If there’s one episode I need every woman in your life to hear, it’s this one —
because what Erin and I unpack together has the power to completely transform the way you show up for yourself and the women around you.
Erin Gallagher is the CEO and founder of Hype Women, an inclusive network unlocking women’s access to human, social, and financial capital, and the author of the book Hype Women. In this episode, we get into the real reason women are conditioned to put everyone else first, how to tell the difference between anxiety and intuition, and why you cannot build real wealth, real friendships, or a real life until you stop abandoning yourself. We walk through the three stages of metamorphosis, and break down the spectrum from mean girl to hype woman so you can finally audit the women in your life (and the woman inside your head). This episode is the pep talk you didn’t know you needed.
Key takeaways:
Women putting themselves last is by design
The conditioning runs deep and it runs systemic. Women carry $10.9 trillion in unpaid labor annually, receive less pay, less funding, and have had rights to their own bodies stripped away. Every message society sends points to the idea that women are not whole humans deserving of equitable treatment. Erin reframes this not as a personal failing but as a logical response to an unwinnable game — and the first step to breaking free is recognizing that you’ve been playing by rules that were never written in your favor.
Reclaiming your self-trust starts with a simple question
When Erin turned 40, she didn’t have a grand revelation, she had a question: Is it still working? She applied it to everything: her habits, her relationships, her family traditions, the way she worked, the way she loved. The things that had once helped her survive had quietly become the things holding her back. That question is the starting point for any woman who isn’t sure how to begin, who isn’t ready to burn it all down, but knows something isn’t right.
Intuition and anxiety are not the same thing
One of the most practically useful moments in this episode is Erin’s breakdown of how to tell the two apart. Anxiety feels like flooding — cortisol, heat, overwhelm, your body on fire. Intuition feels like flow, ease, a knowing, a call. Women are routinely told their instincts are “too sensitive,” “too mystical,” or simply wrong — which is exactly how self-trust erodes. Erin argues that women’s intuition is one of the most powerful forces on the planet, and that rebuilding your relationship with it is not woo-woo. It’s a reclamation.
You cannot be a hype woman for others until you become one for yourself
This is the core tenet of Erin’s entire framework, and she says it plainly: you will be unable to stop loathing and lusting after other women’s lives until you start loving and living your own. The inner mean girl is real, she’s loud, and she’s the product of patriarchal conditioning that taught women to scrutinize, compare, and question everything about themselves. Hyping yourself isn’t vanity, it’s a prerequisite. And doing it alone isn’t the answer either. You need your A-team: the people who will show up when you’re not shiny, who hold your vision when you’ve forgotten it, and who stay when things fall apart.
Not every woman in your life is a hype woman
Erin walks through a spectrum of five distinct archetypes: Predators (mean girls who exploit vulnerability), Pretenders (chameleons who gather intel), Projectors (well-meaning but draining), Promoters (supportive when asked, not proactively), and Protectors (your ride-or-dies, the ones saying your name in rooms where you aren’t). The women in your life are not fixed — they can shift based on their growth or yours. What matters is knowing where they fall, and reclaiming your energy from the ones in the red zones.
Your metamorphosis is not a one-time event
The butterfly metaphor Erin uses in her book isn’t just poetic, it’s precise. The caterpillar phase is the “good girl” — compliant, incremental, other-focused. The cocoon is the dissolution — not knowing who you are anymore, renegotiating everything. The monarch is the becoming. But Erin is clear: you don’t arrive at monarch and coast. You will land again. You will cocoon again. Growth is cyclical, and the women who thrive are the ones who build communities that let them fall apart, and stay anyway.
Notable quotes
“I will no longer abandon myself in service to others.”
“Those that have the biggest issue with your boundaries are the ones that benefited from you not having them.”
“You will be unable to stop loathing and lusting after other women’s lives until you start loving and living your own.”
Episode at-a-glance
00:00 Intro
01:08 The Phrase That Changed Everything
02:55 Why Women Abandon Themselves
06:40 The Constant Threat Assessment
09:45 Remembering Who You Are
13:30 The Difference Between Intuition and Anxiety
17:40 Is It Still Working?
21:00 The Three Stages: Caterpillar, Cocoon, Monarch
25:10 Looking Around at 40
29:30 Renegotiating Your Life
33:15 The Mean Girl Inside of Us
37:00 You Can’t Hype Others Until You Hype Yourself
41:45 Recognizing Your Conditioning
46:00 The Five Types on the Spectrum
51:00 Learning to Hype Yourself
56:00 Building Your A-Team
60:00 The Power of Women’s Communities
Erin’s Links:
Website: www.hypewomen.com
Visit herfirst100k.com/ffpod to stay up to date and find any resources mentioned on our show!
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Meet Erin
Erin is the CEO + Founder of HYPE WOMEN— (an inclusive network unlocking women’s access to human, social and financial capital), the Founder of the Hype Women Movement and Host of the Hype Women Podcast.
She brings 20 years experience leading global marketing, business development, media relations, branding, communications and organizational and culture change to the many roles she currently plays: small business owner, disruptor, entrepreneur, system-challenger and mother to two young boys.
She has been named a Top 100 LinkedIn Creator and Top 10 DEI Voice (#5) and penned one of the Top 100 Most Influential LinkedIn Posts of the Decade. Erin has counseled The White House and C-suite and senior leaders at some of the world’s biggest and best brands and companies — from LinkedIn to United Airlines to Carhartt to McDonald’s, to name a few.
Through her work forging relationships with change makers and leaders who believe in the power of diversity, equity, inclusion and access, Erin has become (as one Global CMO so succinctly put it) “the not-so-secret weapon so many leaders count on to drive real change…she knows everyone.”Erin is the creator of The Fairway (Dinners, Membership and App): inclusive, intersectional, intimate spaces where every woman has a seat to give and get business.
Transcript:
Tori Dunlap:
Every single woman in your life needs to listen to today’s episode because it has the power to transform your female friendships and absolutely change the way you speak to yourself.
Today’s guest is one of my longtime friends and one of the most supportive women I know. Erin Gallagher is the CEO and founder of Hype Women, which is an inclusive network unlocking women’s access to human, social, and financial capital. And she wrote an incredible book called Hype Women.
Today’s episode is transformational, and I know that sounds like clickbait, and I promise you it’s not. This is the pep talk you need to actually like your life, to actually build authentic relationships, especially female friendships, and to tap into your self-trust. This is an episode that you’re going to want to share with every single woman in your life. Without further ado, let’s get into it. But first, a word from our sponsors.
Erin, I am so thrilled to have you today. You start your book talking about this phrase that broke you out of the spell you were under. Can you share what that was and what happened before you started actually believing it?
