How our girlhood experiences shape our businesses, with Rachel Simmons

Rachel Simmons0:02

And I just have always been astonished at the expectation that we somehow separate those two things. Because, of course, who we were as children comes into play. Of course, messages that we heard, ways that we were rewarded or punished for taking up space, are going to shape who we are in the biggest risk taking moments of our lives.

Leah Neaderthal0:23

Welcome to the smart gets paid podcast with me. Leah Neaderthal, I help women land higher paying clients in their B2B, consulting, coaching and service based businesses, but I've never been a salesperson. My background is in corporate marketing, and when I started my first consulting business, I learned pretty quickly that it's about 1000 times harder to sell your own stuff than it is to sell someone else's. So I taught myself how to do it, and I created the sales approach that I now share with my clients so they can feel more comfortable in the sales process, get more of the right clients and get paid way more for every client contract. So whether your client contracts are $5,000 $100,000 or more, if you want to work with more of the clients you love, do more of the work you love, and get paid more than you ever thought you could, then you're in the right place. Let's do it together. Thanks for tuning in, and don't forget to rate this podcast. Review it and share it. Thanks.

Leah Neaderthal1:19

Hey there, Leah here, thanks for tuning into this episode. I hope that wherever you are, wherever you are listening to this, I hope you're having a great week, making some good progress in your business, and, of course, taking some time for yourself. So story time. All right, you guys ready? So back when I was in fifth grade, a girl came to my school, and pretty soon she decided that she did not like me, and pretty soon after that, she started bullying me, but not bullying like shoving me into a trash can or anything like that. She did it in that way that only girls can do to each other. She turned all of my friends against me. In fact, my most vivid memory of that time was that I was walking down the hall at school, where the hallway kind of makes this right turn, and I saw a group of three of my friends walking towards me, and when they got close to me, I don't know, maybe 1015, feet away, they sort of stopped, looked at each other, turned around and ran away laughing, you know, leaving me standing there with my backpack, like wondering what happened. And that's just one of the scenes I remember kind of like that from around those years, in like fifth grade, those like early middle school years, and thanks to my bully for all those years, I was ostracized, I was made fun of. I was tormented, and because I went to a really small school, like there were only 66 kids in my class, I couldn't even really get away from her, which meant that wherever I was, you know, I was in class or at basketball practice, because we both played basketball if I made any move whatsoever, or if I drew attention to myself in any way, I was at risk of getting made fun of. You know, how, like Burley's, just find you with any move you make. So I learned, you know, back in those years, I learned to just sort of put my head down and do my work so that I wouldn't open myself up to being tormented. And you know, eventually I found a great group of friends and you know, I went on to have an awesome high school experience, but those years when I was bullied, those are still one of the most formative experiences of my adolescence and really, of my life. So then, is it any wonder that when I was early in my corporate career, I just approached it like I wanted to put my head down, do my work, but really just not draw attention to myself. And then later on, when I started my first business with my former partner, I was just a lot more comfortable being in the background, right? And I let her be the face of the business. And even when I started my coaching business, you know, where it was just me, it took me years to be comfortable putting my face on my own website and just showing up online and being front and center. I mean, is it any wonder, after my experience being bullied like that kind of makes perfect sense, and that's because our girlhood experiences shape us, and they show up later in our lives. And it's not just negative experiences, either. You know, when I was young, my parents made sure that I tried sports and instruments and all the things, right, like, as you do, and if I didn't like them, I could quit. I mean, my parents weren't gonna like force me to pursue something that I really didn't like, which, you know, maybe they experienced when they were growing up. Seems like, you know, normal parenting, right? But as I grew up, that whole, you know, quitting things I didn't enjoy sort of morphed into quitting things that I wasn't good at, instantly. And you know, if you're someone for whom that sounds a little familiar, you know that when you start quitting things. You aren't good at instantly. Then you stop putting yourself in situations or trying new things where you can't be good instantly. You stop persevering, even when it's hard. This is actually something I talked about back in episode 28 the confidence to show up and so fast forward even more to when I started my first business. I discovered that while I was smart, right, and I had done well in my career, I had no grit. I lost that ability, or, you know, never developed that ability to really persevere when something was really challenging. And as a business owner, you need grit. So were my parents wrong not to force me to continue something that I didn't like, no, but did that experience shape how I showed up in my business? Absolutely, and it still does. Grit is something