Category: Coaching Tips

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They Just Need to Put on Sunglasses

Did you know that you have a glass ceiling of joy? That most likely YOU are self-imposing? Several years ago I read The Big Leap by Gay Hendricks. I had so many aha-moments that I have re-read it several times since. (And highly recommend it to everyone.) 

In his book, Hendricks says that we have all created a limitation for how much joy we feel worthy of experiencing, and unless we intentionally overcome it, we will always self-sabotage to keep ourselves within our comfort zone. 

One of the main things holding us back from experiencing more joy in life and achieving greater success is linked to our hidden barriers. 

I had an experience with bullying in the 8th grade. Losing all my friends at age 14 went on to fundamentally change how I interacted in the world. 

The short version of the story was that I was class president and editor-in-chief of the yearbook staff while continuously making straight A’s and achieving perfect attendance. Whereas I believed that the more successful and smart I was, the more people would like me, the reality was it had the opposite effect. 

A group of girls decided to use rumors to take me down. It became “cool” to not like Sophia and people would pretend I was invisible. The turning point was when a girl told me,

“I’m actually really smart, but I don’t let people know because people like to feel good about themselves. So if they think they’re smarter than me, they will like me more.” 

In that very vulnerable moment of my youth, I took her words as gospel. I tested it out and it worked. I applied it in high school and beyond, and it worked.

“Don’t be too successful and you will make everyone around you feel more comfortable.” 

It was Hendrick’s book that helped me to realize how this experience created a “fear of outshining” in me, and why for the rest of my life I continued to stay at just above mediocrity so as to not make others feel uncomfortable in my presence. 


I would love to say that 4 years later I have overcome this fear, but the reality is, I have not. It’s happening at such a subconscious level in me that it truly takes intention to recognize it and a conscious effort to push past it. I am a work in progress and constantly trying to remind myself that I am worthy of success. My comfort zone has become second place, and I am still trying to push past my fears and lean into my potential. 

What is your glass ceiling? How are you holding yourself back from your greatest potential? In Hendrick’s book he spells out the four hidden barriers:

Hidden Barrier One: Feeling Fundamentally Flawed: You feel that something is wrong with you.

Hidden Barrier Two: Disloyalty and Abandonment: This is a belief that achieving success essentially means you have to leave your tribe.

Hidden Barrier Three: Believing that More Success Brings a Bigger Burden. This fear will immobilize you because you believe that the life you create will burden others and triggers the emotion of guilt.

Hidden Barrier Four: The Crime of Outshining: You believe that if you become too successful you will make others look bad.

In 2016 when I listened to this book on Audible, I started weeping as I drove down the road and learned about the “crime of outshining.” I had suppressed that 8th grade memory, but I immediately knew I had internalized it. Ever since, I have been working on giving myself permission to shine brightly. I often encourage myself by saying,

“If my light makes them feel uncomfortable, then they just need to put on sunglasses.” 

What barrier is holding you back? Do any of the four listed above resonate with you? What fears do you actively have to overcome? 

Thanks for making it to the end of this blog post! Two options to keep going if you want more:

Looking to get from where you are now to where you want to be? Then I highly recommend downloading the free E-book from my site, “Coach Yourself in 10 Minutes.” Just drop your email below and it will be sent to you.

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Why I Said Bye to Hustle Culture


There was a season of my life I participated in hustle culture, mostly from my teen years through early twenties. I believed that burning the candle at both ends and running myself ragged would help me get to the top faster.

I specifically remember one speaker in college who greatly inspired me. He was a highly successful businessman who was the guest speaker at an event my last semester. There were two quotes he shared that day that I wrote down and internalized,

“You can sleep when you’re dead.”

And

“Do not put off for tomorrow what can be done today.”

My type-A personality loved the reinforcement to continue to pursue my workaholic behaviors.

Fast forward two years from that event and my body was crashing, my marriage wasn’t very healthy, I was regularly sick, I lived with constant brain fog and I was exhausted all the time, to the point of falling asleep in my desk at work. This was not working for me.

I later learned that sure, this man had accumulated a lot of wealth and had built one of the largest advertising agencies in the world, but his family suffered. His marriage ended in divorce and come to find out, he didn’t have a strong relationship with his kids until they were adults.

After my body crashed and I took my sabbatical, I started reframing the way I did everything.

The first thing I did was grab a couple mentors. I looked specifically for people who were in their sixties and had created a life that looked like what I wanted mine to resemble at that age: strong family, successful career, financial independence and a peaceful confidence.

