How parents can help their daughters avoid the financial gender gap →

(I'm honored to be featured by the Washington Post again this week!)

“I need to feed my pig!” my daughter said as she ran with the coins to her beloved purple piggy bank many years ago.

Firmly fixed in family lore, we invoke the line every time we talk about money. Want to go on a family vacation? “Feed the pig.” Want a new bike? “Feed the pig.”

Now that both of our children are teenagers and closer to living on their own, feeding their “pigs” has become a lot more complicated — and not so cute. Especially for my daughter. The statistics show that, in her lifetime, she will end up having less money than my son, and feel more uncomfortable dealing with it.

Women live longer than men but, on average, make less money in similar occupations, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Add the potential of leaving the workforce to raise children, maybe a costly divorce and higher health-care expenses than men, and you get a cocktail of factors that lead to a hangover of lower lifetime income, less personal savings and lower Social Security benefits than men.

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(Featured On The Washington Post)

How to Help Your Child Through Bouts of Impostor Syndrome →

(This Article Was Originally Featured on Parent.co)

Usually it’s me but this time, it was my husband. I had to sit back and watch the carnage.

It all started because our daughter wanted to learn jazz.  She had been playing piano for almost a decade but only classical music. Yes, she’s 12. The short version of the story is her three-year-old self wanted to be like her big brother but what started as sibling rivalry, turned into a love affair with music.

So, we found her a jazz piano teacher and let’s just say it wasn’t a great fit.

After listening to my husband complain for the umpteenth time about this new teacher, I replied, “If you don’t like it, you fix it. I don’t have the bandwidth right now.”

So he did.

He did his research online and found a music school instead of a music teacher. He looked at all the prerequisites. Yup. Looked at the calendar. Yup. Looked at the price and location. Yup. Yup.

He even did a quick check-in with me. He explained what he found, and I replied, “Sounds great!”

At the first drop-off, they only started to get a whiff that something was amiss when they strolled past the bar near the front entrance.

He had failed to notice that he signed her up for an adult class.

My 12-year-old, 4’7” daughter was asked to take a seat next to the 6’8” Chinese grad student eating a footlong sub. They exchanged smiles – his full of food; her’s strained. On her other side was a studious Latino male undergraduate rushing to finish a homework assignment.

To my daughter’s credit, or maybe because she was a shined deer in the headlights, she sat down at her keyboard and waved goodbye to her papa.

When my husband picked her up he tried to make jokes, and told me later that “it sorta worked,” but when she walked in and saw me, she burst into tears.

“I can’t do this! I don’t belong there.”

But she did belong there. She understood the teacher’s material. Even at 12 years old, she had all the credentials. The teacher welcomed her warmly and had no problem with the age discrepancy. He even approached her and told her that he had started taking jazz at age 12, too.  “Well done,” he had said.

All of this went out the window because she was different. She was uncomfortable. She was completely intimidated. She had the most raging case of impostor complex I’d ever seen. 

This wasn’t surprising since feeling very different (race, gender, education, age) often triggers this complicated emotion. I was surprised, however, that it wasn’t reserved for us adults.

Amy Cuddy, author of the book “Presence: Bringing your Boldest Self to your Biggest Challenges,” says, “It’s not simple stage fright or performance anxiety; rather, it’s the deep and sometimes paralyzing belief that we have been given something we didn’t earn and don’t deserve and that at some point we’ll be exposed.”

I wasn’t ready to let her quit. There’s a difference between giving up and knowing when you’ve had enough. I’m okay with quitting, but we don’t give up just because things are hard. 

I needed to help her puff out her chest and strut into that class every week. Well, okay – maybe that wouldn’t happen, but I did want to help her look past her physical differences and embrace her talent. 

Dr. Pauline Rose Clance, the researcher who coined the phrase “impostor complex,” said, “If I could do it all over again, I would call it the impostor experience, because it’s not a syndrome or a complex or a mental illness. It’s something almost everyone experiences.”

I’ve been there. You’ve been there. Famous people have been there:

Maya Angelou: “I have written 11 books, but each time I think, ‘Uh-oh, they’re going to find out now. I’ve run a game on everybody, and they’re going to find me out.'”

Kate Winslet:  “[I would] wake up in the morning before going off to a shoot, and think, I can’t do this; I’m a fraud.”

We needed to be careful how we boosted her confidence. We did not want to sound insincere like SNL’s Stuart Smalley and dole out empty praise, “You’re good enough, you’re smart enough, and doggone it, people like you.”

The key, according to a 2011 research review, is to address the specific worry areas such as “…worries about whether they’re respected, whether their teachers think they’re dumb, whether they belong – and precisely, briefly, without stigmatizing them or singling them out, give them messages that can remove those barriers,” Dr. David Scott Yeager says, who co-authored the study with Gregory Walton.

Their work with middle and high school students has been extremely successful in increasing grades, lowering drop-out rates, and improving mental well-being for as long as three years.

So our family talked about this a lot. We talked too much, according to my daughter. However, we don’t regret it, and I secretly doubt she does either.

We reiterated that she deserved to be in this class. She had the same base as everyone else – nobody else in the class knew jazz, either. And when she put in extra practice work until she was sure she wouldn’t “embarrass herself,” we reminded her of her work ethic and ability to go toe-to-toe with those “grown-ups.”

But in the end, never doubt the importance of a teacher, boss, or leader. My daughter said, “I still have self-doubt, but the teacher helped me the most.”

Joyce Roché, the author of Empress Has No Clothes, says, “Leaders need to understand important triggers of impostor feelings – race, class, gender, education, sexual orientation are some big ones. If you are not creating a culture that values the authentic self, you are not going to get it.”

Indeed. Now when she walks into the classroom, instead of only seeing tall, intimidating grown-ups, she sees one warm and welcoming teacher.

And that is what has made all the difference.

How to Rise Faster and Stronger From Hurt and Disappointment

My daughter didn’t make the soccer team.  

It wouldn’t have been such a big deal except this was the team she tried out for and made last year.  Even worse, all her teammates from last year made it.  All of them.   

She placed on the lower team with a bunch of girls she didn’t know.

She was devastated.  

This isn't going to be the usual musing on how failure is a necessary part of life, that she took a risk; it didn’t pan out, and she’s better for it.

This story is, perhaps, more valuable:  that owning the excruciating pain, disappointment and embarrassment of failure can make all the difference between rising like a phoenix or simmering like a pile of ashes.

The reality was that she didn’t have a good try-out.  At first, she listed all the reasons why.  She might have been a little overconfident, or it could have been the sleep-over that she shouldn’t have attended the night before.  It could have been because she is petite for her age while all the other girls are morphing into gazelles.   Her biggest excuse was that her old coach was replaced with someone who didn’t know her.  

She licked her wounds as she went through all the possible excuses for weeks afterward.

I wasn’t sure how this was going to turn out.  She was very raw and a tween.  I knew she could very well be a powder keg that I didn’t want to light by “trying to help.”  So I decided to watch quietly from a distance.

Then she got silent.  Like she had made up her mind about something.

Would she tell me she wanted to quit?  Would she become passive aggressive on the team?  

I braced myself.

At the pre-season meeting with the new team, not surprisingly, she found a seat in the back of the room.  She sat slumped and quiet throughout until they got to the number of practices per week.  This team would only practice one day a week.  Last year, her team practiced 2+ times a week.  She suddenly sat upright and whispered to me, “How am I going to get better with fewer practices?” I was surprised by her comment and suggested she talk to her new coach. 

He liked her reasoning and recommended sending an email asking the coach from the higher team…her old team…if she could guest practice with them. 

“How do you feel about that?” I asked her.

“It’s kinda embarrassing but I guess we should send the email.  I really need more practices.” 

So we wrote the email request together.  No assumptions.  Just one extra practice and lots of gratitude and thank you’s for the extra ball touches. 

He agreed and was extremely welcoming. 

Every day she went to this extra practice, she faced the shame and disappointment in not doing her best the first time around.   Every time she went to this practice, she knew she was reminding those girls she didn’t make it.   

I watched her take a deep breath each week before getting out of the car and own all of it.  I listened to her respond to the girls who asked her, “are you back on the team?”  

This time, there were no excuses.  

And that is when she started to transform.

Brene Brown, the author of Rising Strong, stresses that the usual narrative of struggle to success always seems to gloss right over the very very painful bits to bask in the glow of the victorious ending.  She says this is a mistake. 

Her research has proven that there is a clear pattern among people who rise steadily from hurt or adversity - they decide to own their stories, and deal head-on with the pain and discomfort.  

She says, “There are too many people today who instead of feeling hurt are acting out their hurt; instead of acknowledging pain, they’re inflicting pain on others. Rather than risking feeling disappointed, they’re choosing to live disappointed. Emotional stoicism is not badassery. Blustery posturing is not badassery. Swagger is not badassery. Perfection is about the furthest thing in the world from badassery.” 

Brown says it’s the age old ‘hero’s journey.’  “Our job is not to deny the story, but to defy the ending—to rise strong, recognize our story, and rumble with the truth until we get to a place where we think, Yes. This is what happened. This is my truth. And I will choose how this story ends.”

In other words; we “reckon,” we “rumble,” and then, we wage a “revolution.”  

This is Brown’s “Rising Strong" process:

THE RECKONING: WALKING INTO OUR STORY—Recognize emotion, and get curious about our feelings and how they connect with the way we think and behave.

THE RUMBLE: OWNING OUR STORY—Get honest about the stories we’re making up about our struggle, then challenge these confabulations and assumptions to determine what’s truth, what’s self-protection, and what needs to change if we want to lead more wholehearted lives. 

THE REVOLUTION—Write a new ending to our story based on the key learnings from our rumble and use this new, braver story to change how we engage with the world and to ultimately transform the way we live, love, parent, and lead.

Two months into the season, at the end of one of the guest practices, the coach gathered the squirming, giggling girls around before they disappeared into our awaiting cars and said, “That's it.  I’m sick of all of the horsing around. If you don’t start paying more attention during practice, just remember, there are kids on the lower team that are working hard and playing great.”  

Then he turned and smiled right at my daughter.  

Brown says it best, “When I see someone fall down, get back up, and say, “Damn. That really hurt, but this is important to me, and I’m going in again” - my gut reaction is, “What a badass.””

Yup.  My daughter is a badass.

An Easy Way Women Can Out-Negotiate the Men

My daughter usually hesitates to advocate for herself but something different happened a few months ago. 

She stood up in her 6th-grade class and respectfully told the teacher she felt the test should be delayed.  She listed off her reasons: there was not enough advanced warning from the teacher and the study materials were not clear.  

I was slack-jawed as she told me the details of her uncharacteristic approach.

Although she didn’t win her argument, she just shrugged her shoulders, “It wasn’t a big deal, but I’m still mad that she wouldn’t listen to my argument.”

Was my daughter finally cured of her chronic case of self-advocacy timidity?

Nope.

It turns out my daughter wasn’t advocating for herself.  

She was advocating for others and professor, Hannah Riley Bowles’ Harvard research, says this made all the difference.

Bowles and her team were looking for gender differences in negotiation prowess and they weren’t disappointed.  They asked 200 senior executives to role play either as an employee who was being promoted or role play their boss.  As expected, the female “employees” negotiated 3% less in salaries than the male “employees.” 

But a different group of women in the study bested the male “employees” by more than 14% in wage increases!

So why was this group of women immune to the usual gender trap?

Because they were instructed to be the employee’s mentor.  

As soon as they saw their role defined as “Taking care of others” they became tough as nails.   

That’s what happened to my daughter.  She didn’t feel she was unreasonable or greedy or pushy.  She wasn’t doing this for herself.   She was trying to help the class.

She might have stumbled upon a solution to not just her self-advocacy problem but also the key to avoiding a major stereotype that is a catch-22 for women when they negotiate.  Like it or not, subliminally, women are generally seen as the warm and “Care About Others” sex and when we go against this stereotype and are viewed, instead, as “Care only about Me,” it can hurt us.  

Studies have found that when women negotiate salaries on their own behalf, they are often seen as aggressive and employers are less enthusiastic about working with them. 

Sigh.

However, when we advocate for others, we stay within our societal roles.  We are not seen as aggressive because, when we champion others, the behavior is expected.

Now, do I think this is a double standard?  Of course!  Do I wish things were different?  Absolutely!  But until the world stops seeing woman = mom, my daughter will need to navigate this tricky terrain.  Besides, she felt confident when she was championing for her class.  I want her to tap into that fierceness.  It might spill over.

Is it possible, while negotiating, to pretend like you are advocating on behalf of a friend?  

Like a mentor?

Adam Grant, Wharton professor and author of Give and Take, thinks this is an excellent strategy and can be done.  He suggests that before my daughter makes a request, she should consider how the request would also benefit others.  

Are there other individuals who share her interests?  If she can identify that “beneficiary” (this could also be a group instead of just an individual), she can justify her advocacy and emphasize her concern for others.

What if there isn’t a “beneficiary” that quickly comes to mind? 

There are other highly successful strategies that my daughter can use that are in keeping with her “giver” tendencies.  Grant says that since givers like my daughter tend to excel at understanding other people’s thoughts and feelings, they have a knack for finding out more about their counterparts interests and needs.  

He found that by trying to focus on what the other party was thinking about and what their interests might be, givers asked more questions and analyzed more options trying to arrive at a solution that was fair.  This way giver still came across as "caring about" the counterparty.

Ed Brodow, author of Negotiation Boot Camp, says this softer approach is exactly what you need to apply to be a world class negotiator.  