that I've had to develop on purpose over the past 10 or so years. And so zooming out here, I've always been interested in human behavior. You know, why we are the way we are, why we act, the way we act, why we feel the way we feel. And over the years, and certainly more in recent generations, a lot of us have been more interested in this type of understanding, you know, observing the way we're feeling, the way we're acting, and we look backwards to understand, you know, where that comes from. I mean, more people are doing this kind of exploration in therapy or just through their own personal development. So on the whole, I think it's becoming more common to look at our experience as girls and shine a light on how they're impacting us as women. But as a sales coach, I'm really interested. I mean, I'm kind of obsessed with how our experience as girls shape how we show up in our businesses, and specifically in the sales process. So you know, exploring like why it feels uncomfortable to send a follow up email or post on LinkedIn or charge more for our work, because our girlhood experiences show up in hundreds of ways. Some you know that are easily identifiable, right, like the ones I just mentioned, but some that are almost imperceptible, but still affect us every day. And if we can shine a light on those girlhood experiences that we've had, then we can better understand what's holding us back today, so that we can be better business owners, we can be happier and we can be a lot more successful. And this is why I was drawn to the work of the woman I'm speaking to today, Best Selling Author, Rachel Simmons. Rachel Simmons is an internationally recognized educator and author of The New York Times bestsellers, odd girl out the curse of the good girl and enough as she is, how to help girls move beyond impossible standards of success to live healthy, happy and fulfilling lives. As a leadership development expert and coach. Rachel helps people build their resilience, amplify their voices and own their own courage. She serves on the faculty of the Google school for leaders. She's an associate with cultivating leadership, and until recently, she was the director of the Phoebe Lewis Leadership program at Smith College. She's the co founder of the national nonprofit, girls leadership, and her writing has appeared in The Washington Post, The Atlantic slate and the New York Times, and if you ever watch Good Morning America, she's also a contributor there. I actually came across Rachel's work first in my 20s when I stumbled upon her best selling book, odd girl out, which is about the culture of microaggression in adolescent girls. So it explains why boys bully each other by shoving each other into lockers, and why girls use psychological torment and pretty much make each other's lives miserable. And the reasons behind that are fascinating, but seriously, that book actually just blew my mind because it helps me make sense of the bullying I had experienced since then, I've continued following her work, and her focus has evolved from girls to women, which she'll explain a little bit more about that in our conversation, and I've stayed apprised of her writing through to her most recent book, called the curse of the good girl. Now the curse of the good girl shines a light on the expectations that society places on girls, which Rachel captures in this idea of the good girl, and how, not only is it impossible to achieve those expectations, but the result of this idea of the good girl has some really damaging consequences for both girls and women, because even Though she's talking about girls now, what she discovered was that a lot of the women that she was speaking to had experienced and felt and learned and internalized the same lessons about being a good girl. And of course, since we're the ones running our businesses, the consequences that we've experienced of society's pressure to be a good girl, those consequences we've experienced in our lives, also show up in our businesses. So if you've ever had or have a fear of making mistakes, if you're a perfectionist, or, you know, like me, a recovering perfectionist, or if you were raised with this idea of success and achievement and that you had to be good at everything, or if you've ever. Felt like you can't do something or say something because it's not considered, you know, nice, then you'll recognize yourself in Rachel's books and in the conversation today. The conversation I'm sharing today is part of the fireside chat series where I talk with authors and thought leaders about topics that aren't like about business, but that affect every woman business owner. So let's dive into my conversation with leadership coach, educator and best selling author Rachel Simmons.

Leah Neaderthal10:30

Do you have an actual sales process? I'm talking about not a general sense of what you should be doing, but a real process where you know exactly what step comes next, who to follow up with and when. And you can see at a glance where every potential client stands, if the answer is no, or if yours feels clunky, or you're reinventing the wheel every single time I made something for you, it's called roadmap to clients. It's a free 20 minute video course, and in it you'll map out your customized sales process, step by step, from the very first contact with a potential client all the way to a signed proposal. It's the same foundational process we use with every Academy member, and it's completely free. Go to smart gets paid.com/roadmap to get started. Rachel Simmons, thank you so much for joining me. Thank you for having me well. So I have been following your work for quite some time, and your work has changed over time, always covering the experiences of girls and women. Okay, so at this point, how do you describe what you do,

