Do you ever find yourself playing small — like not sharing your idea in the meeting, or talking yourself out of applying for a job you really want, telling yourself that you’re just not quite qualified yet? It doesn’t have to be job focused either — we play small in our personal lives too, like not asking a new acquaintance out for coffee, figuring she probably has enough friends already. If any of that sounds familiar, you’re not alone. I struggle with playing small too, and it’s time for you and me to knock it off and step into the lives that we were meant to live. Today I’m talking with the woman who wrote the book, quite literally, on playing big. Let’s get started.

Hello, gorgeous, welcome back to the Everyday Style School, the podcast that gives real-life style advice to real-life women. I’m your host, Jennifer Mackey-Mary. I’m a wardrobe stylist who’s been dressing everyday women for over 20 years, and I’m the founder of Everyday Style, where we are on a mission to inspire women to love the way they look and give you the tools to make getting dressed easy.

Friend, I am beyond excited to share this interview with you today. I’m not kidding when I tell you that today’s guest has been on my dream guest list since I started this show in 2019. Over the years, there have been a few books that have had a profound impact on my life, and at the top of that list is the book that we’re talking about today, Playing Big by Tara Mohr.

I first read it at a time when I was struggling to gain traction in my business. I saw all these people around me who, frankly, were pretty average, having all of this success. Their social media followings were skyrocketing, and they were getting all these super cool opportunities. And I was mad. I was jealous. I felt like I was working so hard to be the best stylist I could be, and to have all the right words and give all the best advice, but it just wasn’t happening for me in the same way. I knew that I was meant for more, I was meant for bigger things, but I just couldn’t figure out what was holding me back.

I didn’t go looking for this book — I didn’t Google “how to stop feeling bad about yourself and start speaking up.” But somehow it found me at the exact right time, which — that’s usually how the universe delivers, right? The first time I read it, I had that sense of, how does she know? Has she been watching me? Because the book described exactly how I’d been feeling and what I had been telling myself. Since then I have read Playing Big many, many times. My copy is so well-read and well-worn and well-loved. I’ve learned a lot. I have challenged myself. I’ve fallen back into old patterns. I’ve started again. And as it turns out, changing your playing-small ways is an ongoing journey, not a linear task.

Now, if you’re wondering what the heck this has to do with style — well, a lot, actually. When you talk yourself out of buying a dress you love because of what people might think, you’re playing small. When you deny yourself a fabulous wardrobe because you don’t like the number on the tag, you’re playing small. There are lots of ways we avoid playing big when it comes to what we wear, and what we wear can actually help us play bigger in all aspects of our lives. Tara and I dive into all that and more in this conversation.

I’m not going to make you wait any longer, let’s get to the good part. But before we do, let’s meet today’s guest. Tara Mohr is the founder of the internationally acclaimed Playing Big women’s leadership program, a renowned expert on women’s wellbeing, and a sought-after speaker. She’s also the bestselling author of Playing Big: Practical Wisdom for Women Who Want to Speak Up, Create, and Lead. Her groundbreaking book has been praised by luminaries such as Maria Shriver and Elizabeth Gilbert. Playing Big was named Best Book of the Year by Apple’s iBooks upon its release, and was recently included on McKinsey’s 2024 “What to Read Next” annual list. Tara’s work continues to inspire women to lead with confidence, courage, and a deeper sense of purpose.

Here’s our conversation. I was a little under the weather when we chatted, so my apologies for my voice, but the message is still the same. I hope you enjoy it.

Jennifer: Hi, Tara, welcome to the Everyday Style School. We are so happy to have you here today.

Tara: Thank you for having me. I’m so excited for our conversation.

Jennifer: So I wanted to start out sharing my story about reaching out to you. I told you, when we first hopped on this little chat today, that I don’t fangirl often, but this is a huge fangirl moment for me. I follow you on Instagram, and one day I was scrolling, scrolling, scrolling, and a post from you came up, and I thought, I should just reach out and ask her if she’d be on my show. That would be my playing big moment. And I have this little voice that says, who would want to be on your show? Well, maybe when you get to 2 million downloads, maybe when you get to 5 million downloads. Like, there’s always this thing that I have to reach before I feel like I have a seat at the table.

And then I channeled my inner Angie — my friend Angie, she should know who she is. I said, Angie would do it, Angie would just send the DM. So I just sent the DM, and I heard back from someone on your team, like, within a day, and it was so lovely. And I thought, wait a minute, what if I just hadn’t spoken up? What if I hadn’t had that moment where I just shot my shot? Right? Everyone listening to this would not have the benefit of hearing from you. So I first of all want to thank Angie for giving me that playing big moment, but also you, for writing that book and inspiring women to play a little bit bigger. So thank you. It’s a journey, it’s a process, we’re all on it, right?

Tara: Amazing. Yeah, I love that story. There’s so much we could unpack in there, we could just stay there, really — I mean, we could take that as our template, because it’s that voice of self-doubt that you talked about. And so often, us brilliant women, the voice of self-doubt does not say, “you are absolutely horrible.” It’s a little sneakier than that, right? It says, “oh, just wait till you get to 2 million downloads.” It has an argument, and it has this kind of illusion — like, later I’m gonna let you do these things, which the later never comes. So I love that that’s in your story.

And also, you kind of played a cognitive trick on yourself by saying, “what would Angie do?” and then you found your way into action. That’s really powerful too, because one of the things I’ve found over these years working with women around self-doubt is, we don’t always have to go into ten years of therapy and dig up the deep, deep root of that self-doubt. Sometimes there’s a practice we can do in the moment that helps us leapfrog it, and that’s what you did.

Jennifer: I love that, because I think we can all sit around and talk about it for years and years and years, but there does come a moment where, like, I just got to send that email. I just got to send that DM. I just have to do something.

Tara: Yes, yes. And understanding why I might feel self-doubt, or what are the things that happen in my life — that doesn’t usually help it go away. In the case of the inner critic, it’s really the muscles and the skills that we can use in the moment to choose a different path. That is what we need.

