School is supposed to prepare students for life after graduation -- but are the skills applied in the classroom hurting women more than helping when it comes to career advancement?
The "good girl behavior" women learn in school -- studying and thoroughly preparing for their lessons -- could be holding them back in the workforce, says Tara Mohr, founder of women's leadership program Playing Big. In a recent HuffPost Live segment, Mohr outlined the ways women need to adjust to a job's "spontaneity factor."
"Women can get into kind of a comfort zone with preparing -- and knowing that if they prepare enough, they're going to perform well and they'll have that sense of control," Mohr told host Nancy Redd. "What happens after we reach a certain level in our careers is we're being asked to improvise a lot more. We're being asked to think on our feet, we're getting a lot of questions or pushback that we can't prepare for. And school generally does not teach us how to do that thinking on your feet."
Mohr says she's noticed that women with high potential -- ones who often succeeded beyond expectations in school -- often had trouble reaching the next level in their careers. Her solution? Women must learn to leap out of their comfort zones.
"We want to learn to be uncomfortable," she said. "So much of women playing bigger is really about learning about how to be out of our comfort zone, have fear flowing through our veins [and] have a little adrenaline going because we're out of the status quo and familiar."
Watch the clip above for more on women and leadership, and check out the full segment on HuffPost Live.
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