Elevate with Grace
Elevate with Grace: Cultivating Success in the New World of Work
Elevate with Grace is back in 2025 after a 3 year break with our career and personal development podcast incorporating a mix of inspirational storytelling, expert insights, and actionable advice. It’s designed for ambitious women looking for ideas to help them thrive at work and life.
The Elevate with Grace podcast blends elements of:
1. Career Growth & Mentorship: Navigating the evolving workplace.
2. Mindset & Smart Risk-Taking: Cultivating confidence, resilience and decision making.
3. Future-Led Learning: Building adaptive skills for long-term success.
4. Leading in the New World of Work: Engaging and supporting others.
Elevate with Grace
S1, Ep2: Why we've got to talk about what might be holding us back
Music created by Claire's daughter Hannah
Welcome to the Elevate with Grace podcast, for people who are short on time and long to take steps, to create success on their own terms. At school, university and in our early careers, we work hard and we approach those challenges with courage, ambition, and passion. We have lots of hope and energy for creating lifelong success on our own terms and then something happens and we head into our thirties and beyond. We start holding ourselves back and put limits on ourselves and what we can do. We put our heads down into work tasks more, and outwardly, promote ourselves less. Fear and worries about standing out from the crowd start to kick in. There is a lot of research that supports the phenomenon that women become less inclined to take risks, career leaps, and maintain financial independence as they move into their thirties and beyond. This is what we want to explore with you on our Elevate with Grace podcast. We will be curating and sharing the best ideas, insights, and knowledge on the topics of smart risk-taking cultivating career success and creating financial freedom. At the end of each podcast we want to leave you feeling inspired and pumped up to take action on some bite steps for you to slot seamlessly into your life each week that will help you propel you forward and reinvigorate your path to success as you've defined it.
Miranda (2):A huge hello to everyone listening. I am your cohost Miranda. And with me is the vibrant and vivacious Claire. In this session, we are going to start exploring what is holding you back from achieving success on your own terms. This is a complex discussion so we are just going to make a start on this. We are not dishing out the, get out of your own way mantra. Instead, we will dig into some of the stories you might be telling yourself, share some context around potentially subconscious gender norms, fears personal habits and the boundaries you probably don't have set up just yet. As always at the end of this session, there'll be actionable steps to breaking down some of the barriers holding you back. So in today's Elevate pod, we're going to be talking about being aware of the things blocking your path and why understanding them can lead to more success on your terms, negative self talk both unconscious and conscious. Gender bias, and the princess effect, the social and economic constraints of being a woman in Australia, fear of failure and wrap up with our weekly Elevate challenge. But before we dive into it, let's do a quick recap of last week's pod and the weekly Elevate challenge we set for ourselves.
Claire:Yeah so last week in our very first podcast, we talked about how the idea for this podcast came about, we chatted about about purpose and our manifesto. And we also spoke briefly about the five elements of our Elevate with Grace model that work together as a virtuous cycle to get you moving on the steps you want to take each day to achieve success on your terms. If you didn't catch our first pod last week, we encourage you to take a listen. It's only about 15 minutes and you'll get a real feel for what it's all about. The Elevate challenge from last week, was to take 10 minutes for ourselves at the beginning or end of our day, and write down the things that we have loved doing that day that have given us the energy and the things that we do during the day that we loathe and really deplete our energy levels. So for me, I've found my 10 minutes first thing in the morning when I woke up, I used it as a way to reach for my notebook and pencil first, instead of for my phone where I inevitably fall down the rabbit hole of news feeds and social media posts. This is not a good habit to be in and I've slipped back into it lately so that was a good way to swap one bad habit for a good one. I found it good to do in the morning as well, because one, the house is a lot quieter. And two, I could reflect on the day that I'd had the day before and also helped me think about my mindset for the day ahead. So one of the biggest it gave me energy over the last week I noticed was that I had set up some virtual networking meetings about how I want to get more involved in working with organizations and teams that support financially vulnerable women in Australia. And I learned a heap of great Intel and met some seriously awesome people and had some conversations that were outside of what I would normally be talking to anyone about. So that was really interesting and fabulous. In terms of what drains my energy, it was definitely too much time plugged into digital devices. I've really gone down rabbit holes into my inbox, social media, newsfeeds, random apps. I really need to put some boundaries around myself in terms of creating bigger slabs of the day, where I'm putting devices away and doing other stuff. How about you? What did you notice this week?
