Stop Ghosting Your Own Life

What if you were as reliable to yourself as you are to your boss, your kids, or your community? Imagine a world where the promises you make in private—to rest, to move, or to create—carried the same weight as a deadline on your calendar. In this episode, Erica Rooney explores "self-ghosting," where ambitious women break promises to themselves while showing up flawlessly for everyone else, and shares how to move from "good vibes" to "clean agreements" to rebuild self-trust and stop the cycle of burnout. 

Inside the Episode

• The Fictional Woman Fallacy: Why we fail by making plans for a version of ourselves that has zero kids, infinite sleep, and no job. 
• Defining Clean Agreements: The four-part framework—When, Where, How Long, and Done—that turns a vague goal into a kept promise. 
• The $20 Rule: Why doing the "minimum" is more valuable than doing nothing when you can't give 100%. 
• The "Fix It Fast" Protocol: How to stop the "shame monologue" and recover immediately after a missed commitment without "starting over." 

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Transcript

​[00:00:00] 

Erica Rooney: Welcome to the Glass Ceilings and Sticky Floor Podcast. The podcast where we get real about the challenges that women face in work, life and leadership. I'm your host, Erica Rooney, HR executive, keynote speaker and executive coach, and I'm on a mission to get more women into positions of power and keep them there.

Erica Rooney: This is the space where we call it the paradoxes, being told to lean in, but not too far to speak up, but not too loudly. Be ambitious, but not too ambitious. Does that sound familiar? Yeah. We're over all that here. We break down the sticky floors that keep us stuck from imposter syndrome and perfectionism to burnout and fear, and give you real strategies to shatter those glass ceilings once and for all.

Erica Rooney: So if you're ready to rewrite the rules, own your power, and take your career and life to the next level, you're in the right place. All right ladies, quick question before we even kick it [00:01:00] off today. I wanna know how many of you are simply phenomenal at showing up for everyone else in your life. I'm talking your in-laws, your partner, your kids, your colleagues, your friends, your neighbors, your community, your church, everyone but you are absolute trash at showing up for yourself.

Erica Rooney: This is just a quick little vibe check here, right? You keep the meetings moving, you remember the birthdays, you hit the deadlines, you answer texts like, you are so good. You're reliable and trusted and capable, but yet all those promises that you make to yourself, like, I'm gonna work out tomorrow, or I'm gonna write 15 minutes in my journal every day or maybe that boundary that you were like, yes, no more emails after 6:00 PM and you swore you'd hold that boundary and the thing that you said that mattered. Ghosted. Now listen, if that hit a little close to home, if it stung a little bit. Hello. This episode is for you [00:02:00] because before you start spiraling, like, just bear with me, right?

Erica Rooney: This isn't an episode where I'm gonna tell you to do more or try harder or hustle harder. This is not a, just set your alarm 15 minutes earlier and have your green celery juice kind of situation. This is about why you keep disappearing on yourself, and it's also about how do you stop without setting yourself up for failure again and again.

Erica Rooney: So here's how this episode was born. I was supposed to deliver and run a live training on this exact topic, and the morning of this topic, y'all, North Carolina had an ice storm. The kids school closed. They also had a fever, and it was simply chaos in the house. And in that moment, you know, the one where your brain kind of goes, oh my gosh, you know what?

Erica Rooney: Everybody would totally understand if I canceled And in that moment, I had one of those moments, you know, where my brain was just like, you know what Erica? Everybody would totally understand if you canceled, it's snowing. You got sick kids like it would totally make sense. And you know what?

Erica Rooney: They probably already got those things going on too. [00:03:00] They would love it if you canceled and postponed. But then I caught myself, y'all, because I had already told myself that I really wanted to show up twice a month, every month for Q1 in this community. I had already made that commitment. It was quiet, it was.

Erica Rooney: Internally. I didn't post it anywhere. I didn't make a big loud declaration about it. But then that irony of canceling a session that was called Stop Self Ghosting because life got inconvenient. Y'all absolutely not. And that's the thing. Self ghosting doesn't happen in these often big, dramatic ways like we might think it does, right?

Erica Rooney: It happens. In a very quiet and reasonable and very, very valid, logical excuse kind of way. And over time, that gap between what you intended to do, the person you want to be and what you're actually doing, the person you want to become, that's where your confidence starts just eroding away. [00:04:00] And so let me say this clearly.

Erica Rooney: You're not someone who's bad at follow through. You're not lazy, you're not undisciplined. Right, you didn't get to where you are today, just by sheer luck and by accident. The issue that we have, especially highly ambitious women, it's not an issue of motivation, but it's an issue of self trust, and that's because trust, like the trust that you have with yourself or with anyone else, quite honestly, it's not built on good intentions, right?

Erica Rooney: It's built on actual evidence. And right now a lot of women have accepted accidental evidence that says. Yeah, I say these things, but I don't always follow through. And that's not 'cause you don't care, but it's because you keep making promises to this version of yourself who just apparently always has the best day every day, right?

Erica Rooney: You make this promise to yourself. And it's like you're a woman who doesn't have kids or a job and always gets a great night's sleep and has unlimited bandwidth. Right? [00:05:00] But that woman doesn't exist. She is absolutely fictional. And you know what? That woman, I love her, bless her. She does CrossFit six days a week and journals for 45 minutes.

Erica Rooney: Okay? We love her, but that is not real. And this is where I want to lovingly call you out, right? I called myself out. I'm gonna call you out too. You don't fail because you're aiming low. You are failing because you set these goals and these unrealistic expectations like nothing else exists in your life.

Erica Rooney: Now, let me say that again. You fail because you aim like nothing else exists in your life. You sit down on a Sunday, maybe you map out these goals, or maybe this was back in December when you had, you know, all this motivation about what the new year would bring. I'm not sure. Right? But then life shows up.

