The Go-Getter Girl's Guide: Get What You Want in Work and Life (and Look Great While You're at It) - Softcover

Shigley, Debra

Softcover

ISBN 10: 031255575X ISBN 13: 9780312555757

Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin, 2009

Synopsis

Every office has one - a Go-Getter Girl - someone who seems to just know certain stuff about how to get the plum jobs/lifestyle she wants and damn, always looks great while she's at it. Magic? No, it's about strategizing--and The Go-Getter Girl's Guide shows you how.

Born out of interviews with hundreds of successful, stylish young women--including award-winning journalist Soledad O'Brien, Spanx founder Sara Blakely, and bestselling novelist Emily Giffin--The Go-Getter Girl's Guide provides a no-excuses, big-picture way of thinking about your life and career, as well as day-to-day strategies for how to:
- Navigate the tricky terrain of office politics
- Find and use a mentor
- Figure out when it's time to get a new job (or career)-and have the courage to act
- Dress (and groom!) for success
- And take care of yourself physically and emotionally

Combining the practical career wisdom of What Color Is Your Parachute? with the savvy fashion guidance of The Little Black Book of Style, this dynamite guide is sure to bring out the Go-Getter in generations of women to come.

About this title

About the Author

A graduate of Harvard University and Georgia State College of Law, Debra Shigley is a journalist who completed her J.D. while working as a full time senior editor for Atlanta magazine. She has appeared as a lifestyle expert on such national television programs as ABC's The View and TBS's Movie and a Makeover and has written for numerous publications, including Allure, Fast Company, Daily Candy, and Neiman Marcus's The Book. She lives in Atlanta with her husband.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

1.

The Birth of the Go-Getter Girl

The summer before my senior year at college, I really wanted to be lazy. No more shamefully underpaid journalism internships for me. I had spent previous semesters toiling practically wage free at places like Dateline NBC and Fast Company magazine. But this summer, I thought, I’m just going to have fun. In retrospect, I think this was code for, I’m about to graduate from college and I really have no clue what I want to do with my life or how to go about it, so I think I’ll just procrastinate a little longer! I took up a friend’s offer to move to New York and share a sweet rent-controlled sublet in Midtown, and the day after I arrived, I found myself a hostessing job at a hip downtown restaurant. There, the staff was a perfect slice of New York’s glittering, glamorous, wannabe life. The bartenders—all tall, dark, and Appaloosa-like—were “models”; the predominantly blond, buff, and all-American waitstaff were actors and singers; and the hostesses, a mix of exotic-looking beauties, were all dancers.

The weeks passed, and I scurried along, delivering menus and crossing names off the always-pages-long waiting list, less fazed than the rest of the staff by the occasional celebrity sighting. (When Keanu Reeves showed up, you’d think the president had arrived!) Less fazed, that is, until one day a lesser-known-boldface name walked in: Soledad O’Brien, then the host of NBC’s Weekend Today.

“Oh my gosh, do you know who that is?” I gushed to my fellow hosts, all hyperactive and borderline girl-crush. But I didn’t approach her. My gut told me not to disturb the famous lady with a stroller, hubby, and what appeared to be in-laws in tow. The next day, however, I was sitting in a park outside my apartment, feeling a bit bored with the hostessing gig, and at the same time a little ballsy, and I thought, Oh, what the hell, I’m going to write her a letter. I got out a pen and handwrote a three-or four-page letter, starting with the oh-so-original phrase, “I’ve never written a fan letter before.” I told her how much I admired her work, then explained my interest in television broadcasting and my experiences as a summer intern at two news outlets. Finally, I said that I didn’t have a clue what to pursue after graduation and asked if she would ever be willing to chat with me. I included my phone number and address and sent it off to Soledad O’Brien, c/o Weekend Today at Rockefeller Plaza—to what I figured was surely a black hole of weirdo fan mail and never-to-be-opened press kits.

A few days later, I was sitting in my apartment, watching MTV, when the phone rang. I picked up—okay, you know what’s about to happen—and heard a chirpy, television-toned voice at the other end. “Hello, is Debra there? This is Soledad O’Brien.” I couldn’t believe it! She said she had received my letter and asked me to come down to the show and have lunch. I was speechless. Days later I found myself sitting in the Today Show studio at 30 Rockefeller Center, and then at a restaurant with Soledad. (She ate a monster hamburger, confiding that she had just found out she was pregnant with her second child.)

Soledad was all business. Her first words when we sat down were a brisk, “So what do you have for me?”—meaning, fire away with the list of questions I was sure glad I’d prepared: How do I break into the field? (Producing, not on air.) How important are looks? (Very, but everyone will want you to change something so you just have to get over it.) How can you manage work and family? (You make it work.) At the end of our little meeting she generously offered to let me come visit whenever I wanted throughout the summer. I accepted her offer and went to visit every few weeks. Soledad set up mini–training sessions/informational interviews with other members of the staff and crew, and she let me sit in on some meetings and hang out with her behind the scenes, including when she was getting her makeup and hair done. She even started referring to me as her “faux intern.” Who could have known that a simple, honest, handwritten letter would lead to such an invaluable introduction into the world of TV news?

