Lisa Gates is a mighty force
"We're desperate for a mic drop right now."
If you don’t control your narrative, someone else will. And you won’t like it. If you have a vanilla answer to the “tell me about yourself” question, you’re going to get vanilla results. If you don’t tell people who you are and what you can bring to the party, nobody will invite you.
So begins the manifesto of amazing leadership and career story coach Lisa Gates (find the full version below). You can see why we’re friends! I started following Lisa online when she was co-leading She Negotiates, a company that helped women strengthen their negotiation skills and get paid more. She sent out a newsletter one week that talked about improv in a way I recognized, because it’s the way I talk about improv; I emailed her, we found time to talk, and surprise surprise, we liked each other a whole lot.
These days Lisa runs Story Happens Here, where she acts as a “career story sleuth” who helps women develop their influence and thought leadership so they are seen, heard, promoted, and paid. We delight in how similar our offerings are because the idea that the world only needs one company that helps women tell their stories is patently absurd. Lisa is also a LinkedIn Learning instructor and, more generally, hot shit on LinkedIn, where she has over half a million followers.
Ladies and gentlemen (but mostly ladies): The one, the only, Lisa Gates.
Amanda Hirsch: Tell us a bit of your own story. When you were a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up?
Lisa Gates: I didn't have that thought as a kid: "When I grow up I want to be XXX." Maybe it was because I was raised by a single mom who was in a hand-to-mouth existence. I don't know. But what I do know is that by the age of 9 I was praised for my writing and storytelling. I was passionate about animals and in 3rd grade I wrote a story about why elephants have wrinkles. It all came down to their anger about being hunted, harvested for ivory, used and abused in zoos and circus acts, etc. I don't know how I knew that at 9 years of age in the 60s, but I did.
I also loved making things: Carnivals with games, jewelry, sewing pairs of jeans from old pairs of jeans. I was deeply moved by one of my high school English/Social Studies teachers who read aloud "To Kill a Mockingbird." Injustice and abuse of power made me crazy. I spoke up loudly and often about the "unfairness of it all."
I confess I bullied bullies. And when I was bullied by an older Latino kid when riding my bike home from school, I challenged him to a game of tetherball at my house and I said something like, "If I beat you, you have to be my friend." I beat him. And then he taught me all the Spanish words for everything having to do with tetherball and a few choice swear words. That was Rafael.
Amanda: Do you see connections between those threads from childhood, and what you do today? Why or why not?
Lisa: Now I do. Took me a while to see the connections and intersections, but I always felt a sense of power and agency — creative power, speaking up power, speaking for others power. So if someone was being treated unfairly or being accused of something with assumption and bias, I seemed to always find myself in the middle of two sides asking people to find another perspective. Today we might call it mediation. I think all of it came into being as a calling and a business when I became certified as a coach, devoured every book and workshop on the topic of negotiation, and dovetailed all of it in service of helping women rise up and gain equity, equality, equal pay—apparently all the words that start with “eq.”
Amanda: Why did you start Story Happens Here?
Lisa: In 2010, in the depths of a recession, I co-founded She Negotiates with a business partner who was a lawyer and mediator. She was brilliant and taught me a ton. At the time, we were among just a few women's businesses focusing on negotiation, and more broadly, pay equity. It was great fun for many years. We developed a reputation. We were writing, teaching, training, speaking, consulting, and for me, coaching.
Whether I was coaching an individual or teaching a workshop, women could not answer the question, "Tell me about yourself,” or, “Why should we hire/promote you?"
After a few years I began to notice a pattern with my clients — a repeating theme, if you will. Whether I was coaching an individual or teaching a workshop, women could not answer the question, "Tell me about yourself,” or, “Why should we hire/promote you?" They couldn't/wouldn't articulate their value, both intrinsically and monetarily, for fear of being perceived as pushy, bitchy, bossy, demanding — all the cultural plagues that burrow into our female DNA and fester. So I said “thank you” to my former partner, and told her, “I’m going to pivot and focus on the ‘career story’ piece of the puzzle.”
Amanda: In your work, how do you define "story"?
Lisa: The first story I help women write (and speak) is more of a Superpower Statement — a pithy, succinct collection of words that express your “why,” the strengths you bring to the table, and how those strengths generate value. If done well, the superpower statement leads to "tell me more" responses and questions.
“The first story I help women write (and speak) is more of a Superpower Statement — a pithy, succinct collection of words that express your ‘why,’ the strengths you bring to the table, and how those strengths generate value. “
The answers to those questions are where all your actual stories — career stories — get deployed. Like any good story, these career stories should have an arc — a little crisis, a little drama, and a resolution. So if you were to look back over the past year or so — or more — of your career and mine it for milestones and accomplishments, there are stories everywhere: Impact stories, stories that demonstrate your values, character, strengths, and future potential in action.
