Overcome Your Sabotaging Behavior for Career Success
Most companies now recruit men and women into management in equal numbers, but almost from the first level up the gender split drops off steadily. 80% of men move up to senior executive positions, when only 20% of women do. I know that there are still cultural barriers out there and many companies still maintain the good ol’ boys club, especially in certain industries.
We can’t control this but we can do things for ourselves that will help us to overcome these stereotypes and barriers and advance our careers and as we’ll discuss today, many of these obstacles are of our own making. We can control the way others perceive us. We can learn to communicate to others what value we bring to the table in an authentic and comfortable way. We can learn to demonstrate our value, showcase our talent to create the credibility we need. We can take credit for our accomplishments and build our reputation both inside and outside the company to strength our subject matter expertise. This needs to be an intentional and strategic focus and today I will discuss some specific ways women sabotage themselves and how they can best overcome their own obstacles.
Featured Guest
Joining me today is Mary Davis Holt. Mary is an executive coach and co-author of the book, Break Your Own Rules: How to Change the Patterns of Thinking That Block Women’s Path to Power. Mary has held numerous executive positions at Time Warner and is now principle with the Flynn Heath Holt Leadership, an executive coaching firm.
Listen or download the May 23rd 2012 show.
You Are Much More Than Your Job
A few months ago, I received a call from a woman looking for help to position herself for employment. She had been out of work for 18 months having a baby and was now ready to begin the process of finding a job. So I asked her what she did. There was a long pause and then she replied in a soft voice. “This is my problem. I can’t talk about myself at all, let alone articulate why someone should hire me.”
Wow! I thought. This was an extreme case of someone who had identified herself with her job and because she had been away from it for a while, she was lost. She was no longer connected to what she believed was her identity and value (her job).
Most of us spend more time at work than we do with our families and friends. We work long hours and our jobs consume a tremendous amount of our energy and focus. It’s understandable that we begin to “become” our jobs, and it’s a challenge to separate our identity and value from our work. That being said, we need to take the time to understand what value we bring to the job and how our value benefits the company and our clients if we want to be successful in moving our careers and businesses forward.
We are much more than our jobs. If all of you reading this had the exact same background and experience, the same position in the same company, you would still be unique and special because of the way you DO your work. Each of us brings something different to our work that defines us and sets us apart. Zeroing in on how you “deliver” the work is the first clue to identifying your unique value proposition and what differentiates you.
Charlotte Beers, former CEO of Olgivy and Mather, writes in her new book, I’d Rather Be In Charge, that it’s not about the work, but the way you deliver the work.
The way you deliver the work comes from an interior place. You know all about the exterior you; it’s right there on your resume. But your delivery is about the essence of who you become when you’re at work, your deepest, truest self sent out to play in the field of work.
Delivery means the way you get your work in front of the right people. It’s how you manage to get the work used properly and, drum roll please, ‘appreciated’.
Ask yourself this: How do you “deliver” the work? What is your contribution? This is your value and identity that will follow you to any job or any company because it’s not about the job, it’s YOU.
When you want to promote or position yourself for a job or attract new clients, remember this. Your value and how it benefits others is what people want to know about; not just what you do but how you do it.
Making a Difference in the World
Today we are going to hear a story that I hope will stimulate you to look inside yourself to discover what you can offer others. We are each here for a reason and we each have unique gifts to offer the world. As you listen to my guest, Jeanne Staples, today, think about what it is that you have to offer and how you can help others with your unique gifts and talent.
Featured Guest
Jeanne Staples has spent her entire professional career working in the arts. She is a full-time, professional artist who lives and works on the island of Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts, and is represented by galleries in Boston, New England and beyond. You can see firsthand the beautiful work she does on her website, www.jeannestaples.com.
She is also the Founder and Director of PeaceQuilts, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, humanitarian organization dedicated to relieving poverty in Haiti by establishing independent, self-managed and self-sustaining sewing cooperatives, and connecting them to international markets. This organization is best described in a book called Patience to Raise the Sun: Art Quilts from Haiti and their power to change women’s lives.
Listen to the May 16th show at 12 noon EDT or download the podcast.
Do You Need Stress in Your Life to Reach Your Full Potential?
We live in an age of great stress. We are bombarded daily with more information than we can possibly assimilate, and we are always connected to this flow of information with our iPhone, Blackberry’s and computers. There is no end to the information that is at our finger tips 24/7. It seems there is no place to hide either. Our personal and professional lives are now publicly displayed across the Internet. The job market is tough, the economy weak, and competition for advancement has increased dramatically with more and more highly educated women in the workforce. And many of us are trying to balance our careers with a family as well.
It would seem only logical that we should strive to eliminate the stress in our lives in order to achieve more equilibrium, health, and happiness.
