Take Your Space

What better way to sink into the New Year than to learn to take your space?

Take Your Space reads like a conversation with friends, and the collective narrative of unique experiences, advice, and observations of a cross-section of successful women are shared eloquently and fiercely. These are women who are all well versed in the ‘how-tos’ of taking their own space. It’s evident that their journeys have not been easy, linear, nor without sacrifice. All have involved some serious personal growth, self-awareness, and self-care.

Authors Jo Cribb and Rachel Petero encourage you to take your seat at the table, whatever that table may look like to you. Perhaps it is a seat at the head of the table, or maybe it is just being seen and heard in a room full of people. They encourage you to champion other women; to be the kind of woman that honours the desires and aspirations of other women. ‘Find your people’, they say – these are your tribe who can mentor, support, and embolden you to get to where you want to be.

Find your voice, learn that ‘no’ is a complete sentence, and own your own unique brand of confidence, not just to get a promotion or to negotiate a higher pay, but fundamentally to walk in your own space with your culture, your family, your past, and your present. I know personally that a licence to be yourself in the workplace is instrumental to happily getting out of bed each morning.

Take Your Space is a bold book and within, you will find the sentiments that I did. Do not accept the status quo in work and in life if the status quo leaves you wanting, stuck in a rut, or unfairly disadvantaged by power dynamics and discrimination. Make work work for you by deciding what you want and how work fits into all your other roles.

Literally take your space as a woman and as a person, implicitly, unreservedly, and without explanation.