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Opinion: Book excerpt: Here’s a secret sauce for women’s success

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Editor’s note: Springfield-based business consultant Dina Readinger’s forthcoming book, “Think Differently,” offers strategies for helping women find and formulate the right problem so they can get out of their own way and create a life they love. Below are excerpts from the forward.

Imagine you just found out that you are let go after six months after your hire date. Just imagine that you have just been told that the hiring manager chose “the other candidate,” and yet, you are great at what you do. There is no feedback, hint or indication suggesting that you were not the “perfect fit” for the role. You are crushed! You ask your boss, “What do I need to do to get promoted,” and he hands you all his non-promotable projects, administrative tasks and items that will move his career forward, but not necessarily yours. Sound familiar? Now you are really in a pickle! You now have more work than ever, you’re burned out, disappointed and unhappy with most things in life. 

What if you had strategies for overcoming age bias, disparities, managing the fact that you are overpromised and underserved, and being used as a doormat for others’ success? What if you find out after you have done a leadership program that tasks you with endless hours of non-promotable work, only to find out, you were passed over? What you believed to be true was a lie.

The latest statistic [from the Society for Human Resource Management] tells a bigger story. Women continue to leave the workforce and are having a demanding time recouping two years of COVID’s hurricane of events. From February 2020 to January 2022, 1.1 million women left the workforce and represent 63% of all jobs lost. 

(This) game-changing book is a change in basic assumptions for the working woman. “Think Differently,” authored by Dina Readinger and Sharon Weinstein, is packed with life stories of tragedy to triumph and gives specific strategies that answer this age-old question, “How do I get where I want to go?” 

Women are tired of waiting for opportunity and struggle for creating their own success. Women must develop a new mindset, get out of the blame game, and take ownership for what they want and deserve. We are no longer the victim but the conqueror, and no one is in your way, except you, if you let it.

“Think Differently” (leans on) the revelation from six years and over 6,000 diagnostic thinking groups that all women carry the same fears, angst, desires and similar symptoms related to their career stalls. Women want more and need more! 

Women need each other to move forward and a methodology that accelerates new thinking and different outcomes. The book answers the age-old question, “How?”  How do I create the success I want and need to feel happy in life and at work? 

Women must:

  • Feel safe to unpack hidden fears.
  • Have confidence for finding their own self-value.
  • Have fearlessness for communicating needs and wants.
  • Feel valued and heard.
  • Have strategies for effective negotiations.
  • Have processes for handling conflict.
  • Have the ability to create their own opportunities and equities for life and work.
  • Feel freedom for authoring their own story and not waiting for others to decide their fate.
  • Optimize the employee experience for bigger outcomes, for self and others.

Women want to be happy at life and work. Yes, they can have it all! Women need a radical reawakening for turning painful “What if?’ into a strategy that creates self-confidence and selflessness. “Think Differently” is the magic sauce for unpacking the subconscious, unaware mind, the self-sabotaging narratives, [that] when under stress, causes many women to throw up their hands and say, “I am done.”

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