Brodow’s tips are perfectly in-line with giver tendencies:

1.     Listen - this will cause the other party to feel respect and it will build trust.
2.     Seek a Win-Win Outcome - “win-win” negotiators seem to have the most success       because (when they “listen” in #1) they can give something to the person they are negotiating with, and that will make it more likely she will get what SHE wants.
3.     Look for Commonalities - When you can share a common interest or find a common ground with another person, they’ll have a harder time being in confrontation with you.
4.     Acknowledge Counters or Objections - When you do this, it makes the other party feel heard while at the same time avoiding ending the discussion. 

Hmm…still sounds like a mentor to me. 

What if the key to all of these successful negotiation tactics for women and girls was simply to help us get out of our heads and be ourselves?

When we overthink and second-guess, we start to fixate on what other people might be thinking about us.  “Does the teacher think I'm too aggressive?” “Does the other person think I'm greedy and selfish with these requests?”

It’s pretty hard to focus on the facts or a fair solution if you start to have anxiety that someone is judging you.  You might even act differently and rub someone the wrong way.

In other words, thinking about your emotions ends up creating a situation where you are negotiating with two people at the same time; the counterparty and yourself!

After sitting down with my daughter and trying to explain the concept and some of these strategies, my daughter floored me with her insight.

“So, in other words, you want me to feel like I do when I negotiate with you.”

She went on, “I know you have my best interest at heart so I’m not afraid to ask you for things.  I might be afraid you’ll say “no” but I’m never scared you’ll judge me, so it’s easy.”

When she advocated for others like a “mentor,” she was confident.  When she advocates with me, a known and trusted counterpart; she is relentless (trust me).  

In both situations, she is out of her head emotionally and focused on the task at hand.

Watch out world.

4 Steps to Mastering the Fear Your Child Will Fail

We need to address our Icarusphobia.  

That’s right. I decided to create a new name for the phobia-of-letting-our-children-fail after realizing no one had bothered to create one.

I used the Greek story, Flight of Icarus, as my inspiration.  You know…the myth where the child ignores his father’s wise warnings, flies too close to the sun, melts his wax and feather wings, and plummets to his death in the sea?  

I thought that was pretty appropriate. 

I poured through the exhaustive, and often hysterical, list on http://phobialist.com and learned a few things.  I now recognize my son has been a long-time sufferer of Testophobia (Fear of taking tests) and, in a few years, I might develop Ephebiphobia (Fear of teenagers).  

But nothing to describe the gut-wrenching fear of letting our child fail, make a mistake, embarrass themselves, or worse, get a B. 

As a kid, no one did my homework for me, helped me with my college applications, or was overly concerned about where I was.  “Come back when the street lights come on,” was a familiar yell from many front porches in my neighborhood as we furiously pedaled away.  They certainly never called my boss to complain if I received a poor performance review like they do now. (Seriously. They do.)

But we certainly have a fear-of-letting-our-child-fail phobia now.

There are scores of experts who say that we need to wake up and address our Icarusphobia head on.  Madeline Levine, the author of Teach Your Children Well, says that “The malpractice of over-parenting,” impacts our children’s critical thinking skills, stress, anxiety, depression, and their sense of self.  In the documentary, The Race to Nowhere, business leaders complain that new hires often can’t cope or succeed without a mentor, constant reassurance, praise or rewards.

I know I’m not alone in finding this concept of letting our children fail downright terrifying.  Here’s the modern-day myth: If they fail, then people will talk about them…and us…in whispers behind our backs.  Our children will never get into college, live in our basements and everyone will see what impostors we are as parents. 

People can dish out advice all they like, but nothing will change unless we (I) overcome our (my) fear of letting our children take more risks and make mistakes. 

So, for fun, if we accept the premise that it’s a phobia, let’s address the cure like one. Thanks to Todd Farchione, Ph.D., Director of the Intensive Treatment Program at the Center for Anxiety, for providing the inspiration.

1.    Develop a “Fear Ladder” (or, in other words, “We Need to Get Some Perspective”)

List all the potential failures that your child could experience that might give you hives. Then rank these situations in order, based on the level of distress, discomfort, or hysteria you might feel.  

Drug use, drunk driving, and unprotected sex topped my list.  Not surprisingly, this put perspective on homework quality and completion. And music practice? Pfft.

2.  Challenge Your Thoughts (or, in other words, “What’s Truly the Worst Thing That Can Happen?)

This is related to the lower level items on your list that you’ve been stressing about, not the unprotected sex stuff.  I’m pretty sure you get a hall pass on freaking out about that.

Todd Farchione, Ph.D., says: 

“Ask yourself questions like: What evidence do I have for this fear or belief? What is the worst that could happen? How bad would that be? Work toward considering another alternative, less fearful outcomes…”

Yup.

3.  Change Your Behavior (or, in other words, “Stop Hovering When You Don’t Have To”)

This is the most important step.  However, I’m going to reverse the usual advice because if you suffer from, say, Agrizoophobia (Fear of wild animals) the fear causes you to run away.  Instead, with Icarusphobia, our first instinct is to pounce straight on top of the poor child.  

For situations that are actually dangerous, this isn’t a problem. Pounce away. 

But for our more over-blown fears (like the fact that our child will be an utter failure unless they get into Harvard), we need to realize that our brain is incorrectly identifying them as dangerous.  

Here are the two key behavioral changes we need to try when feeling our inner Tiger Parent coiling up for an attack.

First, instead of creating a “systematic pattern of approach” to walk toward our spider to acclimate to it (Arachnophobia), we need to remove ourselves more and more from our child’s life where appropriate. 

I will still ask about grades and homework, (I can’t help it.  Maybe I should be writing about a 12 step program instead.) but I will try to resist interjecting anything else into the conversation other than praise on hard work and effort where deserved.    

Second, try to respond physically in a way that is different than what your fear prompts you to do. For instance, when I notice that I’m tensing my body, clenching my jaw…narrowing my eyes…I need to try to relax.  If you feel like you are at the breaking point during the conversation, walk away and collect yourself. 

4. Reward Yourself (or, in other words, “Have ‘Unproductive’ Fun!”) 

Overcoming a phobia is extremely hard work and, if you master it, you deserve to treat yourself as a pat on the back.  For instance, if you have aviophobia (fear of flying), and you master your fear, the experts suggest flying to some exotic locale.  

I think that a sweet mother-child lunch or mother-child baseball game could be super cool.  Something frivolous and fun that has nothing to do with getting ahead or college resume’ building.  It would help something far more important - relationship building.

They say that living with a phobia can keep us from living our life to our potential.  But perhaps, in this case, Icarusphobia inhibits our children from living to their potential. That includes growing into their own, individual, and flawed self that all grown-ups eventually become. 

By the way, I desperately want to meet people who suffer from Arachibutyrophobia (Fear of peanut butter sticking to the roof of the mouth) or Zemmiphobia (Fear of the great mole rat). 

I think that would put some perspective in my life.

-Laura

My Girls Leadership Interview on the Mindsoak Podcast

This week I'm posting something a little different.  A podcast!  

I was recently asked by a great guy, Jon Filitti, to come on his MindSoak Podcast and talk all things girls' leadership.  Although we had a good time, we didn't pull any punches as we dug deep talking about vulnerability, fear of failure, and some of the most common traps girls and women fall into as they navigate through life.

If you would rather read the transcript of my interview rather than listen, I've included some edited excerpts which you can find if you scroll down below Jon's intro.  I'll be back with a new blog post in two weeks.

Until then, enjoy!

-Laura   

"I recently had Laura Clydesdale come on the podcast to talk women’s leadership, her philosophy on failure, grit and teaching children how to take risks1. Laura speaks eloquently on a variety of topics around parenting and it was a pleasure to explore strategies with her. Her main focus as a blogger is writing and teaching about girls' leadership.

I knew we would have a great conversation when I read some of her thoughts on teaching leadership to girls and woman 2. Like it or not (I don’t) society teaches leadership differently to girls than boys.

Laura and I confabulate3 on how girls are taught to be assertive much differently than boys, girls tend to apologize even when they have done nothing wrong or as a disclaimer. When girls in leadership share their point of view it can be perceived as “bossy” instead of a leadership quality. And many other leadership issues from being “smart”, being assertive, showing confidence and avoiding conflict.

Raising daughters is as important as ever. Especially in this day and age. The world is at their fingertips and we need to make sure the playing field is level. If you have a daughter make sure to read Laura’s thoughts on teaching leadership. If nothing else, reading her words will reinforce and solidify your approach to parenting."

To learn more about Laura, follow her on Twitter @l_clydesdale 

1. She is also Co-Chair of TEDxYouth@EB and Notes & Words for UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital Oakland. How awesome is that? ↩

2. Plus she’s a Golden State Warriors fan…so we have kindred spirits on how to play team basketball. ↩

3. I’ve always wanted to use that word in a post. Check. Done. ↩

 

Edited Transcript

Jon Filitti:  Hello Laura.  Welcome to the podcast.

Laura Clydesdale:  Hello. Thank you, John!

JF:  So, I wanted to talk to you about everything that you’re engaged in and all the different roles that you play.  Would you say the biggest role that you play right now is blogging about girls leadership?

LC:    My career has taken an interesting trajectory and so, yes, the short answer is yes.  But to just give you a little background on how I got there, I was a general leadership development consultant, had one-on-one executive coaching clients and was working with companies on team facilitations, etc when all of a sudden I started noticing my 10-year-old daughter (she’s now 12) exhibiting some of the same career derailing habits that some of my female adult clients were exhibiting.  It was sort of this interesting a-ha moment.  Does it really start when you’re 10?  And so I started keeping a journal and trying to go out and find research that was going to help me facilitate her out of some of these bad habits that she was starting to embrace when I realized that there really was nothing out there for young girls.  There are a couple of individuals that are doing fantastic work in really narrow slices but nothing in a broader sense.  So I started using adult research…research that Corporate America uses…and tried to flip it a little bit and make it a little more simplified so I could work with my daughter.  I kept a journal and after a while my husband said this is great stuff you should probably start blogging.  I’m like… blogging?  So I just threw it out there and really didn’t tell anyone about it and then people just started to come.    

JF:  Did you feel vulnerable when you first started to blog?

LC:  Oh yeah!  Absolutely. You put yourself out there. You have 900 words or so to try to make it as simple as possible, keep people with you, and then you open yourself up for people to misinterpret those words.  At the same time I was letting my daughter be vulnerable.  She reads them all before I post them but they are sometimes very very tense, vulnerable moments that she is willing to share with everyone in the hopes that maybe some of these kids and parents can avoid what she is going through.

JF:  Wow. So what have you found?  What are the posts or the ideas and concepts that have struck a chord with the most people in terms of women’s leadership or girls’ leadership?

LC:  I think the biggest ones..well, you said vulnerability and that’s a huge one…the perfectionism problem women feel is big.  Girls in particular feel they have to be little-miss-perfect.  They have to hide behind their straight-A’s.   When they do, they don’t take risks because, you know, when you take risks it probably means you are going to make a mistake or you might fail.  Then you are no longer perfect.  It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy where you stay very contained in your small little world and you don’t experience all the upsides and joy of success.  Another one that’s really big is how to deal with the failure.  My daughter recently didn’t make her soccer team and how she dealt with that, actually taught me a few things about how you have to own the feelings you have…the disappointment…the hurt…and when you do, you can rebound a little faster.  We talk a lot about grit.  I think that’s kind of a buzz word lately but it’s a really important one.  Another one is doing everything to make sure you preserve your nice girl image.

JF:  It’s interesting to go back to risk for a second.  Boys are told to take risks.  It’s encouraged.

LC:  Correct!

JF:  Why do you think it’s different.

LC:  I think the biggest thing, and I’m not an expert, I’m still figuring this out myself…

JF:  I want you to answer for all mankind here.

LC:  OK, here we go!  Everyone listening?  No…I think the real issue is when you look at the history books, even though there are women in there, there are a lot of men.  Also, when you look at those heroes, they did something so spectacular that they actually made the history books.  It’s a frightening prospect if you believe you will come out of high school and must lead nations, or charges, or civil rights movements in order to be considered a “leader”.  They don’t really transition you into the small incremental steps that it takes to get you to a leadership role.  I think teachers…it’s been proven that teachers automatically give a waive on boys and encourage this and girls are expected to sit more quietly and be good girls and polite and nice and by doing that, again, it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.  I think it’s more like death by a thousand duck bites than it is one major thing.  I think we just very slowly over time indoctrinate boys and girls with very subtle clues, very subtle statements, that push them in that direction rather than it being one big major issue.  Does that make sense?

JF:  Yeah.  Absolutely.  Which goes back to, I know you and I had a little bit of discussion regarding the concept of failure and it’s even been brought up already.  I love getting people’s insights on what they feel failure is.  It sounds like you’re saying that the opposite of risk, or part of risk, is failure because that is always going to be a chance that you have to take.  That’s what risk is.  So what’s your concept of failure just in general.

LC:  In terms of the upside or how I would approach failure?

JF:  Yeah.  How have you dealt with failure in the past?

LC:  Well, I think in the past I didn’t do such a great job.  I think I did a lot of what many people do, which is they try to hide it or they make excuses or they become defensive and that kind of saves your pride a little bit.  There’s a fantastic author and researcher named Brene Brown…many people may have heard of her book Rising Strong…but she’s proven that the people who can bounce back the best from hurt and failing are those that actually look at their failings…really look at the emotion and get curious about it…you know, “why am I feeling that way?”  She calls it reckoning with those emotions.  When they say, “OK, yeah I screwed up,” then they can finally move on.  When you decide where you are, that’s when you begin building your own story.  OK, that happened to me.  It may have been my fault, or it could have been something that happened to me that I had no control over. A lot of times that happens.  But, are we going to let this story define us or are we going to define our own end of the story?  I think that’s what Brene Brown does so well.  