Jennifer: Okay, I love that so much, we’re going to come back to it. But I don’t want to leave our listeners in the dark, so for our listeners who have not carried this book around for years, this well-loved, well-worn book — can you, in a nutshell, tell us what Playing Big is all about?

Tara: Yes, absolutely. Many years ago, I started a small coaching practice. I knew I wanted to work with people around creating the lives and careers they wanted, and really work with people around, how does our inner life affect what we get to do and create in our life? That’s all I kind of knew about my focus.

But what happened early in my coaching practice is, my clients were all these wonderful women, full of personality and ideas and care for our world, and again and again I would hear them doubting their abilities — doubting their readiness to start that business, or take on that community leadership role, or ask for something they wanted at work, or start the creative project they’d been daydreaming about. So much self-doubt, and it was so starkly in contrast to how capable they clearly were.

And I could really relate to that. I had another full-time job at the time, I was doing well in my job, I don’t feel confident there. I did well in school, I got the gold stars, that didn’t add up to confidence. And how are we going to create this more wonderful world of women creating and leading if we are holding back in these ways? So I got really interested in that. Playing big and playing small are sort of a shorthand for all of that self-doubting and holding back that we do, and I got interested in why are we playing small, and then, more importantly, how do we play bigger?

Playing bigger, to me, is not what does the world think is big — what’s the biggest title, what’s the biggest paycheck. It’s not that, it’s your own self-defined courageous playing big. My kind of working definition of playing big is that playing big is being more loyal to your dreams than to your fears.

Jennifer: Oh, I love that. I love that. One of the biggest themes of the book is the idea of the inner critic versus the inner mentor. Can you talk about those a little bit?

Tara: Yes, yes. So how do we start to do that playing big — that inner playing big — a lot has to do with quieting the voice of self-doubt. I always say it’s the first thing I do with women in a course or in a coaching situation, because if you don’t quiet self-doubt, you kind of can’t use anything else you’ve learned, right? Like, you might be learning about personal style, you might be learning negotiation tips, but you don’t even get to implement any of it if you are immediately overcome by that voice that says, who do you think you are, you look ridiculous, you’re going to be made a fool of. So from the gate, we need some basic skills in quieting that inner critic voice.

That’s what that’s all about — recognizing all of us have this inner critic voice. And I can tell you, whether it’s a stay-at-home mom or a partner in a law firm, whether you’re 20 or you’re 80 — I have worked with such wide-ranging groups of women, and anytime I convince myself, “oh, well, these women aren’t going to have an inner critic, they already ran for office and won,” or “these women aren’t going to have an inner critic, they’re 50 years into amazing lives and work” — that voice is there for all of us, and we have to learn to manage it.

And then there’s this other voice that I think of as the inner mentor. Some of us may feel a little familiar with this voice, a lot of us never really were talked to about a part of us that’s like this, but the inner mentor is like the wise, calm elder within us. In the playing big work, we do a guided visualization — anyone can do it, you can get it in the book, or even if you don’t have the book, on my website. It takes about 20 minutes, and it’s just a meditation to really encounter your older, wiser self. I’d love to hear if you’ve had experience with this exercise and what it was like for you.

For what happens for so many women is, they meet this really vivid sense of their older self, and that’s so important, because mentors are great, but no mentor has all the right answers for us, and no mentor knows exactly what our unique right path is. So then we can sort of consult with that voice — both asking her help, “I need advice in this situation, what does that part of me have to say,” but also just picturing, how would she show up at this tense family gathering? How would she approach this potential job application process? How would she talk to my kid’s teacher when it feels really charged and like a hard subject to raise? And we can then kind of live into her. To me, that’s the best way to live into our playing big, because we’re being pulled by a very compelling, true vision for us — we’re not pushing ourselves harder.

Jennifer: I think every woman right now, without doing 20 minutes of guided visualization, can hear her inner critic — it is loud, it is there, it is immediate. Why are we so in tune with our inner critic? But we’ve got to dig deep to find our inner mentor. Where does that start?

Tara: So one is, I think we get a lot more reinforcement for the inner critic in the culture and in our lives, right? We have critical people in our lives who teach us how to talk to ourselves critically — maybe fashion magazines taught us to talk to ourselves critically, maybe teachers did, or people we were close to — so we kind of get planted with those narratives. But also, the inner critic is really rooted in our fears. It’s the fear of not fitting in, the fear of failing, the fear of embarrassing ourselves — those are what turn into inner critic thoughts. And fear is loud, because fear is trying to help us survive in this world. The inner mentor voice, I often feel, is quieter, because it’s actually more loving and respectful of us, and so it’s waiting to be invited into the conversation.

Jennifer: But we’re not really inviting her very often, right?

Tara: Right. So the inner critic is an intruder, and it’s great to think of it that way. If you’re having a thought like, “I’m not going to say that, that’s ridiculous” — that voice, that thought, is not the core of you. That voice is actually invading, intruding on the core of you, which is the part that said, “oh, I have an idea, and that idea feels like it might be fun to share.” The inner mentor, you could picture her very secure in her seat — maybe yours is sitting in a beautiful armchair by the fireplace, or on a beautiful hillside outdoors in nature. She’s going to stay in her seat and not intrude. You have to go to her, slow down, get a little quiet, and say, “okay, what do you have to say about this situation, how do you see this situation?” And then she’ll answer.

The other thing that’s interesting, in terms of research on left brain versus right brain: the inner critic tends to be very verbal, it has a lot of words for us, it’s more cerebral. Our inner mentor voice will sometimes answer us more with a feeling, or more with images — which is interesting, because you work with people around style, and in a way, style is all about what visuals resonate with me, what are the visuals I want to express in the world. So if you ask your inner mentor how she would approach this job situation, you will not get a paragraph. You might get a couple words, like “common” or “collaboration,” where you go, oh, I get what that means, I can kind of feel that. But you might also get a picture — you might just see yourself walking in a certain way, with a certain presence and calm, and you can watch the movie and go, oh, I get that, that would be really different. So another reason we feel like we don’t hear from her as much is because we’re not really socialized to trust answers that come through imagery or feelings. We’re usually looking for the paragraph and the verbal plan, like —

Jennifer: Give me a sign. We’re literally looking for a sign with text on it.

