By Martha Hutzel, Library Director, Central Rappahannock Regional Library
I cannot claim that quote, but I do appreciate and love it. It’s powerful, and it matters. It’s from
the Fran Hauser book, The Myth of the Nice Girl. The upcoming Women’s Leadership
Colloquium @ UMW, on November 7, 2019, has the theme Be Your Own Hero! I couldn’t agree more! In her book Fran Hauser explores how we can be nice in the workplace, and in our personal lives,
without being pushovers or letting ourselves be walked all over. We can choose our words and
our behavior so that we gain a reputation for being great to work with, great to work for, highly
respected and effective all at the same time. This also allows us to respect ourselves as well, to
actually like our own behavior, and to be our own heroes. It’s very important to like who we are
and to respect our own choices and behaviors. If we don’t, how can we be our own heroes? My
mother, who is 97 years old, and who is one of my personal heroes, always said when we were
growing up “Love thy neighbor, but love thyself first.” That’s very profound and a very important
life lesson.
Fran came to realize that her strengths were being nice, being honest, and being fair. She
refused to lose those inherent tendencies, and when she found herself working with and for
toxic, mean-spirited people, she successfully sought employment elsewhere. Her career took off
and she continued to blossom and to understand that others truly appreciated that she was both
nice AND strong, nice AND effective, nice AND respected. She just did it without yelling, without
backstabbing, without gossiping and without being unkind to those around her. I highly
recommend this short, easy-to-read book, which is available at the Central Rappahannock
Regional Library.
Other titles that I have read recently are in the Harvard Business Review series, HBR’s 10 Must
Read Series, of which there are many, and the library owns most of them as well. At this writing,
I’m part way through HBR’s 10 Must Reads on Women and Leadership, and I highly
recommend it. It’s a series of ten great articles from Harvard Business Review, and I especially
like this title because there is a very lengthy interview at the end (yes, I read the end first!) with
Sheryl Sandberg, in which Sheryl addresses the dearth of women in the CEO, or C-Suite
positions, the world over. There are many reasons for this, as we all know, and Sheryl offers
quite a few solutions to fix the problem. You’ll have to read about them in the interview! Happy
reading, and I advise always following my own personal mission: never be without a good book
to read, or listen to!
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