Grace Killelea - The Confidence Effect: Every Woman’s Guide to the Attitude That Attracts Success

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For my mom, Audemia Ozvalda Killelea (Thea), who taught me lessons that have lasted a lifetime. You were the first person to tell me I could do anything and be anything I wanted to be, and with those words you planted a seed of confidence. You left your handprint on my heart.

Success and happiness are not just for the worlds richest, luckiest, thinnest, or smartest women. We can be successful and happy even when we arent given every opportunity or advantage. I know because I have never been the richest, thinnest, most beautiful, luckiest, or smartest woman in the world. Yet, Ive created a life, career, and business that I lovedespite significant challenges.

Along the way, I found that the negative voices in my head are lying, and that by connecting my internal knowledge to my external energyor, simply put, my competence to my confidenceI could achieve both success and happiness. In 2013, at the age of 53, I ended my corporate career as a senior vice president of a Fortune 50 company and launched what has become a premier leadership program for high-potential women. Im a woman who has been morbidly obese, yet Ive walked several 60-mile events and skydived to celebrate losing more than 120 pounds. I survived a devastatingly bad marriage, and at 55, I met and married a wonderful man.

I wrote this book because for many years I was the woman who believed just working hard was enough. I was the classic good girl who said yes to everything I was asked to do at work, yet never asked for anything in return. I was the woman who spent too many years listening to the negative voices inside my head and the ones forced upon me by society.

When I walked into a room, Id have the Im not conversation in my head. You know how that conversation goes. Im not:

• Smart enough
• Thin enough
• Attractive enough
• Experienced enough
• Worthy enough
• Deserving enough

I was always waiting for building security to come and haul me awayfeeling like a fraud, sure Id be found outand yet that never happened.

The Confidence Effect is my way to give you shortcuts and provide you with tools to help you connect your confidence to your competence. This information is based on my many years of experience, both personal and professional. In addition, I interviewed a number of successful women about their experiences with confidence. Once you meet them, Im sure youll agree that this is a diverse and amazing group. It includes entrepreneurs, senior executives, a senior leader in the Girl Scouts, the first African-American female combat pilot, authors, speakers, and media personalities. These powerhouses help drive home the importance of The Confidence Effect. So lets get started.

Throughout her career, Laura has been putting in long hours. She rarely misses a day. She prides herself on her hard work. Shes always the first to arrive at the office and the last to leave. And shes a busy mother in addition to holding her full-time job. During meetings, she usually has ideas and valuable insights to contribute to the conversation, but she doesnt speak up unless shes positive her solution or response is pitch perfect. There are some new leadership opportunities in her company, and Laura wants to move up.

What Laura doesnt know, however, is that shes unlikely to get a promotion. Why? Like many women, Laura thinks working hard and doing a good job is enough to get her promoted. Yet she lacks confidence and a strong professional brand. She hasnt yet learned to ask for what she deserves. Laura hasnt built a strong network of allies and champions, and sadly she doesnt even know what information shes missing, because she also lacks awareness of her own styleand how to go about changing it for optimized career success.

But there is hope. Laura already has the solutions to her own problems. She needs to build a confidence + competence toolkit to help move her out of the role she is in. Part of her problem is that she is not connected to people who can inform her about opportunities. Consequently, other people get picked for roles for which she would have been perfect, but she never knew that the opportunities existed. Laura is one of her companys biggest assetsand her own worst enemy.

As you can imagine, Laura isnt alone. Many female employees face silent, challenging realities on a daily basis. This is inspiring some of the nations strongest and most celebrated female business leaders to speak out about the future of women in corporate America.

When it comes to women in business, Laura is in the majority, i.e., not in a leadership position. In fact, according to Forbes magazine, while women make up almost half, or 46.9 percent, of the modern workforce, 40 percent of large companies have no women on their boards and only 5 percent of startups are owned by women.

And, according to Unlocking the Full Potential of Women at Work, a special report by McKinsey & Company, Leaders make gender diversity a priority because they see the prize: a talent advantage thats hard to replicate. But few companies are winning that prize. The top circles of leadership remain male bastions; women make up just 14 percent of Fortune 500 executive committees, and there are few women CEOs. Although corporate leaders are working hard to change this, progress remains elusive.

With so few women in positions of leadership, those who are feel a responsibility to speak out on behalf of the marked disparity between female and male leaders in the workforce.

According to Arianna Huffington, Founder of The Huffington Post, Women still have an uneasy relationship with power and the traits necessary to be a leader. There is the internalized fear that if we are really powerful, we are going to be considered ruthless or pushy or stridentall those epithets that strike at our femininity. We are still working at trying to overcome the fear that power and womanliness are mutually exclusive.

This could explain why in 2014, 95 percent of all venture capital went to men; of the top 2,500 corporate executives in America, only 63 were women; only three Fortune 500 companies were headed by women; and Congress was 90 percent male!

Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook, former VP of online sales and operations for Google, and author of the bestselling book Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, says, We need women at all levels, including the top, to change the dynamic, reshape the conversation, to make sure womens voices are heard and heeded, not overlooked and ignored.

Sandbergs words are particularly resonant in the technology industry from which she hails, where only 25 percent of the workforce and less than 5 percent of startup owners are women. Recently, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella made front-page news around the world when he suggested women should not ask for raises but simply rely on karma to take care of them. Nadellas comments highlighted the pervasive and unconscious bias that affects so many women in the workplace today.

And finally, in a fiery call to arms, Rachel Sklarblogger and Founder of Change the Ratio, a group that seeks to increase visibility and opportunity for women in technology and new mediasums up the way many women in business feel: Theres a benefit to including women, theres a benefit to considering women, theres a benefit to writing about women, and theres a benefit to having women included in everything. And I think its ridiculous that this is a situation I have to be defensive about.