Tara: With text, right. But I bet if your listeners think about the things that have powerfully pulled them forward in their life — maybe they saw a certain picture of how they wanted their family life to look, maybe they saw something on Pinterest or Instagram, or they always had a picture of how they wanted a living room to feel — imagery is so powerful in helping us create our next chapters and uncover what’s pulling us.

Jennifer: Is that difficult for us, though — to get this sort of mental picture and then have to decipher it? Because I might get a picture of me walking in somewhere calm and collected, which never happens. And I go, that’s not me, I can’t do that. How do we start to translate that image into action and figure out what it means?

Tara: It can be. And in fact, the part of our mind that jumps in and says, “I need to know what it means today,” is also the part we want to go, yeah — or maybe not. Maybe I don’t need to know what it means in that literal sense. So I might say to someone, let’s just see what happens if you live with that image for a couple weeks, just let it be there, see what else it sparks, let the possibilities come from living into it, versus having to know right now exactly what it means.

And sometimes images are very literal — like, “oh, I’m seeing my inner mentor, she’s painting.” For some people that means, oh yeah, it’s time to paint, I always wanted to paint. But for someone else, it might mean, yeah, she’s really creative, and I just want my creativity to come out more when I’m making breakfast, when I’m getting dressed, when I’m leading a meeting. So sometimes those images are symbolic in themselves, and sometimes they’re more literal. Usually, when we really reflect, we kind of know where that’s leading us.

Jennifer: The first thing that struck me, that really resonated with me reading the book, was this idea that we tell ourselves we’re motivated by our inner critic — that our inner critic makes us better. And I was like, that’s so me. And then the next page you’re like, no, knock it off, that is not how we do this going forward. Can you talk a little bit about that — about how we believe that beating ourselves up makes us better?

Tara: Oh, it’s so huge, I’m so glad you brought this up. Because it can sound like, in our heads — well, if I just accepted my body however it was, would I limit what I’m eating? That’s scary to not do. Or would I still get on the treadmill if I wasn’t being self-critical? Or, for many women, it’s that inner critic voice saying, you’re going to screw it up, you’re not prepared enough — that’s what makes us double-check our work, that’s what makes us prepare extra hard. And we know from a lot of research that both women and people of color, both in school and in the workplace, do more preparatory work — we’re more primed to have that self-doubt, and a lot of times we learn, I have to be twice as good to even be taken seriously, or to get the job, or to get the promotion. So we start doing all that extra work, and often that becomes inner critic–fueled work. We do this to our kids too — we might think that by being critical of them, we’re helping them be more motivated and perform better.

So it shows up in lots of different ways when we’re being motivated by the inner critic, and the reason I say let’s not do that anymore, and I feel really good about helping people let go of being motivated that way, is for a few reasons. The first is that if you are being motivated in your life by self-doubt and self-criticism, you essentially are always having fight-or-flight physiology in your body — you have stress hormones going through your body, it is not a relaxed way to work. If you’re working out of a sense of “I’m going to totally mess this up if I don’t double-check it,” the physiology of that is a stress response, and if you are chronically working that way, you have all the negative health impacts that any other chronic stress situation would give you, and those are significant.

Number two, it is not fun. It is not fun to work that way, and we deserve to have pleasurable, sustainable ways of working.

And then the third thing I’d say is, when you’re being motivated from your inner critic, you can be a great worker bee — you’re never going to be a game changer. The inner critic will help you proofread that thing for the ninth time, do the extra background research, make sure you’ve done all your due diligence. It will not help you share your unique point of view, influence or propose something to someone in leadership, send the DM to the person you want to pitch — that has to come from a different place. Even if we’ve succeeded to a certain point in our careers — and I work with a lot of women like this — they’re like, oh, but double-checking and crossing all the eyes, running on the fear fuel and the inner critic fuel, that helped me get the first two promotions. But now I need a different skill set — I need a strong point of view, I need to be able to make polarizing decisions that not everyone’s going to like, work the relationships and politics of a situation. And our inner critic doesn’t really help us get there with any of that.

Jennifer: I just love the idea that it’s not fun. I mean, I think we can all think about people who are maybe at the top of their game, doing really well, but they don’t seem very happy about it.

Tara: Yeah, and it’s like, what’s the point of running so hard if you don’t enjoy where you’re going, what you’re doing, or the place you’re at? A hundred percent.

Jennifer: Yeah, that’s a really tough thing, I know, because — my inner critic is loud, loud. It’s a tough thing to undo. It’s a really tough thing to undo.

Tara: It is, it is. And I think it’s a combination of turning down the inner critic’s voice and turning up other things. So you could start with, what are those inner critic thoughts, can I pause when I hear them? If it’s, “this episode is going to be a disaster,” or “my blog writing talent is whatever it is” — oh, I’m hearing my inner critic right now, I can remember that’s not the voice of truth. Maybe I’m going to imagine sending that voice out of the room, or maybe I have a playful character I’ve created that symbolizes my inner critic, and I’m going to go, oh, that’s just anxiety from the movie Inside Out talking to me — I’m going to personify it. So I can do those things to turn down the critic’s voice.

But then I’d also say, we’re so helped by turning up other parts of ourselves. So it’s like, why am I doing this, who am I trying to help, let me think more about them right now, what are the values I hold dear that are leading me here, that can really propel me forward. That’s turning up the volume on the good stuff, so we’re being motivated from those more resonant, sustainable sources of motivation.

