Career Self-Care by Minda Zetlin

Author:Minda Zetlin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New World Library
Published: 2022-04-06T00:00:00+00:00

Say Yes to Things You Don’t Know How to Do

In chapter 8, I wrote about research from HP that shows women tend to wait till they’re completely qualified for a job before applying, whereas men tend to apply if they have just 60 percent of the qualifications. This finding is sometimes cited as evidence that the long-lasting disparity between men’s earnings and women’s results from women holding themselves back. I personally believe, as other research suggests, that women in the workplace correctly foresee that they’ll be held to higher standards than their male counterparts.

There’s a much fuller discussion of this issue in chapter 8, but the point here is that if you do get the opportunity to take on a task that you don’t know how to do but you would like to learn, you should definitely say yes to that opportunity. In the same way, if you want to do something but don’t know how, that shouldn’t stop you from setting it as a goal.

My coach, Wendy Capland, took this approach, and it worked out spectacularly well. “Years ago, I found myself declaring during a workshop that I wanted to have my own television show. As soon as I said it, I thought, ‘I have no idea how to do that. That was a stupid goal.’” But after the workshop was over, a woman went up to Capland and told her she was being interviewed on cable TV the following week. She invited Capland to go along and observe. This turned out to be the introduction Capland needed, and soon she had her own local cable show, which ran for three years and had 2.5 million viewers. (See chapter 11 for more on baby steps.)

A lot of people, including my husband, would take this story as a sign that the universe provides what we ask for. How else, he would say, do you explain the coincidence that within that small group of women there happened to be one who was appearing on TV the following week? I personally don’t buy that, not only because it’s too woo-woo for my taste but also because the evidence doesn’t really support it. We all know too many instances of people in desperate need for whom the universe has provided nothing at all.

I do think there’s something simpler and less mystical at work, a variant of the cognitive bias called frequency illusion — that is, having something on our minds causes us to notice it around us when otherwise we might not have. With or without that workshop participant being there to invite Capland to the studio, I believe — assuming she was serious about her desire to have a television show and didn’t just forget about it — she would have come across another opportunity to learn about being on TV because she would have been on the lookout for it, consciously or not.

In general, for just about anything you don’t know how to do, from fixing a leaky faucet to piloting

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