Conclusion

Confidence isn’t walking into a room thinking you are better then everyone, it’s walking in and not having to compare yourself to anyone at all.

There you have it. We’ve come to the end of our journey and hopefully you have new ways of thinking, new ways of talking to yourself, and new ways of dealing with failure. The goal of this book was to give you a practical approach to risk, resilience, and confidence. The first part of this book focused on mitigating self-limiting behaviors (perfectionism, people-pleasing, control, isolation, and busyness) and becoming intentional about your thoughts and self-talk. If your thoughts are negative, destructive, or self-defeating, you need to drown them out. Intentional thinking is hard and controlling my thoughts is probably one of the hardest things I practice every day. But if I don’t, the negative self-talk and self-defeating tapes play on a continuous loop. Do I occasionally get down on myself and start beating myself up for doing/saying something stupid? Of course, I do. But the down time is minimized as I return my thoughts to the resilience strategies we’ve covered and remind myself that failure is an event not a person.

In the subsequent section of this book we focused on communication habits and how those habits not only effect how others perceive us, but more importantly, how we view ourselves. Usually, the focus of communication is on the other person—did they accurately receive the message I sent. And I agree. It is important that our message is received and interpreted accurately.

But my emphasis is on how our communication impacts our impression of ourselves. Every time we write an email making ourselves small by using the word “just” (i.e., I’m just checking in), we become small in the message receiver’s eyes and we perceive ourselves as small too. The receiver reads the words once. But we read the words multiple times as we edit the message which continues to reinforce that we are small. When we start a sentence with a qualifier—”I’m not an expert but…”—and then go on to make our brilliant comment, not only does the receiver hear that we’re not experts, but we tell ourselves that we aren’t really sure we know what we’re talking about either. We undermine our own competence and reinforce our lack of confidence. And we do that every time we say sorry, use a qualifier, employ hedges, and deflect compliments. We do not need to be constantly telling ourselves to stay small. There are enough people in the world wanting to make us small. Eliminating those self-defeating communication habits allows us to feel confident in our competence. It doesn’t mean we’ll always be right. But we’ll have the courage to speak up which is half the battle. And if we’re wrong, we have the resilience to keep going.

Finally, we concluded our journey with the beauty of the sisterhood. We are all in this together and it is time we started supporting each other and working together to create a culture of cooperation and abundance instead of competing and sabotaging each other. I wish I had known this when I was younger. But better late than never. I want to continually lift other women up as I climb and I hope other women are inspired to do the same.

The men reading this book need to be acknowledged. And I do hope that men read it. Let me be clear. I love men. I wouldn’t be in this position without the support of men—most notably my father who insisted in first grade that I study hard, make good grades (this is first grade!), and get into the best college I can; my husband who, with our three daughters under the age of four, insisted that a mind is a terrible thing to waste and made it possible for me to obtain my Ph.D.; and my former department head who convinced me that I could do this—I really was smart enough to be a college professor.

Please note that none—none, zero, nada—of the suggestions in this book, hurt men. I’m not telling women to take up more space than is rightfully theirs. I’m telling them to take up the space that belongs to them. When women stop using qualifiers in their speech, it doesn’t hurt men at all but it does build women up. When I ask men who enroll in my Women in Sales class if they’d rather work with a team of wimps who are afraid to speak up, afraid to ask for what they want, afraid to take a risk or work with a team of confident, competent partners who are not afraid to stand up for themselves and the organization, the answer is no surprise. The men don’t want wimps on their team.

Truly great and productive teams are made of strong and powerful members. Hence, the title of my TEDx talk: empowering women benefits everyone. I hope the men who read this book find the suggestions helpful. And as this book concludes, I want to say a special thanks to all the men who have taken Women in Sales. They become our greatest advocates and have a special place in my heart.

Do I wish this book and my teaching could identify and change all of the external factors that cause women to doubt themselves, make themselves small, and destroy their confidence? Absolutely. But that’s not going to happen in these pages. It is beyond the scope of this book to identify and correct the root causes undermining women’s confidence. And while I have my suspicions of some of the causes that have resulted in women feeling “less than,” I will leave it to the researchers to search out the causality and address the root cause. My focus is on helping women get comfortable with risk, resilience, and confidence.

Do I wish this book could offer solutions to all of the gender disparity and inequity in our world? Absolutely. But I’ve tried to fix society and guess what, I can’t. I cannot single handedly fix all the injustice in the world. However, I can fix myself. I can learn how to speak up even when I scared. I have learned how to ask for what I want even if I might not get it. I have learned to take risks that have opened new opportunities. When I am told no, I try again. And I can teach other women to do the same. The more we all start speaking up, taking risks, moving past setbacks, the more the world will change.

Once, when giving a talk about asking for what you want to a group of high school students, a young woman lamented that women who ask for more are perceived as pushy, greedy, and unlikeable. She implied that was her rationale for not speaking up. What she says may be true. However, the more we ask, the less the behavior becomes an outlier event and the more it becomes the norm. I hope I’ve inspired and equipped you to practice resilience, build confidence, and take risks. Let’s make strong, powerful, kind, compassionate, and confident women the norm and change the world.