I’m excited to make a double announcement here on InPower Women! We have a new blogger joining us – Emily Bennington – who just wrote a great book called Who Says It’s a Man’s World: A Girl’s Guide to Corporate Domination. (Buy it in the InPower Women’s Book Store)
Emily and I took a few minutes to chat last week so you can get to know her better. Listen to the 12 minute interview here and read some of her followup answers to some of the questions my read of the book brought up. Please welcome Emily and look for her posts to begin soon here on the site!

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Emily’s Insights on Women & Corporate Domination

1. On Yoga & Business

I became interested in yoga a few years ago first as a form of exercise. I had friends who were regulars and loved it so I decided to tag along. And like most people I carried my own set of baggage and issues into class but – to my surprise – yoga became like therapy in that it gave me an outlet to work through them. So, for example, one of the reasons I write about careers is because – personally – my biggest anxieties have always been around work. I’ve never felt successful “enough” and that used to eat at me in the form of crippling comparisons, self-doubt, and general fear for my future. The principles of yoga opened the door for me to learn that sometimes we don’t get what we want because we are being taught we can survive without it. I’ve never lost my drive, but I have lost the stubborn insistence that “success” is living in this particular city, making this particular amount of money, and having these particular accolades. Through yoga I’ve learned that true success is who you are first which, of course, is the foundation for sustained success anyway.

2. More Career Benefits of Mindfulness

Piggybacking on the example above, in my own career I’ve seen how getting caught up in the future, judging my success against others, and being anxious about unmet goals actually sets up a victim mentality that becomes self-fulfilling. In other words, by focusing on what I lacked in my life, I was only strengthening  my perception of lack. And because we act based on how we feel, my disempowered thinking was creating a very disempowered reality. I was grossly undercharging for my work, I was insecure about pursuing new business, and I even carried myself differently. I can’t think of a better way to describe it other than to say I was “walking small.” But then I realized – in part through yoga and practicing mindfulness – that the source of my anxiety was focusing on things outside my control. I can’t control how successful someone else is or precisely when I achieve a specific goal, and so stewing over those things is not only a waste – it’s counterproductive because it’s unhealthy. That’s when I decided to turn my attention to WHO I want to be over WHAT I want to achieve. I don’t always have a say in what happens to me but I can always  choose how I respond to it. That’s a tiny shift in thinking but, believe me, it clears up a lot of negative head traffic.

3. What’s wrong with “work-life balance”?

I don’t like the phrase “work-life balance” because I think there’s a lot of competition and guilt involved with it. There’s competition in the sense that we pit our “work self” against our “home self” and guilt in the sense that if it doesn’t meet some perfect 50/50 ratio, we feel like we’ve failed. Yuck. What I tell women is to focus on being your BEST self all the time regardless of whether you’re at work or home. When you approach your life in this way, you always know the next right step.

4. The Virtue in Virtues

In Who Says It’s a Man’s World, I outline a process called VIG living where I essentially ask readers to define their best selves by defining their virtues, intentions, and goals. Virtues are the anchor to the process in the sense that they are what you want to stand or be known for. Intentions are the specific action steps you take to underscore your virtues, and goals are the things you want to achieve. This is where focusing on the WHO over the WHAT comes into play because virtues carry far more weight in this definition of a “best self” than goals do. So in my personal practice, I review my own VIG list – which is printed in the book – and evaluate myself on how well I’m living up to it.

5. Is Your Reputation Important?

Be intentional about the reputation you want to create. Too often I see women – and men for that matter – react to situations at work versus respond to them. For example, let’s say you have a coworker who says something that rubs you the wrong way. You get angry. Pretty soon you’re swimming in negative thoughts which begin to spill over into career-limiting behaviors. Maybe you start talking about the coworker behind their back or maybe you get a little terse in your interactions with them. But, again, if you know WHO you want to be – and creating a VIG list is an excellent first step – you can respond based on your best self and not the trigger. Most execs miss the boat on this. They just go through life reacting based on how they think or feel at any given moment with no circuit breaker between their mind and their mouth. Then they don’t have the career they want and  wonder why.

Have more questions about the book or this post? Leave them in comments and I’ll make sure Emily sees it!

Emily Bennington is the author of Who Says It’s a Man’s World: The Girls’ Guide to Corporate Domination. She can be reached online at www.emilybennington.com, on Facebook at www.facebook.com/EmilyBennington, and on Twitter at www.twitter.com/EmilyBennington.

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