Before we do any of this work, there's often another set of stories lurking in our subconscious. This is the BS story we concoct about ourselves to avoid risk and failure and disappointment.
Amanda: On your website, you write, "I wholeheartedly take the stand that it’s time for women to stop twisting themselves into pretzels to conform to gender and cultural expectations. In fact, it’s time for the patriarchy to start conforming to us. We have a planet to save." I love this and to say that I agree with you is an understatement. For people who don't necessarily sit around thinking about things like this all day, let's unpack it a bit. First, tell me more about the link between women's leadership and saving the planet.
Lisa: Generally speaking, you don't see women choosing to solve problems by stockpiling M16s and blowing stuff up. They don't usually choose to invade, rape, and pillage. You don't see too many female big game hunters. And when women take up space, and gain power and money, they generally contribute to causes and activities that improve the status of humans, animals, the environment, education, healthcare.
Amanda: And how do you see women "twisting themselves into pretzels"? What does that look like, and/or sound like?
Lisa: Women:
Doing twice as much for half the pay.
Conforming to overwork expectations / hustle culture to be seen as worthy of attention or promotion.
Believing they need another degree or certification or license to be eligible for whatever is next.
Failing to track progress and accomplishment and talk about same — to self promote to be seen, heard, promoted and RAISED.
And then doing the laundry, kids, cooking, cleaning, volunteering.
And then of course falling asleep in the middle of making love.
All of the above are the results of ingesting gender cultural norms and expectations.
Amanda: And in your experience, what helps women get "untwisted"?
Lisa: We have to own our story.
We have to own our value.
And the way we do that is by re-exploring — through writing prompts — all our major/some minor life experiences. What we discover are things very core to your being: Your values, your aspirations, what makes you jump out of bed, what pisses you off. We also discover repeating themes — and those repeating themes generally reveal your strengths, what you can be relied on to deliver no matter what. And some of those repeating themes are things you never want to repeat again. Things you are good at that you are tired of. Bored by. They don't get you anywhere.
All of this prompted writing brings out lovely strings of words, phrases, language that will ultimately fuel the finished superpower statement and the stories that bring that statement to life.
This may seem a bit sideways, but I often tell clients who are worried about being rooted out for being a fraud that we are all missing a piece, and in that sense everyone is a bit of a fraud, not just you. We can flip the narrative on that story. We can reframe the fraud/imposter syndrome conversation to "what do I want to learn?" or "what experiences do I need to grow in my life/career?"
And maybe this little manifesto I wrote quite some time ago might help:
If you don’t control your narrative, someone else will. And you won’t like it.
If you have a vanilla answer to the “tell me about yourself” question, you’re going to get vanilla results.
If you don’t tell people who you are and what you can bring to the party, nobody will invite you.
If you’re worried about what people will think of you if you boldly claim your strengths, you lose and they lose.
If you rely on your résumé to tell your whole story, “the end” will be the last sentence of that story.
If you think that decision makers are fully apprised of your strengths and the value you add, then you should already have the role or project of your dreams.
Amanda: If a woman reading this thinks she doesn't have a story to tell — what would you say to her?
Lisa: I would say, "Of course you feel that way. The patriarchy is designed to have man up, woman down. But every single human being alive on the planet at this moment has a story. What you really are asking is, ‘Is my story good enough. Am I enough?’ The answer is, ‘hell yes.’”
What you really are asking is, “Is my story good enough. Am I enough?” The answer is, “hell yes.”
Amanda: What kind of stories are you personally craving and/or consuming right now?
Lisa: Personal stories, aka The Moth. Always. Listening and telling. Big fan of both. Right now I'm in an escapist frame of mind, so I'm reading spy novels, whodunnits, and binging on shows/stories that make me cry or laugh.
Amanda: Why does the world need more women’s stories?
Lisa: The best way to answer that is to reference the story of the Liberian civil war and what women did to bring the patriarchy into peace talks to stop the war. In the nonfiction documentary, Pray the Devil Back to Hell, we see how Christian and Muslim women banded together to block entry/exit during peace talks, with no food or water. They also threatened to strip naked if the men did not come to a peaceful resolution. Mission accomplished.
We could take a page from that story and apply it in the good old USofA right now regarding abortion.
We women...we're desperate for a mic drop right now.
For more inspiration:
Read my interview with Jamia Wilson, feminist storyteller and movement builder and currently a vice president/executive editor at Random House
Pop in to a Mighty Forces story circle (every Friday at noon ET)