Introduction

Ask questions. Surround yourself with inspiring people. Know you will fail. Learn to embrace failures as part of the process of evolution, growth and leveling-up. Get quiet regularly so you can listen to your gut—it always knows. Stay true to who you are and who you want to become!

—Carrie Dorr, founder and CEO, Life Smart x Carrie Dorr; founder, Pure Barre

Congratulations! You’re doing this “life” thing exactly as planned. You’ve taken all the right steps, and your path is stretching out in front of you as we speak. Whether you’ve got a college diploma, apprenticeship, or grand scheme in hand, you’ve done the legwork and are ready to start living. You’ll soon have a couple job prospects waiting for you to choose from. You’ll build your career for a few years, while investing in your friends and family, and remain open to the possibility of beautiful, fun relationships.

Eventually, one of those relationships will blossom into the engagement of your dreams and a storybook marriage. You’ll both pursue your careers and enjoy a year or two of marriage, then the first baby will come. For a few weeks or months, you’ll stay home with the baby, and when it’s time to go back to work, you’ll find exactly the right nanny or day care service who will love your little one while you return to pick up where you left off with your job until your second—maybe third, if you’re adventurous—baby is born. Not too close together, not too far apart.

Life will go right back to normal as you juggle motherhood and your career for another couple of decades, and then you’ll spend a carefree retirement catching up on things you’ve always wanted to do—using the money you’ve saved up throughout your successful and fulfilling career, of course.

Still with me?

That’s the path that many of us set out on, anyway. I know I did, many years ago, and my daughter is where you are now. We all look to examples of prominent women who have “made it,” and it looks like they have it all. Our families, teachers, and mentors move us along that path toward career and family, and we agree with them. It all looks like such a good plan.

The problem is, society’s plan isn’t really a plan at all. It’s only an ideal. We usually don’t figure out that the path we’re on isn’t working for us until life happens and things start to fall apart. We don’t meet the right person at the right time, and our expected timelines become skewed. Or we’re married with two kids, heading back into the workforce, realizing that “having it all” is not as easy as it’s cracked up to be. Leaving kids at home becomes a more difficult decision than we could have known, or work starts to take us out of family events or moments in our kids’ lives. Or the career we’ve fallen into isn’t as fulfilling as we’d expected it to be, and we’re stuck miserably counting down to five o’clock every single day.

It took my generation decades to realize there is more to life than that. My daughter’s generation—you and your peers—seems to have a better handle on the need for balance. Your parents have raised you to have clear expectations of success and have set you on the right path to get there. You might have taken some time off after school to explore for a bit before you started your life, but the thing is, life is still going to start. In fact, some of you are already feeling that pressure—you’ve got student loans, a relationship, and bills and can’t just take off to Europe to gather your bearings before it all hits. Life is happening now, and you’ve got to figure out how to cope—never mind how to thrive.

I’ve been there. I’ve had the path laid out in front of me, ready for the taking. And I’ve had life implode around me, laughing in the face of my expectations. That moment—when you realize that society’s ideals don’t line up with reality—can be exhilarating or terrifying. For many in my generation, it didn’t hit until we felt like it was too late to make a change. Many of us suddenly realized we were entrepreneurs at heart, and far too many pushed it off because they had two kids and a dog and no time to pursue their newfound goals.

That’s why I’m so glad I can share these stories with you now. It’s much better to figure out who you are and where you want to go sooner rather than later. That’s not to say you can’t get back on track, no matter where you are or where you wind up. I know because I’ve been there, and plenty of other women have been there as well. We all took wandering paths to where we ultimately needed to be, but the point is that we kept moving until we got there. I won’t ever ask you to give up everything and start over. Instead, I want you to discover who it is you are and what kind of life you’ll thrive in, and then I’m going to teach you how to hold yourself accountable to that path.

The SheFactor process, which we’re going to walk through piece by piece in this book, is the framework that society’s plans won’t give you. It’s how to figure out how you roll and what kind of work (and life!) will align best with that. The model of the superwoman who can do it all is a fantasy. Every woman around you who has found fulfillment in her life and career has only done so because they aligned their life with who they are at their core. They made it happen—not anyone else—and they did it in spite of what life threw at them.

My life oscillated between perfection and chaos for decades. I remember being twelve years old, riding in the back of our Pinto station wagon, crying as my grandparents, Orange County, and the life I knew faded away and the mountains of Colorado rolled past my window. In Colorado, I wound up with amazing experiences that would shape my future, including a full-ride scholarship to SMU—and then I promptly lost that same scholarship at the end of my freshman year. Just in time for my dad to lose his job and his ability to help me pay for school. I moved in with my grandparents in Southern California to attend a nearby college, worked two jobs, did an internship with an ad agency—and finally traversed my way back to CU Boulder to finish college a year later. I had the time of my life at CU (while still working a couple jobs and heading up public relations for Panhellenic), then promptly lost my boyfriend of three years, during senior year, when he married someone else without telling me first. (You really can’t make this stuff up.)

The ups and downs didn’t really stop. In fact, they became bigger and more painful. There were several earthquake moments in early adulthood that shook me to my core and threatened to take everything from me. The kind, bighearted, good-looking guy I married a couple years out of college was taken from me in a plane crash. The daughter I didn’t plan for but loved and protected with all my heart was at risk for several years while I endured a long, expensive custody battle that exposed me to the corruption in the family court system. The multimillion-dollar business that I built from the dreams my late husband and I had was almost lost to the market crash of 2008.

Some of you will have earthquakes of your own. Others might only experience small tremors. No matter how your story unfolds, if you don’t listen to your heart and your head, if you don’t pay attention to what your gut or the universe is telling you to do, those moments will pull you completely off course. These are skills that take time and maturity to develop. But if you’re willing to learn—from my ups and downs, from the other women who’ve shared in this book, and from the women willing to mentor you—I can help you get a jump on them.

If you were looking for another career book that would just tell you win big, this isn’t it. But I hope you’ll stick around, because I’m fed up with people acting like a job is all there is in life. That’s not all that makes you happy. That’s not what creates a life that you love. If a job is your biggest priority, why not build it out of something you love and are passionate about? The SheFactor steps we’re going to walk through are meant to help you build a way of life, not just get a job. That’s why careers are last on our list in this book. It’s okay to take your time and work up to that.

I hope you’re breathing a sigh of relief. When you’re young and launching your life, that sudden pressure to be an immediate rock star in whatever you decide to do can be anxiety-inducing. You’re just launching your life—how on earth are you supposed to know what you want to do with decades ahead of you?

Rather than setting the impossible expectation of knowing exactly what you’re going to do and knocking it out of the park—you’re going to play. You’re going to be forgiving of yourself. You’re going to listen to your intuition, do more of the things you love, and do less of the things you don’t. You’re crafting a whole life here. You should enjoy that process.

SheFactor 101

SheFactor was born out of playfulness. Literally! When the pet care franchise that I started, Camp Bow Wow, grew to be the country’s largest of its kind, we brought in a consultant to help us set goals from the corporate level down to an individual level. They did...