Why Good Girls Don't Get Ahead... But Gutsy Girls Do (23 page)

At this point you have to use what I call the Body Heat test. When I was working at
family Weekly,
a major part of my job was to recommend the celebrities for the cover, so I went regularly to screenings of upcoming films. One night I found myself sitting alone in a dark room watching a new film called
Body Heat.
It wasn't a perfect movie. The music was overblown, the plot was somewhat convoluted, and everyone seemed to sweat more than they should have, considering that air conditioning had already been invented. But I was mesmerized. There was heart-thumping suspense, very sexy sex, and Kathleen Turner saying things like, “You're not too smart. I like that in a man.” Did I suggest that we immediately do an article on William Hun or Kathleen Turner? No. Because two people from work who had sat in front of me snickered about the movie as they left the theater, making me question my original impression. The film was a huge hit and turned both actors into major stars.

Today, when I have to make a judgment and lots of people have thrown in their two cents. I always give myself the Body Heal test—I try to get back to my very first feeling about the idea before anyone else said a word.

Claire Brinker says that when she thinks about some of the projects she's worked on that haven't been a success, they're generally those that she let other people talk her into, even though she had bad vibes initially.

The other trick, of course, is simply not to ask people. Certainly it can pay off to ask the people who have insight and brilliant judgment, but get over the good-girl tendency to include others just to be polite.

Strip Off All Your Clothes and Run Naked Down the Street

I don't mean that literally What I'm talking about is getting yourself in a certain state of mind—a creative state of mind. You sec, a golden gut isn't only one that tells you that A is a better approach than B. It's also one that's capable of coming up with C, a bold, new approach that no one has considered before. And in order to produce C ideas, you must loosen up, strip away your inhibitions, and let yourself have some fun.

There are lots of wonderful techniques for unleashing your creative instincts, but there are two that are especially helpful to good girls.

First, you have to give yourself time off to relax You take enormous pride in how hard and how long you work. In fact, it may be well over a year since you've even had a vacation. Maybe they really can't live without you, but never giving your brain a rest provides no time for great ideas and revelations to germinate, percolate, or do whatever they do so well at a subconscious level.

Rebecca Matthias makes sure she gets a twenty-minute bath every night and forty-five-minutes of reverie outdoors on a bench every Saturday, just for relaxing and reflecting.

Some of the very best ideas occur when you're in a dreamy state, when you've pushed budget restrictions, cost analysts. R&D reports, sales projections, and organizational tables out of your mind.

Interior designer and author Alexandra Stoddard told me a story once of how she and a team of people from her book publisher had tried fruitlessly for days to come up with a cover concept for her newest book. Finally, she put the project out of her mind. She and her husband were traveling a day or two later, and while she sat in the airport, she daydreamed about her home in Connecticut, which she and her husband had just lovingly restored and which she now longed to return to. Suddenly, the idea for the cover came to her. “As I sat there daydreaming I could see the front of the house with its two pillars on either side of the door.” she says. “And I thought how charming it would be to have the book cover look like that, with two pillars on cither side.”

There's another kind of loosening-up good girls need to do in order to be more creative, and that's daring to think about the situation in a different way or from a totally different angle. In Chapter 3, I talked about how a gutsy girl makes her mark by breaking the rules, by taking a step that's outside the parameters of her job or the outlines she's been given for a specific project. You also have to break the rules in the way you think. Roger von Oech, who is president of Creative Think, a California-based consulting firm, and the author of
A Whack on the Side of the Head,
says that creative thinking requires an attitude that allows you to manipulate your knowledge and experience. Sometimes, he told me, it helps to “use crazy, foolish and impractical ideas as stepping-stones to practical new ideas.”

Be playful, silly, outrageous.
At Working Woman,
we once interviewed a team of people who had created a successful new shampoo by asking themselves, If we were a hair shaft, what would we want? Jonas Salk is said to have used a similar approach when he was frustrated in his quest for a polio vaccine. He asked himself, If I were an immune system, what would I do to fight a virus or cancer cell?

