Power Moves

How Women Can Pivot, Reboot, and Build a Career of Purpose

Lauren McGoodwin

• Publisher: Harper Business
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780062909206
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Careers

From the founder of the influential website Career Contessa, an invaluable career resource for women feeling stuck or unfulfilled that combines actionable advice, learning tools to make impactful life changes, and an in-depth discussion of how to build a meaningful career on your terms. With her popular website Career Contessa, Lauren McGoodwin built an audience of ambitious, professional, millennial women who thought they did everything right—they got the degree, the internship, and even the promotion—but still wondered why they felt stuck and unfulfilled. The first site of its kind to focus on the unique, complex aspects of women's careers, Career Contessa offers women the smart advice they deserve, in a voice that resonates.

Drawing on the insights and lessons developed from Career Contessa, Power Moves is the essential handbook that helps professional women truly feel understood so they can bypass perfection and planning and head straight to evolving. McGoodwin addresses young professionals' number-one concern: career transitions and growth, and engages them with specific goals, including:

• What is a Power Move and why they matter
• Cutting out comparison, shame, and self-loathing
• How to abandon the elusive "dream job"
• Embracing your inner questioner, your inner quester, and your inner-quitter
• Making money moves and taking control of your financial future
• Tuning out from the noise and tuning into your voice

Power Moves is filled with the information, guidance, advice, and essential tools, (including helpful graphics) that can help women take decisive, bold steps without self-doubt and fear, Power Moves shows women how to build a successful career on their own terms.

Part I

Does This Sound Familiar?

On the surface, we live in a culture that shouts, “You can do anything!” Most of us have near-constant access to extensive, loving, and supportive networks (thanks to social media, texts, email, and more!) that reinforce this belief. What could be better?! We’re bursting with confidence and seemingly unstoppable.

But it’s not so simple. Because that mind-set comes with a major speed bump. While we approach the world with bold expectations and a clearly charted path to success, we quickly find the world doesn’t always cooperate.

Most of us had (or will soon have!) the same disorienting experience. By the time we are firmly in our twenties, we realize the inverse was true—that our careers will pivot, veer, double back, and suddenly pitch forward until we find ourselves so far from our intended destination, we’re practically on another continent. And to make matters worse, we all know this “American dream” we bought into is a lie, but we keep striving for it anyway.

So how exactly did we end up so far from our expectations? Understanding why we had those expectations, and the mind-set that still persists, is essential to learning how we’ll guide our career moves in the future. Let’s go back to the beginning.

Chapter 1

How Did We Get Here?

It all starts with millennials. Well, it actually all starts with generations of parents and their children; with decades-long attempts to overcome systemic sexism, racism, and economic inequality, to find work-life balance, to “have it all,” and every other buzzy phrase you’ve heard and read in vintage career guides. But for our purposes—and the purposes of understanding just how you got to your current state of professional malaise and why it’s increasingly hard to maintain your ambition—let’s focus on millennials (with the caveat that even if you’re not a millennial, anyone living and working right now has been and continues to be impacted by everything I’m about to explain).

According to most, the first millennial woman was born on January 1, 1982, and the last on December 31, 2000. We are the last to be born in the twentieth century and, since then, have become the most studied generation of all time.

But even with all this research, the findings about millennials (particularly around work and money) are often wildly contradictory, if not downright false. One school of thought says we’re lazy and entitled people who live with our parents, can’t manage money, and don’t understand how work works. On the other side, we’re considered fearless, authority-demolishing entrepreneurs who flout career conventions and demand flexibility while disrupting corporate paradigms and norms. Neither of these notions quite gets at the truth. And understanding the truth about millennials’ professional lives is the key to understanding the seismic shift that’s happened in work over the past fifteen years—not just to us, but to everyone.

For many millennials, planning for college started early in our high school years because competition for college acceptance had become fierce—the math was simple but problematic: there were more of us applying but the same number of spots to get in. Blame it on aspirational parents or the idea that a college degree can somehow guarantee a better life, but a study from the Pew Research Center found that there are more college-educated young adults now than ever before—in 2016 40 percent of millennials ages twenty-five to twenty-nine had a bachelor’s degree (compare this to 2000, when 32 percent of Gen Xers were college educated, and 1985, when 26 percent of baby boomers received the same degrees). “The demand for higher education has risen dramatically since 1985,” author and professor of economics Richard Vedder explained to Business Insider in 2018. With this demand came lowered chances of admission. Hence, the hustle.