JF:  Yeah, don’t try to push through it, sit in it for a while.

LC:  It’s hard.  Talk about vulnerability.

JF:  When did you figure this out do you think?  And I know you’re not going to say I’m perfect and I have this down 100% all the time but did it take until your adulthood to understand the concept?

LC:  Definitely.  And it took a couple really tough things that happened in my life and one in particular to realize that certain things are beyond your control. That’s when I think it came together for me.  Because there were no excuses.  There was no nothing.  I just had to deal with it and then figure out how I wanted to live the rest of my life with that.

JF:  So do you feel like success came more rapidly after that or in a more fulfilling way?

LC:  I think both.  Because when you actually sit in your failure a little bit, I think you come to the realization that maybe it’s not so bad.  I mean, it feels really bad! It feels awful initially.  But once you start really looking at it you realize the earth will continue to spin and, you know, at the end of the day there are a lot great things in life and these failures, they seem so monumental and huge at the time, but they do pass.  You have all of these other things to look forward to.  So you start to not fear the failure so much because you realize that perspective.  Then you take more risks and the upsides happen, which are exhilarating, and you realize the upsides way outweigh the not so great disappointments and failure.  It seems like highs get higher and the lows become more in perspective as time goes on.

JF:  The perspective is important.  Things that we felt were so important when we were in 8th grade aren’t necessarily as important any more.  We start to gain that perspective for the rest of life.  Things happen that shakes us and we live through it and we build upon it.  Are you listening Sarah Burkhart?  I’m no longer broken hearted!

LC:  (laughs) Right.  And it’s difficult to say this and expect someone to go, “yeah, great” and then easily apply it.  You really have to live through it. That’s the toughest part.  I think ultimately this goes back to my leadership blog.  As parents, we try to protect our kids so much from failing and disappointment and all those bad emotions. Instead, the more we can talk our kids through those emotions and explain how this is a part of life, helps put that into perspective for them.  So when they hit 8th grade and Sarah breaks up with my son I can try to help him through it instead of, and this literally does happen…calling the other parents trying to fix it for him.  You can’t fix it.  You just need to talk to your kid.

JF: The new thing is, not that the parent will call the other parents, the parent will text the other child.  That’s been happening a lot more frequently.  What are we doing here people?

LC:  You know what parents will also do?  They will call or email bosses.  

JF:  Oh, for teenage kids.

LC:  No, adult children.  Honestly, this happens.  Parents will call a boss after their child has received a poor performance review.  

JF:  Wow.

LC:  Yeah, it’s bad.  So, that point that it’s getting a little out of control is right.  We want to shield our children.  It’s natural, but all we do is stunt their ability to be more resilient.

JF:  You and I can’t sit here and say, hey, we need to sit in it as adults and then look at our children and say, they shouldn’t have to.  But once you’re a parent the worst thing for you to watch is your children going through pain, whether it is physical or emotional.  Every part of your being wants to protect themand run in and make sure that they are OK.  Sometimes you just have to back off and let the world happen.

LC:  It’s so hard to watch it.  It’s like do what I say and not what I do.  (Laughs)  I’ve made many mistakes on this, we’ve all made mistakes, and I will continue to make mistakes on this.

JF:  It’s tough to consequence when you know something is going to hurt really badly.   

LC:  It’s tough being a parent!  It’s the hardest job, right?

JF:  At least the pay is really good.

LC:  (laughs) 

JF:  So what is the most important quality that you look for in other people.  And I want your answer both regarding leadership and just in general for friendship.

LC:  Well, in leadership, I would have to say that a person who is driven by vision rather than by profit or the end result.  I know that is very broad but when someone exhibits a passion and vision for something, it’s really easy to get behind that person and you really want to follow them.  I’ve had a couple of bosses who’ve had intense vision and they’ve been completely different kinds of bosses and I could still follow those individuals.  It kind of smooths over some personality issues.  When individuals are super nice but they are all profit focused, it can be a real grind when you don’t have a purpose or a reason for going to work every day.    Obviously, there are so many other ones.  You want someone who cares about your growth and cares about your development.  In terms of friendship, I would say I just love a sense of humor.  Life can be so serious and we talked about the failure and the vulnerability piece.  If you can keep going through life with a sense of humor and openness to things changing, it helps.   

JF:  So you are basically saying you love people whether they are leaders or friends who are genuine.  I think everyone wants genuine people around them.  The trick is finding out and having a good compass for who is genuine and who is not and what is genuine and what isn’t.  

LC:  It can be tough.  I think a lot of us walk through life with this imposter complex which creates a situation where we are not genuine.  Because we are so worried about what others are thinking.  This is a perfect example.  We talked about the blog earlier and being vulnerable. For a while, I was writing in a protection mode and it wasn’t really good writing because I was too worried about what other people would think of me.  Therefore, I wasn’t being genuine.  I think that happens a lot in the work world.  I think that happens a lot in the world in general.  We go through life, “Oh, someone’s going to find out about me…I’m really not this person…I’m really not this smart…I shouldn’t be in this room with these people…I’m over my head.”  What it does is change your behavior.  Because you are constantly thinking about what other people are thinking, you try to modify your behavior rather than just being vulnerable, being yourself and being genuine.

JF:  So when you were writing the blog to begin, what were you worried about people thinking about you?

LC:  That I was a bad mom.  For sure.

JF:  Ahhh.  Because you were being honest and genuine.

LC:  Right.  If you talk about the messy underbelly of parenting you’re bound to strike a chord.  You know I have had some pretty awful comments.  I don’t read comments any more let’s just put it that way.  Some of the comments that have been posted…there’s just a bunch of people out there..I have to realize those individuals don’t know anything about me and they’re just making an assumption.  Or maybe there is something bad going on in their life.  But I know who I am.  And my friends all know who I am and they all love it so as long as they’re happy and I don’t get a call from my mother asking me if I’m abusing my daughter, then it’s OK!

JF:  Were some of the comments in the abusive realm? 

LC:  The one I read that made me stop reading comments was from the Washington Post article I wrote about how if you send your kids to summer camp.  And I just used summer camp as an example of this perpetual need to over-schedule our kids over the summer and that maybe we should just let them have a summer where they can lay in the grass and look at the trees. Ironically, if you do that you help your kids even more because they become more creative and they get perspective on life, etc.  Anyway, I was just trying to use this as a tool.  But the comment that came out of sending my kid to summer camp was, “Those kids are lucky to get away from her.”

JF:  Wow.

LC:  Yeah…That’s when I realized that some this stuff wasn’t rational.  Some of this stuff was coming from a place where I didn’t even know how it could possibly be perceived that way.  That’s when I decided that I just needed to write the way I write and if those people come and want to think that way then that’s their problem and not mine.

JF:  It’s almost a blessing in disguise.  That it was that far leaning of hate that you’re like, wait a second, well this is just ridiculous.  

LC:  I would say so.   

JF:  So do you have comments turned on for your blog or is this when you went on the Washington Post?

LC:  It was the Washington Post.  The net was thrown much wider.  Everybody on my blog has been incredibly respectful and wonderful.

JF:  Because they come to you looking for that information and it’s not people just reading the sports section.

LC:  Exactly!

JF:  But we are both sports fans so we don’t want to throw them under the bus.  Should we talk about the finals? No, no no.  Keep talking.  Sorry.

LC:  We should be talking about football.  That’s coming up soon, right?  

JF:  Too soon.  So where were we?  I got off on sports.  The hate that was coming from some of the comments.  So you were able to turn that in and say, “I’m not going to let this affect me.  I’m moving forward.  The more I’m myself the better I’ll feel about the product and the words I’m putting out there.”

LC:  Right.  And here’s a perfect example ofmy blog.  My daughter came back from a field trip.  She went to a wonderful marine biology institute with her school’s science class for three or four days.  There was a bunch of bad stuff that happened with the girls.  You know, typical mean girl behavior.  It was unwarranted and silly stuff.  Like your hair is frizzy.  I’m not going to tell you what it actually was but you couldn’t control it.  It was bad criticism.  So she came home and, of course, I started thinking, oh, this could be a great blog post on how to deal with this kind of criticism.  So we started chatting about it and then I started singing Taylor Swift…”haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate..”  She’s rolling her eyes.  OK mom.  Great.  I get it.   And then literally three days later my Washington Post piece hit.  It was great, I ended up laughing last last because it was very popular and I got a lot of really great feedback but some of these comments came in and I was devastated!  (Laughs) And I turned to her and I said, “Do you have ayn words of wisdom?” 

JF:  Did she sing the song?

LC:  (laughs) Yeah, she did.  She’s like, you know, it’s a lot easier to say things from the sidelines than when you are actually going through it.  And I said, “Yeah it totally is!”

JF:  Again, do as I say and not as I do.

LC:  Exactly.  We do that often.  Go back and forth like that because these things keep popping up whether you’re ten, eleven, twelve or whether, you know, I’m not going to say how old I am.  Middle of life.

JF:  (laughs) I want to shift the topic back to girls’ leadership because one of the things that I saw in some of our back-and-forth was that you say girls like to apologize a lot even for things that they haven’t done wrong or that is not their fault.  We always used to give my grandmother a hard time because she used to apologize for things that didn’t need to be apologized for and it became an endearing trait as she got older and we loved her so much and all that.  But when I saw you write that I started thinking, oh, but that can be insidious.  Of course it wasn’t for her because no one took advantage of it.  I think it was more habit than anything but it could be insidious as far as going down the line of future generations and what does that mean?  I know I have picked it up as well.  Just yesterday someone said, “You don’t have to apologize for anything.  I come to you for advice and you are throwing out all of these disclaimers before you even say it.”  Once I said it he said, “Oh, thank you for the disclaimer because that was pretty harsh.”  But even I have the tendency to do that sometimes.  I just want to pick your brain about that both for women and then all of us in general.

LC:  Well, I do think that used properly, and it sounds like the way you used the disclaimer was used properly, it isn’t a problem.  Because if you have credibility already and people look at you as a professional and you have that competence already laid down as a foundation, using speech disclaimers can actually make you more powerful, believe it or not.  It allows people to view you as human.  You can say, “I don’t know if this is right or not.” There is a bunch of stuff lately where women are not supposed to be saying any of this stuff.  I don’t necessarily want to throw the baby out with the bath water because when you work on a team, for instance, using speech disclaimers is much more team oriented.  However, the key, the real nuance to using it powerfully, is you have to have credibility.  You have to have the respect from the people you are using it with.  It sounded like you had that respect, you had that competence, that person was coming to you for advice and you were using a speech disclaimer in an appropriate way.  Where it really gets insidious is when we have this nice girl mentality.  There’s a great author named Rachel Simmons. She wrote Curse of the Good Girl.  It’s really a bible in our house.  If something happens I flip through there first to see if Rachel has some sort of statement because girls go through life with the absolute objective of everybody liking them.  They view a lot of things in life in terms of friendship.  For instance, a long time ago, my daughter was saying that her soccer coach was mean and didn’t like her.  I asked, “Why?”  She told me because he yells a lot.  I said, “Is he yelling at you in terms of saying are you an idiot because that is really bad.”  She said, “No, he’s telling me where to go on the field.”  I’m like, well…that’s coaching.  That has nothing to do with friendship.  The teacher.  Same thing.  The teacher game me a C.  She doesn’t like me.   So we do these crazy things like over apologizing for things that we didn’t do.  Here’s a great example, you have this statement: “Sorry, I’m not really an expert, um, but maybe I can help you?”  So you end the statement with a question mark, an upward inflection, you’ve said sorry in that statement, you’re not really an expert so you’ve already discredited yourself, or you’ve given yourself a personal put down because you didn’t want to be a bossy girl.  When all you really had to say was, “I know how to do this.  Would you like me to show you?”  What a difference.  You’re still polite.  This is a much more powerful way of getting across the same thing.  So that’s the insidious problem that I think females do and then they carry that with them throughout adulthood.  I have a lot of female clients who do this.

JF:  And to be clear, this is a mom and dad issue.  This is not just something that moms should be working on.

LC:  Totally.  Completely. And thank you for saying that because men have a tremendous role if a girl is lucky to have her dad present and an interested member of the family to help her grow and develop.  Men don’t usually do this.  I won’t say they don’t ever do this but a lot of them don’t.  However, the flip side of that is that if the moms are doing it the girls say, I’m imprinting, that’s a female, that’s the way I’m supposed to act.  The parent sort of has to modify their own behavior in order to show their daughter how to do it.

JF:  We’re all little ducks.  The opposite with sons, from their dads specifically is, “grow up, be a man” and that type of message.

LC:  And that’s just as bad.  We don’t allow them to settle into their emotion and their own hurt.  Or they have to take risks that they might not want to take.  But there are behaviors that men exhibit that girls could say, I can do that and still be feminine.  I can have respect when I do these types of things that men do.

JF:  And it’s not seen as bossy.  You look at the Steve Jobs and the Michael Jordans and all those great leaders that we think of throughout history and they were jerks.  We know that.  We’re OK with it because they’re great leaders.  And so I love the work you are doing because you are showing you don’t have to be that way and if you are being that way, not being jerky, but taking a leading role, that doesn’t mean you are being bossy or you should mind your manners, you are being a leader and that’s all we need to be thinking about.