Rachel Simmons11:34

starting with the easy questions, I've never really been able to answer that question well, but what I would describe myself as is primarily a teacher, because I really love to write curriculum. I'm kind of a design a program design nerd, and what I do is my women's leadership development work, both as a facilitator and as a coach, focuses on how who we were as girls can shape the way that we lead now, and in many ways, how the culture has made us feel that we are the ones that need to be fixed, while it is, in fact, the culture that needs to be changed and fixed. And so I do still work with girls, but I do primarily now work with adults on leadership development, and see, I still can't be concise. Did I everyone just fell asleep in the middle of that description? No, no, no, but yeah. So that's what I do, plus, you know, various and sundry other little side hustles,

Leah Neaderthal12:32

yeah, side hustles, including writing several

Rachel Simmons12:35

best selling books. I write books and I don't know, I do little gigs for Good Morning America. My whatever it is I do, I'm I generally just like, enjoy doing things that I'm interested in with different kinds of people. And that seems to lead me in lots of different directions.

Leah Neaderthal12:53

I love that. I love that well. So your work started with this book, odd girl out around the culture of microaggression among high school and middle school age girls, and now you're working with adult women like what prompted the shift to between those two populations?

Rachel Simmons13:10

Well, pretty much every book I wrote about girls, the mothers who are the typically, the ones who would come to the book talk would pull me aside and be like, Hey, I know you wrote this book for my daughter, but it's actually about me. And I'd be like, Yeah, great, cool. Thanks. Obviously, not really taking it in because I was so focused on understanding girls better. And after a while, I began to really listen to that and and then, coincidentally, I was invited to facilitate a workshop for Google for women leaders at Google. And after I recovered from my imposter syndrome and was like, Who me, what? Go to Google, and, you know, hyperventilated and flipped out, I went and did it, and did a great job, and fell in love with working with women, and realized that actually, I could understand completely now why all those women were coming up to me saying, This book's about me, because so much of what girls go through repeats itself for us as adult women. And so now I can see how much my career studying girls really prepared me to support women.

Leah Neaderthal14:14

Now I love it. Yeah, it's, there's this little piece I, you know, screenshotted from the internet, that's like, when the universe sends me a sign, it's like, no thanks. I'll wait for a sign of your sign. Yeah, what happens?

Rachel Simmons14:27

Totally, yes, that's what happened. And also, I mean, to be personal for a minute, I had a lot of success at a young age. My first book came out, and I was 27 which feels like, like I'd barely just gotten my period. And like, you know, I mean, when I look back, I was really, really young, and it was thrilling, and I went on Oprah, on the Today Show, and honestly, had written that book, not for a minute thinking anybody would read it. It was like a healing process for me, and was kind of launched into this life as a professional. Public speaker. I mean, I remember the day learning that someone would pay me to talk. I was like, What are you even talking about? Like somebody would give me money to just stand on a stage and speak about what I think. So that's about how naive I was and unprepared. And so I kind of sprawled along for a couple of decades going from speech to speech, and realized that maybe I wasn't super fulfilled by that after a certain point, because people really just want to hear the most important things that you think you have to say, and then you end up doing it over and over again, and it becomes a little boring. So I was also ready for a change. Yeah, that

Leah Neaderthal15:36

makes perfect sense. That book that you wrote at 27 being a girl out which is the book that I first read that really spoke to me, because as like you, I was bullied as a young girl, and so understanding why that happens and how that shows up in later life, which if you guys haven't read this book, go out and get it. If this was part of your experience, or if you were around this experience, it's really, really eye opening, but when we talk about, how did girlhood experiences show up in our lives as adults, and so when we talk about girlhood experiences, what are we talking about here?

