Women's Leadership & Executive Coach | Career Strategist | Manager to Leader Promotion Expert | Author
Here are the top five things you’re doing to stay stuck in your career: People-pleasing. Working like a workhorse. Trying to be perfect. Saying yes to everything. Playing by the same old rules. This shit will get you nowhere, or at least nowhere higher than where you currently are. None of it can be solved in a split-second, but what I can draw your attention to is one remedy that if you started working on today, you’d be well on your way to driving yourself out of a huge rut. That one remedy is strategy. When we’re not being strategic, we do all the tedious work so that our teams only do the “cool” work and stick around. We keep ourselves in the weeds working overtime hitting the same wall instead of working smarter. We set the bar sky-high so that we can never progress unless we’re perfect. We’re afraid to say no and potentially disappoint anyone while disappointing ourselves constantly, weighing ourselves down with overpromises and a stuffed schedule. Becoming strategic lifts us out of that life. Becoming strategic hoists us out of the burnout track, out of clipping weeds, out of invisibility and takes us from managing down to managing up. So why are women so bad at it? Why is strategy not our natural strong suit? Because we’re conditioned to believe that people-pleasing, working overtime, being perfect, saying yes and playing by the rules will get us what we want. It’s as simple as that. We have a role and a lane marked out for us and we’re scared to deviate from it. At the core of it, we’re afraid of failure, but I’m here to tell you that you’ll continue to crumble on the field of trying to play the game if you play it like you always have. As you move up, you need to rewrite the rules of the game. That’s what being strategic is about. For whatever problem you’re facing, How do you mobilize people and the company to tackle the problem? How do you bring a free-thinking, creative, innovative approach to the challenges instead of making micro changes to get more out of the team? How do you tap into vision and knowledge outside of your scope and industry to solve the issue? How are you recognizing what’s in the way and inventing new ways to overcome it? As a leader, you need to be able to break what exists and redefine what the future holds. You need to let go of what’s keeping you stuck and migrate into being what you truly are: A rule-breaker. If you recognize yourself in any of the staying-stuck behaviors we so commonly fall into as women, you’re not alone. I’m here to help you drive somewhere so much better by using the strategy module of The Powerhouse Blueprint. Book your free call today to learn more.