Erin Gallagher:
Well, that’s a big question to start with, sister. The phrase that came to me when I turned 40, that refused to leave until I paid it the respect it was due, was I will no longer abandon myself in service to others. I had spent my entire life doing this. In my personal life, in my professional life, all of my value and worth was tied to my service. Everything was about external validation.
And I just got to this point where I looked around and said, “I’m not 20 anymore. How much longer am I going to put up with this shit?” And I decided that I needed to have a real hard conversation with myself about the 360 degrees of my life surrounding me. And when I started to look at it and ask myself, “Is this still working?” It wasn’t. It wasn’t working in a lot of places.
And that led to me exiting the first company I co-founded two and a half years after I did. It led to friendships of more than 25 years ending. It led to very different relationship with my husband and how we are rearing our children and being in each other’s lives. It led to ending traditions in my family that have been passed down for generations.
It was just a fucking disaster. Everything fell apart. But it fell apart so I could put it all back together.
Tori Dunlap:
That is something, that quote, “I will no longer abandon myself in the service of others,” is the recurring theme, I think, one of the recurring themes of this show, actually. We have spent a lot of time talking the past year or two in our episodes about how women put themselves last.
And can we talk about why that happens? Because it’s very easy to hear that and think, “Oh, it’s because we’re weak. Or because we are not standing up for ourselves.” What is the conditioning that’s happening that is telling us, everybody else and everybody else’s needs matter before yours?
Erin Gallagher:
When we think about how the world values us, both in the way that they pay us, they pay us less than we deserve, we get less VC funding than everyone on the planet. We carry $10.9 trillion in unpaid labor on our backs every single year. We have the rights to our bodies stripped away from us.
Everything is pointing to the fact that we are not whole humans that deserve to be treated equitably. We’re told this every single day, every interaction that we have. So it’s not our fault that we then just kind of fall in line and start to play the game.
I was given a lot of advice in my younger years in my career by women who thought they were being helpful saying, “Play the game. Do what you need to do in order to get ahead here.” When the real message should have been, “Stop following the rules in a game rigged against you.”
That’s why this is happening. It’s happening because everything in the world tells us that we have a very finite amount of power and value and worth, and that it also begins to deteriorate once we hit a certain age. And that if we don’t check the boxes on these very patriarchal milestones, that our value decreases even more. It is inevitable that you succumb to it until you finally break. I mean, once you break though, you look around and you say, “I actually don’t fucking care what any of these people think anymore.”
Tori Dunlap:
One of the things I’ve discovered in my life that we’ve talked about on this show as well, is that we’ve been conditioned as women to put everybody else’s comfort above ours. And the example I’ve given before is when I was actively dating, I had literally in one week, two different situations where I was very clear on this first date of, “It’s going well. You can come back to my place. We can make out, but I am not interested in having sex.”
And both of them, literally within five days, two different men who by all accounts were the good ones, good men, pushed the agenda forward and I kicked them out of my apartment. And I remember thinking in that moment, “Oh, I could have just allowed this to happen. It would’ve been easier. We wouldn’t have them having a bruised ego.”
It also would’ve protected my safety better because who knows if this man would get violent when I reaffirmed that boundary. All of those things were, I have to now have this uncomfortable, deeply uncomfortable situation that might literally result in me being physically or emotionally unsafe, but because I have to re-cement a boundary.
And that is a dramatic version, but something that literally women are having to do every single day. Which is, do I make a fuss to get the thing that I need?
Erin Gallagher:
The constant threat assessment, physical threat, threat to career.
Tori Dunlap:
Career.
Erin Gallagher:
Psychological threat, right? It’s a constant threat assessment.
Tori Dunlap:
Financial threat.
Erin Gallagher:
Oh. My God. We’re constantly assessing every single room we enter, every single situation that we’re put into, whether it’s of our own volition or by chance. And that level of intense focus is so exhausting over time. It is so exhausting to be hypervigilant, right? To be hypervigilant.
We’re told that hypervigilance is actually us being type A, ambitious, successful. No, we’re fucking hypervigilant. It’s actually a very heavy sword to carry. Just like you said, so much of this is about whether or not we are interested in making other people uncomfortable. Women are taught that it is more important to be likable than to love ourselves.
And there are a lot of women who really fucking hate themselves, but they are doing all of the things that they are told to do. They’re being good girls.
And I think we are seeing, Tori, we’re seeing a real fucking wave right now, an uprising of women who are remembering, they’re remembering who they are. There is something very sort of sacral happening where we’re just fucking done. We’re really done with this system that is intent on minimizing, destroying, and silencing us.
Tori Dunlap:
So if you’re not at the point where you’re like, “I’m ready to live my truth. Or I even know what that looks like for me,” how do we get women to a point where they know what they want? Regardless of what their parents want or their partner wants or society wants for them, how do they actually figure out how to live the life they want, even if it makes people uncomfortable?
Erin Gallagher:
Yeah. I’m going to come at this from a couple angles. Women’s intuition is the most powerful force on the planet, and it’s why the patriarchy is so terrified. It’s why we are told that our experience didn’t happen over and over and over and over again.
So when I think about my 15 years in corporate America, my two and a half years inside of the first company that I co-founded, I was told every day that my experience didn’t happen the way I thought it did. “That’s not what she meant. You’re being too sensitive. Why are you so difficult? Why can’t you just get over it? How much longer are you going to keep coming back to this?”
So when you are told every day that what you think happened to you didn’t, you stop trusting yourself. Because you sit there and you say, “Damn, I really don’t fucking know what’s going on.”
Tori Dunlap:
Well, and it’s an additional way to control you because if you can no longer hear the voice inside your head, all you hear are the other voices.
Erin Gallagher:
All you hear are the other voices. And, Tori, all you do is you ask other people, “Is this okay? Is this what I should-“
Tori Dunlap:
Then you have to seek validation.
Erin Gallagher:
You seek everything outside of yourself because you have completely lost trust. So I actually completely lost trust until I turned 40. It took me a while, took me years to get it back because I forgot what it felt like.
So the answer is it is a feeling. You know, you know how people make you feel. What happens when you get a text from that person and your stomach drops? All of those things are real and women are told like, “That’s witchy, you’re being too mystical.” It’s like, “No, no, no.” It’s actually fucking powerful and they’re terrified of it. So the feeling is the really important part.
I did a book event in New York a couple days ago and a woman sat there and asked me, “How do I know the difference between intuition and anxiety?” And I said, “Yeah, I mean, as a person who has navigated clinical anxiety since I was 16, I fucking know anxiety really well. It’s like my friend.”
And anxiety, there’s a level of it that is actually healthy that helps you to get up and do things, but it’s when it’s debilitating that you have to get additional support and intervention. But the way that I sort of helped answer that question was anxiety feels like flooding, your body is flooded. It’s flooded with cortisol. You feel heat, you feel-
Tori Dunlap:
Everything’s on fire.
Erin Gallagher:
… clammy, right? All of it, right?