Rachel Simmons16:10

Well, what we're talking about is first and foremost, the messages that we heard when we were girls. So one of the questions that I ask groups that I work with, and I actually now work with men a lot, because companies are now bringing me in to educate their men and what I would call gender intelligence. Because, of course, it's not just our responsibility as women to you know, as I mentioned, change ourselves, but but the culture has to partner with us on that. But the question that I often ask is, when you were growing up in the culture where you grew up, how was a good girl expected to act? And that's really the starting point we talk about the mainstream gender norms that we all grew up with. And when you ask a question like that, what's really interesting, especially when you work, as I do, with global companies, people from all over the world answer that question almost identically, with a couple of exceptions. And so what you hear are things like the good girl was polite and, you know, liked by everyone, and modest and selfless, and didn't break the rules and didn't take up too much space, and was smart, but not too smart. And you know, goes on and on, and then I ask the question, tell me what gets a leader promoted in your organization? And we take those two lists and we find that they're often in deep contrast with each other. So to get promoted, you have to be visible, and you have to know all the right people, and you have to be bold and distinguish yourself. And those terms of success are often, as I said, just at great odds with the messages and the muscles that girls were flexing when they were growing up. And so that's one of the questions that we look at, is like, how is it possible for women to succeed when the rules for how they are supposed to behave are so totally different from each other in girlhood and adulthood, or at least adulthood in the workplace, yeah.

Leah Neaderthal18:02

And I knew that what you're describing the good girl, right? The girl was supposed to act or behave or her experience. I tended to think that, you know, because I was raised in the south and, you know, and I'm Jewish, but like Southern Jews aren't the same as like Northern the character of like Northern Jews. And I tended to think that, like, I had sort of gotten it more than, you know, your average person, but it sounds like it's all over the place, and everybody gets a different version of this. How does that start to show up later? Well, I

Rachel Simmons18:35

think it shows up when, let's say, I mean, I think we have a lot of access to messaging around this, actually. So if you look at so much literature that's aimed at women in leadership, or just women who are in corporate or leadership spaces, so much of it is like, women don't ask, right? Like, why don't women ask for a raise? Or women the Confidence Code, like, Why are women struggling with confidence, or Why are women, you know, I don't know, not speaking up, or have imposter syndrome, or whatever it is, so much of the pathologizing of women in leadership books really comes from that hard right turn that they're expected to take. And let me also be clear, it's not just that women are expected to play by a different set of rules to succeed. It's that when they do try to play by those rules, it's like, okay, I'm willing to stop being a good girl. I'll speak up. I'll tell you what. I think we get dinged for it. So there's really no way to go if you're damned if you do. You're damned if you don't, and that is what has been missing from the conversation. And instead, I think we've heard a lot about kind of lean in, and if you just decide, make the decision as an individual, you should be able to be successful. And it's just not really the case. But that's often, I think, how it shows up in we hear all this message, all these messages. Around, you know? Why? Why are women lacking?

Leah Neaderthal20:03

Yeah, it's so. I mean, I see it in the women I work with because, you know, I'm working with women who are starting, who are running their own consulting or coaching businesses. They've sort of taken their expertise. They have to sort of be the face, they have to be the expertise. They have to be everything. And I think this idea of women don't ask. Or women, you know, we don't toot our own horns, all of the things that the good girl is supposed to be. You know, it's one thing if you are working in a company, and maybe you have mentors, or maybe you have people or a culture that says, at least, try to do this right when you're on your own. It's even harder. Because what kills me about all this, like, you know, women don't ask, or, Why aren't women competent, or whatever is that it's not a switch you can flip on. You know, there in the work that I do, we talk about, there's a lot of learning, but there's also a ton of unlearning. And this is a lifelong unlearning process to, you know, unlearn, that if you celebrate an accomplishment, that you're somehow bragging or you're somehow going to be shut out of the group, you're going to not be liked, right? Which is where I think the link between what you're doing now and what we're doing as girls is so strong because all of these fears that we have. You know, at least in my experience, and from what I've seen, all these fears we have now about what's going to happen if we do the things that we've never been done, but we're not told to do. Those fears come from when we were girls and we were afraid to be shut out of the group. I mean, do you see that as well? And the way

Rachel Simmons21:35

that you track that definitely, and that's why. So one of the funny things, maybe not haha, funny, maybe strange. Funny things about being new to the corporate world. Because, you know, when Google called me, that was just about five years ago, so I'm a newbie, which means I'm not afraid to ask you what your acronym means. I love being like, what, what are you what are you even talking about? Like, I'm just, like, fascinated by corporate vernacular and like, just, I just find it astonishingly excluding and also ridiculous sometimes, and also just the fact that like, and I'm, by the way, about to make a point, so I'm not trying to be totally random here, but like, the fact that like, also feelings don't seem to have much of a place in in the corporate world. And just like, there's a lot of indirection. Used to say things that actually would be better said candidly, but what's really kind of bizarre is that there's this expectation that when you go to work, it's like either you're not bringing your past with you, or that somehow your whole life began on the first day of your job, and that we're have we're supposed to somehow Keep divorced from our professional lives and personas and experiences, anything about ourselves from beyond the office or beyond the Zoom screen, and that's insane. And I just have always been astonished at the expectation that we somehow separate those two things. Because, of course, who we were as children comes into play. Of course, messages that we heard, ways that we were rewarded or punished for taking up space are going to shape who we are in the biggest risk taking moments of our lives, right? Like who's going to take a leap and be willing to risk failure and be willing to risk all kinds of difficulty if they've heard the message their whole lives that good girls don't do that. So there is a lot of unlearning that needs to happen.

