Why would you want to swagger at work?  Aren’t there many dangers and risks? The answer is yes – there are danger and risks, but they are far outweighed by the fun, benefits and pay offs.

The goal of The Girl’s Guide to Swagger is to offer an approach to resolve the barriers to self-confidence that women face at work and to offer a third way – different than exhibiting only traditional feminine values or trying to copy men’s values.  Through stories of women who swagger and exhibit healthy self-esteem, Swagger at Work demonstrates ways to build confidence and invites women to tell their own stories of empowerment. Here is how I found my swagger:

As a young, relatively inexperienced woman, it was part of my job to run a construction project to build 35 townhomes, a childcare center, and a community center.  We selected a contractor that I trusted, but I was concerned about the site superintendent, the man who would actually be running the job every day.  He was very old school and I could tell even in the interview to get the job that he was uncomfortable with me in the role of running the construction.  We had a hard time at first – he was slow-talking and slow-acting, I was fast-talking and always in a hurry.  He would present a decision for me to make, but the only way I could figure out his opinion was to offer mine and have him disagree with everything I said, until at last I hit upon what he thought was the right way to proceed.  At this point, he would stop, slowly consider my last suggestion and allow as how that might work.  This would be followed by a lengthy discussion about how to implement the idea.

I realized that as the representative of the public entity building the project, I was in charge and it was my job to make decisions.  It was something I could do.  Although I was inexperienced, I had lots of good advisers.  I began to act like I had more confidence than I did.  But it wasn’t until the snakes that everything changed.

From the beginning, I went to the site meetings every week in the trailer. I made decisions on where to pour concrete and what to do when the foundation was in the wrong place.  But none of this earned me much respect.

There was constant testing, led by the site superintendent. One cold, sunny winter day, he called me to say that there was a problem on the site.  They had found some unexpected rubble in the ground where they had been digging a foundation.  This was bad news, indeed, as it meant that we were going to have to find someplace to dump the rubble and pay someone to do it.  I went immediately to the site to see what was in the soil.

In fact, there was a lot of rubble – old tires, concrete blocks, and other junk.  And in among all that junk were the snakes.  The snakes had moved in to the pile of junk under the soil and were hibernating there.  There were snakes everywhere – in the rubble, hanging down from the bucket of the front loader that was picking up the junk, littered everywhere on the ground. Some of the snakes were asleep and some were dead – in pieces, but mostly there were just waking up and slowly crawling around.

It was a horrifying sight.  But what the site superintendent didn’t know what that I was a tomboy growing up.  I played in the creeks near my house and brought snakes and frogs home to upset my mother, while she was doing laundry.  She did not like snakes.

I took one look at the snakes and saw that they were garter snakes.  I told the site super to find someone to haul off the junk and get a price.  I had never seen anyone so disappointed.  He said “But what about the snakes.”  I told him “don’t worry they are only garter snakes – they won’t hurt you” and stalked off.  I didn’t allow myself to look back over my shoulder until I was back at my car.  The site super still stood in the middle of the site – dumbfounded that he had not been able to upset me.

After the snakes, the constant testing and challenging stopped.  I got myself a pair of big boots and stomped on to the site like I was in charge – and at last – I was.