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah.
Erin Gallagher:
Whereas intuition is flow.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah.
Erin Gallagher:
Intuition feels like ease. It feels like a knowing. It’s like a call. And so that’s the difference between those two. So when women are at a place where they’re not yet here, where they’re like, “Yeah, I’m ready to fucking set it all on fire.” Or they’re not even quite sure how they feel about their own life, I have a question that I want them to ask themselves.
When you look at the lot of your life, when you look at your daily habits, when you look at your rituals, when you look at your family traditions, when you look at the way you work, the way you run your business, your relationships, your friendships, is it still working?
It’s this most simple way to look at it. Because when I, a year and a half ago, started looking around and answering those questions, a lot of things weren’t working. And so I needed to make shifts. The things that had helped me survive, Tori, the things that had saved me were now actually working against me.
And that’s hard when your operating system is built in fight or flight, and you decide that you want to stop living that way. You have to create a whole new fucking operating system, but you have to start with that simple question.
Tori Dunlap:
One of my favorite parts about your book is you broke it down into three parts. So it was all the stages of a butterfly. So caterpillar, cocoon, monarch. Can we walk through each of these stages, what they looked like for you? And what they might look like for somebody else?
Erin Gallagher:
The first part of the book, the first phase is I was the crawling caterpillar. And this represented for me the good girl. The version of myself that played by the rules, fell in line, did what I was told, people-pleased, thought about everyone except myself. Was willing to move at an incremental pace to make other people comfortable. And that version of me, I have a ton of empathy for. I had to be that way until I learned that there was more out there.
I think this is the other part that’s very difficult about your own metamorphosis is how do you not turn it into a self-hating exercise? Where you look at versions of yourself from before and you say, “Why did I do that? I was so stupid. Why was I in that relationship? Why did I stay so long in that job?” That’s not helpful.
We have to have compassion for those versions of ourselves that we had to be in order to survive. But when you know better, you have to do better. The first part was like me and corporate America, 100%. That was me like, “I’m going to be the most senior woman at my agency and my agency is the most important place on the planet.” It was a fucking joke.
But I played by those rules and I did that and I let them tell me what I was worth. And when they saw me thinking bigger, they just kept pushing me back into boxes and telling me why I wasn’t ready.
Second part of the book is I am cocooned and dissolving. And so this was when I turned 40. This was me saying, “I don’t want to be her anymore, but I have no idea what I want to become.” I mean, I had a real period of liminality, Tori, in between leaving the first company that I co-founded.
When I was 40, I was two years, two and a half years into that first company. I didn’t have a plan. I didn’t have my next thing lined up for the first time in my entire life. And I had already checked all of these boxes that I was told by the world that I needed to.
I was married, had two kids, we owned a house, we had a fucking dog and a car. And I looked around and I was like, “Is this all there is? Is this really? This is it?” And that scared me because I realized that I never actually considered not doing those things. I never, never considered it.
Tori Dunlap:
Because that was what you were supposed to do.
Erin Gallagher:
That’s what I was supposed to do.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah.
Erin Gallagher:
I was on three different dating sites at 30 because I was like, “I’m fucked. I got to get this done. I got to get this done.” I literally was like, I was-
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah, it’s like a check box.
Erin Gallagher:
I was treating it like a fucking job. And I just was like, “Yep, you’re good. Let’s do this. Let’s keep moving.” And I look back and I’m just like, “I didn’t even consider another option.” That’s a hard pill to swallow.
Tori Dunlap:
Well, and, Erin, I have to stop you there because you said something really interesting, which was like, “I looked around and thought, is this all there is?” And I think so many women do have that feeling, but then they go, “I can’t be ungrateful for what I have. I have good friends. Or I have children and I can’t feel bad about that.”
I can already hear listeners that something in their mind is going, “I know I’m meant for more. Or is this all there is?” But also, “Oh, I can’t be ungrateful. I can’t because I can’t say that I don’t like my life because then I’ll have to blow it up.”
Erin Gallagher:
Oh, yeah. So it was the pandemic and I was interviewed by The New York Times for this feature that they did on nine different sets of folks who were living in quarantine together, ranging from grandparents and a college kid to spouses.
And our situation was we were living with our three and one year old at my mother’s house in Michigan, all of us under one roof for 90 days. What I said to The New York Times was, “This has taught me that I need alone time. And my husband is saying, “Woo,” all the time in quarantine and it’s really fucking annoying. And my kids are great, but also shitty.” I literally said all of this and the people that knew me best were like, “How could you say that stuff? How could you say that?”
Tori Dunlap:
Especially in The New York Times. Yeah, I can just hear it.
Erin Gallagher:
To the New York Times. “You were an ungrateful mother and wife and founder. God.” And I just started to realize like, “Oh, my God, we’re not allowed to tell the fucking truth.” But what was more interesting to me is that those were the people that quote/unquote knew me best because they liked the version of me that I had been, the crawling caterpillar. And I was starting to like-
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah, because they benefited from that version of you.
Erin Gallagher:
Oh, you’re damn straight they did, girl. They really benefited from that. This is the Emma Gannon quote, which is, “Those that have the biggest issue with your boundaries are the ones that benefited from you not having them.” I mean, that’s what was starting to happen.
But all these other women were like, “Yes, sister, it’s a disaster. It’s a shit show.” And I was like, “Okay, so it’s not just me. This is really happening all over the place.”
I realized what you just said about when we look around and we said, “Is this all there is? ” When you’re 20 and you have a career goal for 40, you put your head down and you go. You do the work, you don’t even look up, and you hit a milestone and you go to the next one, you go to the next one.
So what ends up happening is you get to 40 and you look around and you got it, you got the thing you wanted, but the problem is you’re different.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah.
Erin Gallagher:
So it’s actually not the dream anymore. And I do not believe that enough women sit there at 40 and say, “Is this really what I want still?” My marriage, my-
Tori Dunlap:
I don’t think enough people do it at 30. I’m 31.
Erin Gallagher:
Absolutely. Yes.
Tori Dunlap:
And I’ve had a lot of change both… It’s hard for me to imagine that I quit my job to run my company in November of 2019 and the pandemic happened five months after. So my life became very different in a very short period of time.
And then I got lower, lower, lowercase F famous. Our company blew up. I started making more money than I thought I’d make in maybe a decade. And I was like, “Okay, life’s very different now.” And I only sat down to really contemplate that last year to be like, “Life is very different.”
Do we like that life is different? And if not, what changes do we need to make? And again, it’s very hard because publicly everything was going great, but privately there was a lot of things I was struggling with. And it was very easy for my brain to gaslight myself and go, “Why aren’t you just grateful? You got everything you wanted.”
And I think that is one thing as well that we are taught you should have this one goal. Starting at five, we ask children, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” It’s crazy that we ask four-year-old children, like, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” And we’re allowed to change. We’re allowed to want different things.
