Angela Priestley - Women Who Seize The Moment: 11 Lessons from Those Who Create Their Own Success 

Women who Seize the Moment

by Angela Priestley

Published in 2014 by Jane Curry Publishing

[Wentworth Concepts Pty Ltd]

PO Box 780 Edgecliff NSW 2027 Australia

www.janecurrypublishing.com.au

Copyright Angela Priestley, 2014

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any other information storage retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

Author: Angela Priestley

Title: Women who Seize the Moment; 11 lessons from those who create their own success

ISBN 978-1-922190-31-4 (Print edition)

ISBN 978-0-9924532-6-8 (Epub Edition)

ISBN 978-0-9924532-5-1 (Epdf/Mobi Edition)

Business, Self-Help, Management.

Cover and internal images: Shutterstock

Cover and internal design: Chameleon Design

Editorial: Amanda Hemmings

Production: Jasmine Standfield

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book could not have been written without the generosity of the women featured in the following pages. Theyve shared their time, wisdom and advice in the hope it might help other women navigate their own careers.

While there are too many such women to name here, Id like to offer special thanks (in order only of appearance) to the following for sharing their stories: Kerry Chikarovski, Janine Allis, Rose Herceg, Kim McKay AO, Diana Ryall AM, Naomi Simson, Megan Dalla-Camina, Fleur Marks, Margaret Dreyer, Ronni Kahn, Ann Sherry AO, Liz Ellis, Liesl Capper, Dr Cathy Foley, Helen Conway, Lynn Kraus, Katie Lahey AO, Elizabeth Ann Macgregor OBE, Anna Goldsworthy, Group Captain Sue McGready, Rosheen Garnon, Carole Renouf, Wendy McCarthy AO and Janine Shepherd AM.

This book would never have been finished without the support and love of my partner Mark, my extended family who took on baby-wrangling duties to give me time to write, and my gorgeous son Harrison who inspires me every day.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Angela Priestley is the founding editor of Womens Agenda, a publication for career-minded women. She has been a journalist and editor for ten years, writing about and editing publications on legal affairs, business, politics and technology. Shes a passionate advocate and supporter of making career opportunities more accessible to men and women, no matter what their life choices. She lives in Sydney with her partner Mark and son Harrison.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

There are women who wait and women who dont.

I once fell into the former camp. I waited for things to happen to me rather than making them happen myself. It wasnt a matter of being lazy or unambitious but rather of believing the success I wanted and the things I desired from my career would simply arrive for me, in time.

And so I waited. I would look to the future expecting turning points to emerge. I expected sudden, seminal moments in life to come up that would propel me from being a waiter to a doer. I sat back and hoped significant transitions would shift me in the direction I desired to be travelling.

Needless to say, the waiting didnt see me reach the destination I expected. I lost a number of years expecting the career I wanted to simply happen to me. I wasnt unhappy, I had a good time, but with those years now behind me and with the benefits that hindsight brings, I can see that I waited.

Im not alone. When it comes to career, I believe many women wait. It could be a matter of working really hard at a particular career we dont actually want thinking we will get to our ultimate ambitions later, or perhaps waiting to graduate as a leader rather than simply being the leader ourselves.

It could be waiting for motivation to arrive, or thinking were too busy and that well knuckle down and get on with it when we reach a particular birthday or point in time. It could be waiting on a qualification, waiting to get the experience we think we need, waiting to get past a particular life stage. It could be waiting for the perfect relationship with a significant other, waiting to meet the right mentor, or waiting to be told were brilliant before simply being brilliant ourselves.

Really, no matter what it is were waiting on theres one thing were relying on to get past it: turning points that will suddenly catapult our career in the direction we want.

Turning points do play a significant part in the careers of women. But they play a more positive part in the careers of those women who seek to exploit them, rather than wait to be affected by them.

Often, our intentions to have a well-planned life rarely go according to plan. The careers we immediately pursue are not the careers we continue later on nor is the lifestyle we hope to have the one we ultimately get. A linear pathway to the top in order to achieve a traditional idea of success is no longer the only option for women looking to have a satisfying career. Adapting to change and unexpected forks in the road will determine where we end up and the level of personal satisfaction we find in our work. There will be mistakes, terrible decisions made, accidents and unexpected loss and tragedy.

But there will also be some elements of luck that we can to some extent control, chance encounters we can exploit, brilliant choices well make that put us ahead, great ideas that lead to new options and, should we really test ourselves, the opportunity to find great positives in adversity.

These are all turning points that can play a large part in determining the career we have and whether or not we achieve the success we desire. But the effect they can have on our careers ultimately depends on how we navigate them. We can be open to the changes that can inevitably reshape our original plans, or headstrong in simply making those plans work no matter what gets in the way. Or we can simply allow all our great ambitions and ideas to unravel at the first fork in the road.

I believe turning points play a large part in shaping a womans career because women still have so many challenges to overcome in order to achieve the success we want: managing the competing interests of caring responsibilities with paid work, conscious and unconscious bias in the office, and battling a male-based hierarchy of leadership style, to name a few.

Thats why theres much we can learn from the turning points of other women. Those of us building our own careers have plenty of role models to look to, women whove navigated their way through different circumstances such as adversity, career breaks, juggling motherhood with work and breaking into male-dominated environments. Were often told about the need for mentors in offering advice for helping us overcome such challenges, but theres more we can simply learn from the women we admire, knowing they too have faced numerous difficulties throughout their careers and have somehow managed to overcome them.

With this book I share stories from women whove made the most of career turning points: those turning points they have created themselves and those that were beyond their control. Theyre the women who didnt wait to get the career they wanted, and still dont wait to get the success they desire. Theyre women who seize the moment.

Ive asked a number of women to share the turning points that made their careers, and have drawn on the anecdotes and stories they tell from their childhood, education and different life stages to determine how they got to where they are today. Ive also interviewed numerous women more generally about their careers some names weve heard of but plenty we havent for my work with online publication Womens Agenda, and built a solid database of tools and techniques for getting ahead from seminars, conferences and events Ive attended, as well as all the wisdom Ive been lucky to share in from career coaches, consultants and generous women whove had some insights to offer about their work and life.