Jennifer: I think that is such amazing advice. I get to volunteer in a high school program — I teach fundamentals of business as a volunteer, I love high schoolers, it’s my favorite thing ever. I was on a panel maybe a couple years ago, and they asked about criticism online — you know, if you live online at all, people are going to criticize you. I shared an email I got — it was a beautiful email, the top of it was “I love everything you do,” blah blah blah, and then there were two paragraphs about how much they hated the blazer I was wearing in a photo on my website, and they would never buy anything from me because they hated it so much, and if I couldn’t dress myself… I mean, it was brutal.

But a few days later, another email came in, from a woman who found my show when she was waiting to hear if she was going to lose her foot to cancer. She said, I just needed something funny, I needed something light, and she said, “I went to every chemo appointment with you.” And when I have my moments, I go, okay, we do this for Lorna. We do this for Lorna. I don’t even remember the blazer lady’s name — I didn’t like that, it will not hold space in my head. But you have to keep going for the Lornas, because if you let the blazer lady win, you’ll never, ever, ever reach the Lornas.

Tara: A hundred percent. Even when it’s scary, even when you know that putting things out there, people are going to criticize — there will always be somebody who will criticize. And maybe that is just partly experience — I would imagine that getting over fear every time you do something and it doesn’t end in a disaster, you have a little bit more evidence that not everything is going to fall apart all the time.

Jennifer: You have another data point.

Tara: And interestingly, though, sometimes when fear takes over, we have to really proactively go find those data points. It’s not like we naturally remember them right in that moment — we have to say, wait, how did this work out the past 20 times? Or have a friend say that. And sometimes that helps, and sometimes not. It’s kind of fascinating with my kids, because it’s so stark — it doesn’t matter if we’ve done this drive ten times, my child who’s afraid of getting sick in the car has not gotten sick on the eleventh time. The fear is as intense, and me saying “it didn’t happen the past ten times” just doesn’t help when we get hijacked by fear that way.

But I want to go back to the criticism, because I think that’s such an important topic. Women are so often socialized — and this happens from girlhood — to feel like we’re supposed to get everybody to like us. If they don’t, we did something wrong, or there’s a problem we need to fix. And I feel like school reinforces that — nobody said to me when I was in school, “some teachers are going to like your style of writing English papers, and some aren’t.” It’s more like, get A’s in every class, basically keep being a chameleon, hit every subject and every teacher in a way that you get the gold star from them.

So then when we go into our adult lives or careers, it’s like, well, I’ve got to get everybody in the volunteer organization I’m in to like me, or everybody in this organization or industry needs to be my biggest fan. And yet what I saw when I went out into the work world is that the women who were doing really significant work basically had a split reaction to them — they had strong fans and strong critics, more so even than men, because I think we heap a lot of unfair and more vehement criticism on women. So that mind shift of, I don’t actually need to win everyone over, that’s not my goal — wait, what is my goal again? Oh, my goal has to do with the Lornas, my goal has to do with doing work that gives me joy, and criticism is going to come my way. I’ll even recommend to women, pick a favorite author, go on Amazon, read some five-star reviews of them, read some one-star reviews, toggle back and forth — it is so fascinating to be reading about a book you love and read a review where someone’s like, the characters are so amazing, and then read another review where the characters are so unrealistic and ridiculous. It helps us reprogram around that idea.

Jennifer: So I want to talk about girlhood a little bit, and where playing small starts. Because I’m a mom of daughters — my girls are 13 and 16 — and I always think, anything I can do to not give them issues, that’s my job, that’s why I was put on this earth, to raise two daughters as issue-free as possible. And I don’t know that you can. I don’t know that you can. But where does playing small start?

Tara: Yeah, yeah. Well, I always think it’s like, we’re trying to raise them for as few issues as we can, and we’re going to have our humility and our repair skills really intact, so that when they come back around and say, “here’s what really was hard,” we go, “I hear you, honey—”

Jennifer: “—no, it wasn’t, that didn’t happen, were you even there? I was doing great with that.”

Tara: So this is a question that comes up a lot, and I get to speak to moms a lot, but I also sometimes get to work with girls, which is really a joy, in schools and things like that. This may sound like good news or bad news depending on how you’re feeling about it, but of course, as with all things parenting, the biggest thing is what we are being and modeling ourselves — so we don’t get to switch the focus to our girls just yet. What are they seeing? Are they seeing someone who’s run by their inner critic, who believes their inner critic is the voice of truth? Have they ever seen mom go, “can you believe I was just feeling so nervous about that, I was feeling like I couldn’t do it — you know how that happens, when we’re doing a big stretch thing, that inner critic voice comes up, and gosh, it’s so not true, but it can so feel true. And here’s what I had to do in that moment — I had to send my inner critic out of the room, or remind myself who I was doing this for.” We want to model all of that.

And then, often the mistake moms make is we end up arguing with our daughter’s inner critics point by point. Daughter will say, “I’m ugly.” “No, honey, you’re so beautiful.” “I’m going to fail this math test.” “No, you’re going to do great.” And of course, that is so well-intentioned.

Jennifer: Yeah, of course.

Tara: And it’s the most intuitive, in a way, thing to do, because we know it’s not true, so we’re arguing for what we know to be true. The thing is — have you noticed? Most of us have noticed — it does not make that voice go away for them.

Jennifer: No. I mean, it’s like when you’re in your own inner critic moment, nothing anybody can say, no matter how rational —

Tara: — is going to make you go, “oh yeah, you’re right, no, I am fantastic at everything, good point.” No, you’re kind of shut down, right? And it can sometimes even add stress — like, “oh, my mom is the only one who thinks everything I do is fine, she doesn’t understand the reality out there, where teachers are giving me harsh feedback, or I really might not get the…” — or it can kind of make us feel more like imposters. So instead of battling point by point with the inner critic, we want to go up a level and talk about the reality of the inner critic, so they’re getting a little bit of “inner critic education 101.” Like, “oh, it sounds like that voice of self-doubt is getting really loud — yeah, that’s what happens when we’re in stretches, we all have that inner critic voice. Here’s some crazy things — you know Aunt Sue, she seems so confident, but here’s some of the things her inner critic says when she’s really feeling…” — and talk about it, normalize it. That voice is just so not the voice of truth. And, “okay, what’s more important to you in this situation than how you’re feeling about yourself? Do you think this would be really fun? Do you think this would be a great stretch, a cool adventure?” So, helping them connect to something larger. But most of all, it’s really about coming out of the argument with the inner critic and into a conversation about the inner critic, so they can start to develop those skills themselves.

