Why Good Girls Don't Get Ahead_. But Gutsy Girls Do - Kate White [42]
A few days later was a luncheon for magazine editors in Washington with the First Lady. Now if anyone had the right to seem frazzled and short on time, she did (she was in the midst of promoting the Clinton health reform plan), but there was a serene quality about her. She glided into the room, took your hand slowly and carefully, and gazed into your eyes as if the only thing she wanted to be doing at that moment was looking at you. Perhaps, I thought, she'd learned a little something about Zen during a session on alternative medicine. It was a delicious experience and one that left me wanting to eat out of her hand. It was very similar to the calm, steady approach she used during her press conference on her commodities trading, which everyone, including Rush Limbaugh, admitted was a triumph.
The lesson: Yes, time is short, but never look as if it's got the best of you Take a deep breath, savor the moment, and show that you're calm and in control.
GO AHEAD. DARE TO TAKE A SHORTCUT
Admit it When you were in college you saw other kids studying with Cliffs Notes rather than reading the whole book, but you wouldn't even consider it. Taking a shortcut was almost as bad as cheating. That kind of thinking has probably stayed with you. As a good girl, you believe that if you shave anything off your workload it will somehow catch up with you. A perfect example from my own life: When I was an articles editor I had to read the unsolicited manuscripts that came in through the mail. I soon discovered that the first page alone was always enough to tell me if the piece was any good, but I dutifully would read the entire article. I had this vague sense that someone, perhaps the same enforcement team that monitored the improper removal of those DO NOT REMOVE tags from pillows, would discover that there were no fingerprints on the last nine pages and I would be slapped with a penalty.
Well, there are no penalties for good shortcuts. In fact, they can be your salvation on many occasions. Try using Post-its instead of writing memos, skimming the table of contents of your trade publications and journals instead of reading all the articles, writing notes back to people directly on the memos they send you.
One of my favorite gutsy-girl shortcuts is never taking notes at meetings. I learned this technique from a Kikuyu guide I had on safari in Kenya during my single years. Everyone in our group had arrived with cameras with telephoto lenses, which they rarely took away from their faces. They looked perfectly silly. I asked the guide once if he ever took photographs of the animals and he said, “The Kikuyu takes the picture in his own mind.” Considering his words later, I realized that I was so busy taking pictures myself, adjusting the f-stop and the focus, that I wasn't absorbing the raw beauty of the Kenyan landscape. That lesson not only led me to abandon my camera on my travels, but down the road it also inspired me to examine the copious notes I took at meetings. Not only did I rarely get around to consulting the notes (for starters I couldn't read them), but I'd be so busy organizing the notes and keeping pace with the speaker that I didn't fully absorb the message. Now, I listen and pick the key points to remember.
FIVE WORDS WINNERS NEVER SAY
When I got the job as editor-in-chief of Child with a seven-month-old baby at home, I had made a commitment to myself to leave at 5:00 every day. I soon saw that in order to do that I was going to have to be very inventive about how I used my time.
During those first weeks people constantly popped into my office with requests or handed me material to evaluate. I took it all into my little hands and promised. “I'll get back to you.” What's ironic about this approach is that there's an illusion that it buys you time when it actually uses up more time. You're forcing yourself to consider the request not once, but every time it stares at you from your in-box. Within several