Caitlin Friedman - The Girls Guide to Kicking Your Career Into Gear: Valuable Lessons, True Stories, and Tips for Using What Youve Got (a Brain!) to Make Your Worklife Work for You

Caitlin

For my best friend and best husband, Andrew,
and my two joys, Declan and Taylor

Kim

For Thomas

acknowledgments

This book was definitely a group effort, so we have lots of people to thank for finally getting it on the bookshelves. Our agent, David Black, who continues to be our champion even while driving him crazy with idea #475. Our editor, Ann Campbell, who from Day One was as committed as we are to helping women think big about themselves in the workplace. Thanks to the publicity team at Broadwayour old friends David Drake and Tammy Blake and our new friend Tommy Semosh. Anne Watters for continuing the great marketing ideas. A shout out to the girls who get our books into stores all over the world, David Blacks foreign-rights queens Susan Raihofer and Leigh Ann Eliseo. You know we love getting those offers from Croatia. We want to thank Tony Tackaberry at Lion Television for believing we could have a show. And we want to thank David Craig and Linda Berman at Media Nation for believing we could inspire a show. And we couldnt have written this book at all without Aimee Bianca and Gabriela Holdt holding down the fort at YC Media. Thanks, girls!

Kim has to thank her special group of girls who help wordsmith and wrangle interviews and generally cheerlead her through her lifeKara, Chrisi, Sharyn, Amy, Amie, and Lauriceyou girls are the best.

Caitlin wants to thank Kim for being the best writing, business, speaking, and travel partner a girl could wish for. And Kim wants to thank Caitlin for continuing to come up with the big and small ideas that keep Girls Guide exciting, fun, and the most rewarding professional venture of her life.

But the absolute biggest thank-you of all goes to all of those girls willing to share their stories, support Girls Guide, and do what they can to help other women succeed.

introduction

Tennis great Billie Jean King once said, I dont want the crumbs anymore, I want the cake and icing. Everybody deserves the cake and icing. And shes right. All of us deserve to have a career that thrills, rewards, and inspires.

A report published by Harris Interactive, Inc., in 2005 found that 41 percent of U.S. workers were dissatisfied with their jobs. You can do betterand you know you can, or you wouldnt be reading this book. Whats stopping you from achieving your professional dreams? Why cant you get that title of vice president? Or the support of your manager for that Great Big Idea that you just know would be a success? Whats holding you back from looking for a better job? Or tackling your fear of public speaking? This book will help you answer these questions and take charge of your career.

If you want to be happy at work, the first step is realizing that your career is worth planning for. Well offer you a positive look at how you can succeed at work by including tips, quizzes, lessons, advice, andmost importantthe inspiring stories of other women who have been there. You will hear from a therapist who will teach us how to ask for what we need and deserve from work, a mother of four who has figured out how to juggle a successful home-based business, a promotions director who transformed herself into a game inventor following a shocking layoff, and a network executive whose passion for her career inspires her reports to want the same.

Girls Guide champions women who succeed by being themselves in the workplace. Although we are all different, as women we face challenges and offer skills that are unique. We wrote this book because we want those unique qualities to be recognized and heralded as our professional strengths, not our weaknesses.

Its time to stop waiting for someone else to notice the great work that you do. Career planning is never easy, but as two women who have been through more than a few career reincarnationstelevision producer, publicist, publishing assistant, restaurant manager, small business owner, author, and business guruswere here to tell you its worth the effort. The benefits of taking control of your career are numerous and can include a few of these noteworthy ones: more money, more respect, your dream job, a work schedule that allows you to spend more time with your children, a new skill learned by going back to school, and maybe even having your boss report to you one day.

The Girls Guide to Kicking Your Career into Gear is for all of you who want the cake and icingand who are ready to make a fulfilling career a priority.

one

you are here

Guess what? If youre not looking out for your career, then nobody is. If you want to be both passionate about what you do and successful, then you must take control of your professional destiny. Only you can determine who you are, what you can do, and where you want to go. This chapter will hold your hand while you step back and evaluate where you started, where you are on the career path today, how you got there, and most important, where you want to be tomorrow. We will ask you to ask yourself the tough questions: What does success mean for you? Are your fears holding you back? Is your job still working for you? Where did you envision yourself at this point? What kind of employee or manager are you? By diving deep into what motivates you professionally and reading the stories of women who have taken charge of their own careers, you will be armed with a better understanding of yourself and able to take that first step on the road to changing your life.

being the girl who makes it happen

We wrote this book for every woman out there who knows she can do more and wants to tackle the challenge. If you are stuck in your career, frustrated with your position within a company, or bored with the professional path you have chosen, then it is time to change your thinking. Start with a simple question: At the end of your life are you going to be proud of the extraordinary amount of time you have spent on this work?

If youve answered yes, then use this book to get you to the next level by learning the skills to ask for what you deserve and confront your challenges head-on.

But if youve answered no, then use this book to figure out whats missingand what you need to do to take charge of your worklife. If you have gotten into the habit of writing a negative script for yourself, well work on the rewrite. Dont accept that you are the girl who never gets what she wants. Instead, become the girl who makes it happen for herself.

Think about this. According to a study done by the National Sleep Foundation, the average American spends forty-six hours per week at work. Wed bet its actually higher than that, especially with inventions like the BlackBerry. And forty-six hours plus is a lot of time. Since the majority of our waking hours are spent working, we had better like what were doing. The more we like what we do, the more energy well be able to devote to doing it well.

The key to finding happiness in what you do is in accepting who you are and what you want from your work life. Comparing your path to others wont get you anywhere because your skills, values, personality, responsibilities, and even your location are all unique factors that will affect the trajectory of your career. If youre frustrated with where you are right now, then finding the answers to what you should do about it starts from looking within.