"Would you rather be liked or wanted?"

(This is the first installment in a series of articles I am writing this year, about 12 women who have fundamentally changed my life, my perception of myself, my habits, my career, my net worth and my happiness over the last five years of building ChairmanMe . None of them know it's coming until I hit publish. . .)?

On New Year’s Day, I was lucky enough to have brunch with Joanna Bloor .?

She was in my neck of the woods visiting family. I didn’t have my kids that day, and just a towering to do list, but nothing that couldn’t be put off a day or so.?

We are in the same city at the same time a lot though, and somehow we never just grab lunch. Or coffee. Or a hike. Or a doggy playdate. Or any of the things that friends regularly do.?

Why is that??

We both like each other and value each other’s perspective and friendship. We are both– in her words– are “hugely ambitious” for one another.?

I have a hunch that I’ve spent so much of the last few years telling other people why Joanna is so great, why she earns every penny of the $3,000 a hour she charges clients, why you should jump at the chance to get a sliver of her time. . . maybe I internalized that I didn’t deserve her time for myself??

I don’t know.?I make a lot of asks of Joanna on behalf of our community, because they love her. Maybe I thought those were my lifetime of Joanna asks already spent.

Anyway, I thought we were just going to small talk and have a nice meal, but it wound up being transformative as so many conversations with Joanna are.?

Here’s what I’ve learned with Joanna. She’s going to get to the nut of what you are struggling with. The thing you don’t really want to talk about, or maybe even face. Maybe you haven’t said it out loud or even to yourself. But she’ll keep asking until she hits on it, so I was uncharacteristically honest with her about my concerns for my future and where I sit right now, professionally; where I want to be.?

She asked the right questions, she listened, and she cleared out all the BS foliage around that truth. She lit a controlled burn that ate up the brush, the dried out needles, the pine cones, the dead leaves. A controlled burn. The trees didn’t catch fire, no villages were in danger.?

But all that other “Well maybe” or “Ooooh! But what about this . . .” or “this might piss someone off and I’m too exhausted for that. . .” all of that was just incinerated away, leaving the trees of my ambition, my goals, and a very clear sense of what the threat against them was.?

Once you get that clear it’s hard and it’s easy. Easy because there’s only one thing you can do. Hard because you have no more excuses not to do it.?

Lemme explain with an analogy about writing that forever changed me as a journalist.?

I was in my early 20s and I went to a writing workshop in Southern California, where a guy was talking about all the “journalese” reporters use. Like the word “garner.” Ever notice how many times reporters use the word “garner”? Garnering votes? Garnering sympathy? Garnering support??

But have you ever actually used the word “garner” in everyday speech or heard someone else do it??

That’s journalese. Weird things all reporters always say in PROSE all the time that they wouldn’t normally say at all.?

It was funny. Everyone in the room was guilty of it, and so we all laughed sheepishly.?

But then he said something that stuck with me for the rest of my career, and I believe drove me to become a great reporter. A better reporter than I was a writer, by design.?

He said: We do it because we are hedging on the facts, the reporting, the truth. Jargony, opaque writing doesn’t happen because we are bad writers, he said. It happens when the reporting isn’t quite there and you kinda know it deep down and so you write around the absolute, clear statement of the facts.

Clear writing is the best writing. But: “If it’s going to be that clear, it has to be that right,” he said.?

F*ck. That is so clear and so right. Whenever I found I couldn’t just say something in plain, monosyllabic English, it was because I wasn’t 100% sure on my reporting. And so I did more reporting until I could.?It became my internal fact checker.

What Joanna did in this conversation was get me that clear. And then, what needed to happen next was that obvious; there was one right answer.?Ya gonna do it or not? Watch out, because she'll check in on you and ask.

This wasn’t the first time a lunch with Joanna has changed my trajectory.?

She is the first person I ever heard say the universally true and retrospectively obvious career maxim: “The vast majority of decisions about your career happen in rooms you are not in.”?

GOOD GOD is that true. In some ways explicitly, like if you pitch someone for funding or interview for a job. But also in small unspoken ways constantly. “Who do we know who does X well that we can call up for this massive contract?”?