LC:  That’s so well said because I’m not necessarily OK with how Steve Jobs was as a leader.  I don’t know if you read Walter Isaacson’s biography…

JF:  I just got through with it!

LC:  Then you know it was a brutal read!    Especially for someone who’s in leadership development.  Brilliant man and just left all this blood on the floor in order to get where he wanted to go.  I’m not sure that a woman would want to say, “Oh, he’s a man, he’s successful, I want to emulate what he did.”  That’s absolutely not what you want to do.  I think, with bossy behavior, you can say we should get rid of that word “bossy” but the reality is that men and women both have bossy behaviors.  The Center for Creative Leadership did a great study on this and concluded that people were viewed just as negatively whether they were a man or a woman if they exhibited those types of bossy behaviors.  They were career limiting whether you were a man or a woman.  Now, did they use the word bossy to describe the woman more often? Yes.  The good news in the research is if you lead effectively you aren’t considered “bossy” whether you are a man or a woman.  That is the biggest take away.

JF:  Love it!  Laura, where can we find out more about you.

LC:  You can come to my blog it’s www.lauraclydesdale.com.  That’s probably the best or you can follow me on Twitter at @l_clydesdale

JF:  You have a good rest of the day. 

LC:  Thank you so much, John.  I really appreciate it.  It was fun.

Acting Nice Is No Good At All

A trait that is so essential to leadership and one that people feel females are better at, paradoxically, might just be holding girls and women back.  

Girls like to be "nice" and care about others (check), and this is one of the few areas where girls rate themselves high in ability (check).  

Also, having compassion has been identified by the Pew Research Center (2014) as a top 5 trait that is essential in a leader, AND a whopping 65% of people surveyed said that women are much better at this than men. 

So what’s the problem?

Unfortunately, “acting nice”, “liked by others” and “acting humble” can be so important to girls that they can take it too far, and it ends up getting in the way of their true leadership potential.  

It may seem counterintuitive but done in the right way; girls can engage in difficult conversations and gain or strengthen compassion (Girls read: “What? Conflict? Scary! No way!”). 

Still confused?  So was my daughter.

My daughter had a tiff with a friend at school and was upset.  When I asked her what she did to settle the issue, she said “Nothing”.  When I encouraged her to talk to her friend she was terrified of adding more conflict, maybe making that girl hate her or making it worse.  By ignoring it, she hoped it would go away and the happy, nice relationship would be maintained.
  
“It’s fine.  Why don’t I just forget it? I was probably being overly sensitive,” she said, discounting her feelings and potentially letting this girl have power over her. 
 
“Uh-oh,” I thought. 
 
But when we discussed how to start the conversation, my daughter began to see how engaging in the conflict with her friend was more compassionate and “nicer” than letting it fester, even if it initially looked like more conflict.  

I suggested she start by telling her friend how much she meant to her and that she wanted to fix this problem.  Then I suggested that she let the other girl know how she was wounded by using “I” statements and by “playing the video” of the altercation. The conversation should sound like, “when you ran away from me on the playground laughing, it made me feel…” rather than using judging words like, “You’re so insensitive!” which can just ratchet up the anger on both sides. 

She said, “I get it.  My friend can’t yell back at me if I tell her how I feel.  But she can yell back at me if I just tell her she's mean.”

She took a deep breath and video chatted the other girl (because that's what they do now).  I wasn't sure what was said but after about 5 min, I heard the usual giggling.  Later that evening, when I asked how it went she said, "Great!  She was confused as to why I was upset.  I think she was glad that I called and explained."

And that was that.

Having real compassion is not just about being perceived as “nice” or “being liked”.  It comes from having a solid set of principles, beliefs and values.  These guide how you treat others and act in the world. It also means that your daughter will know how she wants to be treated. 

There is nothing weak about that! 

So why do we girls feel so compelled to compromise ourselves for niceness sake in the first place?

Being polite is drilled into girls by parents and teachers daily which can create “an impossible set of standards,” says Dr. Stephen Henshaw, author of the book, The Triple Bind.  

In a recent article by The Child Mind Institute called Raising Confident Girls: When Apologizing is Not a Good Thing, Henshaw says the confusing messages to girls are:

• Be confident, but not conceited
• Be smart, but no one likes a know-it-all
• Ambition is good, but trying too hard is bad
• Be assertive, but only if it doesn’t upset anyone else. 

To conform to this tall bar of expectations, girls can distort themselves.  Here are a few of Henshaw’s landmines and I’ve added a few of my own observations.

-Girls don’t speak their minds for fear of being perceived as bossy, a mean girl, or impolite.
-Girls over apologize or even apologize when they’ve done nothing wrong.  Girls often apologize just to repair a relationship or fix their reputation, not because of any error.
-Girls put disclaimers like “Excuse me, can I ask…” “I don’t know, but…” into their speech.
-Girls put down or discredit their own feelings.
-Girls put down their own abilities: “I’m so stupid.”
-Girls avoid conflict.
-Girls end their statements with a question mark.

Having humility or a modest opinion of one’s importance should not be confused with a humble view or opinion of one’s self-worth.    

Low self-esteem isn't polite, and it's not nice.  

It's weak.

She feels she must make herself look less important than others.  She appears not to know what she wants. She wavers and is inconsistent. 

Forget about being a leader.  She will attract no followers.

Still don’t believe how big a difference these changes can make?  Here is an example of one sentence that has four of the problems mentioned above:

“Sorry, I’m not an expert but, if you want, I can try to help?”

Boy! Where to begin? There's a question mark at the end of the sentence, an apology, a personal put down and not being direct for fear of appearing a “bossy girl”.

Look at how powerful but polite this phrase can be instead:

“Oh! I know how to do this. Would you like me to show you?”

When girls are strong in character, are authentic creatures and have genuine compassion, who can’t help but want to follow them? 

Can Hamilton Make Your Child a Creative Genius?

Artificial Intelligence is here.  Solid, middle-class jobs are gone.

Starting to panic?

Creativity.  That’s what the experts say our kids will need to stay ahead in this new economy.

“Lawyers. Doctors. Accountants. Engineers. That’s what our parents encouraged us to become. They were wrong.  The future belongs to a...different kind of mind: designers, inventors, teachers, storytellers — creative and emphatic “right-brain” thinkers whose abilities mark the fault line between who gets ahead and who doesn’t,” says Daniel Pink in his book: A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future.

Here's the problem.  Creativity is intangible.  Forcing our children to be doctors actually seems easier because there is a set educational path to follow.  How does one become a brilliant “designer” or “inventor”, exactly?  How do you tell someone to be creative?

You can’t.

But what if you taught your child someone's creative process instead?  Could a peak behind the curtain of one of the greatest recent examples of creativity de-mystify it?

Where we get discouraged is when we believe that creative genius is a “light-bulb moment,” an “epiphany” or a “flash of insight.”  We think our kids need to be wicked smart to have any shot at being struck by this divine inspiration. 

The reality is that it's more of a “Hey, you got your chocolate in my peanut butter!…You got your peanut butter on my chocolate!” Reese’s-Peanut-Butter-Cup moment.   

Stephen King, in his book, On Writing, agrees “…two previously unrelated ideas come together and make something new under the sun.  Your job isn’t to find these ideas but to recognize them when they show up. "

Lin-Manuel Miranda, the “founding father” of the Broadway smash, Hamilton, did his job.

I had been looking for a good example of the creative process for a while.  I needed something that didn’t require a Ph.D. or a team of engineers to explain how to be prepared to recognize an idea.  Then one day, last fall, my daughter - rapping with a French accent - hopped into the car.

“Oui oui, mon ami, je m’appelle Lafayette!  The Lancelot of the revolutionary set! I came from afar just to say “Bonsoir! Tell the King “Casse toi!” Who’s the best? C’est moi!”

“That’s hilarious!  What is that?” I said.

“You don't know who Lafayette is?!” she said, charmingly misunderstanding me.

Today, Hamilton is an American obsession.   Nominated for a record-breaking 16 Tony nominations, it won 11 last week, along with a Pulitzer Prize earlier this year.  Crazily, its Grammy-winning album is on continuous play in our car, our house, even my own iPod, and we haven't even seen the show.  You practically have to sell an organ to do that.  

Even so, I had a hunch that my children could learn a lot about creativity from Miranda's story and I was right.

Miranda was going on vacation and picked up Ron Chernow's 700 page Alexander Hamilton for some “light reading”.  It turned out to be the chocolate bar that fell right into Miranda’s jar of peanut butter.

In an interview on CBS, he said, "By the end of the second chapter I was on Google saying 'someone's already made this into a musical. How can anyone not have made this into a musical?'”  He saw so much drama and energy in the story that he "felt like a mosquito who had tapped into an artery."

The key to Miranda’s creativity was his cache of life experiences.  Son of Puerto Rican immigrants, Miranda is an actor, composer, freestyle rapper, and playwright. He already had a couple of Tony's under his belt for his first musical, In The Heights. 

Lots of experiences.

As he began to write Hamilton, this diverse background allowed him to make even more unique connections which he remixed into something incredibly original.  The most exciting of which was his decision to use hip-hop.

Miranda took it for granted that hip-hop would be the musical form because "The hip-hop narrative is writing yourself out of your circumstances." which was exactly how Alexander Hamilton rose in social standing.   Miranda also said that "We need a revolutionary language to describe a revolution." He argued that the American Revolution "was a war of ideas," therefore, "Hip-hop is uniquely suited...because we get more language per measure than any other form."

And, of course, the rap battles are perfect for cabinet debate, not to mention a lot more fun.

Miranda is exceptionally talented in his field. However, Adam Grant, in his book Originals, says it takes the combination of deep study, and broad experiences that allow these flashes of connections which advance science, inspire inventions and change cultures.  Let's not forget that a Puerto Rican, freestyle-rapping, musical-theater thespian chose to pick up a massive biography of an American founding father on his way to the beach, after all.  He's obviously a curious guy.

Miranda's tale enthralled my children almost as much as his Hamilton creation. 

There's a million things we haven't done (pun intended), but we have already learned a few lessons in our experiment to creative thinking. 

• Give children time to explore things that they choose, not just what looks good on a college resume. This allows them to build up experiences.
• Celebrate curiosity and nudge them to investigate their questions.
• Ask them questions like, “How is this connected to other concepts/ideas?”
• Encourage them to flex their creative muscles by "Mirandizing" their school projects.

My husband and I found that letting our kids do whatever they wanted once their work was done, became their biggest creative inspiration. 

At first, we thought we had made a mistake.  Video games and YouTubes popped on as soon as books closed.  Instead of opening their minds, we feared we were rotting them.

But then good things started to happen. 

My son interviewed a family contact from South Africa and incorporated the audio files into his PowerPoint assignment on American segregation for contrast. Inspired by YouTubers, my daughter decided to forgo the boring book report and, instead, created a movie.  She got into different costumes and had the book’s characters deliver the summary instead. Two weeks later, really channeling Miranda, she rapped her personal story for a unit on autobiographies.

Not only were we heartened by the fact that our children were starting to see flexibility in their school projects but that their teachers embraced and rewarded the fresh approaches.  We are hopeful that they will continue to apply this creative process to even more aspects of their life.

Parents can help their kids practice making connections and with encouragement, knowing the process, they might feel liberated to seek out creative twists. 

The hard work of changing the world with their discoveries - the genius part - well, that’s up to them.

But, "just you wait."

How To Beat Test Anxiety and Win Your Brain Back

As she was walking toward me waiting in the carpool lane, I knew something was up.

Her waves to classmates as they hopped into their respective cars, carried an unusual veil of strain. 

She has a “tell”.  It’s slightly different from her father’s.  His lips completely disappear when something is wrong.  For her, she looks down and appears to want to crawl into any hole she can find.

Now closer, I can see the tears welling up.  I brace myself for the gale-force winds of emotion that are about to enter my car.

The door is barely closed as she sobs out, “I’m so stressed!  I’ve been studying for five days for this Chinese character test, and I still can’t figure out how to memorize them.  I’m going to fail the test tomorrow!”

I was instantly reminded of a TED Talk by the author, Karen Thompson Walker.  “What if instead of calling them fear, we called them stories?”  Ms. Walker says. “That’s what fear is in a way.  A kind of unintentional storytelling that we were all born knowing how to do…Fear has characters. Fear has plots - a beginning, middle and end.” 

My daughter’s fear story: Girl isn’t prepared for test.  Girl takes test.  Girl fails test.  Girl’s life is over.   

She was giving up when it was getting hard.  A terrible prospect. 

My daughter desperately needed a new story.  

“Honey, you cannot learn anything in this state,” I said.  “Remember what they said in the Brainology® program?”  

Last fall, my daughter enrolled in the program which is based on the research from Carol Dweck’s book,  Mindset: The New Psychology of Success.   

She hadn’t needed this part of the program before, and she required a refresher course…fast.   

Although it’s called Brainology®, it isn’t brain surgery.  It’s really just an easy biology lesson, and Dweck has proven that that’s all you need. Learning how the brain works helps children become more resilient.

Using brain science, the program teaches it’s young students how to beat performance anxiety through calming down, creating new, positive stories and by giving them a simple but effective study process.

The first step was to calm down.

Since there are few saber-tooth tigers in our lives, most of us experience stress symptoms when we have performance anxiety. 

Although these stress symptoms are normal, they get in the way of mental performance.  Not only does the brain have a hard time learning anything in this state, it even has a hard time recalling information that it has already memorized.    

