#BOTY 2018: Day 4

On the 4^th day of Christmas my true love sent tome Lean In by Sheryl Sandberg 😉

The first time I heard of Sheryl Sandberg was at the 2017 Global Leadership Summit where she was a speaker. I must be honest, she spoke with such grace, ease and confidence. She is the COO of Facebook and before that she worked for the US Treasury Department and Google, so I was took lol listen here work for Google AND Facebook and let’s see if you wont have people’s attention. As a 4 year old girl her siblings said she didn’t play but she supervised them playing which is really funny “Play Supervisor” and every time her parents had to travel she would say “oh no now I have to take care of my siblings and grandma and grandpa.”  Such a sassy young lady her teachers even said she was bossy and the mum said, “no she is not bossy, she has executive leadership skills.” And you know she highlighted how different for male and females from a young age, if you are a little boy supervising, giving instruction to your fellow peers, then you are a leader but if you are a little girl doing the exact same thing you labelled as bossy!

So this book really talks about being a woman with a will to lead in the workplace. I love that she draws from her experiences and just her portfolio alone just makes you want to read the book. The gender division in leadership whether you are from the first world country or third world country is the same. She talks about how men can be promoted based on potential alone while for women they are promoted based on past achievements. It’s very interesting how there is still sexual harassment in the workplaces, 2 months imprisonment for raping a 2 year old girl, helpless widows being swindled off their inheritances by crooked lawyers etc, imagine if there were actually more women in power addressing these issues?

One of the things that brings many women down is self doubt, we lower our expectations of what we can achieve and compared to our male colleagues, few of us aspire for senior positions; women make up 5% of world CEO’S. She talks about how she needed to make an intellectual and emotional adjustment. While it’s hard to shake feelings of doubt there is a distortion. She talks about how her brother was confident and she had self doubt and she could challenge the notion that she was headed for failure and she had to learn to undistort the distortion.

We all know supremely confident people who had no right to feel that way and yet also know people who could achieve a whole lot more if they only believed in themselves. Like so many things a lack of confidence can become a self fulfilling prophecy.

But as the good old saying goes “fake it, till you make it”As she says when you are offered a seat on the rocket ship, don’t ask what seat, get on the thing where else could it be flying to?!

I could go on and on but one needs to read this book to understand the plight of women in the workforce. Some don’t care now, but just wait until someone close to you, your wife, your daughter, you friend, your sister shares one experience of injustice in the workplace, you will look for this book lol. As she says herself it’s not a self-help book (I don’t believe in those by the way, only you know the help you need and when you are ready you will know where to get it from) or about career management but it’s an eye opener on what it takes to reach the top and also an eye opener for men to understand just what it takes for women to survive in the workplace.

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