EP250: Sally Helgesen - How Knowing Your Strengths Can Benefit Your Bookkeeping Business

Michael Palmer: And what's fascinating is these internal barriers that are, you know, habits and manifest as habits and behaviors, really most of them are rooted in women's strengths and they are responsible early in our careers for helping us to survive and thrive. You're listening to The Successful Bookkeeper with your host, Michael Palmer. Listen each week as inspiring guests share their secrets of success to help you increase your confidence, work smarter, and build a business you love. This episode of The Successful Bookkeeper is brought to you by purebookkeeping.com, the proven system to grow your bookkeeping business. Welcome back Welcome back to the Successful Bookkeeper Podcast. I am your host, Michael Palmer, and today's show is going to be a fantastic one. Our guest is a world-class expert on women's leadership, bestselling author of the book How Women Rise, a speaker and a leadership coach, Sally Helgeson. Welcome to the podcast. Thank you. It's wonderful to be here. It's great to have you. And what an amazing career it seems you've had. I mean, you are the world's premier expert on women's leadership, cited by Forbes. I mean, it's remarkable. I'd love to hear your career journey leading up to this point so our listeners know who you are.

Sally Helgesen: Well, my career journey has been a long one. I've been around for a while. I had about 20 years working as a journalist and in corporate communications. And then in 1990, I wrote a book called The Female Advantage. Women's Ways of Leadership, which I'm really proud to say was the first book that focused on what women had to contribute as leaders rather than how they needed to change and adapt. It came directly out of the experience I'd had in corporate communications, seeing how the organizations I worked with, although they were excellent, had really very little idea of what women had to contribute as leaders. So that book, I think being the first one to take that point of view, became very popular, and I started getting calls from companies and universities and associations and partnership firms and asking if I could deliver programs, keynotes, workshops, et cetera. That was in 1990, so I just said, well, I could be writing my own speeches instead of writing them for executives. I think I'll give this a shot. And the last 30 years have really been focused on women's leadership and building more inclusive organizations. I've written 5 more books, 6 more books in the field, and just spent the