Jennifer: Okay, that right there is absolutely genius, because I’m just thinking about the moments where I’m in some kind of spiral, and my husband’s like, “no, you’re pretty and talented and you know everything,” and then I want to argue — I feel like I have to convince him that my inner critic is right, that my feelings are right. And now that you’re saying that, I’m thinking about situations with my daughters where I have argued with the inner critic, and they go harder — they go harder on their inner critic, like they have to defend her.

Tara: Yes, yeah. So it’s kind of like, instead, we’re just naming what’s happening in the situation from a little further back — “oh wow, sounds like self-doubt is coming up big, this must be a situation that feels a little uncertain and scary. Gosh, that sucks, when that voice really comes up so strongly.” And then you could even share a story — “you know, the other day, can you believe I was about to record a podcast, and my inner critic was chattering away, and gosh, sometimes I just have to not listen to it.” That kind of thing.

Jennifer: I always have these moments — if people walk away with nothing else, that’s it for me, right there.

Tara: I’m so glad.

Jennifer: What else causes us to play small? So we’ve talked a little bit about fear, which seems to be a driver of all of it, and I would imagine that there are messages that we’ve gotten. I do think parenting today looks very different than it did probably when you and I were being parented.

My first employee that I had — she was one of those people, it was not a great story, this is not a success story at all, it’s a business disaster story, but yeah, she was one of those people who, on the first day of the job, was going to tell you how you can run your company better. Always my favorite, right? And I remember saying to my sister — and I meant this as an insult — someone told her she was important growing up.

Tara: Oh, my God. Oh, good, yeah — like, if that was the meanest thing I could think to say, but it was like, somebody really told her, her ideas were important growing up.

Jennifer: And then I think about how much I try to make my girls feel like their ideas are important. But there is sort of a generational parenting thing where that was not a priority for our parents. If you asked my mom, of the hundred things she had to worry about on any given day, making Jennifer feel like her ideas were important probably was not on that list.

Tara: Right. Yeah, there’s a lot to unpack in there. There is definitely this generation gap — I hear a lot of us talking about it, and it’s a big workplace issue for sure. Although, interestingly, I also heard women 20 years older than me talking about it when I was in that seat, because for them it wasn’t quite the exact same issue you’re talking about. I think for women who were more part of that career wave — who came into very male-dominated professions in maybe the 60s or 70s — they had to go through so much waiving of their femininity, their womanhood. They didn’t get work-family balance, they almost had to go through a really tough hazing. And then for my generation to come in and say, I expect to get to be a little more of a woman at work, I’m not expecting to slug so hard — they were like, what? And now that’s even more pronounced with the next generation, who have a whole new set of expectations around impact and pacing of career advancement.

But I would say — and this is often kind of an “aha” for people — one of the things we talk about in the Playing Big book and in courses is this idea that what we don’t allow in ourselves, we will never allow in another woman.

Jennifer: Okay, talk more about that.

Tara: Yeah, so if we don’t give ourselves permission to feel important on day one — if we wouldn’t let ourselves say that, if we wouldn’t let ourselves take that much time off, or look that glamorous in our lives, or be as brash — if we are internally policing ourselves around that, we’re going to be very triggered when we experience that in another woman, because something inside of us is like, no —

Jennifer: We don’t do that. How dare she, yeah, yeah, how dare she.

Tara: We don’t get to do that. I don’t want to see somebody else doing that. And there’s a form of jealousy happening in there — like, I wish I felt that entitled, that would have been nice. So when we feel that in the workplace, or with a younger person in our lives — really, it can happen in any direction — it’s good to say, what am I not allowing in myself? What got a little stamped out in me, that this person is kind of reflecting back to me? Can I soften around that? Can I grieve that nobody made me feel that important? You kind of can’t step over the grief part. And if I can grieve that and go, yeah, that might have been better if it was a little different — not saying the way kids are being raised now is perfect, but that might have been better if I could have been allowed to feel important — then, what values do I really want to recenter in how I’m dealing with this person?

Jennifer: That is very, very good advice. I want to talk a little bit about what we can do to start playing bigger, even if you’re sitting here with your inner critic turned up to level 10 decibels. What can we do? I want to talk about something in the book — the language that we use. As I was preparing for this interview, I picked up the book, and I had a little bookmark on the page talking about the language patterns we use that keep us small. Can you talk about some of those?

Tara: Yeah, and this is a great one, just in terms of practicality and immediacy of getting started. We tend to use these diminishing speech habits — saying “I just have a thought,” “I just have a question,” “I actually disagree,” instead of “I’d like to ask a question” or “I have a different perspective I want to share on that.” We also say things like, “did that make sense?” after we’ve shared something, questioning, “was I coherent at all?” Or we’re telling someone something really important — maybe we’re pitching our business, or raising an important conversation — and we say, “I just want to take a little bit of your time to tell you about my business.” This kind of diminishing.

Linguists actually have a term for all of these words and phrases — they’re called hedges. It’s a way of hedging what we’re saying, making it a little more tentative. And in all different societies and contexts around the world, the people who use hedges are the low-power, low-status people in the society. So when you do it, you’re saying, yep, I’m identifying with being low power and low status — because what that’s really about is, as a low-power, low-status person, what’s the sneaky, unoffensive way I can get my point across, get my question out, I have to really tone it down.