Leah Neaderthal23:26

Yeah, I mean, and I think about it from myself, you know, I think that, generally speaking, in the best of all worlds, your girlhood experiences are shaped by people who are very well meaning, right? But you don't realize, like, the impact that those have. So I was, you know, my my family, really valued education achievement. You know, I was like, if I got an A minus, it was like, why didn't you get an A or an A plus? And that followed me through college, right where I actually, in my last semester of senior year, I withdrew from a class because I thought I had taken it pass fail, and I had actually taken it for a grade, and I was about to, like, get a D in it, basically, and it would ruin my GPA. And so this constant achievement, you know, now as a in the corporate world and as a business owner, that shows up in so many ways. You know, it shows up in always needing to be busy, always thinking about work. It shows up in everything. And, you know, were my parents, like, wrong to foster this in me at the time? Absolutely not. But it has, I think we're always sort of experiencing the unintended consequences of of our experiences.

Rachel Simmons24:39

Yeah. And I can also say, like as a coach, it's, you know, incredibly important to be self aware, just to understand, how does your past shape who you are today? How do lots of early messages as you're pointing out? Leah, like beyond who you were as a girl. And I want to also kind of pan out for a minute and talk about what it. Has meant to grow up as a young woman in the last couple of generations, because I think that some people would argue, and interestingly so. Sidebar, I am occasionally invited to make presentations on gender intelligence to boards of directors of like publicly traded companies. And not long ago, I did one of these presentations, and the board was primarily like, older white dudes, maybe like in their 70s, probably like grand parental age, say. And a lot of them were just like, What are you talking about? Like, I thought all this good girl stuff was a thing of the past. I mean, look at all of the accomplishments that young women have celebrated. And aren't we past that sort of in this post gender world, right? And it's really That's adorable. Yeah, totally. And I was like, Okay, so anyway, I mean, what's really remarkable about that is how much, how easy it is to think that actually, like, if you do look kind of superficially at the opportunities that women are given, and actually like, if you look at the ways that colleges and universities prepare women, even women's colleges are preparing women for the world, you hear a lot of like, Girl Power rhetoric, and you know, the sky's the limit, and you can do anything that boys can do, and they're Really, I mean, it's two things. Number one, there really isn't a conversation about sexism. We're not, we are not training young women to be prepared to manage discrimination on the basis of their gender. We know that it is a rampant problem, and that you can contrast that, for example, in the United States, with African American families who very intentionally and fiercely train their children to be prepared for racism and and there's a we can talk about what some of the differences there might be in terms of how those kids grow up and how they react to the culture. But the point is like you can understand why some people might say, Oh, isn't everything great for girls and women? Because we're not, as a society, training our girls to get ready for what is still out there. But the second thing I want to say is that, you know, we're sending very mixed messages to girls, so we're saying to them, and I think, by extension, to women, you know, go ahead and do everything you want. You can have it all. And we haven't really upgraded some of our more outdated expectations of girls. So we're still telling them your body has to look a certain way, you have to have lots of friends and be incredibly likable and kind of be there for everyone. You have to kind of do everything perfectly and please everyone and not fail. And we haven't updated our expectations of girls. And so I think that has created enormous ambivalence, but also, just like, total, what's called role overload in girls and women, where it's a sense of like, I have to do. I have to be all of these different ways. I have to be this, like, badass, you know, ambitious person, but I also have to take care of everyone else around me, and that's

Leah Neaderthal27:56

exhausting, absolutely. And I think that, you know, I was listening to something that you had said on other podcasts around the ways in which, all those ways it's like perfection by some other name, right? Maybe self the way we have to take care of ourselves perfectly. We have to do like the perfect self care. We have to be the perfect parents. We have to be the perfect everything. And part of that is, of course, like the external messages that we get around you know what we're supposed to do, but I think it lands in an ear that is raised to believe that anyway, absolutely.

