The Likeability Trap

Be nice, but not too nice. Be successful, but not too successful. Just be likeable. Whatever that means? Women are stuck in an impossible bind. At work, strong women are criticized for being cold, and warm women are seen as pushovers. An award-winning journalist examines this fundamental paradox and empowers readers to let go of old rules and reimagine leadership rather than reinventing themselves. Consider that even competent women must appear likeable to successfully negotiate a salary, ask for a promotion, or take credit for a job well done—and that studies show these actions usually make them less likeable. And this minefield is doubly loaded when likeability intersects with race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and parental status. Relying on extensive research and interviews, and carefully examined personal experience, The Likeability Trap delivers an essential examination of the pressure put on women to be amiable at work, home, and in the public sphere, and explores the price women pay for internalizing those demands. Rather than advising readers to make themselves likeable, Menendez empowers them to examine how they perceive themselves and others and explores how the concept of likeability is riddled with cultural biases. Our demands for likeability, she argues, hinder everyone’s progress and power. Inspiring, thoughtful and often funny, The Likeability Trap proposes surprising, practical solutions for confronting the cultural patterns holding us back, encourages us to value unique talents and styles instead of muting them, and to remember that while likeability is part of the game, it will not break you.

Are you wondering how you can improve your relationships with your friends and family? Are you curious how to get or keep the job of your dreams? Do you want to become a more popular person? This book will show you how to do all that by raising your likeability factor—or how much other people like you. After all, life is a series of popularity contests. The choices other people make about you determine your health, wealth, and happiness. And decades of research prove that people choose who they like. They vote for them, they buy from them, they marry them, and they spend precious time with them. The good news is that you can arm yourself for the contest and win life’s battles for preference. How? By being likeable. The more you are liked—or the higher your likeability factor—the happier your life will be. This book will show you how to raise that likeability factor by teaching you how to boost four critical elements of your personality: •Friendliness: your ability to communicate liking and openness to others •Relevance: your capacity to connect with others’ interests, wants, and needs •Empathy: your ability to recognize, acknowledge, and experience other people’s feelings •Realness: the integrity that stands behind your likeability and guarantees its authenticity What happens when you improve in these areas and boost your likeability factor? •You bring out the best in others •You survive life’s challenges •You have better health—and even improve others’ health, too •You outperform in your daily roles •You win the popularity contests that define your life Join me for a few hours and I’ll share the results of hundreds of thousands of pages of research, numerous seminars, and hundreds of interviews with people just like you! Together let’s build our likeability factor and improve our lives! Also available as a Random House AudioBook

From the acclaimed author of Unfinished Business, a story of crisis and change that can help us find renewed honesty and purpose in our personal and political lives Like much of the world, America is deeply divided over identity, equality, and history. Renewal is Anne-Marie Slaughter’s candid and deeply personal account of how her own odyssey opened the door to an important new understanding of how we as individuals, organizations, and nations can move backward and forward at the same time, facing the past and embracing a new future. Weaving together personal stories and reflections with insights from the latest research in the social sciences, Slaughter recounts a difficult time of self‐examination and growth in the wake of a crisis that changed the way she lives, leads, and learns. She connects her experience to our national crisis of identity and values as the country looks into a four-hundred-year-old mirror and tries to confront and accept its full reflection. The promise of the Declaration of Independence has been hollow for so many for so long. That reckoning is the necessary first step toward renewal. The lessons here are not just for America. Slaughter shows how renewal is possible for anyone who is willing to see themselves with new eyes and embrace radical honesty, risk, resilience, interdependence, grace, and vision. Part personal journey, part manifesto, Renewal offers hope tempered by honesty and is essential reading for citizens, leaders, and the change makers of tomorrow.

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.

You are stronger than your anxiety—you are mighty. In this empowering guide, you’ll find practical tools to help you shed the shackles of worry and fear and embrace a more vibrant life. In a culture where women are still paid less for doing the same jobs, expected to juggle family and career effortlessly, and faced with the harsh realities of misogyny and sexism daily, it’s no wonder you’re also twice as likely to experience issues related to anxiety and trauma. But there are real tools you can use now to build personal resilience in a difficult world, move past anxious thoughts, and conquer your worries and fears. This book will help guide the way. Be Mighty leads you on a bold quest to gain a deeper understanding of your anxiety by exploring your own “origin story”—how your early experiences led to thoughts and behaviors that may have offered comfort and protection at one time, but are now keeping you from living your best life. Using practical tools and experiential exercises based in mindfulness and acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), you’ll learn to respond to present-day triggers in a new way, making choices from a more conscious, values-driven place. So, drop that outdated armor and dive headlong into this book. You’ll emerge fresh and fierce, with the confidence to stand up for the life you want to live and the power to face life’s complexities as your best, most authentic self. It’s time to be who you truly want to be. It’s time for you to be mighty!