Now, women are kind of in this transitional moment — we’ve been socialized, or we’ve learned to talk like that, we may feel like we need to talk like that to get our point across, or to still be seen as nice, but we’re often overcorrecting in that direction. We may not need to do it as much as we do, we’ve just developed those habits, and so we come across as a lot less powerful than we could.

I’ll add one more piece, because I know what people are often thinking when they start contemplating this — “but I’ve got to sound nice.” And it is absolutely true, we know this from a lot of research, that if women come in and they are all assertiveness and no nice, people will think they are competent but not likable. This is what’s called the double bind in research, and it’s unfortunately very real — women are often seen as competent OR likable, but not both. Yeah, Devil Wears Prada, right — the Meryl Streep character, the big boss. She’s allowed to be highly competent, but then she’s the ice queen. Or, sweet little old grandma — she’s so lovely, but we’re not putting her in charge of a Fortune 500 company. She can be one or the other, likable or competent. This is part of the feminine stereotypes we live with, and we get caught in — men don’t have this same problem. “Oh, he’s a great guy and he’s gonna be a great president,” right?

So we sense, every cell of our body knows, I’m allowed to show my competence to a certain point, but I’ve got to say the pleases and the justs and the actuallys and the “oh well, what do you think of that,” so that I still am seen as likable. And the most practical solution I think we can come up with is, yes, we do need to show that we’re warm and likable as women — one, because it’s a nice human thing to do, but two, because we’re held to a higher standard to show that — but we want to do that in positive ways, not self-diminishing ways. Let me show you that I’m likable and relational because I start a meeting by saying, “how are you, I’m so happy to see you again, how was your weekend, I’m excited for the things we’re going to talk about today.” That’s how I’m going to show warmth and likability — not by saying, “I actually have a question,” or “I don’t know, does anyone else think that makes sense,” not by all that self-diminishment.

Jennifer: I wanted to pull that one out because, like you said, it’s such an easy, practical application of something — you don’t have to sit and reflect, you don’t have to do anything else except look at the email you’re writing, and take those words out. Just take them out — you often don’t even have to change the sentence, you could just take them out, they don’t mean anything. I did that over the weekend, and I thought, oh, that’s a better email, that got my point across, I wasn’t rude — I was not rude about anything, but I didn’t tone it down for the sake of not offending someone else, or being seen as nice, or “I don’t want to be a problem.” No, I was actually having a challenge, and it needed to be addressed. And the response back was, I think, probably better, because I was clear, there was no cloudiness about what I was asking for or what the issue was. It was just better both ways.

I think if our listeners can just challenge themselves — every serious text you write, or every email you send, just look for those little words. Just look for the “just,” the “actually.” “Can I have a minute?” “Is this a dumb idea, just spitballing?” “I hate to bother you, but —”

Tara: “— I’m no expert in this, but —” Yes! And I’m so glad you mentioned email, because that’s such a great way to start — email slows down our communication habits, we actually have a minute to pause and look at the email, whereas when we’re talking, things come out automatically. So email is a great place to start relearning. I’ve heard that from so many people — not only did I feel better once I edited this email, but I remember one young woman saying, “finally, people in my company are responding to my emails — I used to never get a response, and now people are writing back, and quickly.” So yeah, it absolutely changes things.

Jennifer: Well, yeah, because it was probably full of “if you have a minute, I don’t want to bother you,” and people are like, I don’t have a minute, this IS bothering me.

Tara: It takes time to read past all your qualifiers to figure out what’s even in the email.

Jennifer: Email is easy too, because you get to stop and pause. You don’t have to be as in the moment as when you’re speaking and hope the right words come to you — you have a minute, you can pause a little bit.

Tara: Exactly. So if that’s kind of baby step one —

Jennifer: What’s a good baby step two?

Tara: Yes. Well, I really like these very practical things you can do with your inner mentor. Once you have a sense of your inner mentor — whether you were just thinking of her today, or doing the meditation, which I do encourage people to do, because sometimes what you imagine with your everyday conscious thinking is not as rich and interesting as what you get when you do the visualization — but when you have a sense of your inner mentor, then I would look at your calendar and say, what is a one-hour period I could spend this week as she would spend it? What does she like to do on a Sunday? What does she eat for breakfast — let me eat that this week. What does she look like — can I buy, or borrow, or find in my closet, something that’s really her? Maybe there’s one purchase you made that was like, oh, that’s so neat, right? Get that out, or move in that direction. For a lot of people, dress is actually one of the ways they grow into that inner mentor self, and it can feel really tangible and powerful and doable. Or, let me write this email as she would write it. So all of those are great baby steps.

And then I’d also say — you’re not going to make your inner critic go away, that’s not the goal. The goal is to have a wiser relationship with it, and that’s a long-term practice. But you could start by just saying, today I’m going to make an effort to at least once notice when I’m hearing from my inner critic, and just not take it as the voice of truth. Just say, oh, I’m listening to my inner critic right now — what’s the deeper part of me, what’s the truer part of me actually saying or wanting to do here?

Jennifer: Do you find a lot of women come into either working with you, or reading the book, hoping that the goal is to get rid of the inner critic completely — and then it feels like failure when the inner critic is still there?

Tara: A hundred percent. In fact, people will often misunderstand my work and say it’s about confidence. And I get it, in some deep sense, maybe it’s a certain kind of confidence that comes from tuning into our truer self. But I think feeling confident, in the way we usually talk about it, is still about assessing yourself — “I feel good about me, I think I’m good enough, I’m this, I’m great, I’m friendly.” To me, that always feels a little like a convincing-myself project, and I don’t know that we’re meant to be that conscious about our story about ourselves. I would rather live my life thinking about the experiences I want to feel from the inside out, and the values I want to live out, and not have to stop along the way and decide anything about good enough or not. I’ve gotten a little more radical over the years, and now I just say, we don’t need self-assessment, thoughts positive or negative. We don’t need them.