It was fascinating to me what these two very different people had in common. Although they had never met, their habits highly resembled one another:

• Strong spiritual life
• Daily meditation practice
• Full night’s rest every night
• Prioritized healthy eating
• Always stayed hydrated
• Had strong boundaries around their time
• Valued philanthropy
• Read books constantly
• Insatiable hunger to learn

I started realizing that I had none of these habits, and I had to release my beliefs around hustle culture. I was “too busy” to slow down and make time for these habits.

Instead of believing I could sleep when I was dead, I spent months getting 9 hours of sleep a night until my body caught up. Now 7.5 is when my body naturally wakes up.

Instead of believing nothing could wait until tomorrow, I now believe that almost everything can wait, and I pick the most important priorities each day. I am deliberate at prioritizing each area of my life and giving it space on my calendar. What’s not on the calendar waits until its designated time. I have fully accepted that my to-do list will never, ever, ever get to zero.

I calendar time with my husband to binge-watch television. I set aside time with my kids to sit in the house with no plans and chill on the couch or chase them around in circles (quite literally, one of their favorite games is playing ‘catch me’ while we run around the kitchen island).

Less truly is more.

As we enter into the peak of the holiday season, I hope you are able to detach from any hanging to-do lists. I hope you give yourself permission to rest. I hope you freely allow things to wait until January to be done. I hope you enjoy the present moment, enjoy your families, and create space and time for restoration, whatever activities that word involves for you.

Grace and Peace my friends,

Sophia

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Thanks for making it to the end of this blog post! Two options to keep going if you want more:

Looking to create more peace in your life? Then I highly recommend downloading the free E-book from my site, Create Peace. Just drop your email below and it will be sent to you.

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How I Avoid Disappointment

We all know what it feels like to have the wind sucked out of us when disappointment takes over. It’s an awful feeling. I used to experience it much more often, until I learned a valuable lesson:

Setting expectations only leads to unnecessary disappointment.

In 2009, tears streamed down my cheeks the whole way home on a flight from Los Angeles to Tampa. While there, I had been offered the ideally perfect job for me, with the minimum salary we needed to survive, and I felt like everything I had worked 5 years toward creating was coming true. We filled out the paperwork for an apartment in Glendale and starting planning our new lives.

Then, I got the strangest phone call the night before I left. It all came crashing down. I would have to leave L.A. with no prospects, my tail between my legs and the reality that we would probably be staying exactly where we were…in the 470 sq ft studio in the same zip code where I grew up.

I was devastated. We both were.

My husband finished his L.A. internship and came back to our tiny studio. We didn’t know what else to do since it was the peak of the recession, so we started our own business. Fresh out of college. That business ended up providing an income that supported both of us and opened up doors to relationships that have changed the course of our lives.

We still ended up making all the things we wanted happen…just here. In my hometown. Not 2500 miles away. Now we both have careers we love, two kids, a home, and my family lives in the same neighborhood as us.

When I think back to how disappointed I was when the opportunity I thought I wanted didn’t work out, I realize that it was a gift.

Plan B became Plan A, and I am better off for it. How can we even see what gifts may be resting in Plan B if we are too busy being overwhelmed in grief from Plan A (that by the way…never happened, was never going to happen, and literally only existed as a figment in our imagination)?

Mindfulness teaches us to keep our thoughts and energy in the current moment. This is particularly challenging for me, but I’ve learned it’s the best path to my inner peace. When I feel the emotion of disappointment coming on, I pause. I ask myself if I am only feeling this because of an expectation I set in my own imagination, and if I am missing a gift that is right in front of me.

As we prepare for 2021, my encouragement for you is to hold the plans loosely. I believe setting goals and intentions are important. They give us something to strive toward. They help us rise into growth and self-improvement. However, we must be prepared for the curveballs that are inevitably coming.

And before I go, I know many of you probably feel disappointment the most from other people. I feel you. But it’s really not much different than what you expect from your future plans. We cannot control either people, nor plans. I try really hard to release people of crazy high expectations, especially the expectations to which I hold myself. I choose to observe people. I let their actions show me their personalities, their priorities, their insecurities, their fears, their past hurt, their strengths, their gifts, etc. When someone disappoints me, I just watch it and observe it. I allow the experience to teach me something I need to learn about myself.

In simple terms…I hold my expectations of people much like I do my plans…loosely and with gratitude.

