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    UnCeiling Your Career: At Any Age
    UnCeiling Your Career: At Any Age
    UnCeiling Your Career: At Any Age
    Ebook145 pages1 hour

    UnCeiling Your Career: At Any Age

    By Natalie H. Luke

    ()

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    About this ebook

    UnCeiling Your Career - At Any Age offers readers a different method that helps them battle self-doubt, build strategic plans, and maintain a positive attitude to get ahead in their careers. If you are stuck and looking for more out of life, this book will help you effectively handle setbacks and network with others to achieve and reach

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherNew Degree Press
    Release dateSep 7, 2022
    ISBN9798885045889
    UnCeiling Your Career: At Any Age

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      Book preview

      UnCeiling Your Career - Natalie H. Luke

      NatalieLuke_UnCeilingYourCareer-COVER.jpg

      UnCeiling Your CareeR

      Natalie H. Luke, PhD

      New Degree Press

      Copyright © 2022 Natalie Luke

      All rights reserved.

      UnCeiling Your Career

      ISBN

      979-8-88504-588-9 Paperback

      979-8-88504-933-7 Kindle Ebook

      979-8-88504-822-4 Ebook

      Contents

      Introduction

      Chapter 1. Invisible Barriers

      Chapter 2. Your Unique Destiny

      Chapter 3. Creating a Positive Vision

      Chapter 4. Breaking the Cycle

      Chapter 5. Step Forward and Keep Moving

      Chapter 6. Stand Up and Brag!

      Chapter 7. Analyzing Past Successes Produces Increased Confidence

      Chapter 8. Networking-Connecting Visions

      Chapter 9. Dealing with Setbacks

      Chapter 10. Pulling It All Together

      Acknowledgments

      Appendix

      For my mother and hero, Beverly Heinking; my best friend, accountability partner, supporter, and husband, Tom Luke; and my talented loving daughter, Megan Luke.

      Introduction

      The journey to success is as important as the destination.

      Beverly told me, ‘Women should not be allowed to drive!’

      What? Shocked, angry, and astonished, I asked with my eyes furiously narrowed and my lips pursed.

      Yup! Can you believe it? My parents wouldn’t allow me to learn how to drive a car simply because I was a girl! Beverly introspectively remembered when asked how she became a physician in her thirties during an era most women wouldn’t dream of attending medical school.

      Beverly is my mother. My mother’s parents insisted she not learn how to drive, but she did anyway. Against the rules, Mom bought a car and drove her way into becoming a practicing physician and my hero.

      Driving was just one of the glass barriers she shattered. How did she buck authority figures and break those barriers? Mom had a secret way about her. Time and time again, I watched Mom take action and trust herself, her abilities, and her intuitive voice.

      Looking back on her accomplishments, I figured out Mom’s secret sauce of transforming her life and our family’s future for the better. I also discovered how I’ve employed the process and it, too, has improved our families’ lives.

      We could all employ Mom’s secret sauce because we women must all buck the system. The demonstrated fact that women are often the minority in leadership roles in our patriarchal society is evidence of needing to oppose the established rules. Our patriarchal society has a set of specific guidelines on how we, as women, should define ourselves. Having confidence in ourselves, abilities, and intuitive voices can be challenging. Women have an expectation placed upon them to look and behave in a manner that is agreeable to the beliefs of the community in which they live (Itty, 2019).

      In many ways, women are held back from being the confident individuals they could be due to the narrow ideas of what women should be and what they should do in the world. The self-confidence gap begins in adolescence and remains with each of us for the rest of our lives, no matter the country in which we reside (Blieborn, 2016). As a result of the self-confidence gap, our wages are lower, our career opportunities are reduced, and fewer women own their own businesses. In fact, women are only 21 percent of entrepreneurs who start companies then receive only 10 percent of all venture capital funding (Guzman, 2019).