Jennifer: That’s a radically different idea.

Tara: It is radically different.

Jennifer: I was at a conference a couple of years ago, and one of the exercises was dealing with your inner critic, or your inner bully — it was a meditation thing, at a business conference — and people were crying, and you were writing letters to your inner bully, whatever it was. Over lunch, people were talking about how much it impacted them, and they were all saying, “my inner critic is gone, my inner bully is gone, it’s gone.” And they asked me, is yours gone? And I was like, I don’t know, I won’t really know until I go home and try to do the things this inner critic has been holding me back from doing. And it turns out, no, it wasn’t gone. It was not gone. And it made me feel like more of a failure, because it seemed like hundreds of people in this room were having this transformative, almost religious experience where they’d just let go of everybody who was ever mean to them, and now they have no roadblocks. And I was like, it just doesn’t ring true to me.

Tara: Oh gosh, I would love to hear the follow-up, because I bet a lot of them are feeling like a failure too, having now had that bully come back or show up again. What I see much more commonly is that when we’re on the edge of our comfort zone, when we’re stretching into some kind of playing bigger, or doing something that feels uncertain, where there’s risk of failure — all of that stuff, the inner critic will come up. There’s good research to support this. For example, there’s a study showing that for women in corporate America, about 45% of entry-level women will say they feel confident in their jobs. Then they look at executive-level women — women who are much further along, with many more accomplishments, who’ve risen through the ranks in a competitive corporate situation — and the number isn’t very different, about 55% say they feel confident. So you have maybe a one-in-ten chance of your confidence increasing with a lot of accomplishments.

Instead, what I hear more and more from women is that the things they feel confident about might change. Maybe early in their lives they didn’t feel too confident negotiating, and that changes — but now maybe they’re on a nonprofit board in their community, and they’re feeling not good enough for that. Or they have a new challenge in their business, and that’s raising the inner critic. So it’s more like the inner critic can shape-shift in what it’s saying, or come back with its greatest hits, but it is structural — it comes when we’re on the edge of a comfort zone, it’s our safety instinct, saying, just go back into your comfort zone. So confidence is not a reasonable goal. The goal is to have a really wise, effective response to self-doubt.

Jennifer: That is a complete paradigm shift, rather than just push it down, get rid of it, make it go away, just be confident, just be bold. I actually like hearing the idea that that may not be a reasonable goal — this thing everyone is striving for may not actually be achievable. And if it’s not, you can take the pressure off of ever trying to achieve it.

Tara: I always say, the bad news is confidence probably isn’t coming. The good news is, you do not need it to do any of the things you thought you did. I’ll tell people — don’t picture yourself as a confident rock star doing whatever that thing is, starting the business, hiring the tenth person, putting up the art show. Don’t picture yourself as a confident rock star — picture yourself doing that as a racked-with-self-doubt rock star, because that’s probably what it’ll feel like. It’s fear all the way through, but I’m doing it, and I’m recognizing why that fear is there.

There’s one more thing I want to add, since you’ve asked about this a couple times — when we’re talking about why we’re playing small and where it comes from, we’ve talked about the messages girls and women get. But I also want to say, just for all human beings, there is a kind of playing small that happens simply because it is very scary and vulnerable to really share our real gifts and voices in the world. No matter who you are, no matter your gender, there’s a lot of momentum — and we could say that sometimes men, and our sons, are playing small in a different way, like they’re hardening up, they’re forced into a different kind of conformity, they’re not feeling free to express maybe their emotions or creativity, or things that fall outside our cultural messages about boys and masculinity. They may not feel free to pursue their true path if it’s not deemed the best “provider” path, the one that creates male status for them. So all of that is really real — there’s just a human journey of, what are my real callings, what are the real values I want to honor, and then the tremendous courage it takes to live those out.

Jennifer: I could listen to you talk about this all day, but I want to respect your time. However, this is a clothing and style podcast, so I have to ask — where does playing big and playing small intersect with style and clothing? How can we use clothes to play bigger, and how do we use them to play small?

Tara: So good. Well, I want to hear you talk about that — I could share some initial ideas, but I’m very curious how you see that fusion.

Jennifer: I was on a podcast years ago, a business podcast, and I was talking about dressing for your brand — if your brand is bold and brash and in your face, don’t walk into a networking thing in a heather gray sweater, right, dress your brand. And she told me afterward, when we were just chatting, “oh no, no, I don’t ever want to stand out, I dress to kind of fly below the radar.” And I just remember thinking, it takes a lot for me to leave my house at night, to go to that networking event, to do that thing — if I’m going to go, you’re going to know I’m there. To me, it doesn’t make sense to do it any other way, but it was a way — consciously — of helping her fly below the radar.

Before we started today, I was talking about a client I had who didn’t go to her friend’s wedding because she didn’t have a dress, she had nothing to wear. And I remember a client I had when leather leggings were just emerging, and they were really out there — 56-year-old women were not wearing them. She found a pair she loved at Nordstrom, and I said, let’s try them on, and it was, “what would people say, what would people think, I can’t show up to the bus stop in those, what would people think.” For me, I wear things because I just love them, I get joy from clothing, I think they express my personality. My question is always, well, who cares? Right? Who cares — but it’s easy for me to say, because it’s easy for me to do. I know it’s not as easy for a lot of women.

But I do think clothing can also be armor, in a way. My daughter, when we first moved here six years ago, she was starting a new school in fifth grade, and she said, I just want to dress really well, I want to feel good about myself. We don’t have a house where everyone has to wear labels and be dressed to the nines, not at all, but I felt like even at ten or eleven she kind of understood that the way you put yourself together can get you through — even if you’re not feeling confident enough to walk into that brand-new classroom of people, having something that makes you feel good can be a little bit of a crutch.

