The Page 99 Test: Kate White's "The Gutsy Girl Handbook"

Thursday, April 19, 2018

Kate White's "The Gutsy Girl Handbook"

Kate White is the New York Times bestselling author of twelve murder mysteries and thrillers and several hugely popular career books, including I Shouldn’t Be Telling You This: How to Ask for the Money, Snag the Promotion, and Create the Career You Deserve,

and Why Good Girls Don’t Get Ahead but Gutsy Girls Do. For 14 years, White was the editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan magazine, where she increased overall circulation by 30 percent and made Cosmo the #1 magazine in the U.S. in single copy sales.

White applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Gutsy Girl Handbook: Your Manifesto for Success, and reported the following:

I’ve done this test before (with my mysteries and thrillers, as well as my non-fiction business books) and the results are uncanny. It’s based on an idea suggested by the novelist Ford Madox Ford: that if you open a book to page 99, “the quality of the whole will be revealed to you."

That’s certainly the case with my new book, The Gutsy Girl Handbook: Your Manifesto for Success. What appears on page 99 really does seem to capture the essence of the book.

I start off the page talking about the importance of asking for opportunities in the workplace. We hear a lot today about how critical it is to ask for money (whether a raise or a great starting salary), and that’s true. You have to come right out and ask for the money you want or you may end up short changed.

But it’s just as important to ask for opportunities. Don’t wait to be assigned special projects. Raise your hand and volunteer to take those on.

The whole point of my book is that in order to succeed, women need to be as gutsy as possible in the workplace, and asking for opportunities is a key way to do that. (And, hey, this works for guys, too!)

The kind of projects you should be asking for are ones that will help out your boss, strengthen your strengths, force you out of your comfort zone, increase your confidence, enhance your reputation at work, and set you apart from the pack. Perhaps it’s running a new team or representing the company at an industry event.

That’s the kind of work that gets you noticed and promoted.

And what if there doesn’t seem to be a project that fits the bill? Create one. Ask, “What are we missing here, what problem can I solve in my department?”

I once mentioned this strategy in a speech I gave and a woman later wrote me explaining how well it had worked for her. She was employed as an assistant in the PR department of an insurance company and after hearing my comments, she asked, “What’s missing?” She realized that her department lacked a crisis manual, so she took it upon herself to write one. That step and a few others like it led to her promotion from assistant to associate.

So don’t wait. Raise your hand and ask. Being gutsy is knowing that in order to succeed, we often have to take that first step, rather than be polite and wait for someone to tap us for the opportunity.