Erica Rooney: Maybe a meeting runs late, maybe your nervous system is completely shot. Maybe a kid gets sick, someone needs [00:06:00] you, and you don't adjust, right? You simply just ghost yourself. You disappear on all the little commitments you said you were gonna make. And then you get shameful about that with yourself and you say things like, I'm gonna start again on Monday, or I'll start, you know, over when the snow clears or when the kids aren't sick.

Erica Rooney: Or I'm gonna wait for the Chinese New Year. And that cycle just repeats. So does that, does that sound familiar? Like I know it hits home for me, so we are going to change the rules. Not all of 'em, but just the ones that are out there that are really sabotaging you. And this is the one that matters the most.

Erica Rooney: I want you to move forward by only making clean agreements to yourself. Now, you might be like, okay, Erica, cool. What's a clean agreement? A clean agreement is a promise that you can actually keep inside of the life that you are currently living. I'm gonna say that again. A clean agreement is a [00:07:00] promise that you can actually keep inside the life you are currently living.

Erica Rooney: Not your ideal life where no kid gets sick, no boss hands you a last minute project that's super urgent on a Friday night at six o'clock, but your real life, and this is how you know it's a clean agreement, you can answer four things. Without thinking too hard, you can answer when it happens, where it happens, how long it takes, and what counts as done.

Erica Rooney: Okay. What is the success measure? And if you can't answer those questions, your brain already doesn't trust it and neither do you. So if you're sitting there and you're saying, I'm gonna work out more, I'm gonna focus on myself, I'm gonna write in the cracks of my day when I have time, y'all. Those are some really great vibes, and I'm here for 'em, but they're not agreements.

Erica Rooney: Okay. And vibes. All those feel good vibes, they're very easy to ghost. So I'm gonna give you one of my favorite examples that I use all the time. If I told you that I needed [00:08:00] $100 and you only had $20 to give me, I would be insane if I ripped it up in front of you. And I was like, no thanks. Come back when you have the full amount.

Erica Rooney: Like, absolutely not. I would take the $20, but for some reason, when it comes to ourselves, right? If we don't have the hour, the full hour for a workout, we just say like, oh, can't do it. It's not gonna happen. Nevermind. If we don't have the 30 minutes allocated to write, we don't write it all. We fill it with mindless scrolling.

Erica Rooney: And if we can't do it perfectly, we ghost. And what I wanna say to you right now that really matters is that the minimum counts. If you give me that $20, I'm $20 closer to my goal, right? Honestly, the minimum, when it's done consistently, that's what builds trust. So here are the rules. If you're writing them down, if you're driving them, you know, just [00:09:00] internalize them.

Erica Rooney: But the first rule is clean agreements only. Those are the promises that fit your real life. The second rule is that consistency beats intensity, right? This is the version that you can repeat. Over and over and over. And that is more impressive than a version that looks good one time. So let me give you a little fitness analogy, right?

Erica Rooney: If you were to go out and run a marathon today, 26 miles versus if you were to run one mile 26 times, which version do you think you can trust more? It's the consistent one. You got 26 miles either way, but consistency over time is what builds trust. And then the third rule that I've got for you when it comes to stop ghosting yourself is that you have to fix it fast.

Erica Rooney: This is where so many women, myself included, often fall off because if we miss one day, we consider it a total failure. Absolutely not. We're not doing that anymore. If you miss a day, you pick it back [00:10:00] up where you left off and you get going. There's no restarting. There's no punishing yourself. There's no guilting yourself.

Erica Rooney: There's no dramatic, I messed up monologues. Just repair it and then move on. Okay? So many times we're into all of these streaks where we have to do it every single day or else we have to start over, right? What is it the, uh, 90 days hard. If you miss one day, you have to start all the way over the beginning, y'all.

Erica Rooney: That is complete and utter bullshit. If you get today 87 and you forget to take a selfie, that doesn't negate everything you've done on all of the other days. You fix it and you move on, and that is what self-trust looks like. So, all right, here's where you're not gonna ghost yourself again. I want you to make one clean agreement today, just one.

Erica Rooney: We're not doing every little bit of your life. We just one, and we're gonna use this format. I will do X on [00:11:00] Y date for. However many minutes and minimum success looks like this, and then you just write it out. That's it. So for example, I'll use a workout one because that's super simple. I will work out on Tuesdays for 15 minutes.

Erica Rooney: And the minimum success looks like me getting dressed and going to the gym. That's it. And I know that doesn't seem like a lot like just getting dressed and going to the gym, but honestly, if you set that as your minimum and you get to the gym like you have done the hardest part, you have done it. And so whatever you do from there, you've hit your goal.

Erica Rooney: Right now, here's the important part. I want you to send me that clean agreement. I want you to DM me on LinkedIn. Send it to me on Instagram, because also when you make it visible and when you have accountability, you start to take it seriously and listen. You also [00:12:00] never know what kind of surprises I have up my sleeve for the women who do actually follow through.

Erica Rooney: But more importantly, I want you to stop ghosting on yourself. You don't need more discipline. You don't need to hustle, but you do need agreements that you make with yourself that you can trust and that woman that you're becoming, y'all she'll ghost herself. She shows up even when it's messy, even when it's not perfect and y'all, that's how everything changes.

Erica Rooney: All right. If today's conversation lit a fire under you, here's your next move. Don't keep it to yourself. All right. Share this episode with a friend. Please drop a review and let's keep the conversation going. Remember, your potential is limitless as long as you stop self ghosting. But the only thing standing in your way right now are those sticky floors.

Erica Rooney: And guess what? You have the power to break through them. So go out there, take up some dang space [00:13:00] and let's shatter some ceilings together.