Dweck says this is why, even though you practice over-and-over again for an important presentation, you can stand up and blank.

We needed to “kill” the foam-at-the-mouth rabid dog she was apparently facing down and start to square-breathe.  Square-breathing, according to Brainology®, “moves concentration from an emotional state to a physical state and breaks down adrenaline in the bloodstream.”  You inhale for a count of 5, hold for a count of 5, exhale for a count of 5, hold for a count of 5, repeat.  

The second step is to create a new, more positive story without focusing on an end result.

 Instead of saying “I’m going to fail tomorrow,” she needed to say “I’ll do my best studying this evening.”  All she should ask of herself was to do everything she could, to the best of her abilities.  

She wasn’t supposed to focus on the end grade, but I did feel compelled to convince her that we wouldn’t ground her for life, and the earth would continue to spin even if she did, indeed, get a D or F.  

Although suspicious, she was now calmer and started focusing on the process.  

She began to make a plan of attack using Brainology®’s excellent B.R.A.I.N. acronym: Break it down, Repeat, Action, Information search, Never give up.

B (reak it down)

To help her get started, we broke down the evening’s work into smaller, more achievable, pieces: memorize how to write the characters, learn their English translations and then put them together to make a simple phrase.  

Then she broke down the memorization piece some more.  She made three piles - ones she did know, ones she “sorta” knew and those that were completely unmemorized.  

R (epeat) & A (ction)

To get the material into long-term memory, repetition and getting active with the content was key.  

Instead of just staring at a confusion of squiggly lines, she now tried to find something in each figure that resembled what it stood for.  For instance, in the character for “teacher,” she found a pitch-fork and decided it would represent one of her teachers that…well, you get the idea.

With these creative cues, she drew each character over and over and over again before moving on to the next one.

I (nformation search)

She dug through the folder for all the past homework to ensure she had everything correct.

N (ever give up)

She’d been at it for over an hour. I thought she had done enough.  She disagreed.  She definitely wasn’t giving up now.

The next day’s carpool was different.  My girl was back.  She bounded into the car exclaiming, “It was sooo funny!  I almost laughed out loud during the test when I got to the word, teacher!” she said.

After a few tunes on the radio, she said, “Mom?  I guess that process really works.”

I was dying to know how she thought she did, but she wasn’t supposed to focus on the end result and, as hard as it was for me, I refused to either.

It didn’t matter.  We were both pretty sure we knew anyway.

Get Your Brave On - How to Help Your Child Fail

I took a deep breath and braced myself…I might have even said a little prayer.

It was time to help my daughter make a mistake.  Maybe even fail a little.

A few posts ago, inspired by the discovery of my daughter doing homework at 2:00 am, I discussed how trying to be perpetually perfect can impact a girl's leadership potential and her sense of self.   Women Pay the Price for Perfection.  Don't Let Your Daughter be Little-Miss-Perfect.

Therefore, I knew my perfectionist daughter needed to take more risks and make more mistakes, but here was the irony:  was I willing to let her? 

I offer an imaginary conversation in the grocery store check-out line to illustrate my dilemma:

Jane: “Hi Jill!  Long time, no see.”

Jill: “Oh, hi, Jane.  How are you?  It’s been ages!  How is your daughter, Sophie, doing?”

Jane: “I’m so darn proud of her!  She just got on the state soccer team, she placed 2nd in the school spelling bee and has been on the honor roll for the last 4 semesters.  How’s your Maggie doing?  It seems like she was just two-years-old yesterday!”

Jill: “I’m proud of my daughter, too!   She raised her hand the other day when she wasn’t 100% sure, got the problem wrong and wasn’t shattered by it.  She just got an 85% on an English test, took it in stride and didn't even cry.  Oh, and last week she did something mean to a friend, recognized her mistake and apologized first!  Can you believe it?!”   

Crickets…

I’m obviously exaggerating here, but I know that you know exactly what I’m talking about.

When I was growing up, we had the “Keeping Up With the Joneses” phenomenon.  It was all about the stuff you had.  Now it seems like our generation is trying to one-up the Boomers with “Look at all the stuff my kid can do.”

If our kids are perfect, then we are perfect parents, right?  

Look, I know we just naturally want to protect our children.  Letting her fail or make mistakes feels scary!  

To us.  

To me! 

Madeline Levine, a psychologist, and author of Teach Your Children Well, acknowledges that letting your child fail and make mistakes is one of the greatest challenges to being a parent.  

Levine says the irony is that “The central task of growing up is to develop a sense of self that is autonomous, confident and generally in accord with reality.”  I’d say that our over-bearing, controlling, achievement-focused parenting style is in direct conflict with this goal. 

Now, you certainly aren’t going to encourage them to go out and start doing drugs or having unprotected sex! 

There are good risks and unhealthy risks.  

We needed to start small.  Maybe letting her ride her bike to a friend’s house on her own, or go to the mall with a friend…by themselves?

Levine says, “She may forget a package, overpay for an item, or forget that she was supposed to call home at noon. Mastery of the world is an expanding geography for our kids, for toddlers, it’s the backyard; for preteens, the neighborhood, for teens the wider world. But it is in the small daily risks — the taller slide, the bike ride around the block, the invitation extended to a new classmate — that growth takes place. In this gray area of just beyond the comfortable is where resilience is born.” 

Together, we make a plan to fail.  

(Yes, I’m fully aware of how helicopt-ery this sounds.)

Armed with the wise, risk-taking-resource, Rachel Simmons’ Curse of the Good Girl, I girded my loins and sat down with my daughter to find out what, exactly, she finds risky.

Simmons instructs my daughter to start with the following lists which focus on two common risk themes:  1.) The ability to engage in debate and 2.) the ability to make mistakes.  

CONFLICT RISK

•     Approaching someone and initiating a conversation
•     Expressing yourself under pressure
•     Asking for what you need
•     Telling someone how you feel
•     Refusing to continue an unsafe conversation (walking away, hanging up, signing off)
•     Being the first to apologize

SPORTS RISK

•     Communication on the field and on the sidelines - asking for help, telling someone where to be or what to do
•     Getting things out in the open and trusting your teammates
•     Appearing strong, skilled, and in control

PERFORMANCE RISK

•     Willingness to make a mistake
•     Resilience in failure
•     Willingness to take on more difficult projects even with the risk of failure
•     Taking a stand
•     Sharing an opinion
•     Asking for help

For my daughter, apparently, the risk was “being first up to the board” at school.  “I’d never do that!” she said.  

“Um.  OK.” I replied.

Her comfort zone was to go second or third even when she knew the answer. 

Her risk zone was to go first, even if she was pretty sure she knew the answer.  

Her danger zone was going first if she was even slightly unsure of her answer.

Simmons instructs us to set goals on how to gain experience in the risk zone. The premise being that once she starts to dabble in the risk zone, discovers that the downside isn’t so great and that the upsides might be pretty awesome, the risk zone will start to feel more like a comfort zone. 

In other words, she’ll grow.

My daughter said that she would try to start going to the board first, 2-3 times a week “but only when I’m 100% sure.”  

Well…It was a start.

A few weeks later I followed up.  “Did you take any risks today?” 

Her answer wasn’t what I expected.

“Yes, I asked some boys at recess if I could join their soccer game.”   She explained that her guy friends from her class welcomed her but, unfortunately, not knowing all the boys, she confused who was on her team and accidentally took the ball away from her teammate.  

The unfamiliar boys turned on her and not only criticized her play, but blamed the error on the fact that she was a girl.

They made her cry.

Why did she do this?!  What happened to going “first to the board”? Jumping into an all-boy soccer game was outside the plan!  We hadn’t made contingencies for this risk taking.  We hadn't created a goal.  We didn't address how things could backfire, how she could be hurt or how she should handle a bad result.  

For goodness sake…we didn’t role-play!

“What are you going to do?” I asked nervously. 

“Maybe I’ll try to play again sometime to prove them wrong.  I’m pretty good, you know.”

I knew.

Sending your kids to sleep-away camp can give them a competitive advantage - in life →

Today I'm writing from the Washington Post!  

Whether it's the YMCA, Scouts, a religious, or a more specialized camp, allowing our children to unwind and unplug can have huge benefits.  Even if you can't put it on a college application...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/parenting/wp/2016/05/09/can-sleep-away-camp-give-kids-a-competitive-advantage-in-life/

To Ban the Word Bossy You Need to Ban the Behavior

My daughter doesn’t want to be seen as “bossy”.  

Heck, who does?

If you are a woman, think back to when you were in elementary or middle school.  Did anyone ever call you bossy and how did you feel?  Did you ever call someone bossy?

When Sheryl Sandberg visited Howard University and asked women whether they were called bossy as children, one woman answered, “During my childhood? How about last week!”.

This is one thing everyone seems to agree upon when it comes to why girls don’t want to be leaders.  It has such a terribly negative connotation for girls. 

That’s why The Girl Scouts, in partnership with Sandberg’s LeanIn.org, have created a glitzy, star-studded, Ban Bossy campaign aimed at reducing the use of the word bossy.  

Their Change It Up! study found that girls’ intense desire to be liked is a major road block to their desire for leadership and they feel this negative word is particularly targeted toward girls and women.  

But is just the word “bossy” to blame?  

The study highlights that out of a list of specific factors, only the girls who tended more toward a “dominant” profile/identity wanted to lead.  So, if they had a preference for control, giving orders, winning, doing better than others, leading came naturally.

I have to admit that when I first read that description I thought A: “Those are ‘bossy girls’!”  and B: “Why don’t the other girls want to lead?”

But wait a minute.  I have a preference for control in my life and who likes to lose? Achievement can be a natural high whether it is against others or within yourself. No. Some of these descriptors aren’t necessarily negative. 

The late Harvard Psychologist David McClelland, who spent much of his career studying motivation and how it affects leadership behavior, said that the reason the word “dominance” keeps coming up in studies as a leadership trait, is because there are actually two different types of dominance: a personalized power motive, or power lust, and a socialized power motive, or the desire to lead.  

The personalized power motive is not a good leader trait to have.  It’s “bossy”.

McClelland says that this type of leader draws strength from controlling others and making them feel weak. Seeking power as an end in itself is dangerous and can be destructive. 

On the other hand, the socialized power motive is a leader who uses power to achieve desired goals or vision. McClelland says that this leader’s strength comes from empowering people. Studies show that great, charismatic leaders are highly motivated by socialized power.  They love developing networks, coalitions and gaining cooperation. 

Ah…influencing, not commanding.  

I’m pretty sure that most girls would love to be leaders if they understood McClelland’s socialized power motive.

But I wondered…do girls believe that every time they raise their hand, organize a game, or run for student council people think they have a personalized power motive? That they’re “bossy”?  

Or…maybe girls (and boys) just don’t know any other leadership methods other than ordering people around, even if they really do have the group’s interest at heart?  

My daughter fed my fear.  

She told me that at school, “…you get assigned to a group to complete a project.  Usually, someone just starts being the leader and everyone just goes along with it.  The leader makes sure things get done and, depending upon the project, sometimes they have to assign people tasks.”  

When I asked her if any teacher has ever given the class tips on how to run the groups or, god forbid, given suggestions as to how to lead a group effectively, she asked me, “What do you mean?”

Schools are trying their best to incorporate more teamwork and collaboration into the school day, to better simulate the real world.  Unfortunately, they are letting the kids figure out how to do this by themselves. 

She shrugged, “I guess I just point at someone and tell them what to do.”

It feels a little like a controlled Lord-of-the-Flies experiment to me.  

My guess is the kids who aren’t afraid to assert themselves will always volunteer, or just start running the show. They have a list of tasks to complete and many just start ordering people around.  The other kids might perceive them as power hungry and maybe they are, but they don’t know any better. 

Kids who don’t want to be perceived as desiring power over people never put themselves forward. They never lead.

I understand and appreciate what the Girl Scouts and LeanIn.org are trying to achieve with their Ban Bossy campaign…and they are right:  

“When a little boy asserts himself, he's called a “leader.” Yet when a little girl does the same, she risks being branded “bossy.” Words like bossy send a message: don't raise your hand or speak up. By middle school, girls are less interested in leading than boys—a trend that continues into adulthood.”  

-Ban Bossy Campaign Website

Yes, yes and yes, but if we don’t model and teach all kids how to lead in the correct way, they are still going to order other kids around, no matter what you call it, and they’ll do it whether they are girls or boys.  The pattern gets ingrained and perpetuates to adulthood. 

So why aren’t parents and schools teaching the difference between Personalized Power and Socialized Power?

There is some good news. 

The Center For Creative Leadership conducted research on the role of the word bossy in the workplace.  They did confirm that women are called bossy more than men in the workplace.   However, “When we look at bossy behaviors - without the bossy label - men are just as likely as women to act bossy in the workplace.” 

Thankfully, they also discovered that the word “Bossy is not a synonym for assertiveness or other positive executive leadership skills.”    

Bossy coworkers were actually described as unpopular and less successful whether they were women or men. 

So when girls and women lead effectively they are not called “bossy” and girls need to know that.  

Therefore, we need to teach girls and boys how to lead effectively.  

We need to teach girls and boys that there is a better way to lead other than just ordering people around.

Schools absolutely need to take ownership here.  Right now they are throwing the kids into the deep end of the pool to see if they can swim and, if they can’t, they might very well continue to struggle with bossy behavior for the rest of their lives.  