I thought it was interesting, therefore, to read a recent post, Stress is Not Your Enemy, by Tony Schwartz in Harvard Business Review that states that we need stress in our lives in order to reach our full potential.
Tony says, “Subjecting yourself to stress is the only way to systematically get stronger — physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually. And you’ll get weaker if you don’t.”
This is the “use it or lose it” mentality that maintains that if you don’t exercise your mind and body “muscles”, you will atrophy and, as a consequence, will not be able to grow and improve.
We live by the myth that stress is the enemy in our lives. The real enemy is our failure to balance stress with intermittent rest. Push the body too hard for too long — chronic stress — and the result will indeed be burnout and breakdown. But subject the body to insufficient stress, and it will weaken and atrophy.
Few of us push ourselves nearly hard enough to realize our potential, nor do we rest, sleep, and renew nearly as deeply or for as long as we should.
The real message here is that moving outside your comfort zone can be stressful, but it also allows you to increase your skill set to advance your career. Stretching yourself to take on new responsibilities at work, volunteering for high profile projects, speaking up in meetings and voicing your opinions when you’d rather keep silent can certainly be stressful, but if you want to get out of the trenches and move your career forward, it’s important to take the leap even though it gives you some anxiety initially.
Tony Schwartz’s point is that we need to do these things to grow personally and professionally but we also need to learn how to better manage our stress and know when it’s right to take a break and rest. We are not going to eliminate all the stress from our lives, but we can certainly learn to control our reaction to stressful situations so that it does not derail us.
This Wednesday, May 9th, at noon EDT, Dr. Fred Luskin from Stanford University will be my guest on GPS Your Career: A Woman’s Guide to Success to discuss the simple techniques we can all do to manage the effect stress has on our personal and professional lives. I hope you can join us.
Are You A Disappearing Woman?
I got married right after college. I had never lived on my own. I had no idea who I was. I knew that I wanted a career. I wanted a family. I wanted it all. 
Well, the family came quickly and I had two children, but then I began to feel very unfulfilled. I loved being a mom, but knew that I needed more in my life in terms of my “own thing”. I was lost and unfortunately, because I lost myself in this marriage, I ended up divorcing my husband.
I can’t be too hard on myself. After all, I saw my mom give up much of her identity in her marriage to my father. It was my role model. She built her life around him, his family, his friends and it worked fairly well. I think they had a good enough marriage, but I wanted more in my life and I had no idea where to begin to find myself.
In her Huffington Post article, author, Vicki Larsen addresses this. She quotes Psychoanalyst Beverly Engel, author of Loving Him Without Losing Yourself, who calls this the Disappearing Woman — what happens when women lose track of what they believe in, what they stand for, what’s important to them and what makes them happy just because they happen to be in a relationship.
No matter how successful, assertive, or powerful some women are, the moment they become involved with a man they begin to give up part of themselves — their social life, their time alone, their spiritual practice, their beliefs and values. In time, these women find they have merged their lives with their partners’ to the point where they have no life to go back to when and if the relationship ends.
Why can’t we stay true to ourselves in a relationship? Engel says that we want to be nice because we’ve learned that being nice is important in order to sustain a relationship. Engel says,
She’ll pretend to agree when she doesn’t really agree, she’ll go along with things she doesn’t really believe in, and if she does that long enough, she’ll no longer know what she feels.
Author Larsen says,
How many women do you know who will break plans or give up a favorite activity for a guy? Not that it’s not OK to do that from time to time or for certain situations; it’s just that somehow in the togetherness of coupledom too many of us forget to have a life of our own. Instead, we look to our partner to fulfill all our needs — and get frustrated and resentful when he doesn’t. Then we see the problem as something wrong with him, and not us.
What are your thoughts? Are we just fulfilling the nice girl syndrome or is it that we don’t have a clear picture of our identity and core essence as a woman before we enter a relationship?
The Key to Success is Knowing Who You Are
When you look in the mirror, who is looking back at you? I’m not talking about your appearance. I’m talking about who you really are. Do you know? 
Many of us are distracted by external factors that we let define us; our job, our looks. We allow these things to become our identity and the way we present ourselves to the world. Sometimes we hide behind them so we don’t have to really do the work to discover our essence.
But, to get outside results, you need to do the inside work. (I just wrote that down from a podcast I listened to yesterday by Suzanne Evans.) It’s so true!
Last week the New York Times published an interview with Charlotte Beers, former CEO and Chairwoman of Ogilvy and Mather Worldwide. In this article, The Best Scorecard Is The One You Keep For Yourself, Charlotte talks about the importance of doing a self-assessment and soliciting feedback from trusted colleagues to help you discover who you are. Sometimes painful, the feedback she received helped her become a better manager and leader.
