Marjorie Hansen Shaevitz - The Confident Woman: How to Take Charge and Recharge Your Life

The Confident Woman is well supported by findings from social science research, but is delivered in such an open, human voice that you feel the author is sitting across from you in your living room (over tea) and speaking directly to you. Shaevitz is compassionate and funnyand among the wisest women I know.

Laura L. Carstensen, professor of psychology, Institute for Research on Women and Gender, Stanford University

Reading The Confident Woman is like being with your dearest, wisest, most loving friend.

Dale Steele, founder and copresident of the As We Change catalogue and Internet Marketplace

Marjorie Shaevitz has done it again! The Confident Womanlike The Superwoman Syndromeprovides needed advice that hits the mark for todays women leaders. I will recommend it to all the women executives I work with. Even more, The Confident Woman needs to be read by all leaders of the future, both women and men!

Marshall Goldsmith, coeditor of The Leader of the Future and The Organization of the Future and a Wall Street Journal Top 10 executive development consultant

The Confident Woman has it allpoetry, thought-provoking facts, humor and humanity, generous suggestions, personal stories of success and learning. What a gift to the reader who realizes that a fulfilling life is an inside-out job and the best gift we can give ourselves (and others) is to truly know ourselves and then go for it!

Ken and Margie Blanchard, authors of The One-Minute Manager; Blanchard Training and Development

The Superwoman Syndrome

Making It Together as a Two Career Couple
(with Morton H. Shaevitz, Ph.D.)

So You Want to Go Back to School
(with Elinor Lenz)

For permissions, see .

Copyright 1999 Marjorie Hansen Shaevitz

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 information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Published by Three Rivers Press, New York, New York.
Member of the Crown Publishing Group.

Random House, Inc. New York, Toronto, London, Sydney, Auckland

www.randomhouse.com

THREE RIVERS PRESS is a registered trademark and the Three Rivers Press colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

Originally published in hardcover by Harmony Books in 1999.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Shaevitz, Marjorie Hansen.
The confident woman /
Marjorie Hansen Shaevitz. 1st ed.
1. Women Psychology. 2. Assertiveness in women.
3. Self-confidence. I. Title.
HQ1206.S465 1999
305.42dc21

99-34390

eISBN: 978-0-307-80926-1

v3.1

T O G EOFF AND M AREJKA

For who you are.
For what you have done in your young years.
For being the sunshine in my life.

Thats the way things come clear. All of a sudden. And then you realize how obvious theyve been all along.

Madeleine LEngle

One Saturday afternoon not long ago, Kate Karpilow, a friend and colleague from Berkeley, California, was visiting relatives in San Diego and stopped by my house to say hello. I had not seen Kate in many, many months even though I am on a number of boards with her. As we sat in my living room chatting about her work and this book, Kate stopped me in the middle of a sentence and said, Marjorie, youve changed. Not that you were such a wimp before, but Ive noticed as we were talking that you seem much stronger, more certain, so assured about yourself. Whats going on?

With no time for reflection, I found myself saying, Really? I hadnt noticed any change, but now that I think about it, I have never felt better about myself, more powerful, or more in control of what happens to me. Writing this book has literally (forgive the pun) changed my life.

Kate and I then went on to talk about other things. After my friend left, I began to think about my comment that writing The Confident Woman had changed my life. For the first time I began to appreciate how true that statement was. (Isnt it interesting how personal truths have a way of popping out of your mouth when you least expect them.)

Then I began to reflect on why writing this book had been such a life-changing experience. I thought about the hundreds of hours I had spent scouring research papers and books looking for new materials on the issue of confidence. I recalled how people had told me to stop wasting my time doing all of this research. They kept saying, Write a KISS book [Keep It Simple Stupid]. People dont care about research. Give them sound bites like they get on radio and TV. Just tell women what to do in the simplest possible terms. And for Gods sake, dont use footnotes!

Well, to begin with, the write and run approach is not my way of doing things. I want to respect readers by giving them the full benefit of whatever research information and current thinking is available. I didnt want to dumb down The Confident Woman. In fact, my hope was that through reading this book readers might develop some of the attitudes and actions that would help them put an end to the sound-bite life.

Before I engaged in my research, I pretty much knew about the whats and hows of confidence, but I had never quite put together the whys. In other words, I had never solved the mystery of why, and in spite of changed laws, new options, and unparalleled opportunities, women, including myself, continued to act in nonconfident, self-sacrificing, self-neglecting ways. As I sifted through all of the research materials, I began to unravel the puzzle. I saw how and why the pattern of historical and current cultural messages has taken such a toll on womens minds.

That was just the beginning. Not only did I learn about the research on optimal health, I began to practice its tenets. I saw how taking good care of herself is one of the least selfish things a woman can do. I found compelling evidence that having a strong, defined self is not narcissistic, but key to making a difference in other peoples lives. I carefully examined the research on negative thinking including that which leads to guilt, worry, and self-criticism. I learned how easy it is to gain control over ones negative thoughts and about the power of focusing ones actions on the positive. What a relief it is to feel that you can handle lifes negative challenges. How reassuring it is to know that accepting less than the positive and less than quality does no one any good.

Perhaps the most intriguing part of writing The Confident Woman was how I found particular books and research pieces. I believe something that writer Phil Cousineau calls synchronicity was at work. Following the thoughts of Carl Jung, Cousineau says that synchronicity is a meaningful coincidence.

Thats exactly what happened to me: the gift of Cousineaus Soul Moments was one of the first examples of my Library Angel at work. Other examples included a friend calling to tell me, out of the blue, about research on what motivates people to do (and not do) what they want, a major issue in confidence. In response to an Internet request for information on optimal health, a professor from Harvard led me to a series of works that became critical for the book. After giving a talk in Seattle and deciding on a whim to spend the day on Whidbey Island, I stopped at a delightful little bookstore where I stumbled upon a book on quality environments. It too became important. And the examples go on and on. The right quote, the right person, the right concept seemed to drop into my hands just exactly when I needed it.