I started acting when I was young, I majored in theater. That was supposed to be my life path. And then I decided at the end of college I didn’t want to do that. It felt like I was abandoning that part of myself, the person who was the theater kid who was always going to do that.
I think that’s the other part of getting over the discomfort is one, you’re going to people off. But two, it might be saying, “That no longer serves me.” And without any shame, without being like, “Why didn’t we fix this sooner?” Or like, “You should have figured this out.” It’s just like, “No.” To your point, I got the things I thought I wanted and I changed in that process and realized some of this I don’t want.
Erin Gallagher:
And with your path of focusing on theater, the message to you was, why would you waste all of those years that you appointed to that to do something different now? Tori, this is a damaging decision.
Tori Dunlap:
I mean, I heard it in college.
Erin Gallagher:
Absolutely.
Tori Dunlap:
I was kind of ostracized by the theater department because it was very clear that I was not going to pursue this as a profession. So I was selling out.
Erin Gallagher:
Correct.
Tori Dunlap:
That I was no longer a true artist and therefore I was no longer a real actor.
Erin Gallagher:
God forbid you change. God forbid.
Tori Dunlap:
Well, and God forbid I want to make money. That’s the other part.
Erin Gallagher:
Well, that’s really gross for women, right? It’s really gross to actually decide that you are interested in building generational wealth for yourself. That’s selfish and distasteful. We know that.
Tori Dunlap:
So this cocoon, you were unpacking all of this. Are these narratives, these stories working for me? They’re not. Everybody, it sounds like there’s so many people around you who you were like, “These relationships no longer serve me.” What else happened in that cocooning stage?
Erin Gallagher:
Yeah. I had to meet myself again. I had to sit across from myself, this latest version and say, “What do you want now? What are your priorities? What isn’t working that is just now a part of your daily life and routine?”
And then once I kind of answered those questions and I had an idea of the areas where things needed to shift, then I had to have conversations with other people and I had to renegotiate the terms. So my husband and I went through a really challenging time because he married a corporate good girl. That’s who he married.
I was rising inside of my agency and that felt comfortable to him. I got a paycheck every two weeks. I had a 401k. He got that. He understood that. This life as an entrepreneur was volatile and unpredictable and he didn’t recognize me and that scared him.
And I was also now a mother. So up until literally six months ago, Tori, my husband was still saying to me, “When are you going to get a real job?” Okay. This is now five and a half years into being an entrepreneur and having two companies. Because he’s like, “Listen, this is a lot for me. I don’t like how your money is like this and then like this and I just don’t know.”
And I will tell you that three years before when he said that and two years before, I tried to go back. I started to interview with corporate companies and I was like, “Everything wasn’t working out.” They were all like, “Yeah, you’re a little much for what we are doing. I’m not sure you would be happy inside of this environment where there are these rules and red tape and all that.”
And so I was like, “Oh, my God, I’m being rejected everywhere. No one wants me. I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m super lost.” And then I fucking read this line that said like, “Rejection is redirection.” And then I was like, “Oh, my God, wait, the universe is conspiring my favorite and it’s telling me, “Erin, don’t do it. Come on. You know that that’s not right for you.””
So I sat down with my husband and I said, “Here’s the deal, I’m not the woman you married. I am never going to be her again. So we have two options here. You get on board with the fact that this is who I am now, I’m an entrepreneur, I’m an author, never going back to corporate America, I’m constantly evolving. Or we talk about how we are going to grow apart.”
And those are conversations that people avoid because they’re scary, they’re uncomfortable, they might have a result that you don’t want or you don’t know if you want. But that’s the kind of stuff I started to do, Tori. I started to renegotiate with everyone in my life. With my mother, saying, “Hey, this shit doesn’t fly anymore. If you want access to me and my kids, here are the ground rules.”
She was not happy about that. We didn’t talk for a long time. This stuff has been very messy, but I just couldn’t live in-authentically anymore on everyone else’s terms. So that was the cocooning period. And it was like I was dissolving into something that I didn’t know I was and wasn’t, and I was becoming something that I wasn’t quite sure of.
The third part of the book is I will be the monarch. I’m obsessed with butterflies if you can’t tell, right? I have a tattoo here. I have a tattoo on my toe that’s a butterfly. There’s butterflies in my fucking book. The book is broken down to three parts that are the stages of the butterfly.
Because I cannot believe that it is real, that a crawling caterpillar can just move along at an incremental pace. And then one day go, “Fuck this shit, I’m done.” And then create a cocoon around itself, dissolve into goo, and then reemerge and break free and fly the fuck out of there.
It defies logic. It defies logic, but if that can happen and that is real and that is true, it is possible for us as well. And that was what I was willing to risk, is that I can’t fucking crawl along at this incremental pace anymore. I believe I could be that and I have to try.
Tori Dunlap:
Oh, Erin, I need everybody to go back about 10 minutes and listen to everything again. And I also want to make a plea for every woman listening. The cocooning process is awful. As someone who has been through her version of it, it is awful. It is a constant, daily, sometimes multi-times a day choice.
And it is back to that first statement you said, which is basically, I’m not going to allow someone’s comfort to dictate the kind of woman I am and the kind of woman I want to become. And that is a constant decision that people, even the closest people in your life will sometimes not like.
The thing I always thought is if my head is hitting the pillow at night and I feel like I’ve made everybody else comfortable, but at the expense of my own comfort, I have not lived my life authentically, just like you said. I have not actually been the person I want to be.
One thing that you said I think is so important and a skill you and I both have, is I have the ability to look back on certain decisions that I made in my life that I would not make now. And rather than looking at 21-year-old Tori, 25-year-old Tori, Tori from a couple weeks ago and go, “God, she’s a fucking idiot.” The shame for me is actually not there.
I speak to myself incredibly generously and I go, “You know what? She didn’t know. She didn’t know any better and now she knows better.” So we’re going to spend a good chunk of our time talking about mean girls and talking about how we can be better hype women. But what happens when the mean girl is inside of us? What happens when your inner voice is the loudest mean girl?
Erin Gallagher:
It is. Anyone who is telling the truth has to admit that we all have a mean girl inside of us and she is meanest to herself. That is patriarchal conditioning.
We are taught to look at ourselves and judge every single thing we see and think and feel and question it and compare it. And that’s this vicious cycle. It’s this vicious cycle that feeds on itself. And so you can’t hype other women if you can’t hype yourself.
Tori Dunlap:
Say that again. Say that again, Erin.
Erin Gallagher:
Right? Because this is sort of the core tenet of it. You cannot hype other women until you can hype yourself. Here is what I have learned the hard way. You will be unable to stop loathing and lusting after other women’s lives until you start loving and living your own.