Let’s teach them to:

• Ask more questions (that probe and clarify).
• Solicit input (from all members of a group).  
• Learn team skills like brainstorming and weighing pros and cons.
• Practice active listening, such as paraphrasing and summarizing.

And once everyone is trained, give everyone a chance to try it out...even the introverts.  We need to teach girls not to be afraid of a word but instead to be afraid of certain actions.

Banning the word bossy won’t do much until we ban the bossy behavior.

If you enjoyed reading this, please click the heart icon below or share. Together we can help girls lead...even if it's just one girl at a time.

-Laura

The Frightening Truth: Your Daughter Doesn't Want to be a Leader. How to Change Her Mind.

It’s not just your daughter.  Sadly, it’s my daughter, the majority of girls, actually, and many women too.

“Do I have to run for Student Council?” my daughter asked me.

“Of course not.  I just think it would be a good experience.  Why are you so hesitant?”

“Because it’s a lot of responsibility.  What if I make the wrong decision and everyone blames me?!” she said.

“Honey, it’s running for Student Council, not the President of the United States…”

Why don't they want to be leaders? 

McKinsey & Company, in a 2015 collaborative Women in the Workplace study with LeanIn.org, calls this problem a leadership ambition gap.

“At every stage, women are less eager than men to become a top executive. They are more likely to cite “stress/pressure” as a top issue, and this is not solely rooted in concern over balancing work and family. There is evidence pointing to another explanation—the path to leadership is disproportionately stressful for women.” 

                        - McKinsey & Company

In addition to very real external roadblocks due to discrimination and bias, are we as a gender creating our own internal glass ceilings? 

Worse, do we start to build these barriers at a very tender age? 

The Girl Scouts’ Change It Up! study says “yes”.

After surveying thousands of girls across the country ages 8 to 17, they discovered that leadership stress (and the lack of desire for leadership positions) that McKinsey & Company point to, starts early.

1.  The girls in the study believed an ideal leader needs to have ‘command and control’ powers.  Although the girls were drawn toward ‘aspirational’ leader descriptions, saying that they would want to be a leader so they “could help others”, rather than to “want followers”, they feared being perceived as a bossy girl and put the brakes on the ambition.

2.  The girls in the study seemed to have an idealized vision of what a leader is and they believed they could never measure up or attain this high standard.  Out of a long list of important leadership traits which included being responsible, hardworking, confident, and a good decision-maker, the girls in the study only rated themselves strongly on “caring about others” and being “nice”.  Seriously?  That's it?

Apparently, when a girl looks through the lens of leadership, all they see is a fun house full of scary images.

What if the operative word here was “ideal”?

The Center for Creative Leadership (CCL) recently tried to get some clarity on what people thought an ideal leader looked like.

Their white paper, Leadership is in the Eye of the Beholder, was built upon a study done over many years by Maxwell and Greenhalgh.  These two researchers asked university students to choose or create an image that best-defined leadership.  

After collecting over 8,000 images, amazingly, three images kept coming to the surface: an image of two hands shaking, an image of a warrior on horseback leading a charge, and an image of a conductor.

Photo Credits: Center for Creative Leadership

The CCL wanted to know if one of these three images trumped the others.  There was no clear winner.   Remarkably, one-third of adults chose the handshake, one-third chose the warrior and one-third chose the conductor. 

All were equally viewed as ideal leaders.

There was just one exception.

Women were far less likely to choose the image of the warrior.  Only women who were executives choose the warrior equally as often as men. 

They were rejecting the image of the commander and controller just like the girls!

This gave me an idea.

Would girls, inexperienced in the world, think that there was only one answer? That the warrior on horseback was the only definition of a leader?  That they had to choose the warrior?  

Would girls, seeing leadership mainly through the eyes of a history book, believe an idealized image of a leader is one that brazenly leads a charge with her ardent followers trailing behind?

If so, no wonder girls aren’t jumping up and down asking to be leaders…even if there IS a horse involved!  

I came up with a very unscientific way to test my theory. 

I tested my 12-year-old daughter.  

I showed her the very same three images and I asked her to point out the image that best defined a leader.  

What did she choose?  You guessed it…the warrior on horseback. 

Bingo. 

Now for my own experiment.

I asked her if she was comfortable with the idea that she could be that kind of leader.  The withering look she gave me was her emphatic answer.  

I then asked her; if she could be any of these leaders, which image was she most drawn toward.  She pointed to the handshake.  

Exactly as I feared!  My daughter was viewing leadership not by what kind of leader she WANTED to be but rather what kind of leader she thought she was SUPPOSED to be.

Could the seeds of the leadership ambition gap problem rest simply in a definition?

If you have a daughter, you should try this experiment at home with these pictures.

This was a powerful lesson for both of us and it allowed me to address two important concepts with her:

First, there are different definitions of leadership that include caring about others and being nice, along with a host of other abilities that are well within her reach.  

Second, that most people usually don’t jump right out of high school and become transformational or charismatic leaders in charge of movements or nations.

Although, history class is riddled with famous leaders that led a charge (literally and figuratively), these are usually extreme examples of individuals who made such a huge impact on the world they actually made the history books.  Even if there are women scattered amongst the pages, the paths that these leaders took often look intimidating.  

Girls might look up to Rosa Parks but, honestly, even I feel scared by comparison imagining myself in her shoes. 

My daughter did end up running for Student Council (of her own volition, I might add).

She redefined the role in her mind from being a bossy girl who would tell everyone what to do to, instead, being a conduit of good ideas and school spirit.  She would be a representative of the student body to the council.  

She could finally see there was a place for herself at the leadership table.  She wrote her speech with enthusiasm and now I could see she wanted it badly. 

She really wanted to be that “handshake”. 

She won.

No horse required.

Like this post?  Know someone with a daughter?  Please share!  Together we can close the leadership gap one girl at a time...

-Laura

The Surprising Power of "Powerless Speech." Can Women Use Speech Disclaimers to GAIN Respect?

There has been a lot of conversation and media attention lately about the negative impact on girls and women when they use disclaimers in their speech. 

However, there is a dissenting opinion out there and, before we start burning our bras, it’s worth taking a look.  

This opposing view believes that the proper use of disqualifiers, hedges, and hesitations can actually make you powerful, not powerless.  

This expert says that the most well-respected men do it too.

So who is right?

In case you’ve missed the discourse and don’t know what a speech disclaimer is, I offer Washington Post opinion writer, Alexandra Petri’s funny take on “Woman-in-a-Meeting” language.   She translates famous quotes “into the phrases a woman would have to...say them during a meeting not to be perceived as angry, threatening or (gasp!) bitchy.”

Some of Petri’s hilarious examples:

“Give me liberty, or give me death.”

Woman in a Meeting: “Dave, if I could, I could just - I just really feel like if we had liberty it would be terrific, and the alternative would just be awful, you know?  That’s just how it strikes me.  I don’t know.”

“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

Woman in a Meeting: “I have to say - I’m sorry - I have to say this.  I don’t think we should be as scared of non-fear things as maybe we are?  If that makes sense?  Sorry, I feel like I’m rambling.”

“I have not yet begun to fight.”

Woman in a Meeting: “Dave, I’m not going to fight you on this.”

“I will be heard.”

Woman in a Meeting:  “Sorry to interrupt.  No, go on, Dave. Finish what you had to say.”

All kidding aside, Rachel Simmons, the author of Curse of the Good Girl, says this habit starts early when young girls ask themselves questions such as “did I sound pushy?” or believe other girls will think “Oh, she’s is so proud of herself...She thinks she is so amazing...She is so full of herself”.  

She says that when they think this way, they start to “dilute their strong opinions” and create, instead, indifferent remarks.  

But what if our natural inclination to not sound pompous, aggressive or abrasive could be turned into a superpower?    

After all, I’m not sure these voices of self-doubt ever fully stop in a woman’s head. Is it possible these disclaimers could work to our advantage?

Adam Grant, Wharton Professor and author of Give and Take, thinks so. However, he says there is a serious and nuanced catch.

This only works if you are already perceived as an expert or extremely competent.

If you are, the disclaimers (especially on a close team) make you look more human, humble and approachable…like you are interested in the team or organization first, rather than just yourself.  Rather than cocky or aggressive. 

This is when you can become powerful.

However, Grant says it is essential to give people other signals establishing your competence in order to avoid what psychologists call the “pratfall effect”.  That is, if you are already looking weak, using “powerless speech” gives people just one more reason to dislike or disrespect you.  

This is when you can become the doormat that Petri and Simmons fear.

So assuming you are already viewed as competent, here is some “powerless speech” Grant says you SHOULD incorporate into your speech:

Hesitations: “well,” “um,” “uh,” “you know”

Hedges: “sorta,” “maybe,” “probably,” “I think”

Disclaimers: “This may be a bad idea, but”

Tag Questions: “That’s interesting, isn’t it?” or “That’s a good idea, right?” “What do you think?”

Intensifiers: “really,” “very,” “quite”

Grant says the reason this works is that assertiveness and projecting confidence doesn’t always gain influence. In fact, it can work against you.  

His research says there are two fundamental paths to influence: dominance (seen as strong, powerful, and authoritative) and prestige (when people respect or admire us).

Individuals are drawn more towards people who are prestigious rather than dominant.  They want to be on teams with those people.  Collaborate with those people.  Follow those people.  

Why?  Because, honestly, who wants to be dominated?

Dominance is a win-lose proposition, whereas prestige has the advantage of allowing everyone to win.  This is why disclaimers and questions can be powerful.  

These disclaimers let people know you aren’t trying to assert your opinion for dominance sake.  You are putting your opinion forward because you think it is a good one but would like to work collaboratively and hear what others think to make it better.

This is why it can be a power tool.

I think an adult can grasp this concept but I don’t know if my daughter is experienced enough to pick up on the difference.   

Is a 12-year-old too young to work on these skills?  How does a young girl establish competence first?  I don’t want my daughter to be a doormat either. 

For guidance, we need to go back to Rachel Simmons’ book, Curse of the Good Girl.

There are a few items on her no-no list which I’m sure Grant would agree are true competence killers.

Ending speech with:

-Inflections that make statements sound like questions (“Holden Caulfield was really depressed?  And he was a rebellious teenager?”)

-Sentences that lose volume and become inaudible

Putting yourself or abilities down:

-“I’m so stupid.”

-“I failed that test” (before getting the results back) or “I’m going to fail that test.”

Using Self-Defeating Gestures:

-Playing with hair

-Hands hovering around the mouth

-Slouching

These are easy fixes which will help our daughters demonstrate likability in positive ways.  

In stronger ways.

However, let’s not lose sight of the fact that these socialized behaviors have their roots in a well-intentioned place. 

Women are naturally inclined toward inclusiveness and this is an asset.  A strength.

If you genuinely care about others, what they think, and are willing to incorporate their opinions to make an idea stronger, then you will be truly powerful.

Like this post?  Know someone with a daughter?  Please share!  Together we can close the leadership gap one girl at a time...

-Laura

Grit (Not Talent) is the Key to Success and You Don't Need Any Magic to Get It.

“I have to write an essay on Beyonce’s video, Formation, for tonight's homework on perseverance and self-esteem,” my son said as he strolled into the kitchen straight off the bus from high school.  

"I figured this was right up your alley," he smirked.

Well, this did sound interesting.  

All I knew about the song was that after her Super Bowl Halftime show, sales at Red Lobster went up 20%.  I had watched the performance and, to be honest, with the exception of the cool part where she said she had “…hot sauce in my bag, swag,” I had a hard time following the words.

I was intrigued to find out why my son’s high school teacher thought this song was a teachable moment on perseverance and asked if I could get in on the assignment. 

“That's what I thought you'd say,” he shrugged.

And why not get my middle-school daughter involved in the conversation too?  After all, it was a teachable moment with Beyonce!  How often do you get those opportunities?  

We decided that we should probably read the lyrics first.  So we gathered ‘round and fired up the laptop… 

…Uncomfortable silence from both kids.

Wow.  In hindsight, I probably should have looked at the words first, before I invited my 12-year-old daughter to tag along for the discussion.  Alas, no parent-of-the-year award for me again this year.

However, once we got beyond all the explicit prose (LOTS of explanations on my part), the purposeful use of hubris, and the uncomfortable Red Lobster line, we all had to admit that the teacher was right.  

That’s because our family has been talking a lot about the incredible power of grit lately.  Like every other desperate parent out there (much to my children's chagrin), I've been trying to find a way to make my kids grittier.

Research has proven that its impact on success is almost magical.

Forget about pumping Mozart into pregnant bellies, buying black and white mobiles to hang over cribs, paying through the nose for tutors, personal sports coaches, and music lessons. 

Work ethic, motivation, tenacity, dedication, hard work, drive, determination…THIS is what's been proven the key to success in life.  

Beyonce definitely has it.

“I see it, I want it,…,

I dream it, I work hard, I grind ’till I own it” 

Not IQ.  Not talent.  Not even station in life.

Grit.

Angela Duckworth, professor and psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, has spent several years proving that IQ and talent don't predict success.  Perseverance does.  

In fact, when Duckworth also held constant for things like race, family income, how safe people felt, and even social intelligence, “grit” was still the biggest predictor of who would graduate from military school, excel in the Spelling Bee, make the most money as a salesman, or be the most effective teacher in the toughest neighborhoods. 

Duckworth even goes so far as to say, shockingly, that talent and IQ could have an inverse relationship to success in some cases. 

