. You don't have to get sweaty for it. It can be stretching. It could be the habit of just telling your loved one, thank you for whatever you did, right?

And inviting more gratitude into your life. It doesn't have to be some big thing, and that is probably one of the biggest pieces of advice. I would say the biggest mistake I see with people is going all in, right? And we've got January 1st coming right up around the corner. So we are going to see this in full effect of people who are like, I'm gonna eat right, I'm gonna run marathons, I'm gonna be super healthy, exercise 90 minutes, eat nothing but.

Salads all day. And I will tell you, I am guilty of setting goals like that sometimes for myself, where I was like, all right, I'm gonna do this and this and this. And then, you know, I usually have a coming to Jesus with myself. And I realize none of that's actually going to happen. But don't go all in, right?

We cannot do it all, all the time. And you're not gonna, it's not sustain. So take the bite size chunks. Get yourself a habit tracker, right? There's a bajillion out there. Since you can't use Brian's anymore, , and just do the small things right, reap the rewards of those small benefits, start building them in slowly.

Do not try to do them all at once.

Bryan McAnulty: Awesome. Yeah, that's great advice. And I think definitely about as far as the, the not having time looking at the time that you spend on your phone, even if you feel you don't spend time on your phone, you probably spend a lot more than you think. and for myself recently, actually I, I recently got apple Watch and I always thought, you know, these are so, so silly, so stupid.

I don't want more notifications. I, I'm the kind of person I enjoy like mechanical watches and all that. I thought, I don't want an Apple watch. But I noticed a lot of other boundaries and entrepreneurs had one. And I was trying to to think like, well, why, why do they have them? And I asked some people, and they were telling me, well, this lets me get away from my phone.

And so that's why I ended up getting it to basically ignore my phone. I basically use the watch as my phone now, and this way I don't get sucked into accidentally checking social media for whatever reason and then scrolling for 15 minutes or whatever. So definitely I think even, even myself thinking that I don't spend too much time on my phone I think, I feel like that's made a big difference.

I feel like there was more time than I expected.

Erica Rooney: Yeah. And I would say too, change your mindset, right? Like, it's not that you don't have the time, it's that you don't make the time. Mm. And that is a very tough love approach to it. But everybody has the same 24 hours in the day, right? And we are, everybody is busy.

It is not. I'm not trying to say I'm busier than anybody else because it's not a competition. Like that drives me crazy when people try to one up you with I, well I'm busier than you cuz I have three kids and I have a dog, or whatever the situation is. We're all busy. But if you feel like you don't have the time, I challenge you to say that it's not a priority.

I'm not making the time and that can be okay. Right? Like you don't have to say yes to everything. It is not a competition, but acknowledge. , don't make an excuse. Acknowledge that you're the one that gets to control your time and you're making that decision.

Bryan McAnulty: Yeah, I, I really like that and I completely agree.

It's, it's easy to fall into making an excuse for something, but if you find yourself doing that, I would challenge you to think about the reason behind that is probably that you're uncomfortable with something and there might be some spot in your time that it's probably, if you're thinking now, well, I would want to do this, but you have an excuse for it.

then there's probably something you can get rid of or change that you can find a way to fit that in. Rather than making the excuse, even though it's not easy. Of course.

Erica Rooney: Hundred percent. If I gave you a really crappy job to do, Brian, and you were like, Erica, I don't have the time for that. It's probably true, but I, what if I came back and I was like, Brian, what if I give you a thousand bucks to.

you might be like, Hmm, maybe I do have the time. Right. So it's like you do have the time. It's just not a priority.

Bryan McAnulty: Yeah. Yeah. You gotta figure out what's, what is that's actually important to you. All right. That's awesome. I think I've got one more question for you on the show. We'd like to have all of our guests ask a question to the audience.

So if you could ask our audience anything anything you're curious about, anything you want them to think about, what would that. .

Erica Rooney: Yeah. So. What I believe in is sticky floors, and I'll tell you, sticky floors are those pesky, limiting beliefs like imposter syndrome, perfectionism, toxic behaviors, toxic habits that keep you from busting through the glass ceiling.

They keep you from being the entrepreneur you wanna be. They keep you from starting, right? So I would challenge the audience to. , take a minute and feel that uncomfortable sticky floor because we all have them and identify what is that sticky floor of mine and what is the step that I need to take to start to clean up that sticky floor so that I can bust through the glass ceiling?

Bryan McAnulty: Awesome. Yeah, that's a great thing to think about. All right. Yeah. Well, Erica, thanks so much for coming on the show. Before we get going, where else can people find you?

Erica Rooney: You can find me on LinkedIn. I am extremely responsive on LinkedIn, so just Erica Rooney, chief People Officer. You'll see me on there. I think there's only two Erica Rooney out there, so you can't miss me.

LinkedIn, I'm on Facebook and Instagram under from now to next, and I do have a TikTok. I'm not super active there, but absolutely hit me up on LinkedIn. I love to connect with people.

Bryan McAnulty: Cool. All right. Thanks so much, Erica. Thank you. If you enjoyed this interview and won the chance to ask questions to our guests live.

Tune in on Tuesdays when new episodes premiere on the Heights Platform Facebook page. To learn more about the show and get notified when new episodes release, check out The Creator's Adventure dot com. Until then, keep learning and I'll see you in the next episode.