The news was better for women, who were not only accepted to universities more frequently than men—making up 56 percent of all college admissions (a number that is rising)—but also crammed and outperformed our male counterparts once we got there.

Most of us graduated from college with outsize expectations. Many of us had no specific dreams, but instead attended college because our generation was “supposed to” or because we were born into the kind of privileged environment that just funneled us there, often without the benefit of time to think about what we even wanted to do with a degree once we got one (beyond just the nebulous concept of becoming “hirable”).

We knew we’d have to work hard to achieve our dreams, but what we didn’t anticipate was the powder keg the world was placing before us: a set of cultural, financial, and social shifts that would make it harder to succeed than we’d ever imagined—and when and if we did, the cost to our ambition, hope, and personal well-being would be higher than we’d ever thought possible. So, how exactly did all of this happen?

Family Matters

It’s impossible to look at the millennial career trajectory without first understanding the unique way we were raised. Unlike generations before us, millennials grew up being the most important responsibility of our younger baby boomer and older Gen X parents, who (generally speaking) made it a priority to be extremely involved in our lives and to place more value on nurturing the family unit than their parents or grandparents had before them. This hyperattentiveness fueled a new focus on child safety and child protections, a movement that included new laws and regulations around how we ate and slept, what we drank, how we could ride in cars or on bikes or even walk down the street. It begot the popularity of babyproofing devices, BABY ON BOARD stickers, attachment and helicopter styles of parenting, and an overall “overprotection” ethos, the effects of which researchers are just beginning to unpack and understand today.

This new parenting paradigm, brought to you by the boomers and Gen Xers, included self-esteem classes, participation trophies, educational television, a variety of after-school activities to keep us well-rounded, and new metrics to raise the bar in education. And, not to be forgotten, we were all “special.”

An expectation for our ultimate adult “success” led parents to organize their children’s free time with activities to put them ahead of their peers. Because of this, we were rarely alone with our thoughts, and our free time was often not free but was instead overscheduled in an attempt to help us excel further and move faster.

One result of all this is we became a generation nearly incapable of operating without a well-formed structure. Millennials desire structure so we can gauge our performance (the focus on achievement also made us hyperaware of how we are doing when stacked against our peers—which is part of why, along with the omnipresence of social media, so many of us engage in “compare and despair,” a phrase first coined by Dr. Alyssa Westring, a professor of management at DePaul University, but more on this later).

Another result of this type of parenting, of having our parents so involved in our lives, is that millennials have a deeply ingrained desire for feedback. So strong is our need for frequent feedback that without it we often get stuck and don’t know what to do next. We depend on feedback and recognition to motivate and guide us to our next steps.

And, as if this feedback neediness wasn’t enough to stress over, research shows that millennials are also always trying to do more and be better. Being a type-A perfectionist is the norm of this generation, rather than an outlier, as we are terrified that any mistake will drastically affect our future. Extreme ambition and drive are the outcome of the pressure we felt as children—we are a busy, purposeful group always looking to strive for more, but often without enough hours in a day to complete what we want. We are all the Energizer Bunny from our youths—we keep going and going and going . . . until we eventually flame out.

Ladies First

Adding to this pressure—and perhaps as a response to second-wave feminism or a desire to further advance the mission they began—baby boomer and Gen X moms were particularly active in pushing their millennial daughters to succeed. Our generation of women was specifically directed to “do it all.” As Courtney E. Martin wrote in her book Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters, “we are a generation of young women who were told we could do anything and instead heard that we had to be everything.”

We were held to high standards, but also held to the notion that we could have successful careers and picture-perfect family lives, and maintain our emotional and physical health while doing it—if only we were willing to put in the work. This messaging didn’t only come from our mothers, of course. The myth of “having it all” was ingrained in us early by our parents and teachers, sure, but since then, entire forests have been cut down and turned into books that taught us to lean in, take a seat at the table, have confidence, own the room, do more, be better. The culmination of which is we have become human DIY projects, our social media feeds flashing motivation and inspiration constantly, encouraging the hustle, sending the absolute message that hard work will bring success as long as you invest in yourself.

