Why Good Girls Don't Get Ahead_. But Gutsy Girls Do - Kate White [96]
That's why you've got to try to see the experience from a new angle. Dr. Farley stresses that “relabeling” a risk can be an effective way of feeling more in control.
That's essentially what my husband did for me when I went to Working Woman. By asking, “Aren't you a working woman?” he changed my position: I was no longer “out of my element,” but rather a perfectly appropriate choice. From there I also began to see that my ignorance about the world of management could be used as a strength. I could look at the magazine as a brand-new reader would. In fact, there were plenty of readers who were aspirants rather than successful managers, and much of the “managementese” in the magazine was probably foreign to them as well.
And, you know, something interesting began to happen once I changed my perspective. As I looked at the magazine purely as a new reader, much of what in my panic had seemed foreign and impenetrable now struck me as simply dry and dull. I began to think about how much fun it would be to introduce features that were not only informative but also had some sass. I assigned articles like “The Nine Worst Business Books of All Time (Plus the Ten Best)” and “SEX … Now That We Have Your Attention, Here's How to Get Everybody Else's.”
So come up with a new name for the precipice you are standing on.
• It could be terrifying—or it could be challenging.
• It could be foreign—or it could be intriguing.
• It could expose your ignorance—or your ability to learn.
2. Know Exactly What You Have to Lose
Every gutsy girl I've talked to about risk says that one of the first things she does before even thinking about taking a leap is to calculate what's at stake. Is it $30,000 or $300,000? A major client or a minor one? And then how much is that loss going to matter to her department and company's future—and her personal future as well?
Several years ago I had the chance to meet Dr. Pamela Lip-kin, a very successful facial plastic surgeon in New York City and one of the few women in the field (no, I haven't done anything yet). Dr. Lipkin says that her approach to assessing risk—and in her field there's plenty of it—boils down to a simple phrase: “Can I live with whatever happens?”
She not only asks herself this question in regard to each procedure she's about to perform, but she also posed it to herself when she had to make a critical choice as she tried to build her practice. The standard way to start a medical practice, she says, is to use family money to buy one or else develop one through the help of the old boy network. Neither approach was available to Lipkin: she had no money, and it was clear that she would never be invited to join the club. So she made her mark by doing something that was taboo in the business. She did revision work—fixes of other doctors’ botched jobs—and she talked about it.
“When a patient's unhappy with plastic surgery,” says Dr. Lipkin, “she may go to other doctors to see if they can help her, but she'll never find anyone who will say, ‘This is bad.’ It's a boys’ club and they won't admit the work wasn't good. Instead, they'll say something like, ‘It didn't heal well.’ When these patients started to come to me, I offered them something no one else would. I'd say, ‘Yeah, I can fix it,’ though I would be honest and tell them it wouldn't look as good as it would have if I'd done it originally.”
Taking revision cases and talking openly about it was a major risk, one that meant burning her bridges, says Lipkin. “Then there was a magazine article about me called ‘The Miracle Worker,’ and it was like an invitation to declare war on a small country. It annoyed every doctor in town.”
And yet, Lipkin knew that those people weren't ever going to help her anyway. She looked at how much being “the revision doctor” could hurt her—and she knew she could live with it.
3. Take Smart Risks Rather Than Stupid Ones
This is where you get to take advantage of that good-girl tendency to do lots and lots of homework. Though