A SUMMARY TO ENCOURAGE YOU TO READ THE BOOK, HOW WOMEN RISE (Sally Helgesen, Marshal Goldsmith)

Where are you right now in your work and your career? Are you in a place that feels satisfying and give scope to your talents? Are you valued not just for your contributions but also for your potential? And you feel your work is leading to a place that will satisfy your ambitions and help you make the difference you want to make in the world? After all, you get to define what success means to you?

You let habits you developed at earlier stages in your careers get in the way of being able to move to the next level. As you become habituated to certain behaviors, you may start assuming they are intrinsic to your character, part of who you are (Autopilot). Approaching behavioral change by substituting new habits for old ones is empowering. More habits get started for a reason. The thing about habit is that they tend to hang around even when the condition that got them started no longer exist. To let go of a behavior that is no longer serving you, you need first of all to recognize it as a habit. You need to bring it to consciousness awareness so you can begin to try out new responses and see if these get you different results (unstuck).

If you recognize that you need to change in order to move ahead, why is changing so hard? Because resistance is a powerful force. Resistance keeps you from having the life you want and imagine for yourself. Learning to recognize and work through your own resistance is one of the greatest favors you can do yourself.

Trying to change a behavior that gets in your way rarely succeeds unless you understand the beliefs that inform it. Beliefs create the framework that shapes your actions. They provide rationales for how you behave and offer logical reasons for why you actually don’t need to change. There is a different set of core beliefs that often operate for women. These beliefs have their root in the society’s expectation that women should put the needs of others ahead of their own.

Leadership expert Sally Helgesen and bestselling leadership coach Marshall Goldsmith observe that women face specific and different roadblocks from men as they advance in the workplace. Sally and Marshall identify the twelve habits that hold women back as they seek to advance, showing them why what worked for them in the past might actually be sabotaging their future success. Building on Marshall’s classic bestseller What Got You Here Won’t Get You There, How Women Rise is essential reading for any woman who is ready to advance to the next level.

Before getting into these twelve habits, let’s mention four gender-neutral behaviors that Marshal explained in his book- what got you here, won’t get you there:

• Passing judgment

Judgmental behaviors waste your time and create negative energy that saps your spirit and can alienate others. Accepting others with their flaws is the first step toward figuring out how to deal with them effectively.

• Starting with No, But, or However

Starting with a negative qualifier always amounts to a direct contradiction of what someone else is saying. You may not mean it, but the person you are speaking with hears it this way. It’s always better to make your point without first disqualifying what the speaker before you said

• Making excuses

People at work typically use two kinds of excuses, either blunt or subtle. You never gain advantage by stereotyping yourself in a negative manner. You undercut yourself to let go of behaviors that hold you back if you cling to the self-defeating belief that they are somehow part of your genetic makeup.

• An excessive need to be me

If you know a behavior isn’t working for you and you persist on doing it anyway, that’s not being authentic: that’s just being stubborn. So, whenever you hear yourself proclaiming that something is just not you, you might want to question your motivation. 

The primary focus in this book is not on identifying external barriers or providing road maps around them. It’s on helping you recognize the behaviors that get in your ways as you seek become more successful on your own terms.

The focus of this book- How women rise- is to teach you about the “must-stop” habits that are most likely to get in your way as a woman. Habits that might once served you but can undermine you as you seek to rise. This book provides examples and case studies of these behaviors. You can rewire your brain to support new habits and thought patterns at any time during your life. The only catch is that you must be willing to repeat these new behaviors until your brain gets comfortable with them:

Habit 1: Reluctant to claim your achievements

If you struggle to claim credit for your achievements, it may cost you throughout your career. Effectively marketing yourself, far from being shameful, is an important part of every job and key to helping you to reach the next level of success.

Habit 2: Expecting others to spontaneously notice and reward your contributions

Expecting others to notice your contributions, or believing that they should, is not only a good way to keep yourself stuck, it can also diminish the satisfaction you feel in a job you would otherwise enjoy.

Having a short, clear, strong and concise statement ready to deliver at any moment, one that says what you do now but emphasizes what you want to do in the future and why you’re qualified to do it, gives you a huge advantage in terms of visibility and positioning (Elevator Speech).

Habit 3: Overvaluing expertise

Trying to master every detail of your job in order to become an expert is a great strategy for keeping the job you have. But if your goal is to move to a higher level, your expertise is probably not going to get you there. Feeling fulfilled at work requires two things: mastery and recognition. There are four kinds of power in organizations: The power of expertise, connections, personal authority or charisma, and position. If you want to influence the world in a positive way, you have to have power.

Habit 4: Building rather than leveraging relationships

Leveraging relationship is key for achieving professional success. Most great careers are built not just on talent or hard work, but on the mutual exchange of benefits.

Habit 5: Failing to enlist allies from day one

Which path you choose will usually depends on what you believe makes you credible at work. Is it what you do or who you’re allied with? Of course, it’s always going to be both. If you have great connections but don’t deliver, you will never inspire trust. To be fully credible, you’re always going to need allies. Allies support your efforts to get where you want to go.

Habit 6: Putting your job before your career

Many women get very involved in nurturing their team and spend huge amounts of time with their people. And they are frequently uncomfortable admitting self-interest. These can keep you focused on your job instead of your career. This devotion can cause highly accomplished women to neglect building the networks with senior leaders and external partners they need to advance.

