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124 pages

English

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WALL STREET JOURNAL BEST-SELLER

“Pick up this book now! Every woman wants to believe she is on the precipice of something major and this book gives you the tools to get yourself there. Randi Braun has created a fun and practical way forward for women who are looking to channel their inner bad-ass, crack the leadership code, and soar!" - Jen Mormile, Chief Business Officer of Condé Nast

She’s changing women’s lives, one play at a time.

Women are natural leaders but they’ve been taught to play the game by an outdated set of rules. So certified executive coach, Randi Braun, wrote them a new playbook.

In Braun’s book, Something Major: The New Playbook for Women at Work, women will discover how to play the leadership game on their own terms and win when it comes to achieving their goals: whether it’s cracking the code on your self-doubt by ditching perfectionism, external validation, and the tyranny of your inner critic, or learning new tactics for owning your message (don’t miss 16 things she forbids you to say at work). Braun’s book provides a fresh take on one of the most tremendous challenges of our time: empowering women at work to chart their own course to the top — dialing up confidence and fulfillment, and dialing down burnout in the process.

In Something Major: The New Playbook for Women at Work, Braun takes the field and re-writes the plays of the game. She is a sought-after thought leader, speaker, and CEO of the women’s leadership firm, Something Major. Her book delivers stories for today’s women leaders in a conversational style that’s packed with sage advice and wildly entertaining.

Sujets

Santé et bien-être

Développement personnel

Gestion de carrière

Business

Success

Economics

Women at Work

Employabilité, métiers et formations

Women in Business

Personal Growth

Personal Success

Informations

Publié par	Manuscripts
Date de parution	01 mars 2023
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9798885043380
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	2 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0500€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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Something Major

Something Major
The New Playbook for Women at Work

Randi F. Braun

New Degree Press
Copyright © 2023 Randi F. Braun
All rights reserved.
Something Major
The New Playbook for Women at Work
ISBN 979-8-88504-337-3 Hardcover
979-8-88504-338-0 Ebook

To Benj—for always believing that I was Something Major.

Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1
Ditching Perfectionism
Chapter 2
Untethering From External Validation
Chapter 3
Quieting Our Inner Critic
Chapter 4
Reclaiming Our Intuition
Chapter 5
Getting After Your Goals
Chapter 6
Rebounding When the Plan Blows Up
Chapter 7
Owning Your Message
Chapter 8
Reassessing Productivity and Reclaiming Time
Chapter 9
Building Boundaries
Chapter 10
Reimagining Wellbeing
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Bibliography
“If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am only for myself, what am I? >And if not now, when?”
—Hillel

