Why Good Girls Don't Get Ahead_. But Gutsy Girls Do - Kate White [46]
• Never say maybe. Maybe is unfortunately one of a good girl's favorite words. You really mean no, but over time you've come to believe that maybe just sounds nicer. But the person doing the asking reads maybe as a possible yes, and will continue to hound you. When you do finally say no, she will be immensely irritated for having been led down the primrose path.
TWO “PLEASER” HABITS YOU DON'T KNOW YOU HAVE
Okay, you're beginning to reform your pleaser style. But you may be looking like a pleaser even when you have no intention of being one. Good girls use two types of body language that can make them seem “too nice”:
• The smile. Studies repeatedly show that women smile more than men. There are plenty of times when a smile will work for you. But not all the time. Alan Mazur, a professor at Syracuse University and an expert on body language, says that at the wrong moment a smile can signal you're a pushover.“When we're nervous, we look for ways to relieve our anxiety,” says Dr. Mazur. “One way is through affiliative behavior, like smiling. It can be a way to form a connection. But in a business setting the other person can begin to pick up, on an intuitive level, that the smile means you're frightened, obsequious, and intimidatable.”My speech coach, New York–based communications consultant Pam Zarit, says that many of the women she coaches come in prepared to smile their way through everything they say. Her advice is to use a smile sparingly, when you really need it. “When you plaster a smile on your face, you have no place else to go.”
• The head nod. If you watch a meeting of men and women, you'll notice that women do most of the nodding. When McCall's ran a roundtable of the seven female U.S. Senators in Washington, I was struck by how much the senators nodded as their peers spoke, showing their respect and support for their colleagues’ words.But nodding can get you into trouble. It can make you look compliant, easy to please. It can also give away more than you'd planned to reveal. Sometimes we nod purely out of habit, which can totally confuse our listeners. Management consultant Nancy Austin told me that she was once in a meeting with a woman who was asked if she could cut more money from her budget. The woman forcefully defended her budget and said she couldn't—but nodded her head throughout her statement It was the old “your lips say no but your body's saying yes.”
THE GUY SECRET OF NEVER TAKING THINGS PERSONALLY
The need to be liked and the desire to please are part of a bigger issue for good girls on the job: the driving inclination to take things personally. It's probably hard for you at times not to relate what happens back to yourself. If the boss is huddled behind closed doors, if someone doesn't return a call, if someone makes a curt remark, you may immediately wonder, What did I do?
Management consultant Nancy Hamlin, who is president of Hamlin Associates, says she sees this frequently in women she works with and feels it saps their energy and attention. She tries to encourage them to look at things in a bigger context. Some people just happen to be brusque or frequently preoccupied, and if you factor that in, you realize that their behavior has nothing to do with you.
Of course, it's tougher not to personalize things when they do relate directly back to you, when, for instance, a project you've been working on gets a lukewarm response. This is where women get into what career strategist Dr. Adele Scheele calls women's “blame yourself” mind-set. Whereas men have a brilliant way of detaching themselves when things don't go their way, a good girl experiences a tidal wave of angst.
New York City management consultant Karen Berg said that she recently posed this scenario to a smart, dynamic, thirty-something