And so there’s a lot of people who are seeking, again, outside of themselves for the answers, how do I do this? How do I know? The answers are actually inside of you. It’s when you begin to trust again and you begin to really feel into that instinct and that intuition, that you have direction. You hit this a decade earlier than I did, Tori. I am so fucking in awe of you and what you are able to do.
Tori Dunlap:
I think Gen Z has hit it before even I have. I think that it is women like you and women who came before you and women who came before. I think we’re all getting faster at this, which is cool. So women born now might get to this when they’re 10.
Erin Gallagher:
Right?
Tori Dunlap:
I do think the gig is up earlier. We’re like, “You know what? No, no, no, no, no, no, no.” But I only realized it because I had women who were really loud in my life going, “You don’t have to put up with this.” And also because I always, I never lost the connection with my intuition. And that is a gift that I had.
I think most women have been beaten down to the point where again, that disconnect has happened, that self-trust is no longer there. And I also want to… I am not special in that way. It’s just that I have always been good at listening to myself. And even when I was a kid, I was really good at listening to myself. So I do think it’s happening. It’s just happening sooner, which is fantastic.
Erin Gallagher:
Yes. It’s true. And again, it’s why we are in the situation that we’re in. We look at what’s happening in government and everything. They’re so terrified because we are getting to it sooner. So there’s going to be less of a pipeline of the foot soldiers to the patriarchy that they have currently in place.
So I got to a point where I realized the thing that makes me endearing to one person will make me intolerable to another. So I cannot live on the terms of other people because it’s an unwinnable game. It’s unwinnable. You have to be okay with being likable enough. Or just more unlikable.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah. It’s a thing in dating where if somebody you don’t like sends you flowers, you’re like, “Oh, my God, this guy’s obsessed with me. What’s his fucking problem?” Or like, “Oh, he texts me, “Good morning, beautiful,” every morning. Oh, gross.” You don’t like that person and that’s fine.
There’s another person that texts you, “Good morning, beautiful.” And sends you flowers and you’re like, “Oh, my God, isn’t he, she, they the best?” And it’s just you cannot be everybody’s cup of tea. And that’s just the reality. And we all know this. We’ve all heard it. We’ve heard it. We’ve seen it stitched on the pillows at Home Goods. We all know this, right?
But because we’ve been conditioned to be likable above all else, everything then fires against that. Where we’re going, “Oh, but we have to be likable. Oh, but we have to be likable. Oh, we have to be likable.” So of course this is a constant battle because you will face people, situations, society who is constantly trying to make sure you’re controllable. Absolutely.
Erin Gallagher:
Absolutely. This is the plan. It’s been the plan for 300 plus years. And so the phase that I’m in now, because the other thing about the metamorphosis is that it is continuous. You don’t get through it and you’re like, “Cool, now I’m the monarch and I can go live my life forever.” It’s like, “Oh, no, girl.”
Tori Dunlap:
I will never have to grow again.
Erin Gallagher:
Here’s the deal. You’re going to land again and those wings are going to get fucking broke off and then you’re going to caterpillar yourself into your next cocoon. That is what’s going to happen because you’re going to keep growing and evolving.
Hopefully, I mean, it’s a choice. Again, a lot of people don’t, they’re not interested in growth. They are good. They’re good with where they are and that is how they live their life and that is their choice. So you are going to have people that you grow with or you grow apart from. And I am in this phase now. What I am stepping into in this next era for myself is that I am now detached from people’s experience of me.
And that is the next level that you get to when you have done a ton of the inner work and the deep work and you have gone through the fucking trenches. Because I still, even with the growth and my strengthening of a lot of these parts of myself, I still felt like feedback was direction and that I needed to consider it all. And that people deserved a certain amount of access to me, right? All of that stuff.
And I am at a place now where I’m like, “Here’s the deal, your experience with me, with my medicine, with my fucking content, with my fucking life, is not mine. That’s on you. So you go have that and I will just keep living over here.” And when we get to that, Tori, I mean, no one can control us anymore.
Tori Dunlap:
I love what you said about, yeah, you cannot authentically hype and support and champion other women if you are being a bad example to yourself. And one of the very tactical things I do, and again, it’s going to sound ridiculous because we’ve been conditioned to feel that it’s ridiculous or embarrassing, is I speak to myself like a mother or like an older sister or like a best friend. And I do this out loud.
Erin Gallagher:
Hell yeah, girl.
Tori Dunlap:
I’m not going to talk about it, but I just got really bad news a couple days ago. I will tell you off mic. And I was in the car and crying and just not doing well.
And out loud, I literally put my hand on my chest and my hand on my tummy and I said, “This sucks. We know this sucks and there’s nothing you can do about it right now. And I am not abandoning you. I am going to be here every step of the way and we’re going to figure this out.” And I said it out loud to myself because that’s what I needed to hear.
And everything you said, which is, I’ve been meaning to do an episode about this, everything that is in touch with our intuition, whether that is astrology or tarot or again, talking out loud to ourselves and like inner child work, all this seems woo-woo and witchy because it’s feminine.
Erin Gallagher:
Yeah. Those freaks.
Tori Dunlap:
Right. It’s only labeled-
Erin Gallagher:
Those people in touch with their feminine side.
Tori Dunlap:
Right. It’s only labeled ridiculous or wacky or witchy. When in actuality, largely women have been using these tools for their entire… I mean, since society was here, right?
Erin Gallagher:
Since the dawn of time.
Tori Dunlap:
It sounds ridiculous until you start practicing it. Until you’re like, “You know what? I’m going to speak sometimes out loud to myself. I am going to self-soothe.” And I think that for me is one tangible thing people can do if you feel disconnected from yourself or if you feel like your inner voice is mean. You have to start talking out loud, talking out loud to yourself the way you want to be spoken to.
Erin Gallagher:
That self-soothing and self-sourcing is so unbelievably transformative. It’s really, those practices, they work. They do start to rewire your brain. They start to reset your nervous system. They start to create a new operating system inside of your body, the infrastructure that you inherited generationally, right?
Epigenetically, we’re carrying trauma from generations before us and we have to decide for how much longer. And so these are the types of practices that undo that and start to create a new way forward. So I did this post the other day where I was like, “Apologies to all of the older women that I used to judge talking to themselves while walking down the street. I now know that they were just having a conversation with the smartest person they know.”
Tori Dunlap:
I love that so much.
Erin Gallagher:
We are talking to ourselves now because we’re like, “Dude, I fucking know and I need to hear it and I am going to have this conversation regardless of how other people feel about it.” So keep doing that. That is so effing powerful.
And again, when you are told lies about yourself over and over and over again, when someone tells you a beautiful truth, you think it’s a lie. And when you are told ugly lies about yourself over and over and over again, you believe that it’s the truth.
Tori Dunlap:
Erin, it’s so good.