This is independently confirmed by a separate study.  British psychologist, Joan Freeman, has studied the life and adult careers of child prodigies.  As she explains in her book, Gifted Lives: What Happens When Gifted Children Grow Up, she discovered that of the 210 baby geniuses that she tracked over many years, only six became incredibly successful in later life.

So, why is it that some kids seem to have this magical fairy dust and others don’t?

Why is it that some kids (and adults!) never seem to give up while others don’t even begin to try? 

“You just might be a black Bill Gates in the making, 

Cause I slay

I just might be a black Bill Gates in the making”

How do we teach our own kids to “slay” like Beyonce?

It turns out that grit isn’t magical dust.  It’s simple and we can all get it.

Exciting research by Stanford psychologist, Carol Dweck, has proven that a person gets gritty when they simply believe they can improve.  

Her research shows that, when kids understand how the brain works, they not only become more persistent, but their persistence lasts.  That’s because the children in the study learned that the brain grows in response to a challenge.

Struggles actually make you SMARTER! 

Dweck calls this growth mindset.

In her book, Mindset, The New Psychology of Success, Dweck transforms the meaning of effort and difficulty - from feeling dumb to, instead, understanding that effort and tackling something hard develops more connections in the brain.

Initially, both “smart” and “dumb” students in the study who believed that intelligence is given at birth (fixed mindset) limited their achievement. 

Dweck's seventh graders in the study were given a choice: either learn something new or do a task that would make them look smart.  If they had a fixed mindset, they opted to look smart. 

They stopped trying.

This seems to explain Joan Freeman’s child-prodigy results.

Once the children in Dweck’s study were taught how the brain worked, they stopped feeling stupid and giving up when they failed, because they realized that failure wasn’t a permanent condition.

This is truly a transformative approach since it positively impacts both the “geniuses” who might crumble at the first whiff of failure, as well as the “dropouts” who don’t even try because “what’s the use?” and helps make sure that both will succeed.

What is even more amazing is that these benefits were especially pronounced for students who were subject to negative stereotypes such as girls in math and African-American students.

So, can it work for non-study participants like our kids?

Acting like a true investigative reporter, last September, I enrolled both my kids (my perfectionist and my underachiever alike) into Dweck’s on-line Brainology® program as "homeschoolers".     

I wish I could tell you that there was this amazing state-of-the-art learning system that blew us all away. Instead, it was just an incredibly easy, and slightly quirky, biology lesson.   Very quickly the eye-rolls and the moans, for having to do extra work, diminished over the six-week long program.

It wasn’t hard.  In fact, it didn’t take much of their time at all.

And herein lies the true elegance of this program...because the kids easily grasped the logic and the science, it unbelievably...worked!   

Truly magical.

Now I hear strange phrases like, "I have to study a bit more because I don't think I've gotten the material into long-term memory yet," or, "I need to get more active with this material."   

We are seeing less stress, better motivation, fewer lows and, most importantly, better results.  

A mindset shift. 

Who knows?  Although I haven’t looked, they just might have started to carry a bit of hot sauce in their bag.

Swag.

Like this post?  Know someone with a daughter?  Please share!  Together we can close the leadership gap one girl at a time...

-Laura

Women Pay the Price for Perfectionism. Don't Let Your Daughter Be Little-Miss-Perfect.

I treat my children differently.  

I know you shouldn't do that.  If you do, you’re certainly not supposed to admit it!  Even my son and daughter know that I consciously do this...because I’ve told them.

It all started last year when I woke up at 2:00 am to the sounds of movement in my daughter’s room. 

It’s certainly no cause for alarm when your 10-year-old has to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night or needs a drink of water, but the noise persisted.  Now angry, and thinking she was mucking around in her room or, worse! watching something on her iPad, I stomped in ready to read her the riot act.

I was literally stopped in my tracks.

She was doing homework!

“What in the world are you doing?!” I asked.

“I woke up and realized that I didn’t do a good enough job on my homework,” she said as tears slid down her face.  It appeared she had been crying for awhile.  She seemed terrified and, shockingly, it wasn’t me she was afraid of.

I used to secretly wish that my under-achieving son could be more like his perfectionist, younger sister.  His idea of doing a good job is getting the socks within one foot of the laundry basket.  

That’s pretty much how he does a lot of things.  Well...just the things he doesn’t want to do.  

At one point, I took pleasure in the fact that my daughter was a perfectionist.  I thought it was a sign that she was smart and driven.  I relished telling the teachers at the parent teacher conference that “I’ve never even seen her homework.” 

I never worried about my daughter, but I sure worry about her now.  She’s just like how I used to be and still am, in many ways.  

She’s how many women are.

How can perfectionism be a problem?  

Because many of us women tend to hold ourselves back because things are just “not quite perfect enough”.

Tara Mohr's book, Play Big, tells it like it is with her “10 Rules for Brilliant Women”. 

I love Rule 6:

“Question the voice that says “I’m not ready yet.” I know, I know. Because you are so brilliant and have such high standards, you see every way that you could be more qualified. You notice every part of your idea that is not perfected yet. While you are waiting to be ready, gathering more experience, sitting on your ideas, our friends referenced in rule five [Be More of an Arrogant Idiot] are being anointed industry visionaries, getting raises, and seeing their ideas come to life in the world. They are no more ready than you, and perhaps less. Jump in the sandbox now, and start playing full out. Find out just how ready you are.”

I recently saw an interview with author Elizabeth Gilbert where she talked about her novel, The Signature of All Things (soon to be adapted by PBS’s ‘Masterpiece’).  

Gilbert created this amazing, fictional character living in the 1800’s, named Alma Whittaker.  She is a brilliant scientist full of resilience and passion, however, Gilbert says she gave her main character a huge flaw to make a point to other women.  

“She is a perfectionist,”  Gilbert said. 

Alma never publishes her seminal discovery…the theory of evolution…because it isn’t quite perfect enough.  We know how this story ends.  Another scientist you might have heard of (a man, no less) publishes first.  

Gilbert said in her interview that, although her story is fiction, she wants women to realize that “sometimes good enough is just that…good enough.”

My son seems to get it.  

He does the quick and minimal work that used to (and still!) drive me crazy.  He gets his B+ or A- and then he’s out of there!  Why put in those countless extra hours?  He wants to do other things that he loves like baseball, video games or model-car building.  Last weekend he and a friend actually built a computer.  Talk about taking a risk. 

I’m learning to “love” his B+’s a little more now.  

Although, I’m still not happy that the socks don’t go IN the laundry basket.

As a leader, it’s important to be comfortable with risk taking and it’s constantly touted as a key leadership trait.  However, you can never be comfortable with risk if you haven’t experienced its upsides and downsides. 

How do you discover your personal limits if you’ve never tested them?  How do you come to the realization that a failure isn’t a reflection of you?  How do you learn not to be shattered by a mistake?  This doesn’t just help build leadership, it helps build self-confidence.  

We must consciously practice making mistakes by leaping more frequently, not hiding in order to maintain our perfect image.

And this brings me back to my daughter…in the middle of the night…doing homework…sobbing.

School doesn’t help us practice taking risks.  It only rewards perfection and we gals LOVE being perfect, don’t we?  And so we hide behind our straight A’s.  It’s safe there.

Rachel Simmons, in her book, Curse of the Good Girl, thinks this actually impacts our daughters’ character and sense of self.  Simmons says our daughters even need to take risks with how to be a person: 

“…in order to become our best self, we need to learn how to fail at that very task…Success is built on a paradox: the more concerned about failing we become, the less we are able to achieve.  Good girl perfection is success with a ceiling.  Its pursuit offers little room for the risk and adventure that yield exhilarating leaps in growth.”

Is your daughter a little-miss-perfect?

To find out, here are some questions that Simmons says we should be asking our daughters’ teachers and coaches the next time we see them:

1.    Are you comfortable with her level of participation?

2.    Does she seem flexible about making a mistake, or does she have a strong reaction to failure?  Does she ever stop participating?

3.    Does she seem to raise her hand only when she has the right answer? (For a coach: Does she play it safe on the field or does she take risks?  Is she willing to push herself to try things she’s not naturally good at?)

4.    Is she willing to take on challenging projects and tasks?

5.    Does she appear nervous to take a stand or share her opinion?  (For a coach: Does she use her voice on the field?)

6.    Does she avoid asking for help when she needs it?

If the answer to any of these questions is a “yes”, then we will need to encourage our daughters to set goals that involve risk.  

Simmons says to focus on two key areas where girls tend to struggle: the willingness to be wrong and the willingness to engage in debate.  

Identify what is her comfort zone, risk zone, and danger zone in each.

What does she feel is really risky and what is just sort of risky?  How does she define it?  I don’t want my daughter to go to a danger zone, but I must push her to get out of her comfort zone.  

And so, I’ll push my daughter to take more risks in and out of school where she might just make a mistake.  She could use it.

Oppositely, I’ll keep pushing my son to take a little more time with his work, do a better job…be a little more perfect.  He could use it.

By the way, here is the true story.  While Darwin was still working on his now-famous theory, another scientist by the name of Alfred Wallace sent Darwin a letter asking for advice.  Darwin was horrified to see it was about a remarkably similar theory Wallace had independently discovered.   At that time, Darwin hadn’t quite worked out all of the details in his Theory of Evolution.  However, this letter made him decide to take an uncomfortable leap and publish his “imperfect” work.

Darwin decided that good enough was good enough.  

I wonder if he ever got his socks in the hamper.

Like this post?  Know someone with a daughter?  Please share!  Together we can close the leadership gap one girl at a time...

-Laura

Leadership Requires Honesty and Girls Better Start Getting Candid

“She had a bad day today.”  In the background, I could hear her footsteps running up the stairs.

“What happened?”

“Some boys at school were miserable to her.  I'd love to give them a rocket!”  he said, as he slammed her lunchbox down on the counter.  My Scottish husband’s expressions can often be extremely puzzling, however, one look at his face and I knew exactly what this one meant.  

Now all riled up myself, I headed upstairs to ask the dreaded question, “Do you want to tell me what happened?”   As it turns out she was being bullied emotionally and physically by two boys.

And all she did was cry. 

She didn’t stand up for herself.  She didn’t tell them why what they were doing was wrong and hurtful on SO many levels.  She didn’t even tell a teacher.  

She didn’t “use her words” at all.  Because she didn’t have them.

She didn’t just let them win…she lost.  I went from being furious at those boys to being disappointed in her.

Girls (and women!) need to take a long hard look at not only their ability to accept and be honest with their own feelings, but also to learn how to be honest with others. 

That’s because effective (read: non-hurtful) honesty is a crucial leadership, not to mention life skill.  In a 2014 Pew Research Center survey, participants said that the leadership trait that matters most is…you guessed it…honesty. 

As parents, we talk to our kids a lot about honesty.  “Don’t lie.” “Don’t steal.” “Don’t cheat on tests.”  In other words, be truthful and don’t be deceitful.  

But is that all there is to honesty?

Most certainly, the Pew Research Survey participants cannot just be talking about leaders who steal and cheat. Nor are they talking about conflict management.  I’m pretty sure honesty here means something more akin to integrity.  

Since truthfulness and candor are such a foundational aspect of integrity, let’s just focus on this part of the equation, and where girls can do a better job.

Why is this so hard for us women? 

Rachel Simmons, in her book, Curse of the Good Girl, shares that In 2007 a highly selective boarding school called Miss Halls School for Girls in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, developed a national survey on personal authority and leadership for over fifteen hundred teens. The survey asked respondents to address ten challenging “leadership problems.” 

Simmons says “The study concluded that girls “appear to define leadership in terms of friendship, which means that they can often compromise doing what they know is right for the sake of maintaining relationships.”

She goes on to explain the sad reality stating that “females who openly talk about their strengths, speak up, and tell the truth are often punished for it. They may be called “bitch,” “conceited,” or worse.” 

Girls don’t speak up about a lot of things in order to preserve their friendships and image.  

My daughter was trying to preserve her image.

She told me that she was embarrassed and that she didn’t want to stick out.  She tried to hide her tears.  She hoped the whole awful mess would just go away.  She felt ashamed that she was crying even though I told her that she had every right to feel the way she did.  

I told her, “I would have cried too.”

But what was really disturbing is that she couldn’t really articulate what she was feeling.  Other than “sad” or “hurt”, she struggled to describe the true reason the tears came on so fast.

Simmons describes the key to turning this weakness into a strength.  It allows girls to be honest with themselves and others, teaches girls how to share their feelings, opinions, and concerns, AND to do it in a way that preserves friendships and their image.

I gave it a shot.

I asked my daughter to stop focusing on what Simmons calls “outside feelings” and instead, focus on her “inside feelings”.  Outside feelings are emotions that you can see on your face such as “frustrated,” “angry,” “irritated,” “annoyed,” and “disgusted”.  Inside feelings, on the other hand, are the underlying emotions that you don’t show but are the real causes such as “embarrassed,” “insecure,” “afraid,” “jealous,” “excited,” and “shame”.  

Yikes!  Talk about doubling down on vulnerability.  

It seems counterintuitive, but used effectively (and with the right people), this vulnerability can be powerful. 

By using "inside feelings" you can often diffuse the situation and avoid a retaliatory statement.  This makes complete sense.  If someone told you that you had made them feel humiliated, would you respond that they are a jerk?  Of course not!  You would be suddenly horrified and try to make things right.  

If you did respond that they were a jerk, well…then maybe you aren’t such a nice friend after all, and should be avoided.  

As a matter of fact, Simmons says that you should only use this technique when dealing with colleagues and friends, not with the neighborhood bully, for obvious reasons.