Over time, I've come to see that some of my best ideas are generated when I do what I call “reading upside down.” By that I mean that I look at a piece of information from a different angle or focus on a teeny-weeny aspect of it. For instance, when I was at
Working Woman,
editors were always suggesting that we do cover stories on Christie Hefner, president of
Playboy.
She was young, beautiful, and was one of the most powerful businesswomen in the country. I felt, however, that there'd been an overabundance of coverage on her. One day an editor made another stab at it, sending me a proposal for a profile, with a few clips attached. As I took a cursory glance at the clips, my eye fell on this little nugget buried in the middle of the story: 47 percent of the people in management at
Playboy
at that time were women. How could they feel comfortable there? I wondered. And that was the birth of one of my favorite articles, “Why Would a Smart Woman Work at
Playboy?”
It was a provocative piece that looked at how women rationalized working for a magazine that ran nude pictorials of their “sisters” with titles like “Animal Attraction” and “Leggy, Bosomy and Hot Blooded: The Birds of Great Britain.” We even ran the story on a centerfold in the magazine.

FIVE WAYS TO KNOW WHAT PEOPLE WISH YOU DIDN'T

Working in a creative field, it's probably been easier for me to learn to trust my gut with ideas than if I'd worked in, lets say, the insurance industry. In the magazine industry, you're constantly encouraged to go with your instincts, and anyone with a golden gut is revered. I've had a much harder time trusting my gut with people.

For years my good-girl tendency was to believe that there was basically something good about everyone. When a coworker pulled a stunt that seemed mean, malicious, or underhanded, my initial instinct was to give that person the benefit of the doubt. I'd think, She's just preoccupied, or, He's having I bad day. There were sparks that turned into brush fires because I didn't acknowledge to myself that the situation was combustible.

I once look over a job in which one of my new subordinates began giving me a hard time almost from the start. I told myself she was just getting used to the change. Plus she had had bronchitis for several weeks after I started and I figured that she fell out of the loop. Even when I developed bronchitis several weeks later and she announced in what seemed like a high stale of glee. “I hope you didn't get it from
me,”
I told myself that maybe I'd misinterpreted her tone. Months later I learned that she had wanted my job and was immensely annoyed by my appointment. I finally woke up to the fact that the woman couldn't stand my guts. (At that point I even had to wonder if she'd sneaked into my office one night and purposely sneezed all over my desk.)

Why does a good girl think this way? Psychotherapist Marjorie Lapp says that a good girl lends to believe that the same principles that apply in a friendship apply at work. When someone's behavior appears malicious or incongruous, she gives that person the benefit of the doubt because she doesn't expect unfairness, mean-spiritedness, or betrayal.

Or, Lapp says, the good girl wonders if
she
has done something wrong, which only serves to distract her from noticing what's really essential. A good-girl friend of mine told me, “I once came across two people whispering in a stairwell and automatically assumed they were whispering something negativeabout me. A month later the company was sold—that's what all the whispering was about. While some people were getting their résumés together because they'd picked up on the clues, I'd been wondering, Why don't they like me?

Of course, some things
are
meaningless or coincidental, so you don't want to overreact. I went to work once for a very mercurial woman who had previously employed a friend of mine. My friend's advice: “Sometimes she's going to seem really cool to you, and you're going to panic. But give it twenty-four hours. She might just have had a bad haircut.”

Because I tend to err on the side of seeing the rosy view, I've adopted these tactics:

I. Look a Second Time at Anything You just Dismissed

The moment you hear yourself pooh-pooh anything (“Oh, he's probably just in a grouchy mood,” or “I'm sure that will never happen”), immediately backtrack and review the event or remark. What
could
it mean? What are some of the implications? What's the worst possibility? I know that sounds paranoid, but because your good-girl tendency may be to rationalize when an event makes the hairs on the back of your neck go up, it's smart to revisit it and get your fears “on the record” in your own mind.