You don’t know how many of those conversations are happening right now that are including you or are leaving you out because you haven't trained people to think of you when they think of THAT THING.

What I love about her work is she teaches you in doable, practical steps how to insert yourself INTO that room, by getting clear on what your unique value add is, using your relationship capital wisely to get that out there, and training folks to talk about you that way. She leverages learnings from the advertising world around reach and frequency to teach you how to link that genius – where you want to be and what you want to be paid for– with your name in people’s minds.?

This is scary stuff. Scary because it’s asking for the precise thing you want and scary because you might get it.?

Putting yourself out there is scary.?

Asking the universe for what you really want and you really believe you are great at and you really deserve is HARD.?

Asking your network for it is even harder.?

It’s exposing. It’s vulnerable. There’s no fallen brush to hide how badly you want it, and how clear you are that this is what you need; what you desire most. And if you get it, you gotta deliver on that future you that you’ve pitched everyone.?

Joanna lays bare what keeps us from this. At our recent ChairmanMe retreat, she spoke about the trap women fall into of wanting to be liked. We all know that can be a hindrance professionally, because most people are paid to be something other than liked. Defaulting to liked silences you, boxes you in, and reduces you because alllllll of us are too much for someone at some time.

Far better than being liked, she said, where we really get paid equally, where our careers and net worths really change was being wanted. Think about the subtle power shift there. Liked is “Can I sit with you?” Wanted is “Dear God, we need you at this table.”

Look, as a journalist, I had to get over not being liked a long time ago. And as she spoke, I thought about my career. Plenty of people have been customers or investors or readers or sources despite not liking me. Because what I had to say was wanted and valued. That’s where my success was. That's where my power and influence was. That’s where I bucked the norms on things like raising venture capital as a female founder. That distinction. I didn’t need to be liked, in fact, if I was, I probably wasn’t doing my job well. I needed to be read, AKA wanted.?

It was another goosebumps moment I keep coming back to. Yes, we have been conditioned to want to be liked as women. But when we have this new north star of being wanted, we can catch ourselves and recondition ourselves towards the latter.?You can do this. I did it as a journalist. And I was a woman from the South. I was raised to be likable. It is freedom from a ton of emotional baggage we shouldn't have to carry around the office with us.

This article is part of a series of articles I'm writing semi-regularly this year on women who I got to know building ChairmanMe over the last five years who transformed me in some way. My job is to find the best and most transformative people in the world for our audience of tens of thousands of underrepresented folks who are in our badass online learning community. In the process of finding them, many have changed my life too.

In my nearly 30 years at the center of media, tech and business, I've met a lot of incredible people, so this is a high bar. It should tell you how incredible these twelve women are.

None of them know I'm writing about them until I do. There's no call to action or ask.

I want to write it as a very public thank you to these women, because we often don’t acknowledge the impact people have on us enough loudly or publicly enough, or even privately to them. And I also want other women who aren't in our community to know who they should be following, reading, hunting down, hiring, or rallying around. Women who have the answers are all around us, but they are never going to get the same airtime as men telling men how to succeed. We need to talk about this more, loudly and more often. I'd love to read about the women who have changed your life. (Pop them in the comments below! Feel free to rip off this idea and write your own monthly post. Just tag me so I can learn all about them as well!)

If you are bored, stuck or scared, follow Joanna . Share this, so that more people know about her, follow her, and can be transformed by her. It costs us nothing to amplify brilliant women who help other women achieve their dreams. It costs you all of two seconds of hitting "share."

Maybe hire her if you can get on her schedule. If you are a journalist, maybe you want to do a Q&A with her or feature her work. If you are a company or a conference planner, dear Lord, book her as a speaker, because she's incredible and your audience will thank you.?

(Sarah Lacy is a serial entrepreneur, best-selling author, award winning journalist and mother of two badasses. She lives in San Francisco and Palm Springs. This series first ran in the ChairmanMe newsletter "The Dose." www.chairmanme.com to subscribe for free.)