I love this approach because it allows you to be strong (sticking up for yourself) while also preserving your “nice” image.  Not only did you not escalate things but, instead, tried to take a more humanist approach.

My daughter suddenly spilled out that essentially she was made to feel inferior to the boys, betrayed by one of them that she considered a friend, and down right humiliated.  I’m translating her 11-year-old speak here but she definitely nailed it.  

In that moment, I decided that an 11-year-old place to start practicing being a genuine, sincere and strong person, is with this type of non-hurtful honesty.  

This shouldn't stop as we get older.  But, unfortunately, it often does.

Think of all the dealings we have with our friends, family, partners, children, coworkers, and bosses.  The list is endless.  I’m pretty sure that half the self-help aisle at Barnes & Noble is devoted to this topic.  This lack of practice in honestly and compassionately dealing with others impacts us greatly later in life. 

Think about when your boss wouldn’t deliver hard feedback to a co-worker that everyone knew was slacking.  Or, something your partner was doing that you felt was demeaning but you never raised the issue for fear of a fight.  Or, the friend who constantly shows up late for Every. Single. Lunch. making your schedule less important than her precious time.  Or, how the leader wouldn’t talk openly about key changes that were occurring in your organization, causing whispered conversations in the bathrooms. 

Or, how about the leader who tended to keep bad news to herself for fear of letting down her boss or possibly exposing a personal failure…

…that was me.

The letter of recommendation I received from an amazing boss as I applied for a higher position within the company was great and he highly recommended me for the job.

But.

He said, “The…improvement area I could comment on would be her tendency to be reluctant to surface potential issues quickly…”  He was right.  Back then I didn’t have the tools or the wisdom to be honest in a safe way.

“Why don’t you write your inside feelings down in a journal for practice,” I told her.

It took me more than 30 years to learn the power of honesty.  

I’m not going to let my daughter wait that long.

Like this post?  Know someone with a daughter?  Please share!  Together we can close the leadership gap one girl at a time...

-Laura

What Women's World Cup Soccer Taught My Daughter About Leadership

She leaned a little more forward in order to hear.  Her brother sat next to her doing his usual Millennial multi-tasking: playing a video game on his phone, a pile of chips in his lap, one eye on the TV.

“Gooooaaaaal!!!!!” she cried out, a small voice in my neighbors’ loud and busy house full of adults in the annual ritual of BBQ.  I looked over at her and realized that this was the first sporting event she had ever asked me to put on.  Uncomfortably, I had asked the host if we could turn on the TV.  But what was I afraid of?  It was a young girl asking to watch sports (US Women’s National Soccer Team vs. Columbia).  Of course, the host happily agreed.  

She was GLUED to the screen.  Rapt with attention on a silly qualifying match. Usually, I have to drag her to the TV room to cheer for our favorite teams.

This time, she was the only one watching.

A lot has been said, post the US Women’s Soccer Team's eventual trouncing of Japan, about the disparity between women’s sports and men’s.  I’m sure you’ve heard it. No media coverage. Few sponsors. No network deal.  Playing on turf rather than grass. The women shared $2 million as winners, Germany’s winning men’s team got to share $35 million.  Let’s not even talk about the US men who got to share $8 million…and they lost!  

But my daughter doesn’t care about any of that right now.  That will come later. Right now, her 11-year-old, impressionable self is growing in ways that the world should take notice.  

This is the rare television that is transformative. 

Why?

Surely I’m exaggerating.  Surely I’m projecting my US female pride into this conversation.  Surely I’m just overblowing the whole ‘girl power’ thing.  

Actually, in this instance…wrong.

For the first time in her short life, because my daughter has so few female, athletic role models…like zero…, this World Cup achievement allows my daughter to envision herself not only as a female athlete but as a female leader. 

This couldn’t have come at a better time.

Recently, I started to notice a pattern with her.  She was liking soccer, but there were strange things that were hanging her up.  

“Mom, what do you think about our coach?”

“Why?”

“Well, Haley and I think he yells too much.  We don’t think he likes us.”

“What do you mean, ‘yells too much’ and ‘doesn’t like’ you?  Is he yelling AT you?  Like, is he saying you did a dumb thing on the field, or that he is disappointed in you in some way?”

“No.  He is yelling, telling us where to go on the field.”

“Um, that’s coaching…”

Or, when the girls on the other team were particularly aggressive she would say, “Those girls were mean.”

”Honey, pushing is allowed and encouraged up to a certain point.  You are out there to win, not to make friends,” 

Eyes roll.  

Another time, her coach said that he thought my daughter could be a real leader on the team (music to my ears!) but that she needed to talk more on the field….help the other girls with their positioning…let them know where they should go during the plays.

“I’m not comfortable with that.”

“Why???!!!”, I cried, flabbergasted.

“Because, I don’t want to boss my friends around.”

She was defining EVERYTHING in terms of friendships:  the coach not ‘liking her’, the other girls being ‘mean’, her teammates remaining her ‘friends’.  

She was applying the same rules from the “good girl” school playground to her sport.  She was simply transferring what she already knew to this different experience not realizing the difference.  

The US Women’s Soccer Team showed my daughter that they weren’t out there trying to make friends.  They were playing to win. 

They weren’t ‘nice’.  They played by the rules, but they were aggressive.  Maybe aggressive isn’t a palatable enough word for most people to describe these beautiful women.  Assertive might be easier to swallow. Whatever you call it, they pushed, dove, lunged and leaned every chance they could. (AND, the women’s team didn’t roll around on the ground clutching their ankles after every foul like the men do!)

The world said this was not only OK for a young woman to do, but was applauded and rewarded. 

This flies in the face of “good girl” school playground behavior, but is completely consistent to success off the playground, on the field, and definitely, in the workplace.

In fact, research done by Ernst & Young, found that the majority (52%) of C-suite women (CEO, CIO, CFO, COO…) played sport at the much more competitive university level, compared to just 39% of women at other management levels and C-suite women note that their competitiveness has been a bigger factor in their careers than more junior women: 37% cite this as a key factor, compared with 26% of others.

However, how does one make this transition from the playground to the boardroom?  It’s such an awfully long and ambiguous journey!  I, myself, have struggled for years with this.  There seem to be very few bridges to get there. Obviously, playing sports is a mighty fine Golden Gate, but… 

My husband and I always wanted our daughter to play a sport.  Fitness aside, intuitively, we just knew it was important for a girl to play on a team.  However, my daughter has always been a bit sensitive in sports, crying when her team loses or when another girl pushes her too much on the field.  I can barely contain myself from becoming like Tom Hanks in a League of their Own, “Are you crying? There’s no crying in soccer!”

It’s been so incredibly frustrating for me.

As I watched her watching these women going all out on the field, it dawned on me that we had been missing a critical piece to the puzzle. 

Having her play a sport might not be enough.  She had no frame of reference.  She needed mentors.  

Role models to tell her it was “OK”, and, “this is how we do it”.

She needed to see real women, playing real sports on a world class stage, and doing it with abandon. 

There were no “sorrys”, or picking of dandelions, or cartwheels or braiding each other’s hair...

ERIC (Education Resources Information Center) Digest says, “Impressionable, athletic, middle school girls need positive and empowering role models to emulate while developing personal and interpersonal skills. In addition to the leaders in their daily lives, contemporary women athletes are the women that girls consider empowering leaders too. ”

The following week, I paused the Germany vs. U.S. game and pointed out an especially aggressive lean and push combination as the players fought for the ball. “See,” I repeat for the umpteenth time… "they are out to win, not make friends.”   This time, instead of the eye roll, I got a smirk.

That’s because, this time, Carli Lloyd just backed me up. 

Like this post?  Know someone with a daughter?  Please share!  Together we can close the leadership gap one girl at a time...

-Laura

Extroverts vs. Introverts as Leaders - Does it Matter?

I just finished reading The Girl Scouts', Change It Up!, study, which strongly correlates a girl's desire to be a leader with being extroverted.  

Really?  

It seems to be the truth if you troll the internet.  Everywhere I look, charisma and being a good public speaker, keep popping up as key leadership traits.

Is only a small portion of this planet destined to make the history books? 

I don’t buy it.  

I have been exposed to great leaders who were not classically charismatic but instead more on the quiet side.  And I have been exposed to not such great leaders who were extremely extroverted. 

How can, depending upon the study, 50%-70% of people (introverts) not be qualified to be leaders? Does this mean that introverts have to fake it to make it?  Does this really mean that if my daughter happens to be on the shy side I can just forget about her ever becoming a leader?  That, if I don’t hear the words “She’s so outgoing!” at the next parent-teacher conference, I can just forget it? Give up?

This just didn’t seem right.  I had the same feelings about this as when my father-in-law once said that women pilots weren't as good as men because one time out of every month their “decision-making was clouded by hormones”.  

My gut was strongly saying that "extrovert" does not equal "leader" just as "menstruation" does not equal "mentally compromised"!  I didn’t have very far to go to confirm my feelings. 

In the book, Quiet - The Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking, Susan Cain highlights research by Adam Grant, at Wharton.  Based upon Grant’s research, extroverts are only better leaders than introverts when they have passive employees.  However, introverts are better leaders than extroverts when they have proactive employees.  The theory is that introverts are better listeners and, therefore, able to pull out the good ideas in people. However, they can also be too passive when employees need to be pushed.  On the flip side, extroverts can actually push an organization along through sheer will, however, they sometimes push the organization off a cliff if they don’t take opposing or new ideas into consideration.

If this is true, then why the pervasive extroversion = leader assumption that constantly keeps coming up?

Author Malcolm Gladwell puts it best I think.  “We have a sense in our minds, of what a leader is supposed to look like, and that stereotype is so powerful that when someone fits it, we simply become blind to other considerations.”  We have also been influenced by many years of Trait Theory or ‘great person’ theory.  Does, “Great leaders are born, not made” ring a bell?

Martin Luther King was extroverted and Rosa Parks was incredibly introverted.  So although people recognize Ms. Parks’ great accomplishment, Martin Luther King is credited as being the actual leader in the classic sense.    

The Change It Up! study might indicate that being extroverted gives my daughter more desire or motivation to be a leader but being introverted gives her no less desire or motivation to change or impact her world. Isn’t that what true leadership is?  What about Eleanor Roosevelt?  Mahatma Gandhi?  Steve Wozniak?  Einstein? Talk about quiet, driven, principle-centered leaders. 

Maybe extroverts are more prone to organize a protest, create a ‘movement’, fire people up to take action than introverts, who might find that approach out of their comfort zone.  And introverts might be more comfortable or prone to lead with their ideas, or lead other people’s ideas forward.  Creatives come to mind here.  Deep thinkers (scientists, writers, mathematicians, inventors…), who change and lead the world with their ideas, discoveries or creations.  Or even people who can bring many different ideas together to create a new concept.  

I worry as I write this, that people will misunderstand that I believe that introverts can only operate as loners in this regard.  Again, introverts CAN lead people effectively, and apparently, sometimes more effectively than extroverts.  As proof, Chuck Williams in his book, MGMT 8, states that 40% of Fortune 500 companies are actually led by introverts. 

Both extroverts and introverts can lead by working with others and sometimes they can lead by working alone.

If I’m trying to find the key leadership traits that my daughter will need as she moves on through life, how does a temperament she is disposed to at birth, which isn’t controllable, and can’t be taught (although with a little practice she might fake it), really impact her? 

So, is it important or not?  

Actually, yes.  But not the way we've been taught to think about it.  I know, I know...I just got through proving that it isn't important.

Cain’s book and Grant’s research dismisses the notion of a binary relationship between temperament and the ability to lead.  Most importantly, it certainly isn’t correlated with GOOD leadership.  

This, I believe, is the important takeaway.  

Good leadership can be taught.  And each temperament seems to offer benefits the other can learn from.

If your daughter is already an extrovert, she will need to surround herself with proactive people, listen well to them and empower them to act on their ideas.  She will need to ask more questions than she's used to doing. She will need to work on being humble/modest, gracious in sharing credit, and most importantly, selfless.  Being selfless means she pursues answers for the organization and not for her own ego.  Otherwise, she risks just being perceived as outspoken, ego-centric and self-important.

If she is an introvert, Cain suggests working on “…“talking deeply” with others, working alone (really!), reading others' works ("a deeply social act"), listening well, taking mini-breaks from overstimulating environments, and practicing "quiet commitment.”  

I would also add trying to overcome any fear of public speaking or, if necessary, pair up with a like-minded and respectful public speaker who can give voice to her ideas and vision. There have been many famous introvert/extrovert teams throughout history to emulate.  Otherwise, your introverted daughter risks being perceived as unsure of herself and could fall victim to being pushed around by bellicose talkers who can persuade a team to "Group Think" (which is when a person with the best public speaking style in a group can drag the group over that cliff I mentioned earlier). 

My big aha here, as I look at my own child, is that whether or not she is extroverted or introverted, she most definitely can be a leader.  However, to be a good leader, she will need to work hard no matter what.  The path to being a good leader is just going to be different, depending upon her temperament.

Passion, drive and commitment to something are the true leadership traits.  Whether you are introverted or extroverted, this holds true. 

And so, I will put to bed the notion that somehow a trait you are more disposed to at birth, decides our fate.  On the contrary, both personalities have positives and negatives with respect to leadership.  

Identifying and accepting who we are (or who our daughter is) is the first step.  Learning from, and leveraging the temperament of others, is the next.

Like this post?  Know someone with a daughter?  Please share!  Together we can close the leadership gap one girl at a time...

-Laura