Thanks for making it to the end of this blog post! Two options to keep going if you want more:

Looking to create more peace in your life? Then I highly recommend downloading the free E-book from my site, Create Peace. Just drop your email below and it will be sent to you.

If you happen to be a working mom, join our community on Facebook

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When confidence is repulsive

During the quarantine I read Glennon Doyle’s latest release Untamed. There is so much to love about this book, but today I want to talk about these quotes:

“I have noticed that it seems far easier for the world to love a suffering woman than it is for the world to love a joyful, confident woman…

…I have been conditioned to mistrust and dislike strong, confident, happy girls and women. We all have…

…We become people who say of confident women ‘I don’t know, I can’t explain it—it’s just something about her. I just don’t like her. I can’t put my finger on why’…

…Their brazen defiance and refusal to follow directions makes us want to put them back into their cage.”

Raise your hand if this felt like a punch in the stomach to you? I highlighted the heck out of this chapter because I have not read many books where I resonated so deeply.

I have dealt with this my entire life. My mama raised all three of her kids to be confident. Whenever we would come home from school and tell her someone didn’t like us or wasn’t nice to us she would say “Oh, don’t worry about them. They are just jealous of you.” Every. Single. Time. We would roll our eyes and tell mama she was crazy, but you know those words sank into our subconscious.

Have I been walking around the earth thinking everyone is jealous of me? HAHA! Heck-to-the-NO!!! But, I have been walking around giving little to no energy toward what others think of me for a verrrrrrry long time.

My M.O. is that I get super attached to a mission I am on, and then I go get it done. Along the way I don’t play victim, I never ask for a pity party, I never give energy to someone else’s worries and concern, I just keep trail blazing.

At the end of my high school senior year I was offered the editor position for my local magazine, and I accepted. At 18 I was managing a staff of freelance writers who were mostly in their 40’s-60’s. It required learning curves for me and them, but my bosses (a husband and wife team) were always so encouraging. I ended up working for them for seven years and held several different positions in the company. One day I asked them “why on earth did you hire me at 18? I was a BABY!” He said ‘When you were 16 years old you called and asked to be a writer. Your very first writer’s meeting you showed up, took a seat, and believed you belonged at the table. You volunteered to write the feature, having no idea that was reserved for the senior writer, and when he dropped the ball on the deadline, you threw together a great piece in less than a week. We knew then we wanted to keep you around.”

I am forever grateful for my first “real” bosses and the potential they always saw in me. But other people, not so much. The same exact scenario from some of the other writers at that table were:

“Who the hell does she think she is just showing up and pitching ideas?”

“Where did she even come from…I’ve never heard of her. Who are her parents?”

“Well…that was bold. She has guts.” (With an eye roll)  

A year into that job several of the writers had overturned. Interestingly enough, I can distinctly remember two female writers who couldn’t handle my presence. The men were actually very kind, tolerated my youthful management learning curves and helped show me some ropes. But my very existence made multiple women uneasy and they left the publication.

In my twenties, this repeating experience deeply bothered me, and I would try to alter my personality to make other people feel more comfortable. When we live out of alignment with our authentic selves, this causes an inner war. I’ve written about this in the past. Eventually I had to just take off the lampshade and let my light be too bright for some people.

If you are a person who is “too much” for some, I want to encourage you to keep shining.

My husband is a feature film Director of Photography. This means he is a lighting EXPERT. He knows the science behind when and why you use every kind of light. He will intentionally dim, brighten, cool and warm up lights. He knows when he needs to bring out the green filters, orange filters, blue and so on. Every single shade, color and intensity is needed to tell a story.

Each. One. Matters.

If you happen to have a super confident and intense personality like I do, we are simply too bright for some people. I want to encourage you to shine at your highest settings. Just like the world needs the soft lights and the cool lights to help people feel comfortable, the world needs YOU to help inspire people outside of their comfort zones.

You do not need a lamp shade, sister. They need to go buy sunglasses.

It’s not your problem. It’s theirs.

Shine on. (As Glennon would say….you’re an effing cheetah.)

*Written by Sophia Hyde. Sophia is a certified life coach specializing in helping people create the peace they crave in their lives. Her 12 week course is currently open for enrollment and will close on May 25. There are three ways to participate: self-coaching, group coaching or 1:1 coaching. For more info, visit her website.

*To receive an email notification any time this blog is updated, subscribe by visiting the website and downloading her free e-book “Creating Peace.”