Why Good Girls Don't Get Ahead_. But Gutsy Girls Do - Kate White [13]
That said, there's a helluva lot (excuse the macho talk) to be learned from men. I don't mean all men. Interestingly, there are plenty of guys who are good girls (someone wrote not long ago that At Gore might be “too good” to be President, too much of a pleaser), and they end up stuck in middle-management jobs for decades.
The ones you should pay attention to are the gutsy ones. Watch them talk, plan, move into action. I'm not suggesting you imitate exactly how they get what they want. Rather, simply be inspired by how they trust their instincts and do what they think is best.
Sometimes being gutsy is actually a matter of taking a good-girl tendency and restructuring it just a little. Good girls, for instance, worry a lot about pleasing people, often sacrificing their own needs in the process. But pleasing the right people in the right way is one of the best skills in business. When IBM announced that it was consolidating all its advertising under the Ogilvy and Mather Agency, the Wall Street Journal attributed the mega-coup to the agency's North American operations president Rochelle Lazarus, who sources indicated was brilliant at making “a client feel understood.”
THE TRUE SECRET OF BEING A GUTSY GIRL
This book is filled with strategies on how to uncover your natural gumption and be a gutsy girl. You may be wondering how you can possibly incorporate so many changes into the way you handle yourself. Keep this in mind: There's a wonderful dynamic at work when it comes to gutsiness. As soon as you try just one little gutsy thing, you will find it so effective and intoxicating you will be eager to try another. It is the M&M's approach to self-improvement.
Marjorie Lapp, a psychotherapist in Walnut Creek, California, who treats many women with classic good-girl tendencies, says she's found that they start out feeling very reluctant to try something new or adventurous because they worry that there will be dire consequences. “But when they do finally make a move, they discover that instead of something bad happening, it is often something very good,” she said. “And that realization is totally liberating.”
The fact is that unlike at home and in school, your gutsy efforts will sooner or later be rewarded.
A friend of mine, Mary Jo Sherman, who is president of Levit and Sherman advertising agency, puts it this way: “When you're growing up and you don't act like a good girl, your mother sends you to your room. But at work, being gutsier wins you a major client or some other kind of prize. As you see what it nets you, you become braver and braver.”
Let's start with the very first strategy of a gutsy girl.
CHAPTER THREE
Strategy #1: A Gutsy Girl Breaks the Rules
When I set out to write this book, I spent a lot of time thinking back on the best lessons I'd learned during my career. Initially, everything I considered automatically came from the years after I graduated from college and went into magazine publishing. And yet one day I realized that I'd gotten one of the most enlightening lessons the summer I was seventeen and employed as a fountain girl at Howard Johnson's on Route 9 in upstate New York.
I was a terrible waitress, with timing so bad that I served people their soup with their main course and their bill as they were pulling out of the parking lot. I'd go home at night feeling exhausted and drained, stung by the insults hurled in my direction (“She must be new” was a frequent one). Even the cook seemed to dislike me. At Hojo's you had to use certain abbreviations when you put an order through, such as OR for an order of two eggs. A few days after I started, someone asked for eggs sunny-side up, and I improvised by writing on the dupe sheet: OR SSU. No sooner had I put it through when I heard the cook bellow from the sizzling kitchen. “What the hell do you think this is—the navy?”
There was only one consolation: as a Howard Johnson