Miranda (2):I noticed I was actually better at tackling this first thing in the morning. I think you wake up with a much more positive mindset potentially than when you go to sleep. I think reflecting on the day, things just weren't as hard as maybe they were in the moment. In terms of hard, for me it was just not getting everything done that I felt I needed to do. I think just wanting to constantly do more, and really needing to dial that back and do a lot of work in that space because I think that you just get on the treadmill, it doesn't serve you. I just need to focus on lesser things and get them done really well. So that was something that I found like there was always this, oh, I should do more, or I need to fit more in and I want to stop doing that In terms of loves, really prioritized bike riding again and also working on this project Elevate with Grace and those two things just bring me so much joy. So that was was definitely, happy vibes first thing in the morning.
Claire:Totally. The fun-ness of working on this, the scariness, but the fun-ness too. Actually a bit similar to what you said about not having enough time to do all the tasks, I did notice as well through this activity that I can really be my own worst critic too, about watching my self-talk on how much I'm achieving. I did. I really achieve that much yesterday. I must achieve more today. Achieve, do. And it's silly, right? We just spoke about you with bike riding, we've done some good stuff like with projects that we're interested in and yet we're still not enough. Not enough.
Miranda (2):Self-doubt is huge. That's why our first pillar dives straight into this, what could be holding you back. I feel like it's helping our listeners to try to move forward without a figurative arm behind your back. Constantly self doubting yourself and undermining your own efforts then it's going to really be a struggle. So like most things, if you can first identify that you're doing it you can put in place tricks and tips to solve these things and get a huge step closer to thinking and achieving bigger. And I think just journaling for one week Claire, you and I have both seen that that self-talk, or that need to do more as potentially a barrier that's going to hold us back from achieving bigger things. So work together to make sure that we don't do that. In terms of self talk, I think there is so much internal dialogue about how other people are going to receive our message concerned, that they will somehow think differently about you. So often we go straight into what's the worst that they could be thinking. What's the worst that could happen and forget to balance this out with what's the best that could happen. To all the women out there. It's not just you. Biologically, we are all wired to assess risk, but as females, as social likability and the ability to relate has been our survival for millennia. However, we now live in a world where our brain, this brain response is actually getting in the way of us achieving great things. My first tip here is to get rid of as much negative self-talk and the insidious analysis of the day and the conversations that you're having as possible. You find yourself driving home and you starting to over analyze everything that you said, or did least that's how negative talk used to show up for me. I work mostly in a female environment. And I see this so frequently, women will call to apologize for an offhanded comment that I chuckled about with them in the moment. Honestly, I'm not that good an actress, it was funny. Others will have built up conversations to such a degree that you need to calm them down to understand what's really set them into this spiral. And more often than not, it's negative self-talk as opposed to anything that's really happened. If you haven't suffered from this please be empathetic to those who have, and for those that do the best course of action is to stop the negative self-talk. I think it's really about practicing focus on the positive learnings from that day. Awareness that it's completely normal but it's not serving you and enjoy look forward to enjoying the mental head space that is free when you don't live in this negative talk. If you have a hard time switching off the negative talk, try and jump in early, try to catch yourself, overthinking something and stop your brain. Listen to a podcast or an audio book. If you're driving, focus on learning something new when you get home, or having a no work friend conversation. Or pick up the Elevate with Grace weekly challenge and start solving the big picture challenges that we are going to work together to make your life stand out. For more ideas we've consolidated the best of Headspace, Very Well Mind and Forbes for some structured help when you find yourself spiraling into that negative self-talk.
Claire:A second interesting area for us to explore on what could be holding us back is there is a plethora of data out there that shows that gender biases and the impact that it has on what girls and women choose to do with their lives is a real phenomenon that we need to be aware of. A good example I found of this is a study that was done back in 2016 by a family life professor, Sarah Coyne, who assessed how 200 preschoolers interacted with Disney princess culture. Interaction was defined as watching princess movies and playing with the toys, dolls and other princess paraphernalia. The study didn't discovered that interactions with the Disney princess culture resulted in more female gender stereotypical behavior, such as physical weakness, affection and submissiveness among both boys and girls. What Coyne concluded was that female gender stereotypical behaviors, while not bad in and of themselves can be harmful to girls when it results in them avoiding certain experiences. Such as an interest in maths and science or getting dirty, simply because those endeavors aren't seen as feminine or they feel too hard to the girls to be able to do them. What do you reckon Miranda, do you think this is something that we need to be aware of and think about, these gender biases?