Rachel Simmons28:32

And it's sort of it reminds me of something that my friend Courtney Martin said or wrote in her book, perfect girl starving daughters, which is that girls grew up hearing that they could be anything, but they heard that they had to be everything. And I think that distinction is very powerful and really cuts to the heart of what so many, so many girls end up trying to unlearn, or women need to unlearn as they come to the awareness that once they have children, you cannot be everything to everyone. And I think that's a real crisis for so many women who, especially women who are working full time outside the home, absolutely well.

Leah Neaderthal29:07

So thinking about this through the lens of women business owners, and now you, of course, are are doing consulting and coaching in your own your own business, I really want to hone in on we are sort of always replaying the experiences we had as girls, even as women, even like writing a proposal or something, and you know, might be surprised to discover the way that they're maybe a reaction that they're having, or the way that they're thinking about something might have been formed or as a result of something from their from their childhood. I can think of a perfect example of a friend of mine who was pretty much in the process, process of getting ghosted by a client who she was really excited to work with, and she had put together this proposal, and they just were not getting back to her. And she started like the interim. Narrative really started going around, you know, they must be mad at me. Maybe I've done something wrong. They're never going to hire me again. And she sort of stopped herself, and she was like, I feel like 12 year old me right now, not 43, year old me the, you know, business owner, mother, grown ass, woman. What? What was going on there in that moment?

Rachel Simmons30:25

So I think that when we are girls, we get a couple of really strong messages that are hard to shake. One is that the most important thing is to be liked, and that comes into play, especially when we have to face this dilemma of, do I tell somebody how I really feel, or do I hide what I'm feeling so that they keep on liking me? And when you become invested in keeping the peace and having people like you and not having conflict, a couple of things happen. I mean, one is that your muscle for dealing with conflict and for dealing with any type of fracture between two people is incredibly underdeveloped. I mean, you contrast that with boys who engage in all kinds of play fighting and or who engage in kind of one upping each other and kind of mean jokes, not to say that these are comfortable for all boys, but that there is a kind of practice that's happening there. So girls aren't getting access to that practice. And I think what happens when you don't well, it's actually really two more things. So what happens when you don't flex that muscle is it becomes unfamiliar and kind of scary, right? It suddenly becomes sort of scary to experience any type of fracture between two people, whether it's a proposal that doesn't get approved, or a friend who maybe is upset with you. For some reason, we don't see a lot of we don't make a lot of distinctions between those contexts. It just feels like, wait a minute, something is bad, something is wrong. And if I've been told my job is to be liked, well maybe it's my fault that I'm being ghosted. We don't think, well, maybe that client just is a mismatch for me. We don't think maybe that client was looking for something that I couldn't provide. And another vendor could we think, Oh God, what have I done wrong, because we internalize that message that this is really my responsibility to make you like me, and that that's part of my self worth and so and the other thing, last thing I would say about this is remember too, that there's also a social cost for being the type of girl who does get into conflicts with others. So even if you wanted to flex that muscle and you wanted to be familiar and comfortable with it, you might get tagged a girl who's kind of a bitch or who's kind of too loud or who's difficult, yeah,

Leah Neaderthal32:50

and that sticks with you absolutely. I also just want to layer on to that, that I think as as girls growing up, and this is something that you talked about in your book, because we're not allowed to be aggressive in the way, the same way that boys do, has to be under the surface. I think that we developed this really strong sense of trying to interpret signals. And you know, what does she mean by that? Or what do they mean by that? And that, I think, never turns off. And so here we are in adults, as adults and women business owners, and our sort of spidey sense, which is from way back in the day when you know girls didn't want you to sit with them at lunch or whatever, trying to apply that to corporate situations and client situations where there's nothing like there's no signal coming back. But we can't help ourselves, because that's been our

