Book: What Got You Here Won’t Get You There

What Got You Here Won’t Get You There (Amazon) initially irked me because it fell under a class of book that I call “Advice for White Men” (my blog post on this topic). It’s about how you can be oblivious to certain characteristics, and never receive feedback on them – and of course all but one of the examples in the book were men.

My friend Camille observed to me once that men get too little feedback, but women get too much. And definitely one of the things that I’ve found helpful with coaching is sorting through feedback – some direct, and some implicit, and deciding what of it I should take.

Anyway, even though I don’t think the content of the book applies as much to women, it was still useful, and once I got over my annoyance I found it so. How do you ask for feedback? How do you get someone else bought into you taking it and changing? It also gave me some observations that I could use to talk to other people about taking feedback and changing.