Repeat After Me: Stop Being a Good Girl

I don’t believe that men go to work, “hoping they will like me”.

Confident and talented as I am, I tried to wear the “good girl” crown for years, and I’m smiling reading Newsweek’s How To Get a Raise: Stop Being a “Good Girl”. 

Women in the workplace continue to sabotage themselves with a lack of confidence about their self-worth. Women still fear being the bitch.Author Rachel Simmons argues that women’s self-perception is a big reason we don’t advance to the top. Rather than focusing on work-life balance and the litany of women’s reasons for being unhappy in the workplace, Simmons zeroes in on women’s own sense of self-worth as a big culprit in why we do or don’t advance.

Yes, we are surrounded by a lifetime of mixed messages about what it means to be strong. But listening to women, you think that we must be 20% of the population, with men comprising the other 80%. Men don’t contol everything anymore and women must stop behaving as if they do.

Work is not a game of “Captain, may I?”

As Simmons describes it, it’s a “yes, but” mentality: yes, be a go-getter, but be nice all the time. Yes, accomplish, but don’t brag about it. “It is a constant qualification—two steps forward, one step back,” she says. “And just as an anorexic might say, ‘I shouldn’t eat this, it will make me fat,’ girls are saying to themselves, ‘I shouldn’t say this, it will make me a bitch, a drama queen, an outcast.’ “

Not only do women put ourselves in this box; we do it to each other.

Based on the Newsweek review, Rachel Simmons argues that the doors of opportunity really are open for women, but women have created our own ‘psychological glass ceiling’, in her words. As long as we worry about being loved as being the nice girl who doesn’t offend anyone, we’ll stew in our own juice, making ourselves only slightly less miserable than everyone around us.

A lot of research confirms that the glass ceiling opens for confident women who seize the opportunity to walk through the door.Simmons doesn’t suggest that we be arrogant and abusive in the workplace or our personal lives. Strength can coexist with charm. Hillary Clinton knows that fact.

Based on this review, we need to read “The Curse of the Good Girl” and then have a consciousness-raising session, alone, with the woman in the mirror. 

Go. It’s #258 at Amazon, and has seven five-star reviews. What more do you want? I don’t even have my Amazon affiliate code loaded in yet. Just buy the damn book and start reading. Anne