Charlotte says, “it’s a mistake to just let the quality of our work speak for itself because sooner or later the quality of your relationships will prevail over the work.”
Charlotte talks about moments of crisis. “ When those moments come along and you need to draw on resources that are internal and your personal belief system, if you don’t know what they are, others will tell you what they are.”
Self-knowledge is so obvious-sounding that I hate to use it like that, but in fact you can be masterful at doing the work and you can be good in team relationships, but one day you will be called on to have difficult, complex relationships and a different part of you has to be used for that.
Do you know what your internal resources are? Can you see beyond your reflection in the mirror to connect with your core essence?
This is the stuff that makes you unique; your unique fingerprint. This is the stuff you call on to be successful and here’s the KEY: When you know this, you can not only draw from this resource to be successful, but you can let people know who you really are and what differentiates you from others who may hold the same position or sell similar products and services.
Charlotte’s new book is I’d Rather Be in Charge and I am thrilled that she will be on my new radio show June 13th. You will be able to call in live with your questions for Charlotte! Stay tuned for more details.
If you are interested in taking this journey of self-discovery for yourself so that you can better position yourself for success, please sign up for my next four week GPS Your Career Coaching Group or come to the live full day workshop in Boston, May 5th, GPS Your Way to Success Boot Camp.
Is Thinking BIG About Your Business or Career Like Bragging?
It’s common knowledge that many people have issues with boastful people. We have a bias against those who seem “full of themselves” and constantly let everyone know how wonderful they are. If the person happens to be a woman, there is even more of a negative reaction to her lack of humility.
If you follow my work and my blog, you know that I help professional women identify and connect with their value and talent and thereby gain
the confidence to promote themselves. (This isn’t bragging or boasting, by the way, but authentically talking about your accomplishments and value proposition.) There is much evidence that communicating your value helps you to advance your career and get more clients.
If you understand your value proposition, what plan do you have to offer your gifts and talent to the world? I mean, what is your BIG plan for your business or career? Do you dare to go there?
I believe that we think small because we are afraid that if we let others know the dreams we have for ourselves, people will think we are “full of ourselves”. We may get the skeptical looks, the rolling eyes, the “are you kidding me?” look. Who do you think you are that you could achieve that?
Well, guess what? If we think small, we stay small. If we keep our ordinary story, we stay ordinary. (I am borrowing that from Suzanne Evans. I just spent three amazing days at her Be The Change Event where I heard this over and over again.) If we want to be extraordinary, then we need to ditch our ordinary story for a bigger one, and we need to be able to articulate that new big story with the same confidence we do our value proposition.
Everything changes when you understand your value. This includes your story and your plans for your career and business. Don’t be afraid to dream big. Don’t be ashamed to create a new big story that expands the way you offer your unique value to the world. It’s not bragging. It’s simply you acknowledging that you have these gifts. It’s simply you understanding your value and believing that you can achieve great success because of it.
What’s your extraordinary story?
Join me Thursday, April 26th for a FREE teleseminar on The 3 Insider Secrets to Marketing Yourself for Success in Business Today.
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Self-Promotion: The Pink Elephant in the Room
Have you noticed that it is now common to use the term “personal branding” instead of self-promotion?
Personal branding and self-promotion are, in fact, the same. I have come to believe that the term self-promotion is so off-putting for women that we will do almost anything to avoid it. Hence, it’s become the” pink elephant” in the room. We know it’s there and yet we don’t want to recognize its presence, hoping that somehow it will disappear. Its very existence is, in fact, threatening, overwhelming, and often scary. We’d rather dance around it rather than deal with it.
So now we call it personal branding and hope that with a new name it will be more acceptable and something that we can embrace instead of the uncomfortable concept of promoting ourselves. But I believe in calling a spade a spade. It’s still all about promoting yourself, and self-promotion remains an important key to your success as a woman in business today.
And the evidence is in. There have been a variety of studies and research that support the need for women to talk about their accomplishments in order to advance their careers, such as the Catalyst 2011 study, The Myth of the Ideal Worker: Does Doing All the Right Things Really Get Women Ahead. Intellectually, we understand the importance of differentiating ourselves and letting others know what we bring to the table. Emotionally, we get hung up in our limiting beliefs about the need to be humble and blend in, our need to be liked, our fear of rejection.
Well, it’s time to “man-up” and dance with the pink elephant. She’s not going away and your continual avoidance of her will only contribute to your lack of career and business success.
How do you dance with the Pink Elephant?
First, you need to change your mind set about promoting yourself. There were probably many things you didn’t want to learn and did anyway, right? Self-promotion is a necessary skill. (I remember how much I hated Algebra, but I realized its importance and learned it.)
Second, take the time to understand your value and what is unique about you. This is so important that I can’t stress it enough. You probably think you know what value you offer your organization, your clients, your community, your family and friends, but I would challenge you and say that unless you’ve taken some time and done some soul searching, you probably don’t know your value.
