Page 23 - Free Yourself From

6 It’s Not a Glass Ceiling, It’s a Sticky Floor

The trick to finding your way out is to avoid getting caught up
in a sense of crisis (a very sticky floor). Instead, appreciate that you
are poised at an opportunity for change. Think about the kinds of
changes you would like and consider how you would go about mak-
ing at least one of them happen.
If you’ve never done it before, take some time out to go through
the kind of self-evaluation and life planning I did. You don’t need the
six months I could afford to take as a young woman with plump sav-
ings and few responsibilities. Even one evening session of intense
career planning can get you started. There are resources right in this
book to help you, and myriad resources online, in other books, and
with people like career coaches if you’d like to go further.

Know Yourself, Be Yourself

So, why all this fuss about knowing and being yourself?
I believe that great leadership is so much about knowing who you
are. Successful leaders know their strengths, weaknesses, beliefs,
motivations, and intentions.
In short, self-knowledge is the starting point for absolutely every-
thing else; the successes you want and, equally important, the set-
backs you’re bound to encounter.
I spend a lot of time talking with women who are in a transition,
who feel like they have no control of their destiny, or who feel frus-
trated or ready to give up because they did not win some plum job
for which they recently interviewed. I know how frustrating this can
be, but at the end of the day, I tell women that the key to coming out
ahead in these types of situations is to have a steady, reliable self-
image to fall back on. Once you have that grounded and mindful
self-awareness, you can channel it into whatever you want to be.
The fundamental questions for all of us are: Who do you want to
be and how do you manifest that in your life and work?