We all know that networking is important, and that forming relationships with others is a vital part of success. But sometimes it seems like networking removes all emotions from the equation and focuses only on immediate goals whereas the kind of relationships that have true staying power, give us joy, and support us in the long run are founded on simply liking each other. This book, featuring activities, self-assessment quizzes, and real-life anecdotes from professional and social settings, shows readers how to identify whats likable in themselves and create honest, authentic interactions.

2023 Int'l Latino Book Award Honorable Mentions This important book focuses on how women of color, children of immigrants, and other minoritized groups are predisposed to workplace imposter syndrome—and charts a path forward for self-advocacy and advancement.​ For women of color and children of immigrants, who are the “the other” at work, there's a different threshold of belonging that creates a false feeling of inadequacy. It can lead to being overwhelmed, overworked, and overlooked. The Other shatters the unspoken expectations for you to stay in your lane and gives you the tools to build unshakable confidence and a career that excels--on your own terms. Bestselling author and MSNBC reporter Daniela-Pierre Bravo spent many years undocumented and in the shadows as an immigrant from Chile, working odd jobs to pay her way through school. Like many other women of color she became an expert shape shifter in order to chameleon her way around professional environments that felt out of reach. When Daniela became a DACA recipient, she finally felt that she’d made it, rising through the ranks in her career. But she quickly realized that no matter how much success she achieved, she always felt she had to prove her worth as “the other.” In The Other, Daniela shares her journey and those of other women to help you recognize your power in the workplace outside of the white gaze. She drives you to reshape the way you think about career advancement without losing your sense of identity and helps you see how to use your differences as an advantage. Smart, revealing, and loaded with practical steps, The Other is a framework for how to effectively advocate for yourself, become your biggest believer, claim the spaces in your career that are rightfully yours.

The key to advancing gender equality? Men. Women are at a disadvantage. At home, they often face an unequal division of household chores and childcare, and in the workplace, they deal with lower pay, lack of credit for their contributions, roadblocks to promotion, sexual harassment, and more. And while organizations are looking to address these issues, too many gender-inclusion initiatives focus on how women themselves should respond, reinforcing the perception that these are "women's issues" and that men—often the most influential stakeholders in an organization—don't need to be involved. Gender-in-the-workplace experts David G. Smith and W. Brad Johnson counter this perception. In this important book, they show that men have a crucial role to play in promoting gender equality at work. Research shows that when men are deliberately engaged in gender-inclusion programs, 96 percent of women in those organizations perceive real progress in gender equality, compared with only 30 percent of women in organizations without strong male engagement. Good Guys is the first practical, research-based guide for how to be a male ally to women in the workplace. Filled with firsthand accounts from both men and women, and tips for getting started, the book shows how men can partner with their female colleagues to advance women's leadership and equality by breaking ingrained gender stereotypes, overcoming unconscious biases, developing and supporting the talented women around them, and creating productive and respectful working relationships with women.

A groundbreaking approach to wellness that will help you cut through the clutter and find the small shifts that create huge changes in your life, from the host of the podcast The Feel Good Effect “An absolutely fresh and insightful guide . . . If you’re looking to create more calm, clarity, and joy, this book is for you.”—Shauna Shapiro, Ph.D., author of Good Morning I Love You What if wellness isn’t about achieving another set of impossible standards, but about finding what works­—for you? Radically simple and ridiculously doable, The Feel Good Effect helps you redefine wellness, on your own terms. Drawing from cutting-edge science on mindfulness, habit, and behavior change, podcast host Robyn Conley Downs offers a collection of small mindset shifts that allow for more calm, clarity, and joy in everyday life, embracing the idea that “gentle is the new perfect” when it comes to sustainable wellness. She then leads you through an easy set of customizable habits for happiness and health in mind, body, and soul, allowing you to counteract stress and prevent burnout. Instead of trying to get more done, The Feel Good Effect offers a refreshingly sane approach that will allow you to identify and focus on the elements that actually move the needle in your life right now. Less striving. More ease. It’s time to feel good.

"From the NPR host of The Indicator and correspondent for Planet Money comes an “accessible, funny, clear-eyed, and practical” (Sarah Knight, New York Times bestselling author) guide for how women can apply the principles of 16th-century philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli to their work lives and finally shatter the glass ceiling—perfect for fans of Feminist Fight Club, Lean In, and Nice Girls Don’t Get the Corner Office."--Simonandschuster.com viewed Sept. 21, 2022.