Free I Shouldn't Be Telling You This: Success Secrets Every Gutsy Girl Should Know by Kate White Page B

response is an automatic one based on their reserves of knowledge.
    A few months after I began at Cosmo , I took a bunch of mocked-up covers out to a shopping mall, showed them to young women, and asked how they liked them. Based on all the covers I’d done over the years, I was pretty sure the women would automatically pick one particular cover because the model was gorgeous and the background color was a yummy shade of yellow. But before they gave their answer, woman after woman asked me the following question: “What month is it for?” Until then, I hadn’t realized how important the seasonality of the cover clothes was to Cosmo readers. Knowing that enabled me to better use my gut when picking cover shots.
    Connect the dots. You just saw two coworkers whispering furtively in the hallway. Is something up that you should be concerned about? Maybe—though it could be that one of them has hooked up with a guy in accounting and is simply sharing the steamy details with her office pal. Your boss didn’t make eye contact with you when she passed you in the hall. Is she annoyed with you? Maybe. But then again, she might just be having a bad morning or got reamed by her boss earlier that day.
    Little moments don’t always mean anything, but sometimes they do—though it may not be exactly what you think. So how do you know what to pay attention to and what to ignore? You play “connect the dots.” If one thing catches your eye in an odd way, make a note but don’t go insane with concern. But if two things relating to the same person or same situation grab your attention, it’s time to sit up. In your mind, run through a list of things they could suggest. Ask yourself how it might relate to you and whether you should be concerned.
    Guard against your gut’s biggest enemy. Even if you’ve learned how to tune in to your gut, there may be times when you end up stupidly ignoring it. Why? Because other people pressure you to—directly or indirectly.
    I’ve seen the potential for that kind of thing to happen with magazine covers. When you’re a magazine editor, sometimes a cover shoot comes in and for some reason just isn’t strong enough. Maybe the clothes didn’t work or the celebrity felt awkward (or was hungover!). Your gut will tell you you’ve got a loser on your hands, but you feel pressure not to say the word “reshoot.” People hate that word. It’s difficult enough to coordinate the celebrity’s and photographer’s schedules the first time, let alone for a reshoot. But you can’t allow your gut to be silenced.
    This happened with the second Kim Kardashian cover we did at Cosmo. In order to make this cover look different, we had decided to shoot Kim in jeans and a bathing suit top and mist her body with water, even wetting her hair a little. I loved the idea—until I saw the results. Kim was her gorgeous self, but she looked in the photos as if she’d been hosed down with Wesson oil instead of water. It was like a Maxim shoot run amuck. My gut was rumbling big-time, and when I started talking about needing to do it again, everybody turned ashen. But it was totally the right call.
    We reshot Kim in a salmon-colored minidress made of sweatshirt fabric, and the cover was the biggest seller of the year.
    Know that you shouldn’t necessarily take your gut at face value. That rumble or knot is telling you something, but it may not be the obvious thing. In a Cosmo interview, Laura Day, the best-selling author of Practical Intuition , pointed out something I’ve found to be true. “When you have an instinct,” she says, “it doesn’t mean you should blindly follow it. It’s a message that you should examine the situation a little bit more.”

{   Always Ask for What You Want   }
    I probably don’t have to tell you that it’s vital to ask for what you want. You know that, right? Whenever I give a career talk to a woman’s group, I stress the value of asking, and lots of women always nod their heads