Miranda (2):Having spent a significant portion of my career in kids products. I concur that previously we have witnessed this princess effect and certainly toys playing into that. Over the last 10 years in entertainment, I've definitely loved seeing the move to women's saving the day or saving each other. So many STEM based toys. I hope that girls will one day believe they can do anything so it's not just a wonderful novelty to meet,"kick butt" lady who's a mechanical engineer and a semi-pro cyclist. Progress is being made. But what about the women of today? The real challenge and the key role models that you need now are the ones that show up as women leaders who have found that balance of getting the work done, being nice enough and knowing their power. We need to be aware that some of these behaviors we have learned almost subconsciously through those early play patterns are just not serving us anymore and seek out inspiration on how to act differently. We are not women who want to make those around us lives as easy as possible. We are women who want to succeed on our own terms. Behaviors that can be holding you back. Pleasing personalities. Everyone loves you, after all, you're doing half the work you're saying yes too often. You're probably bringing in treats to share with your coworkers, and you organize the parties. You are exhausted and most likely working way too many hours while your coworkers are getting handed that big project because you freed up their time. Women seeking rescue. They're leaning on male leaders like dads, particularly when getting something wrong and it might serve as a get out of jail free card in the moment, but you're giving up your power and when time comes for promotion, your resilience, your problem solving skills, and your ability to be calm in a storm will be questioned. Taking control of your destiny. You do not need to wait for somebody else to decide you're worthy of that Tiara or that promotion, that payday, holding out to invest in a property As we know, the reality of life is very different, sometimes ugly, but also an empowering journey of self discovery when you own your power. Don't wait for somebody to recognize you in a modest way and be sure your accomplishments are heard by the people that matter. And the best for last perfectionism. Yep. We learned that one in these princess play tales too. It's not a badge of honor being perfect is getting in the way. If you occasionally or more frequently dabble in one or more of the above, you can make some important changes today. Together let's seek another way to be that woman that others can look up to, admire how you gracefully balanced kindness with boundaries and not taking on other's work. How you respect your time and that of others, how you assert yourself in meetings, have a voice and take on those big projects and lead others to find their own power and success.
Claire:A couple of things that was jumping into my mind those last couple of bits was I'm so hell bent on women not saying sorry where there's no sorry requires. So there's the, my no sorries line. And then the disease to please. The disease to please.
Miranda (2):I'm trying so hard not to bring sorry into my language anymore. So thank you. That's definitely something that I was guilty of.
Claire:So, a fair bit of stuff for us to be mindful of already. The next topic that we wanted people to have a think about is the social and economic challenges that Australian women face into, and we've faced into them for a while. And in fact, we're still facing into them a lot today, particularly in a COVID pandemic world. It's been a topic of discussion of late. In my view, one of the most powerful books on the subject of what's holding Australian women back from achieving success on their own terms, is Wife Drought by Annabel Crabb. While the statistics Crabb draws on are from the 2011 census. I believe a lot of the insights in the book are equally applicable in 2021. Crabb calls out in the book that 76% of working full-time Australian dads have a wife. Where a wife is defined as a partner at home who either works part time or not at all. Whereas only 15% of full-time working Australian mums have the definition of that wife support at home. This means that Australian men are five times more likely to have a wife and the economic advantage of that is actually so significant it's effectively anti-competitive for Australian women, because it leads to a financial gap for women in Australia that has significant adverse implications for them as they head into their fifties and beyond. The book talks about some really interesting and frankly, quite confronting societal norms and constructs that are unique for Australia relative to other developed countries around the globe. In Australia we don't really expect men to want to work differently after having children, but we do expect women to want to. And whether we want to or not, we tend to get into this habit of doing that expectation. And so at its core, what this means for many Australian women is that we're juggling two full-time jobs. The majority of the full-time load on the home front plus a full-time working paid job and what it can cause is people to opt out or do less for themselves because of having to juggle all of that load. As I mentioned, there's a lot of commentary circling at the moment about the impact that COVID is now having on many women globally, contemplating downsizing their careers, or even opting out of the workforce altogether. And in Australia, some key metrics have gone back for us in the last 12 months. We've dropped to something like number 99 on the gender equity index, where I believe New Zealand is up at something like number four as a comparison. And with the 31st of August, each year, marking gender pay gap day, the gender pay gap has taken a turn for the worst this year in Australia relative to the prior years. So yeah, something to be really conscious of, I think, is the social economic landscape that we have as a hurdle to mindfully address when we're wanting to redefine success for ourselves. Have you read the book, Miranda?