Erin Gallagher:
So, Tori, it’s why you will also be un-hypable. You cannot be hyped if you don’t fucking believe it about yourself. So we joke when we say, “Oh, it’s imposter syndrome. Oh, she’s just deferential.” No, she doesn’t fucking believe what you’re saying.
When you tell her something good about yourself, whether it has to do with something she’s accomplished, something she said, a way that she’s wearing something, when you say that to her and she says no, it’s because she doesn’t believe it. But here’s the interesting part. We are also so uncomfortable and disgusted with the woman who goes, “Thank you. I did do that. I did write that.”
Tori Dunlap:
It’s the Barbie Movie.
Erin Gallagher:
It’s the Barbie Movie.
Tori Dunlap:
I worked really hard. I worked really hard for that.
Erin Gallagher:
It’s why I saw it seven times in the theater. Saw it seven times in theater because I was like, “This is actually the whole fucking thing. It’s the whole fucking thing.”
And I opened my book with the line, “The moment I remembered who the fuck I was, the spell was broken.” And it is like that moment when they bring them into the Barbie ambulance and they’re like, “I know that you’re currently a brewski-beer-serving, foot-rubbing, but do you remember that you’re also a Nobel Peace Prize winning author?” And they’re like, “Ding.” And it comes back.
Because what happened for me, that happened inside of my first company. Where I had been mistreated for so fucking long and I fucking believed them. And then one day, Tori, something just broke in me. And as soon as I fucking remembered, it was done. It was done.
And you take all your power back, and I’m not saying it happens overnight or it’s simple or it’s easy. This is 25 years of therapy and my own fucking journey. But the second that you remember, they can’t fucking touch you again. So this is what we need to get every woman back to, is the remembering of who she is, regardless of what the fucking world says.
Tori Dunlap:
I don’t know anybody better at hyping women, so much that of course the book is called this, your company is called this. We think, like we were just talking about, we are conditioned to believe that every other woman is competition.
I grew up with a lot of mean girls, got bullied every day. It took me a long time before I truly saw other women as allies for me. And we’ve just absorbed this message that other women are threats. There’s one seat at the table. How can we recognize when this is happening?
Let’s say, I’m giving you a situation, Erin. You’re scrolling social media, you come upon my post or Erin’s post and you have this moment where you go, “Who does she think she is?” How do you recognize what’s actually happening there and how do you reroute it?
Erin Gallagher:
Yes. I mean, it happens to me. It happens to me every day and I wrote the fucking book because-
Tori Dunlap:
Me too.
Erin Gallagher:
… it’s my conditioning, right? So conditioning is in you, but you do… When you get to a place where you are able to recognize it, then you do have the ability to make a different choice.
I’ll give a very specific example of how this went down recently. So my friend, Nive Tiwari, she got a deal with Penguin Random House, a book deal, and she posted about it. And Nive and I were friends for years, have been friends for years. She’s come to multiple Fairway Dinners. We’ve hyped each other, we’ve made introductions.
So I see this and I was like, “Nive got fucking Penguin Random House? She really that good? How the fuck did she get Penguin?” This is literally what’s happening in my head.
So I had a choice. Here is the way that this could have gone down. I think all of this and I unfollow Nive because I don’t want to hear about it. I don’t want to see this. I don’t want to look at it because what’s often underneath jealousy or envy is desire. It’s telling you something that you want. So I could have done that and said, “I just don’t even want to fucking see it.” I could have started talking shit about her to other people.
Tori Dunlap:
I was going to say, “Erin, that’s actually a mild reaction.” That actually I think is a relatively healthy one.
Erin Gallagher:
Oh, girl, right?
Tori Dunlap:
Which is like, “I need a second and I’m not.”
Erin Gallagher:
No, you screenshot that shit and you text it to someone and you’re like, “Does she really? Man, Penguin Random House just isn’t fucking doing it anymore, I guess.”
Tori Dunlap:
How does this happen? Is she-
Erin Gallagher:
How did this happen?
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah.
Erin Gallagher:
I don’t know.
Tori Dunlap:
No offense and I know she’s really great, but…
Erin Gallagher:
Right, exactly. So you start that and then you find those people who feed that and you build that mean girl energy. And in the end, you are actually fighting, when really it was always about something that you wanted.
Okay. So here’s what I did. I had that feeling and I said to myself, “Oh, hold on. Not today. Not today, patriarchy.” And so I fucking texted her and I said, “Girl, you fucking deserve this. You earned this. I’m so proud of you. I will tell you everything about my experience so that you can make sure that they don’t do this shit to you at your pub, your publication.” Okay?
And then I fucking posted about her and I said, “Nive got Penguin Random House. This is her book. As soon as it’s out, I will be pre-ordering. You better be pre-ordering it.” Okay. So then guess what happened?
Nive goes, “Well, if we’re being honest, when I saw that you got a good deal, I was pissed.” And I was like, “What’s a good deal? What are you talking about?” And she’s like, “It tells you that the person got an advance of 100K or higher.” And I was like, “Oh, I didn’t even know that was a fucking thing.”
And she said, “Yeah. So when I saw it, I was like, “Erin got a good deal? I didn’t get a good deal with Penguin Random House. Is she really that good? Does she really deserve this?””
Tori Dunlap:
“Is she better than me?””
Erin Gallagher:
Right? So then she told me that and we were both like, “Holy fuck, this feels amazing to just fucking tell the truth about the conditioning.” We could have become broken. We could have stopped talking to each other, but instead we laid it all out there and we hyped each other. She bought my book. She fucking posted about it.
So the thing that has to happen, Tori, is that when you have the thought, you have to first recognize it and then you have to forgive yourself. You have to say, “Of course I think this. I have been conditioned my entire life to think this about other women. This is not my fault, but it is my responsibility and my opportunity to make a different choice.”
And then you have to hype. Hype is a verb. I think a lot of people think that hype is frivolous. They’re like, “Yeah, it’s just you being like, “You go, girl.”” Nah. Hype is a transfer of capital and we have five areas of capital that we can transfer, human, social, financial, political, and spiritual. Okay.
So your human capital is what you know. This is your expertise. It’s your experience. It’s your knowledge. Your social capital is who you know. This is your network, your relationships. Your financial capital is cash, money, investments. Your political capital is who you are. This is your reputation, your power, your influence. And then your spiritual capital is how you live. This is your energy, your manifestations, your good karma.
So you have to actually transfer capital to be considered a hype woman or someone who hypes women. Because sitting at home, girl, looking at their phone going, “That’s so great for her,” is not fucking hype. That is passive admiration at best, but really just fucking trolling.
Tori Dunlap:
Or it’s performative. You’re not doing that for that person. You’re doing that as like, “Oh, it checks my box. I was a good friend today.” When again, secretly, you’re harboring the resentment or you’re like, “They got the opportunity instead of me.” Yep.
Erin Gallagher:
That’s exactly right.