2. Play Connect the Dots

Years ago I read a quote in which someone who worked for a company that sold educated hunches to businesses explained how he came to some of his conclusions. He said that he combed hundreds of trade and technical journals for early, isolated clues that, when connected, conveyed an “unintended message.” I thought that was good advice for anyone marketing products to consumers, but it struck me later that it was also terrific guidance for assessing people on a gut level.

One isolated incident may not tell you anything definitive about someone, but if you're paying attention, you may be able to see a pattern emerge in two or three small incidents. This works especially well for good girls. If your natural inclination is to dismiss a warning sign, playing connect the dots forces you to see a pattern.

I once had a boss who suddenly seemed to be out of the office more than he was in. Whenever I dropped by his office he was at a convention in the Caribbean or a conference in Dallas or whatever. The trips could all have been classified as “junkets” rather than pure taking-care-of-business trips. I saw a little red flag go up, but I dismissed it when I heard him talking about how productive one of the trips had been. Then, a few weeks later, we had a catch-up lunch. As I talked about some of the exciting new opportunities on the horizon, he did something I had never seen him do in a meeting with me: He yawned.

Now, that yawn alone might not have told me anything. It might have simply meant he was overworked—or I was being a bore. But that yawn along with the junkets was an unintended message—this guy had lost interest, had mentally checked out of the organization. And I knew at that moment that I couldn't expect him still to be running the show six months down the road. But as bad as I felt, seeing the handwriting on the wall also allowed me to gather my thoughts and plan for changes. When he left two months later, I didn't have to pick myself up from the floor.

3. Use the Gutsy-Girl Pause

One of the best ways to get a read on people is to talk to them, to ask them questions. But you have to be patient. The first thing out of their mouths is often the party line or a lot of patter. You need to wait, say nothing, and hear what they say
next.

Psychotherapist Marjorie Lapp explains that when you pause, you give someone the opportunity to think over what they've just said and they may begin to elaborate or modify.

4.And While You're Pausing, “Watch” What They Say

Sometimes people don't know how to tell you what's going on with them. And so you have to watch them. This is something that Rosalyn Clement, a dynamic property manager for Compass Management and Leasing in Sacramento, trained herself to do. In her field, if you neglect to pick up on any discontent, you may be in for major problems: Your tenant can up and leave. She's learned to be a careful observer. “Sometimes I'll be sitting with a client and someone younger on my staff will be babbling away and I realize that's probably what I used to do. But I now know to watch. If someone is leaning back, arms crossed, eyes glazed over, I know he hasn't told me what's really the matter.”

I wrote lots of articles about body language when I was in my twenties, in part because I was so fascinated by it. I warned to learn what each and every movement meant. What was the message behind a nose twitch? Did crossed arms and legs really mean someone was inaccessible? But what I discovered from one of the researchers I interviewed. Dr. Alan Mazur of Syracuse University, was that it doesn't have to be that complicated. You can understand it without having to learn a particular “language.”

“If you simply pay attention, you'll
know
something is going on,” says Mazur. “As human beings we're built to read the body signals of one another.” Mazur explains there are really just two areas you need to observe: a person's stress level, which manifests itself in behavior like fidgeting, and a person's affiliative behavior—whether or not he seems to be trying to connect with you with smiles and body “openness.”

5. Develop Validators for Your Gut Reactions

Houston political consultant Sue Walden, president of Walden and Associates, whose clients have included Sen. Kay Hutchison, says that though a big part of politics is looking at numbers, when it comes to the players in the game, you have to trust your gut. For her, one of the most helpful tools has been networking. “I'm always networking.” Walden says, “and when I do I'm a sponge for information. It's when I'm networking that I often pick up the information that validates what my gut has been telling me.”