Introduction
“Randi, I just have no desire,” she whispered into the phone, worried somebody might hear her, even though she had called me from her home office.
Letting out an audible sigh, she luxuriated in a moment of relief for finally saying the aching, silent part out loud. “In fact,” she confessed, “I honestly can’t even remember the last time I was even in the mood.”
It took every ounce of self-control I had not to spit out the second—okay, third —cup of coffee I was sipping. Placing my The Bags Under My Eyes Are Chanel coffee mug on the fireplace mantel, I leaned in as though she was sitting right in front of me. “Tell me everything, Ana.”
“There should be sparks,” she explained, “but there’s just nothing lighting me up. In fact, this amazing thing happened with my boss yesterday…”
That’s right: she wasn’t talking about that thing you think she was talking about.
We were talking about work, and about a relationship to work that used to feel fresh and exciting but was different now. Ana could hardly remember the fireworks she had once felt in this job. Nothing had gone wrong , but things didn’t seem quite right , either. That led to Ana looking around, asking herself, and even asking me, “Wait, how did I get here?”
She had played by the rules and done everything “right.” Instead of the happily ever after she had been promised, she was left with a case of low work libido, and—unfortunately—there’s just no little blue pill for that.
The Old Playbook for Women at Work
Ana had made all the moves she was supposed to. Armed with a pristine résumé and an advanced degree from Harvard, she was six months into a new, shiny role as Chief of Staff for one of the largest tech companies in the world.
It was the job she had always dreamed of. She was working on the types of projects that could actually change people’s lives—a true passion that drove her career. While her hands were calloused from her diligent climb up the corporate ladder, she rose through the ranks without martyring herself. Her hours were demanding but manageable, allowing her to balance a high-profile job, a vibrant social life, hobbies like yoga, and even a toddler. Her boss was a sponsor and an ally, and she had an incredible network of mentors and colleagues.
By her own standards, this was serious life goals material—at least on paper. But on that cold January morning, she sat in front of her computer looking at all the should-be-exciting projects on the year’s strategic plan and felt unmoved.
What had once been a career that gave her “butterflies” was suddenly giving her nothing. It was an emptiness she had never experienced at work—an emptiness that left her feeling frigid when all she wanted to do was feel hot , hot, hot .
“This is objectively so great,” she continued as she choked back tears. “So why does it feel like I wake up every day and I’m just not in the mood for any of it?” Like so many successful women, Ana was killing it as a leader on the outside. From the inside, however, her passion for her career was slowly dying.
Ana was experiencing what psychologists call languishing: “the void between flourishing and depression.”
Playing by the rules of an Old Playbook taught her a set of strategies— “get sponsors and mentors,” “manage bigger projects and budgets,” “supervise more people and be a killer boss,” “be a servant leader” —but she became so lost in all the performative doing at work that she forgot who she wanted to be at work. After years of box-checking, she had never been more successful—or more numbed out to her own success.
To be clear, all those things are important. It’s not that the Old Playbook is necessarily wrong or bad. It’s just that the Old Playbook is way too focused on how we prioritize other people. Mentors and sponsors are critically important, but what is their value if we don’t first believe in ourselves? Showing up for others as a servant leader can be transformational, but what about when we serve others at the expense of ourselves?
The Old Playbook has led too many women toward careers driven by the “shoulds.” We create careers where we too often burrow inside other people’s needs, challenges, and goals instead of prioritizing our own. This leaves too many of us uninspired at best (just like Ana), and burned out at worst.
The collateral damage of the Old Playbook has been insidious, and it’s not just anecdotal. All we have to do is look at three trendlines in the data to see the impact on women everywhere:
#1. There still aren’t enough of us in leadership roles. At the time of publication, less than 15 percent of CEOs in the Fortune 500—a bellwether metric for tracking women’s representation in leadership—were women, according to Forbes . Of those seventy-four women, you could count the number of women of color on your hands.
These numbers are abysmal. A lack of representation at the senior-most leadership level isn’t a bug in our workplaces—it’s a feature: according to Lean In and McKinsey’s joint Women in the Workplace 2022 report, only one in four C-suite leaders was a woman, and only one in twenty was a woman of color.
What’s even more troubling to me than the numbers themselves is the media hype. In 2021, for example, when the Fortune 500 added its first two Black women CEOs, headlines were gleeful:
“A record 41 women are Fortune 500 CEOs—and for the first time two Black women made the list,” hailed CNBC . “The female CEOs on this year’s Fortune 500 just broke three all-time records,” declared Fortune. Yes, this is all factual information. But the story should be why did it take this long, what are we going to do to change this pace of progress, and how do this few women still constitute a record?
Similarly, after Black women made gains on S&P Board seats in the early 2020s, outlets ran headlines like, “Corporate boards used to be mostly white and male. That’s changed since George Floyd’s murder” in USA Today or “Black women hold record share of S&P 500 boardroom seats” in Bloomberg.
Hold the phone. For all the media hype, Black women’s “record-breaking progress” was notching up a mere 4 percent of S&P 500 Board Seats. While these trailblazing women are worthy of celebration, the metrics aren’t.
On the contrary, the fact that we celebrate these metrics instead of rallying around them as a battle cry, shows us just how broken our system is—especially when we consider that at the same moment in time, male executives still controlled ninety-nine times more S&P 500 shares by value than women.
#2. We’re actively backsliding. The COVID-19 pandemic ushered in a staggering loss of millions of women from the workforce. While many were mothers, notably not all the women who left the workforce were mothers—something that is not discussed enough.
As the National Women’s Law Center found, jobs have rebounded after the pandemic, but women are returning to work at an alarmingly lower rate than men. Equally concerning is the backslide we’ve made in women’s earning potential.
According to the World Economic Forum (WEF), the pandemic reversed the already-snail’s-pace progress we were making on closing the gender pay gap. Since 2020, the WEF has extended its forecast for achieving gender pay equity by thirty-six years (the length of an entire generation), from 99 years to 135 years. Notably, that’s an aggregate estimate not adjusted for the larger gap faced by women of color.
No matter how we slice it or dice it—and no matter how many Future of Work, #MeToo, or DEI stories blanket our news feeds—too many women are moving backwards in the workplace. Let me be clear: I’m not trying to bum you out. I’m trying to keep it real about why, according to Forbes , 50 percent of women do not feel confident about their future job prospects.
#3. Women aren’t happy . This is about the quality of life in our existing system. While I’m concerned about issues like our representation in the workforce and in leadership, as well as gender pay equity, perhaps what’s most troubling to me is that women aren’t happy at work.
According to Deloitte’s 2022 Women @ Work survey, more than half of working women are more stressed today than they were in the past year, and nearly half of working women feel burned out. The study showed that, more than ever, working women feel like they’re drowning from an “always-on” culture. In fact, a full third of women surveyed feel like they can’t ever “switch off” from work. Even more troubling, the study found that nearly half of working women feel like they can’t “switch off” because, if they do, their career progression will be negatively impacted. Our hustle culture is crushing women. We are not thriving. We are merely surviving.
How Do We Thrive in a Broken System?
The numbers confirm wha