Tori Dunlap:
And we’re all guilty of it.
Erin Gallagher:
That’s exactly right.
Tori Dunlap:
We’re all guilty of it.
Erin Gallagher:
We’re guilty of it. And I think, Tori, because my intuition is so strong and because I take care of my intuition and I respect it, it gets stronger. That’s kind of how it works, like with anything in your life. I can see the performative very quickly and easily.
Tori Dunlap:
Yep, me too.
Erin Gallagher:
The people like, “Girl, you have this.” Where people show up when you’re shiny and then fucking they disappear when they think you’re dull or things get hard. This tells us everything we need to know about them. Again, this is the shift for me over time was I used to see that as a reflection of me and feedback that I needed to consider. Now it tells me everything I need to know about them.
Tori Dunlap:
You created an audit for identifying mean girls from the hype women. Can you walk us through that?
Erin Gallagher:
Yes. There is a spectrum from mean girl to hype woman. I’ll talk about these five sort of groups within this spectrum. What’s wild is there are women who will shift between them over the course of your relationship based on either their growth or their decay, but there are also women who will shift between them based on yours.
So there were women who I thought were hype women, but they were actually mean girls and it took my own growth and transformation to recognize that. So on one end, you have the predators. These are the mean girls. These are the women who are completely out for themselves, who are constantly looking for a weakness or a vulnerability and they’re-
Tori Dunlap:
Flaw.
Erin Gallagher:
… and a flaw and they are exploiting it. They’re the ones who tell you horrible things about yourself under the guise, they’re just trying to be helpful. “Hey, I just want you to know that this is what so-and-so said about you. I think it’s something that you might want to think about.”
Tori Dunlap:
It’s crazy that she said that and I just want you to hear it.
Erin Gallagher:
“What a bitch. What a bitch.” And what you want to say, but you don’t in the moment is, “Well, what did you say? Did you agree with her? Because it sounds like you agreed with her.” So these are the predators. These are really the most dangerous of women.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah, it’s Regina George.
Erin Gallagher:
Regina George, listen. And we know that a shit ton of them are straight white cisgendered women. I mean, we’ve got foot soldiers to the patriarchy who are squarely in that space.
And then you have right next to it, you have the pretenders. And the pretenders are the ones who are under the spell of the mean girl. And so waddling along after her and doing what she says. But then when they’re around you, they also are acting like they believe you and they are supporting you, but there’s no truth to any of it.
They are shape-shifters. They are shape-shifters who are so almost more dangerous. Because the mean girls are so fucking obvious, but these women can trick you into thinking that they’re actually on your side. What they don’t realize is-
Tori Dunlap:
They’re chameleons. Absolutely.
Erin Gallagher:
They’re chameleons, right?
Tori Dunlap:
And they also, they gather information. That is their-
Erin Gallagher:
They’re spies.
Tori Dunlap:
Yes. They are there to gather information and there to distribute said information. Yeah.
Erin Gallagher:
That’s correct.
Tori Dunlap:
They’re not there to support you. They’re there to get the dirt.
Erin Gallagher:
That’s right.
Tori Dunlap:
Or that’s something that they can create into dirt. Yeah.
Erin Gallagher:
Because they think that strengthens their-
Tori Dunlap:
Bonds.
Erin Gallagher:
Right.
Tori Dunlap:
Their position.
Erin Gallagher:
That makes them look cooler, their position. The position with the mean girls. So they’re going to use you. They’re going to get information from you and they’re going to weaponize it. So you have to be very careful.
And what they also don’t realize is that they’re prey. They think that they’re good and they’re in. It’s like, “No, no, you are just as much prey.” So those are the pretenders.
Then you have the projectors. Now the projectors in my experience are women who are, for the most part, well-meaning, but they have so much unresolved trauma and unhealed hurt and they project it onto you. And so these are the women who are just really kind of draining. They’re the ones who always think that you’re mad at them.
They’re the ones who you do something out in the world and somehow they have found a way to feel like it was a direct hit to them. And you’re like, “I wasn’t even thinking about you. How did that offend you?” So these women, they have potential, but they have to do the work.
So you have to be careful about your energy with them as well. I have a lot of people in my life who are projectors and you’re like, “Oh, my God, do we really have to go through this again?” This exhausting experience that should just be a very seamless one. This doesn’t feel like flow at all. So those are the projectors.
Then you have the promoters. So the promoters are the women in your life who, when you go to them for help, they help you. When you ask them to do something, to do a post or to buy something, they do it. When you need support or advice, they give it to you. So they are absolutely in your corner, but they are not necessarily going to go out of their way to do it on their own.
They’re not like these women who just show up for you without being asked. So they are important, but because sometimes, Tori, it’s not even about you that they’re not showing up as often as you wish they were or they’re not hyping in the way that you want them to. It’s either their own journey that they’re navigating or it’s actually a capacity issue where they’ve got something else going on in their life.
So these women cannot be discounted. They’re a part of our growth and transformation. And so you do need them in your life. And you just have to sometimes think about the fact that you aren’t actually the center of everyone’s universe.
And then you’ve got the protectors, the fucking hype women. These are your fucking ride or dies. I say in the book, “These are the women that will pick you up from the airport and from jail.” You count on them for anything and everything. It’s a judgment free zone. They are actively saying your name in rooms where you’re not. They truly see your success as theirs. And these are the women that you must build your life around.
It will take you to new heights, both in this 3D world that we’re in, but also in this sort of expansive spiritual world when you have women that see the best version of you and that remind you of who you are when you forget. When you have those moments where you’re just not so sure or something is really getting to you or you don’t think you’re good enough. And they’re there to remind you and say, “No, we’re not doing that again.”
And so it is time to look at your life, your professional world, your friendships, your family members, and do an audit. Where do the women in your life lie on this continuum? And the ones who are in that red zone, it is time to start reclaiming your energy and your time and your space. Because you cannot strengthen the muscle of your own intuition and your own self-love until you stop siphoning it to those that are energy vampires.
Tori Dunlap:
Something you said that I get asked about a lot is people come to me and they go, “Tori, you’re really good about talking yourself up. You’re really good about hyping yourself.” You’re very good at that, Erin. And I think a lot of women, because we’ve been conditioned not to, come to me and ask, “How do I get comfortable hyping myself?”
So as you’re talking about these women that we hope are hyping each other, how do we even get comfortable doing that for ourselves? Talking about our accomplishments, saying, “I did that.” Posting on LinkedIn, posting on Instagram, going into spaces and saying, “I worked hard for this.” How do we get comfortable doing that?
Erin Gallagher:
We cannot do it alone. The trap and the trick is that we’re supposed to just all of a sudden shift and then go and be like, “I’m amazing.” No, no, no, no.
You need to have your A team around you and you need to say, “Hey, I just accomplished this. I know that I deserve it, but I’m worried and afraid to say it out loud. So I’m going to go do it and I need you to fucking show up and I need you to be there for me.”