Rachel Simmons33:42

training, right? And why are we trained to be hyper vigilant? We're trained because we've been told that our jobs are to be liked by people. And so if you're if you are taught that your value comes from connection with others, then of course, you become skilled at sensing what others are thinking and feeling, and if you are also a member of a social group that doesn't get in a lot of open conflict, and I'm not talking about knock down, drag out, I'm just talking about conflict, by which I mean like me telling you what I really authentically think and feel, then for a whole other reason. Now you're trying to parse out, what does that mean. What does that mean? What does that signal mean? Because you're a member of a community that isn't engaged in open, direct dialog, and yes, that spidey sense, which here has a positive connotation, actually becomes really counterproductive when it becomes a source of overthinking or of kind of confirmation bias. See, I knew that they didn't like me, right? As opposed to, wait a second. Do you have all the data? It is the people who have developed enough self awareness to understand what they're doing and why. Can begin to move beyond those behaviors and think in a different way. And it reminds me a lot of that, of that saying, What Got You Here Won't Get You There, which is big in the coaching world. The lessons that you learned in girlhood may have helped you to a certain point, because they made you hard working, and they made you intuitive, and they made you kind of pleasing to others in a way that allowed you to succeed, but they're not going to get you there in terms of navigating risk, managing rejection, and going through all of the growing pains that owning and developing a business invariably involve, absolutely

Leah Neaderthal35:39

another area where the way we are sort of conditioned trained, the things that service really well don't serve us later on is in school, when the way we're taught to succeed in school is one way, and like, for example, just putting your head down, doing great work and getting recognized with grades. And I find that a lot of women, it's like a jarring experience to know that those things aren't rewarded, right? And how do you find women navigate that? How does it translate to, you know, the adult working slash business owner world?

Rachel Simmons36:11

It doesn't translate so well. Leah, turns out, tell me about it. Carol Dweck, who is the Stanford social psychologist who wrote the great book, mindset, I know worship Yeah, I worship her as well. So Carol said, If life were one long grade school, girls would rule the world. And she, of course, is getting at exactly what you're saying, which is that the behaviors that girls internalize, I mean, boys, boys hear them too. They simply reduct them, either because they want to, or they just can't comply with them, but the rules that you hear in school are, keep your head down, raise your hand when you need to speak, keep a neat notebook like please the teacher and do everything that you're told, and be compliant and be obedient. But of course, life is not one long grade school, and so girls aren't ruling the world, because the rules fundamentally change. And there are many ways in which you see some of those internalized lessons showing up to limit women, but one of them, I would say, and one of them is in the area of kind of aggressively seeking a promotion, or kind of going after what you want and and being willing to kind of raise your hand and say, I know you think it's this way, but I think it's that way, or I am not visible enough, and I need to get some visibility. And a lot of women people, but a lot of women are inclined to kind of feel like either they don't want to have to do that, or they see it as extraneous to their success or to their workload. And of course, me and lots of other people out there who coach women in this space are saying, No, this is actually part of the work. This is not, it's not like a nice to have. It's a must have. But that's hard. And again, it's like, What Got You Here Won't Get You There. It's really hard to be an entrepreneur, and you know, have to break some of those rules that you learned. But I do believe, if you choose which if you once you start to do that inventory, that good girl inventory, and be like, oh, here are some of the ways this is showing up. Then it's up to you to find a coach, or to, you know, do some, undertake some kind of personal development work. And it's all very doable, and not to kind of belabor the point, just as long as you're not believing that there's something wrong with you. And then in the course of it,

Leah Neaderthal38:22

absolutely so with this in mind and knowing that these experiences are always part of us, but don't have to be our part of our day to day. What? What are some things that you would advise women business owners to do to, I don't know, free ourselves from the emotional remnants of those experiences as they run their businesses.

Rachel Simmons38:44

Well, I do think, at the risk of sounding super cheesy, that self awareness is a big part of the battle. And I think asking yourself that question, that my goal is to ask this question of as many women and girls as possible, and that question is in the culture where you grew up, how is a good girl expected to act? And doing a kind of personal inventory of what messages from the culture Did you receive about what was going to be rewarded behavior as a girl. And you can ask yourself, how did that benefit me? And also, how's it holding me back? Because then I think if I were doing an exercise with your clients, Leah and the people who listen to your podcast, I'd probably ask the question a second list would be, tell me all the qualities it takes to run a successful business, like, like, what are the I'm not talking about, like, I need to know accounting or whatever I'm talking About. Like, what are the psychological traits that you need in order to have the stamina to manage the challenge. And I would guarantee you that the list people would make would be in sharp contrast, in many cases, to that good girl list. And then the question becomes, okay, what am. I ready to let go of what am I ready to do differently? What parts of my girl self Am I would I like to keep around, and what parts aren't, what parts aren't serving me? And it's not obviously so easy as, like, I'm just gonna let go of this, like, fear of rejection. It's obviously work, and that's where coaching can come in, really spending time developing the muscles that were atrophied, but I think the key is truly not to blame yourself to remember that. I mean, remember, as I mentioned a while ago, like when we were talking, we get a lot of messages as women about what's wrong with us and how we can fix ourselves in order to integrate with the culture at work, in the workplace, and that is a wonderfully convenient philosophy and kind of practice that allows women to continue beating the shit out of themselves and each other, as opposed and allows society to do that to them, as opposed to saying to the culture. Here are some of the ways that the workplace needs to change in order to accommodate us. So it's not about you, right? I mean, you, if you're going to play in this space, if we are going to play in this space, there are certain muscles we're going to have to learn to flex. You can do that without beating yourself up and thinking there's something wrong with you along the way. All the women I work with