Tara: Yeah, yeah. That’s so interesting, and interesting that she sensed it was a situation where she might need some armor. Like, there’s a reason we put on the softer pajama thing when we feel most safe, right? You know, when we could look at so many different parts of — even, what’s the inner critic voice you feel around clothes and your physical style and appearance? Which, by the way, in my studies, in research with my community, body and appearance is one of the biggest things the inner critic is talking about. And sadly — I would have hoped that fades as women age and come into their own — it’s just as strong, if not stronger, and that just feels like, gosh, for us in our primes, with so much life experience and accomplishments to be savoring, and family connection, to still be going there.

So just bringing the inner critic to all of that conversation around clothes and body is huge. What would my inner mentor wear, what does she like? And what you’re talking about with the client and the leggings is really about switching from the story where I’m watching myself from the outside, to going back inside myself — how does this feel to wear, to buy? I’m not looking at myself from 50 feet away, thinking about what other people are looking at, what’s the story about me — just, is my felt experience of wearing this, and being in this, feel right, feel good? There’s so much opportunity for individual expression, and values too — my values around buying reused things, or things that last a long time.

What I’ve been noticing in myself lately, and I find this really interesting — when I’m going somewhere where I don’t feel like I’ll be loved or warmly embraced, that’s when I feel like I have nothing to wear, that’s when I feel like nothing looks good. And when I’m going to gather with friends, or go to a community I love, or do something creative I’m excited about, I have many options in my closet, I put things together in an interesting way, I feel like I look great. So I almost use it like a reverse barometer — if I’m frenetic and upset over clothes, is that something I even should be going to in the first place? Because I notice I only feel that way when I’m trying to conform to something, trying to fit into someone else’s rules —

Jennifer: I feel like I’m being judged by those people, but —

Tara: — I’m ending up there anyway. That kind of stuff.

Jennifer: That is really interesting, I hadn’t thought about that, but as you were talking I was thinking about this past weekend, where I was really stressed about what to wear to something I had to go to. That’s kind of an interesting way — the reverse barometer — to check in on how we’re feeling about the actual event, not what we’re wearing.

Tara: Yes, exactly, exactly. Ladies, take that one to heart as well.

Jennifer: All right, so a question I like to ask all of my guests. Our listeners are busy, busy women, and they will listen to this and vow to remember every single word of it, and they won’t, because we are human. If they can take one thing away from this conversation — to put in their heart, put in their pocket, and carry with them — what would you like it to be?

Tara: Playing big is being more loyal to your dreams than to your fears. And therefore, playing big is not the accomplishment of the dreams — it’s actually when you shift your loyalty, in your heart, in your stance in your life, to, “I may not know how I’m going to achieve those dreams, but okay, honey, I am gonna be on your side and trying to figure that out.”

Jennifer: And letting that simmer, and see where that takes you. That is so good, so, so good. Tara, thank you for being on the show today. Where can we find you, where can we buy your book — everyone needs a copy.

Tara: Thank you. What a great conversation, I have enjoyed your spirit so much, and your storytelling — you’re such a great storyteller too. My website is TaraMohr.com — T-A-R-A-M-O-H-R dot com. The Playing Big book is available pretty much wherever you like to get books, and there’s lots more free resources and courses and writings on the website too.

Jennifer: Love it. Ladies, normally I am a big fan of the library, because, you know, free books. This is a book that you want to buy, because you’re going to want to write in it, you’re going to earmark pages, you’re going to put your coffee down on it for years to come. Every woman needs this on their bookshelf, so go get it. And again, Tara, just thank you — I’m so excited to be able to share this conversation with everyone today.

Tara: Thank you so much.

Y’all, I am so glad that I played big and just asked Tara to be on the show. This is proof that if I can go after what I want, even when it’s scary, you can too. I want to thank Tara and her team for their time, kindness, and generosity. I hope you were as inspired by her as I was.

Before we go, I’ve got two quick things for you in the show notes. First, the 2024 style survey is open for the next couple of weeks. I want to hear your thoughts on all things style related — from how often you shop and how much you spend, to how you really feel about your wardrobe, and when the last time you got a bra fitting was. I’m going to share the results of the survey with you in our last episode of the year, so head over to the show notes, click the link, take the survey. It’s quick, it’s fun, and just for completing it you’ll be entered to win a $100 gift card to the store of your choice. There are other opportunities to win gift cards as well — this is going to be a fun one, I can’t wait to see your answers.

Also, we have a brand new free guide for you, called the 10 Piece Style Solution. In it, I’m showing you how to mix and match 10 wardrobe basics to create over 30 stylish outfits. If you’ve ever wondered where to start when creating a capsule wardrobe, this is it — I’m showing you the pieces, the outfits, and of course there’s a link database in case you’re missing any of these 10 pieces. If you want more versatility in your wardrobe without adding a ton of stuff, you need to check this out.

Links for both the survey and the guide are in the show notes, and of course you can find the links to connect with Tara and get her book. I cannot say enough good things about it — give it to your sister, give it to your friend, your daughter. Every woman deserves to play big and get the life she dreams of.

Finally, before we wrap up, I want to challenge you to find a way to play a little bigger this week. Wear the outfit you’ve been wanting to try. Ask that new friend out for coffee. Speak up in the meeting before someone says exactly what you were going to say and gets the credit for it — that’s the worst feeling, right? I don’t care what you do, just do something, every single week. Tens of thousands of women listen to this show — can you imagine what would happen if we all played a little bit bigger? Amazing things, I bet. So let’s go get it.

All right, I will see you next time. Until then, remember that your everyday matters, so get dressed for it, and that’s a wrap.

Thank you for listening today. If you’re loving the Everyday Style School podcast, I’d like to invite you to become a member of the Style Circle. It’s our monthly all-access membership that gives you everything we create to make style easy, so you can save time and money, have easier mornings, and more confidence all day long. You get our seasonal capsule wardrobe guides, all of the masterclasses we offer, and our exclusive members-only podcast, the Everyday Style School Extra Credit — plus, you’re invited to the Facebook community, where you can get even more style support and inspiration.