Miranda (2):I have, I absolutely devoured this book too. There was so many truths in it that women just take for granted as their lot in life. Many aha moments. Of course I just assumed that was what I had to do. Frustrated, but like the pleasing personality earlier taking on extra load without too much pushback, just definitely feels like something that women are doing. And while many listeners might not be mothers. This is still a great book to read and preemptively seek to create rules and boundaries in your life before bringing a child into it. I felt that pressure to have reached a peak in my work career before attempting to take a family on and then needing to take my foot off the pedal for a couple of years. But I was so lucky to have some great role models towards my late twenties early thirties that showed me that actually you just keep going. Now I'm here and I actually have a child, I'm working hard to follow the great role models in my life. Claire, you included and also Alison who I worked with and travelled with while she grew her family. These role models continue to grow their careers and their families. And if you can also relate to this pressure to succeed before you create your progeny, you are not alone. Research shows this isn't just in my head many women seem to make the decision between career and family subconsciously long before they even get married. And I think this really sees them pull back from taking on those promotions, taking on those career choices and just working hard and staying with the status quo position. I believe this preconception it's starting to change slowly and when you see it in your organization, I think you believe it's possible for you too. So both our GM and our GAD were promoted into these roles while pregnant, which was amazing to me. I didn't think that was possible. Learning about the possibilities from the likes of Prue Gilbert from the Australian company, The Grace Papers, or by inspirational leaders like Sheryl Sandberg in her book Lean In, help us to start believing that it's possible to do both. These long held beliefs are hard to change. Your mother possibly stayed at home or worked part time for part of your childhood and having seen many women drop out of the workforce or hanging around in the same role for many years, the belief becomes a fact. Perhaps think about the last couple of decisions that you, our listeners have made and if you consciously or subconsciously factored in a future family or the weight of your current family needs on the decisions that you've made or the promotion that you didn't go for, then you're absolutely not alone. But then think about what if you did take that next promotion then that role you love. How could you negotiate your work with your husband? How could you set a life up for this to happen through extra childcare, through extra support at home. And it's been really enlightening to hear people like Emma Isaacs, actually talk about how more women need to talk about the help that they get to achieve this success. Uh, we are pleased to share that there is so many tools available as this is such a huge barrier. And I know we are going to explore this further.
Claire:Yeah. Thanks Miranda. I need to check out Pru Gilbert and The Grace Papers. I haven't seen any of her stuff, so I will check the show notes and check it out as well. As you said, I think the concepts that are in the Wife Drought, you don't have to be a woman with children. I think there's so many concepts around the economic and social construct of Australia for gender roles that you can get out of that book and some, yeah it's quite broad reaching in that perspective. And I think also Annabel Crabb's new series Ms Represented, about the challenges of Australian women in politics. you know, that's another good resource as well for understanding some of that social and economic backdrop that we have here in Australia. Okay. So, bear with us one last big, hairy, scary theme that we're going to cover today and is one of my favorites and long held battles. The fear of failing. This can be one that really stops us from having the life that we really want for ourselves. The fear of failing. And also I think our ability to dust ourselves off and move forward really quickly when we do fail, which you mentioned Emma Isaacs she does talk about that in her book, Winging It, about this ability to dust herself off really quickly. That's not to say you don't feel it, you do feel it and you feel it quickly. And then you dust yourself off and move on. The fear of failing also links back with the gender norms and expectations stuff we talked about earlier, because women are generally socialized from a young age to not take risks, the way that boys are encouraged to do. And so over time, this can get ingrained in our female psyche and that we should stay nice and princess like and stay out of trouble and generally avoid doing anything that might cause us to fall on our face. There is a podcast I really enjoy dipping into from time to time on embracing failure. It's called How To Fail with Elizabeth Day. Which she followed up with a book actually called How To Fail fancy that. The How To Fail podcast is up to about 11 seasons, I believe. And the best thing I can recommend is to dip in and have a scroll through the episodes and pick someone that you recognize the name of one of her guests speakers, or, just the topics that they might be covering. Every time I've done that, I've never been disappointed by the conversation. And it really does feel a little bit like wrapping yourself in a warm blanket. It's just really comforting and it's energizing at the same time. It's just listening to how people have faced into their challenges of fear. How they've uncovered things about themselves and it just makes you feel quite normal actually. Albeit that, a lot of them are celebrities and have great lives, but I think the normality of fearing failure is there for all of us, right? So, as a recommendation of a particular episode, I recently liked episode one of season 10. I think it was with Jameela Jamil. So she's a female actor. I think she starred in The Good Place, but she's also well known for her activism. And she talks to Elizabeth about failing to be a good girl, as in not meaning that very narrow expectation of what a female celebrity should do and act and be like. And she also talks about her failure to be kind to her body and her failure to get a handle on her finances. So yeah, I thought it was really good episode.