      The strict rules society places on us cause us to have perfectionist tendencies. These traditional rules dictate that we are not qualified for leadership roles unless we check off a series of boxes or if an authority figure taps us on the shoulder. Perfectionism leads to strict, black-and-white demands on us that further reduce our faith in ourselves. This often causes us to falsely believe we are unprepared for leadership roles or do not possess skills that will enable us to take on challenging and demanding projects.

      Furthermore, our perfectionist inclinations cause us to place unrealistic expectations on ourselves, such as the obligation to always say yes or never take credit for our efforts or positive job results. All these things further contribute to the erosion of our self-assurance.

      I propose that because of a lack of faith in ourselves, we are missing out on a vision of how our lives could be.

      Many of us grew up with a scarcity mindset, which causes us to doubt our own abilities. If an authority figure doesn’t tap us on the shoulder or we don’t have a supportive mentor, we won’t go for a bigger and better role. In this situation, we remain in mediocrity, with our potential resting dormant on the table. Alternatively, some of us take action but feel we need to work twice as hard as necessary, causing us to burn out.

      My mother taught me a different way. She taught me that everything starts with a dream of a better future. Mom instilled in me the notion of dreaming big and being daring. Mom said the goal should make your palms sweat because the aim is scary but doable. The dream should be so exciting that it makes your heart sing. She taught me the importance of doing homework (planning) and then gathering the tools and people needed to achieve the dream. She showed me how to take action and work with others to make things happen.

      Most importantly, she trained me to use rejection, obstacles, and failure as learning opportunities for attaining ambitions. Being perfect, checking every box, or waiting for the tap on the shoulder never entered Mom’s formula, though listening to feedback did.

      It took me a while to learn and enact the lessons Mom taught me. My career didn’t start off as strong as I had hoped after college. Immediately after graduation, all the positive expectations, which were once high, dropped to an all-time low. I had graduated with a full scholarship for both music and science. However, against my parent’s advice, I dropped out of premed and opted to start my career as a science teacher. After graduation and interviewing for high school biology or chemistry teaching roles in several school districts, I could only land a job as a substitute teacher for a year before attaining my first full-time high school instructor role.

      I ended up not enjoying teaching and wasn’t sure how to pivot my career. Had you told the past Natalie of the future Natalie, she may not have believed you. Past Natalie would have broken down into tears or said the notion was flat-out crazy. No way could past Natalie have imagined what current Natalie would be able to accomplish.

      Today, I manage a research budget most university professors aspire to. In my current position, I lead a team to produce research papers and design clinical studies involving the world’s most brilliant physicians and academic leaders. I then take the insights from the studies to assist the marketing team in educating health care providers on the most modern technologies to diagnose diseases. I also work with a group of people dedicated to developing new diagnostic tests and technologies that make a difference in patients’ lives.

      Who am I? My name is Natalie Luke, and today I am Vice President of Clinical Research at the company I’m currently employed. I am also a wife, a mom of a beautiful and intelligent teenage girl, a sister, and a daughter. I earned an interdisciplinary PhD in molecular biology, biochemistry, cell biology, and biophysics. I also enjoy playing tennis. I am a writer and author and an advocate for empowering women. In short, I’m lots of things.

      Some people describe me as creative, energetic, and focused. Others label me a dog with a bone because they can count on me to stick with a strategy or task until I finish the challenging job. While I am tagged a bulldog, I have lived six of a cat’s nine lives. My career transitioned from high school teacher, to graduate student, to sales professional in biotech, to director of sales, national training director, marketing director, and a director of clinical research before becoming a vice president. Most of the transitions took place while working within two companies. This means that within a corporate environment, I was able to either transfer to a new department or climb up the career ladder.

      My bold career transitions wouldn’t have happened without Mom’s formula. I had confidence in my ability to learn, take action towards my dreams, find people who could help me, and listen and learn from others. I express myself in a way that is authentically me. My mother taught me the importance of listening to the small voice inside that says, You can do this. As a result, like Mom, I’ve created a new future for myself and my family.

      I decided I needed to immortalize Mom’s formula after sitting in a leadership meeting and wondering, Where is Davetta?, or the female name for David. You’re probably wondering why I would ask such a question, Where is Davetta? Let me

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