If you don’t know your value proposition, then promoting yourself will ALWAYS be uncomfortable and difficult. You will feel phony because you haven’t made the necessary connection with your unique value.
As I’ve said before, everything changes when you understand your value. You can then talk about yourself with confidence. You will speak up in meetings, voice your opinion, and take advantage of opportunities to showcase your talent.
Dance with the pink elephant. If you climb on board, you may just end up where you’ve always wanted to go!
Tell a Good Story to Pitch Yourself and Your Business
Everyone loves a good story, but how many of us are good at telling good stories? For the most part, I think we create exciting and stimulating stories about our personal lives. We certainly have a tremendous amount of material to serve as our database. We love to tell stories about our girlfriends, spouses or partners, children, grandchildren, neighbors (good and bad). And we have no problem adding emotional content and passion to our stories.
Stories are a great way to draw others in and influence their behavior, yet many of us hesitate to use the same emotions and passion in our storytelling when pitching ourselves and our businesses. As a result, the stories don’t have the impact that we desire to grab people’s attention and stimulate further conversation.
In a recent article in Fast Company, author Kaihan Krippendorf, talks about a workshop he attended on storytelling where he was told to “use lots of LOTS”.
Our facilitator, Gary Lyons, senior coach at The TAI Group, told us a story and had us dissect what we remembered. Do this, and you will realize your audience is often checked out, comatose, or unable to hear or remember what you are saying. The key to engage them is to use lots of “language of the senses,” or LOTS. When telling a story, share with us what you see, smell, feel, taste, and hear. When you trigger a sense in someone, you bring them into the story with you.
Think about your own story. What type of senses can you bring into your story to engage your audience?
See: How can you open someone’s eyes to “see” your value? What do they experience when they see your product, walk into your store, enter your office? What visual trigger will add to your story?
Smell: Perhaps your product or service can be best described by its scent. How can you add this to your story?
Feel: This is a great one! What does success feel like? How does someone feel when they use your product or service? What is the end result? People love to hear stories where they are transported to a new positive mindset. Take them there with you story. Is there a tactile aspect of your product? Is this something you can talk about?
Taste: “I’m so close to success, I can taste it.” We use the sense of taste figuratively and literally. If your product is edible, describe in great detail what the experience of tasting that product is all about. Yummm.
Hear: Another great sense to include in your story! People are talking about your services. There is a buzz that starts slowly and builds up to a feverish pitch. Colleagues and clients are standing up and cheering for you! YEAH! What do you hear?
Kaihan Krippendorf goes on to say about the workshop,
We close with a “before and after” exercise. One of our members gets up to practice a pitch; he is raising money for an energy tech venture. He starts speaking, but I just can’t follow. When he finishes, I realize I have not heard a word. Gary coaches him–lots of LOTS, story spine, look us in the eye, take us in–and the speaker tries again. Now it is all waterfalls of electricity pouring down the mountain, the opportunity to create something and break through with passion. I heard every word, and so much more.
Improve your ability to tell stories–about the company you are building, the project you are leading, the life you live, and will enroll people more completely and emotionally in your mission.
That’s my story and I’m sticking to it!
Is Self-Confidence Your Friend or Foe?
I often talk and write about the importance of having self-confidence for business success. I believe that when you connect with your value proposition, you can talk about your accomplishments and talk up your business with confidence and authenticity, and that most people associate your confidence with competence. 
But here’s another take on the subject. According to author, Margaret Heffernan’s article for CBS News,
The best work isn’t done when you’re confident. The best work comes from pushing yourself beyond what you know you can do.
And she quotes Steven Spielberg on the topic:
You know how many movies, I woke up in the morning, gotten to the set and said, ‘What the bloody hell am I going to do today? I have no idea how to attack this scene.’ All the planning that I did from the safety of my office is no longer valid because the day, the weather we have, the new ideas the actors came to the set with that morning, have trumped every single of my best laid plans and I have to start from scratch.
I get stage fright every single morning. If I didn’t have that, I wouldn’t be a director. You can’t make a great movie from a position of great confidence. The more nervous I am, I think the better the films turn out. Confidence sometimes is a bit of an enemy.
Margaret goes on to say,
Sports coaches will tell you the same thing: Confidence is an outcome. It’s what you get after you’ve done the work, taken the risks, pushed yourself beyond the comfortable, the planned and the knowable. It’s your reward for courage and, if you use it correctly, it will encourage you to take big leaps next time. But it will never offer guarantees, real or imagined.
The question is what comes first here, the chicken or the egg?
Does it take confidence to stretch yourself and move out of your comfort zone or does confidence come from knowing that you took the leap and succeeded?
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