“It’s hard for me. I’m not good at confrontation.” (Paula, nurse)
“I don’t like confrontation. I allowed a coworker to intimidate me.” (Laurie, manager in the travel industry)
“I’m a wimp! I would let conflict slide and then come around, behind the scenes, and do that passive-aggressive thing. That’s not good.” (Sheri, technology manager)
“It’s difficult because you don’t want to make somebody angry.” (Claire, nurse)
Paula summed it up best for this group of women: “We weren’t raised that way [to be direct and confrontational]. We were told that women didn’t do that . . . you were to be seen and not heard.” “Seen and not heard”—I remember being told this when I was growing up, along with “girls are sugar and spice and everything nice.” I remember thinking that I had to avoid confrontation because it could damage a relationship—or, as Claire said, “make somebody angry.”
An excerpt from my book,
New Rules for Women, available at Amazon (
http://www.amazon.com/dp/0982056982/).]]>