Tori Dunlap:
Which by the way, sometimes that worry is 100% valid. Because one of the things very vulnerably that I think about a lot is the more attention I draw to myself, the higher I climb, the higher I can fall of if-
Erin Gallagher:
Ooh, yeah, girl.
Tori Dunlap:
… cancel culture wants to come for me for either something that didn’t happen or something that was an honest mistake. That is something that used to really freak me out, freaks me out less now. But is something that’s like, because we’re not kind to women and because women only get one shot and sometimes not even that, it is sometimes the most public women are the ones that were like, “Oh, yeah, she didn’t run her company like this or something happened.”
So again, this fear is 100% valid. This fear of, “Oh, if I draw attention to myself, it’s a tall poppy situation where somebody’s going to come for me.”
Erin Gallagher:
Oh, it’s 100% valid. And you and I have both had that happen to us, right?
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah.
Erin Gallagher:
Because remember, those with courage and conviction will attract the people that don’t have it. They will be the first people to criticize those that have courage and conviction. So it is just like, it’s scientific that it is going to go down that way.
So when I say an A team, like my A team looks like this, I have a therapist, I have a psychiatrist, I have a masseuse, I have a colorist. I have a Reiki healer, I have a yoga teacher. I have a group of incredible women friends, I have a group of incredible founders. This is my A team. I need all of them in order to keep doing stuff, keep saying, keep living loudly, keep experiencing. Because when you get knocked down, you need to be able to go to them and get supported and re-infused.
But I also think that women are so afraid to ask for support and help because we are conditioned to believe that we are supposed to be able to do it on our own. That we are a burden to people when we ask for it. And no man has ever gotten anywhere by himself, like not even fucking across the street, okay? He’s using Siri to get across the fucking street.
So we have to fucking lock arms when we do these things. And so when I was launching my book, I went to my whole fucking crew. My whole fucking crew six weeks out to say, “I need your hype. I need you to post about this.” And guess what? A lot of people didn’t do it, and that told me everything I needed to know about them, not me.
And then there were a lot of fucking women who did do it, you being one of them. Who took the fucking time to use your social capital and political capital and transfer it to me. That is meaningful. But we have got to ask for help and we have got to do this with other women because doing it alone not only is not possible, but the martyrdom to grit shit is, there is no glory to it.
Tori Dunlap:
I have been lucky enough to sit in a room with you. We were at the DNC together and you hosted an incredible fairway dinner in Chicago. If people are unfamiliar with your work, one of my favorite things you do is you gather women, largely women founders, but women who are trying to build something or try to do something big in a room together and it’s not just, “Here’s what I’m doing. Oh, yay.”
It is like, “Who do you know? How can I make more money? What does that look like? And then what can I offer to these women?” This dinner was so incredibly impactful. And it is the kind of shit that we just need more of. So my final question to you is, what have you learned through your work, through writing this book, through these dinners about what actually makes women’s communities so powerful?
Erin Gallagher:
We have to be able to break. The thing that has made the Fairway Dinners so powerful that has made my own transformation through writing this book and birthing it into the world, that has guided my solo-preneurial journey over the past three years, that has put me in community with women like you, is that we have allowed each other to break, to fall apart, to fail.
And we didn’t run away. We stayed, girl. We fucking stayed and said, “You’re not done. It’s not over. This isn’t it. That’s not all there was. Let’s be in this moment. Let’s feel through this. Let’s try to understand what we are learning from it, what the universe is trying to message to us. And then let’s go forward together.”
The communities of women that have not been good for me are those that only like me when I’m shiny. The ones that only are there when you get the big headline and you have the viral moment, but who fucking disappear when shit gets hard and when the rubber meets the road.
And so communities of women that are based on allowing the cocooning period to exist, the dissolving into nothing without a plan or a path for where you’re headed, these are the women who are going to be a part of your life for eternity.
Tori Dunlap:
And I will also say you have to be that for yourself. Because as you just lovingly put it, you cannot be that for other women if you’re not that for yourself. Erin, I love you. I admire you. I am so excited for everybody to read this book. Plug away, my friend.
Erin Gallagher:
Tori, I love you. I admire you. I’m so grateful for you. Here’s what I want for anyone who reads my book, I want you to hear this directly from me. I am not here to tell you what to do. I am not here to tell you where to go. I am not here to tell you who to be.
I am here to invite you to ask yourself the question, is it still working? When you look at the lot of your life and you look at everything that you feel is the infrastructure of your day-to-day and all of your relationships and the way that you view the world and the way that you view yourself, if it is still working, the things that you’re doing, great. Keep doing them.
But if any of them are not working and you are interested in making a different choice, you will need support and you will need to be in community. And that is what I am creating here.
Tori Dunlap:
Thank you.
Erin Gallagher:
Thank you for having me.
Tori Dunlap:
Thank you for listening to Financial Feminists, produced by Her First $100K. If you love the show and want to keep supporting feminist media, please subscribe or follow us on your preferred podcasting platform or on YouTube. Your support helps us continue to bring this content to you for free. If you’re looking for resources, tools, and education, including all of the resources mentioned in this episode, head to http://herfirst100k.com/ffpod.
Financial Feminist is hosted by me, Tori Dunlap. Produced by Kristen Fields and Tamisha Grant. Research by Sarah Sciortino. Audio and video engineering by Alyssa Midcalf. Marketing and Operations by Karina Patel and Amanda Leffew. Special thanks to our team at Her First 100K, Kailyn Sprinkle, Masha Bakhmetyeva, Sasha Bonar, Rae Wong, Elizabeth McCumber, Daryl Ann Ingman, Shelby Duclos, Meghan Walker, and Jess Hawks. Promotional graphics by Mary Stratton, photography by Sarah Wolfe, and theme music by Jonah Cohen Sound. A huge thanks to the entire Her First 100K community for supporting our show.
Tori Dunlap
Tori Dunlap is an internationally-recognized money and career expert. After saving $100,000 at age 25, Tori quit her corporate job in marketing and founded Her First $100K to fight financial inequality by giving women actionable resources to better their money. She has helped over five million women negotiate salaries, pay off debt, build savings, and invest.
Tori’s work has been featured on Good Morning America, the New York Times, BBC, TIME, PEOPLE, CNN, New York Magazine, Forbes, CNBC, BuzzFeed, and more.
With a dedicated following of over 2.1 million on Instagram and 2.4 million on TikTok —and multiple instances of her story going viral—Tori’s unique take on financial advice has made her the go-to voice for ambitious millennial women. CNBC called Tori “the voice of financial confidence for women.”
An honors graduate of the University of Portland, Tori currently lives in Seattle, where she enjoys eating fried chicken, going to barre classes, and attempting to naturally work John Mulaney bits into conversation.