Leah Neaderthal41:19

are great at that. Nobody's harder on us than we are, right?

Rachel Simmons41:22

But that's also a really understandable response to all of these books that we've read and messages that we've heard. We just don't have to do it

Leah Neaderthal41:28

that way, right? Well, thank you so much for being here with me and for chatting

Rachel Simmons41:33

with me. Oh, it's a pleasure. Thank you for having me.

Leah Neaderthal41:38

All right. I loved that conversation with Rachel. When you get a chance, check out her books and you can learn more about her books and rachel@rachelsimmons.com so there are a lot of paths we could go down here about specific experiences and specific ways that those girlhood experiences are playing out in our daily lives. But I honestly think that the most important thing I want to leave you with is this, we can't underestimate the degree to which our experiences as girls shape our lives as women and our lives as women business owners. Sometimes it's a straight line, you know, like for me, I was bullied and it made me afraid to be seen as the face of my business. But more often, that line twists and turns and runs through the 1000s of other experiences we have the 1000s of other people we meet, and, you know, the lives we live. But those experiences are always with us, and they always show up where we are, which is in our businesses. So my fascination, and really my quest, has been to uncover how our experiences as girls shape us in the sales process and then in our businesses. Because nobody comes to this with a clean slate. When you filed your LLC or bought the domain for your website, you didn't just show up in the world that day. We carry with us the experiences that we've had. We carry with us the memory of everything you know, good and bad that's happened to us, so every girl who didn't want to sit with you at the lunch table, or every person that you liked and who didn't like you back, but also good things, right, like every encouraging word you heard about your talents or people who cared for you, all of that is with us in our businesses, and so when it comes to selling and getting clients, our work isn't just to figure out how to have better sales conversations or how to price your work or get more referrals or whatever. A real part of the work is to understand how our experiences as girls show up in our lives today and make sales conversations awkward, or make saying the price out loud feel uncomfortable, or make sharing your point of view on LinkedIn feel weird, because when we can understand those things and how they impact us in the sales process and in our business, then we can clear space to do what needs to be done, to show up confidently in a sales conversation, to double your price and feel really good about it, or to share your point of view on LinkedIn, and creating that space to do this is just as important as what you actually learn in that space. So what I want to leave you with is this, have compassion for yourself, because inside the ambitious, driven, smart woman who's running her own business is the little girl that you were. And so ask yourself, what does that little girl need to hear from you today? If we you know, as the women we are today, were to sit next to our little girl selves on our childhood bed, what would you say to her? And how can we start to have compassion for that little girl inside of us so that we can show up better for ourselves and our families and our businesses. Hey, everything we're talking about in this episode is part of the system women like you are learning in the. Academy. In the Academy, we help women consultants install the two systems every B to B consultant needs a marketing system to consistently attract the right clients and a sales system to lead a sales process to a yes and get paid more for every contract. So even if you've only gotten clients through referrals or word of mouth, in the academy, you'll learn how to attract and sign clients outside your network, how to lead a sales process with confidence, and how to get paid for your value, not your time, and there's no cold calling or cold emailing involved, no changing your services or making a course, and you won't use any pushy sales tactics. That's just not our vibe. So if you like what you've heard here, the academy may be your right next step to learn how you can get these two systems in your consulting business and make progress faster and with fewer roadblocks. Head to smart gets paid.com/academy and apply and we can chat about next steps. All right, see you over there. You. Transcribed by https://otter.ai