Habit 7: The perfection trap

If you have perfectionist tendencies, you can best serve your long-term interests by learning to delegate, prioritize, and get comfortable taking measured risks. This will create a less stressful environment for you and for others and demonstrate your readiness to move forward.

Habit 8: The disease to please

The desire to be wonderful in all circumstances, to be thoughtful and nice and make everyone around you feel good, is known as “the disease to please”. You need to think long and carefully about your priorities. Not what would please others, not what would make everyone think you’re the most wonderful person they’ve ever worked with or met, but what you in your heart want to be and achieve in your life.

Habit 9: Minimizing

Whenever you use words or actions that minimize your presence or contribution, you show uncertainty about your right to take up space. Others tend to read this hesitancy as a failure to really show up and the inability to project a strong and engaged presence. Being present will give you the power of connecting across cultures, empathy, seem more credible and authoritative.

Habit 10: Too much

The usual culprits in the “too much” scenario for women are “too much emotion”, “too much words” and “too much disclosure”.

Habit 11: Ruminating

Rumination is counterproductive for two reasons: first it always makes you feel worse and second, it gets in the way of your ability to resolve your problems. Rumination is a real killer for women. It keeps even brilliant and talented women stuck. Plus, it can destroy you at the executive level, where you need to seem, and be confident and decisive. And because at that level, you’re probably more around men who really know how to move on.

Habit 12: Letting your radar distract you

Being highly attuned to the details of relationships and to what people are feeling enables you to excel at motivating others, inspiring morale. It helps you negotiate and communicate with sensitivity and skills. It supports collaboration and teamwork. And radar helps you build the intimate friendship that support your resilience when the going gets rough. But as with any strength, radar has its shadow side. A well-developed radar can make it difficult for you to filter up unhelpful distractions, scattering your attention and undermining your ability to be present.

By reading this book, you will know which habits may be playing a role in keeping you stuck. It’s humbling to admit that what used to work for you has stopped working, and a little scary because familiar behaviors can feel like part of who you are. But it’s inspiring to consider how much you might benefit from letting them go.

How having a clear understanding of what you are trying to achieve in life can be both a spur and a benefit when you seek to change. Knowing your purpose- defining it, speaking it, sharing it, and being intentional in its pursuit- can be powerful asset as you address behaviors that undermine you.

To become clear about your purpose, you start by articulating concisely and precisely what you hope to achieve, either in your present job or over the long term. Once you have your statement, you begin sharing it, over and over.

A statement of purpose can also be useful when you’re trying to identify which behavior you might benefit from addressing first. That’s because articulating your purpose gives you a lens for deciding what may and what may not serve you as you work to accomplish the goal you’ve set for yourself.

As you sort through your decision, it’s helpful to keep in mid the old saying: perfect is the enemy of good. In other words, don’t agonize, don’t imagine you need to start in the perfect place or get every step exactly right. Just get going.

It’s difficult enough to change a habit. But it’s almost impossible to change it alone. Because, we all have built-in forgetter, and we tend to default to our habitual response. This is what operating an autopilot means. This is why coaching can be so useful. Coaches serve as disruptors, reminding you that you’re trying to change. But if you don’t have a coach, you just start by asking one person you trust for help in addressing a habit you would like to change. Involving someone else will disable your forgetter, make it harder for you to revert to autopilot, and make it harder for you to rationalize your resistance.

Of course, asking for help requires you to make yourself a bit vulnerable. To reduce the discomfort or confusion you may feel, choose carefully, be specific, be concise, remember that disclosure is not the point, and specify a time limit.

How you ask for help is important. You’ll also want to be intentional about how you respond to the feedback you invite. Guidance for using feedback has four components: listening, thanking, following up and advertising.

If you really want to ramp up your change efforts, you might consider working with a peer coach. Peer coaching takes the core principle of enlisting help and turns it into a semi-formal and ongoing process that is also reciprocal instead of one-way. If you work with your peer coach regularly, you will make positive changes consistently over time.

When you decide to change, judgment is the number one thing that could get in your way. The problem with judgment is that it gets in your way, sucks up your time and makes positive changes more difficult. It also demonstrates ill will to your fellows, which inevitably comes through, even when you think you’re cleverly disguising your assessment. Judgment of self or others won’t improve the quality of your life. It certainly won’t make you happier. But it will keep you stuck when you’re trying to shift a behavior so you can become that most wonderous of creatures, your best self.

Successful women tend to be avid self-improvers. They rarely react defensively to suggestions about how they could get better. On the contrary, they usually listen attentively and then set to work with enthusiasm and zest. It’s important to bear in mind that every limiting behavior is also rooted in a strength. Your strengths are what got you here, here being where you are now. They may not get you there, that is where you want to go. But you will benefit from maintaining a healthy respect for the gifts you bring and for what you have achieved as you go about addressing behaviors that may limited you in the past.

They are gifts you bring to the world. And they surely have contributed to your success. And since part of your success will ultimately be helping to make your organization, and the world, a better place, you don’t want to leave these strengths behind as you move higher and expand your scope. Nevertheless, fulfilling your potential is bound to take you beyond your comfort zone, and examining how your strengths may also undermine you is one aspect of that. That’s why you’ll want to celebrate the skills, talents, attitudes, and behaviors that have brought you to where you are. Even as you identify and work to surmount self-limiting behaviors that won’t get you where you want to go.