What does success mean to you? Have you sacrificed your health and family for your career? Have you lost your inner peace and joy? Is a career and illusion of success really worth dying for? It has been proven time and time again that companies and organizations with women in senior leadership positions perform better. Women comprise more than half of all college graduates and nearly 40 percent of MBAs, but only represent 5 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs and 17 percent of board members. Companies have spent millions of dollars, and expended just as many hours, studying the large gap between women in senior leadership positions and the number that graduate from college and enter the workforce. They want to understand why there is a gap, where women lose momentum, what causes them to leave, and how to increase the numbers in executive leadership. These studies have drawn a wide range of conclusions, observations, speculations and recommendations. Who's paying attention to the trade-off and what women sacrifice to get ahead? What are some of the real-life stories behind the numbers? What's behind the curtain and what can women learn from it in order to teach the next generation? Christy learned that regardless of race/ethnicity, background, industry (nursing, lawyers, IT, telecommunications, coal mining, professors, military, doctors, etc), high performing women share a large number of commonalities. This includes women she's talked to in the U.S., Bahamas, Netherlands, UK, and Australia, etc. The number of common experiences is not only staggering in what high performing women give up to achieve success, but how they are treated by men AND other women along the way. They share similar stores of pain from having a large number of critics, unhealed wounds, the baggage they carry, guilt about not having balance and the secret desires that go untapped. Adding those issues to all the battles they fight to ascend the ladder of success is exhausting, so by the time they reach the top, it doesn't feel like success. Some high performing women don't feel successful, because they are bleeding from all the battle scars. This is not true for all women, but it's true for enough of them, which inspired Christy to write this book. In this book, Christy shares her journey to high levels of success, but also highlights what she gave up along the way. In the last few years of her career, she realized she was digging an early grave and courageously shares her breaking point and how she left a 6-figure career for freedom.
About the Author: Christy Rutherford is a Leadership and Success Coach and President of LIVE-UP Leadership, a leadership development and training company that provides success coaching for mid-level and executive level leaders. She assists leaders with lowering their stress, removing unknown obstacles and accelerating their success. She resigned from her successful six-figure career nearly 4 years ago to pursue her purpose with 3.5 years to retire with a full pension. Over the past 4 years, Christy has invested over $100k in personal development training, events, coaching and other programs and nearly 20,000 hours in learning longstanding success and leadership principles.