And unlike previous generations of women, we grew up consuming media that illustrated an unrealistic picture of success, assured us that as long as we had the prerequisites (i.e., education, social skills, motivation, etc.) to be successful, It. Would. Happen. For. Us. Although this message fed the need for structure and order that many millennials crave, it also built anxiety around measuring success in a world that doesn’t give out trophies or actually care about graduation rankings.

This pressure to succeed has left an entire generation with a desire for direction, to retain minute-by-minute control over their lives and to strategize for the future—it also left us with new challenges to overcome. We submerge ourselves in plans, lists, and nonstop work; we need to know what’s ahead of us, and we turn to the multitudes of online advice and life hacks, cultlike apps, and secret social media groups that capitalize on and enable our obsession for efficiency.

Thanks to technology and the internet (remember, millennials are the first generation of digital natives), we have become more adept at multitasking and scheduling, we pack our days with ambitious to-do lists and squeeze in extra appointments, we may even regularly pencil in self-care, but, if we’re honest with ourselves, we know that, really, we are always on and always living in a crisis of expectations.

It’s the Economy, Duh

For several years before and up until the fall of 2008, the financial picture for lots of millennials looked sunny. Many were raised in dual-income households and were surrounded by more wealth than their parents and previous generations. But in the fall of 2008, the financial collapse wiped out the investments, retirement plans, and income potential of many baby boomers and Gen Xers. While the economic crisis and subsequent recession most actively impacted the generations before us, that doesn’t mean millennials were left unscathed. In fact, we are still learning just how much impact it had on our lives, in ways obvious and covert.

Debt Nation

Perhaps the most universally recognized financial characteristic of millennials (beyond overpaying for avocado toast) is the fact that many of us are struggling under the weight of crippling student loans. We’re the most educated generation in US history, but the rise of tuition moved faster than our salaries, and our degrees came with higher expectations and higher stakes, including debt. The 2008 financial crisis—along with a complicated and delayed economic recovery—meant that many of us thought we had had no choice but to take on outsize loans to cover education costs in order to be on the path to career success.

In 2017, the average millennial American’s student debt was around $50,000 (the country’s total is $1.5 trillion, which is now higher than credit cards or car loans). The average student loan payment is $350 a month, payment that is around 8 to 10 percent of our incomes and more than the average US household spends on groceries. Proportionally, millennials, and particularly millennials of color, use more of their income to pay down student loan debt than anyone else. And the financial snapshot gets worse from there: when adjusted for inflation, our wages are, on average, lower than any have been since 1984.

Add this to ever-rising housing, health-care, and child-care costs, and the picture becomes even more bleak. Student debt is holding us back from doing what generations did before us: saving money for retirement, purchasing a home, investing, and generally feeling financially stable or safe.

In a 2017 Forbes article titled “The Impact of Student Loan Debt on Millennial Happiness,” writer Sarah Landrum outlines precisely why this matters, explaining, “The size of our paychecks is, practically speaking, immaterial if we’re not already on sound financial footing. In other words: Debt is a happiness killer. None of us can be truly happy if we’re saddled with debt.”

She goes on to say that “the specter of student loan debt nearly extinguishes the joy we associate with graduating from college in the first place.” Landrum describes a “kind of ‘tipping point’ where the accrual of personal debt shifts from ‘acceptable investment’ to ‘source of existential dread.’”

Mind the Pay Gap

Today, women attend college and receive degrees more than men, yes, but despite this educational advantage, we’re still earning a hell of a lot less than our male counterparts, in virtually every industry. Although the Equal Pay Act was enacted in 1963, as I’m writing this in 2019, women are still only making 79 cents for every dollar earned by a man according to PayScale’s The State of the Gender Pay Gap report.

The situation is even more dire for women of color. Black women earn 62 cents and Latinas earn 54 cents for every dollar paid to a white man.

Thes...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part I: Does This Sound Familiar?
• Part II: It’s Called a Power Move
• Part III: The Power Moves Tool Kit
• Final Thoughts
• Acknowledgments
• Index
• About the Author
• Copyright
• About the Publisher