I certainly didn’t at the time, even if my instincts helped me stumble in the right direction. It wasn’t until after I entered the working world, first as an entry-level video journalist at CNN, and then as an editor for Atlanta magazine, that I made a startling observation: some women do know a set of unwritten, nearly second-nature rules about how to go after what they want and get it.

MEET SUZANNE

Suzanne is a young woman who, say, just started working at your office. She is smart, savvy, sophisticated, and stylish. She walks briskly into the conference room with a sparkle in her stride. She opens her mouth to speak, and all eyes turn, backs straighten, and everyone pays attention. Her words, filled with substance and thoughtfulness, pour forth polished and with just enough precision. She has presence—vibrance even. Above all else, Suzanne appears to be self-aware. But at the same time, her charisma is completely sincere.

As she speaks, you’re wondering (hoping?) whether there is anything wrong with Suzanne. You glance from her ensemble (a tidy navy Nanette Lepore–looking suit) to her hands (which, if not manicured with some pale pinky color, are always neatly groomed) to her shoes (fashionable spectator heels with just a splash of pizzazz). Even the folders of documents she’s using for her presentation that day are placed in front of her all neat and organized—not unlike her entire office, you’ve noticed, which remains relatively clutter free even during deadline week.

The degree of Suzanne’s substance and style is so impressive that, at first, you are—oh gosh, it kills to admit it—a little intimidated by her. Naturally, part of you wants not to like her—she’s just too poised and polished! She can’t possibly be down-to-earth, you think. But then you see her in passing around the office enough times to challenge that initial impression. She’s always smiling, and you’ll occasionally spot her in the break room making conversation with everyone from your boss to her secretary to the interns about, say, last night’s American Idol episode. And then you’re assigned to work on the same team as her for a project. She’s filled with ideas on how to get the job done (when did she find time to do all that extra research?), acts respectfully and appreciatively to everyone on the team, stays later than you and comes in earlier when it’s crunch time, and even volunteers to organize the food and beverage runs. Of course, she simply wows the bosses with the final product. You see that Suzanne is ambitious and focused, but you start to realize that she’s just plain cool. In other words, she is so not a b*tch.

Then, seemingly out of the blue, you hear that Suzanne got the coveted promotion to a new division of the company, complete with a 30 percent raise and a fab new Managing Director title—and she’s only twenty-eight! You really want to hate her, but you can’t. You respect and admire her too much! And, it’s so clear to you that Suzanne is not Miss Perfect. She’s just a go-getter—that is, a Go-Getter Girl.

After I’d been in the working world a few years, I’d met quite a few Suzannes—but at the time I hadn’t quite realized the shared characteristics among these distinctive women. Instead, you might say that the Go-Getter Girl was born a few years later on a beach in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, where I was vacationing with my former college roommate, Jenn. It was one of our regular cross-country—or in this case transcountry—get-togethers in which Jenn, and a handful of college and postcollege friends, and I would update one another on our love lives, swap style advice, share war stories about work, and generally plot the course of our various hopes and dreams.

In our years as recent college graduates we’d already observed the difference between certain types of young women in the workplace. There were the women, like Suzanne described above, who just seemed to know certain stuff about appropriate workplace behavior, how to socialize and network and how to always look great while they were at it. Then there were other young women who seemed frazzled, self-conscious, or easily dispirited—who stumbled to find their footing in a professional environment. We wondered what the Suzannes had in common—which factors set them apart from their less proactive colleagues. Jenn and I started to brainstorm women who typi-fied this all-around ambitious mentality, along with a certain fashion sense, poise, and grace. I thought about gals like Sara Blakely, the still-under-the-radar founder of Spanx, whom I’d met through work, and my mentor Soledad O’Brien. Jenn threw out some names of people who were successful but perhaps known for having a queen-of-mean personality or perhaps were not so stylish.

“Yes, maybe,“ I said. “But you see, I’m thinking about young women who seem to have it all going on—they’re stylish, successful, sassy, maybe even sexy. Definitely super smart—what’s the ‘it’ about these women?” I mused, sitting there on the sand, as Jenn splashed in the waves. Then Jenn looked up and said, with the crystal clarity of those Pacific waters, “They’re Go-Getter Girls!” And that’s when I knew I had to write a book based on this unique breed of young women.

Later, after I returned from Cabo, I sat down and decided to research the etymology of the term go-getter. I immediately went to the place where all research vague and specific begins nowadays: Google, of course. After a few clicks, I discovered that the word go-getter—a phrase I had heard people use often...

About this edition

• Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 031255575X
• ISBN 13: 9780312555757
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256