Miranda (2):I couldn't agree more Claire, the fear of failure is probably the first thing that I, and many think about when you think about what's holding you back. Don't want to fail. I haven't checked out Elizabeth Day and I do look forward to checking her out. I am a huge Brene B rown fan, and her work on vulnerability, shame and failure are legendary. If you haven't, I would start with a Ted talks or also a podcast Unlocking Us and several books on this topic. And I would suggest Daring Greatly. I for one have absolutely no desire to fail. But I acknowledged that, that shouldn't stand in the way from achieving what I need to achieve or what I want to achieve. Which is why, I guess one of key pillars is taking smart risks. So the antithesis of this idea of failure is to really lean into that smart risk taking. So we look forward to discussing that with you a lot more. A Brene quote that I found inspiring. I want to be in the arena. I want to be brave with my life. And when we make the choices to dare greatly we sign up to get our asses kicked. We can choose courage or we can choose comfort, but we can't have both, not at the same time. So true and so powerful. And I want to be in the arena. As promised listeners. This is a huge and complex area. What is holding us back? And we have covered a lot, lot, lot in this session. Negative self-talk, gender bias, the princess learned gender behaviors, pleasing allowing us to be rescued, not taking control and perfectionism, the challenges of motherhood even before we were married. And the fear of failure. Not to mention the social and economic effects of being a female in Australia. To match such a huge topic. I have a huge challenge. Recognize at least one of these behaviors in yourself, you can have more, but at least one and then treat our group like an AA meeting. Share what the biggest thing is holding you back and booking your weekly key behavior challenges to make your lasting change.
Claire:Ooohhh I've got a date with my own devils this week. Is that right? Miranda? Holding myself back devils, that should be fun. It will be hard to pick one, I think, but challenge accepted and I'll give it a red hot go and I'll pick one. I'm sure there's more than one. So I think that's really helpful because in next week's episode, we're going to be talking about why getting clear on your big picture and your goals is an important step in creating a life of success as you define it. We're going to be talking about how to do little steps to get you thinking about your goals and aspirations, not doing some, blue sky thinking for days on end or anything like that, just in quick actions together to get us going. So I think coming into that with a feeling of one of the big things that might be holding you back will really help us all to be a little bit bolder and braver about the dreams and aspirations that we start setting for ourselves in the next year or so to come. We've put all the curated content we've mentioned today in the pod episode notes. So you can check them out over the next week and dip into some of the stuff that resonates with you and inspires you to take some more actions for your own success journey. But we are well at a time today, Miranda, so we're going to have to love you and leave you. And a very quick reminder to please subscribe to this podcast. Tell your friends about the podcast. Please check out at elevate with grace Insta account for inspirations on actions to take. And also at any time, send us an email elevatewithgrace@gmail.com. We would love to hear about how we can best support you in being your accountability buddy, for getting our weekly elevate challenges done. So let us know. Can't wait to see you and chat again next week. Thanks so much for listening everyone.
Miranda:Thanks Claire. Bye. Thanks everyone.