How Learning to Work It Worked for Me: The Power of Female Mentorship

Before last year, I knew very little about running a business. I saw the corporate world as shrouded in mysteryand assumed I would never go anywhere near it. After all, all businesspeople work a 9 to 5 job and what did I want with that as a college student dreaming about becoming an actor? From my perspective, business had very little to do with my creative life and I never bothered to learn more…untilone book changed my mind.

Last summer, while scrolling through my email I saw an email about a female entrepreneur looking for a virtual personal assistant through a mentorship training program called “Apprentice”. While this kind of opportunity would usually slide right past me, something caught my attention about the idea of a female entrepreneur, which outside of reality television, was virtually unknown to me.

I read Carrie Kerpen’s book, Work It: Secrets for Success from the Boldest Women in Business thinking it would help me prepare for an interview. What I didn’t expect was that it would change my outlook on life and my career. I learned from Carrie’s book how important it is for women to ask and often fight for what they want. As she points out in her book, there’s no reason to let dreams stay hidden when there are always things you can do to chase after them, especially in a modern era when future contacts are at our fingertips online.

From that moment on, I stopped censoring my vision for the future with what I thought was realistic, or what dreams I had seen the people around me achieve. I stopped seeing myself as “performer only” and expanded my vision.

Why couldn’t I direct? What’s stopping me from running my own theatre one day? Or writing a book? I went from avoiding the idea of business to embracing all the ways I could start my own business, and it taught me the profound impact of female role models and mentorship.

Although I have never met or spoken with Carrie, her story and the many other female success stories in her book gave me a profound wake-up call. And one day I hope to inspire future generations of women to dream even higher than I could have imagined