July 27, 2023

As director of AAMC's Office of Women in Medicine and Science from 1987 to 2002, and since the beginning of ELAM, I have actively supported this influential program in many ways and served as ELAM faculty for more than two decades. Throughout these decades I learned so much from coaching these extraordinary women physicians and scientists. I have transformed these learnings into a book designed to assist early- and mid-career professionals, as well as emerging leaders, to turn their intellectual capital into satisfying career and leadership capital, and to equip mentors to improve their track record of mentoring women.

Key elements include:

1. Learning from your strengths, fears, emotions and assumptions, which are all skills fundamental to career-building and getting somewhere new in any partnership and group.
2. Bridging to others, particularly using the skills required to communicate effectively across multiple differences, such as self-monitoring, creating an invitational presence, engaging in inquiry, listening and presenting perspectives with adequate background. As you more effectively communicate across differences, what you notice and understand expands. These skills enable you to approach negotiations and conflicts as relationship-building opportunities. An ever-expanding network assists you to navigate organizational politics and to more easily identify emerging career- and leadership-related opportunities and constraints.
3. Unlearning the habit of comparing ourselves to others. A key insight for me arrived in a crowded lounge as I nervously awaited the arrival of a potential client early in my business launch. Everyone else looked so much happier and more self-assured than I was feeling. By comparing my contorted insides with others’ put-together social outsides, I’d cornered myself into an acute angle of misery. My inner coach alerted me to how, by comparing my familiarly messy self to the limited information I had about others in that lounge, I was undermining my own self-confidence. From that point on, I got better at hopping off any train of association that detracted from the validity of my own reality, and from the evidence of my own expertise.
4. Internalizing the evidence of our strengths, staying connected to our own needs and befriending ourselves — all key to arriving at a guiding definition of success for ourselves.
5. The importance of reflection. Reflection points can serve as discussion aids in your coaching of mentees, possibly recommending specific chapters and questions to individuals in preparation for time together.

To learn more, please visit janetbickel.com/new-book/