241: Read our New Book! "I Got This! Leadership Blueprint"

How many leadership books do you have that are written by women? 
In this episode of "Child Care Conversations," Kate and Carrie discuss the lack of representation of women in leadership literature, especially in childcare. 🎙️ They share their eye-opening experience at a conference where, despite a majority female audience, the recommended leadership books were mostly written by white men. 

This inspired them to write "I Got This! Leadership Blueprint," a resource to empower women in childcare leadership. 📚 They also discuss the challenges of publishing and the biases in categorizing women's leadership books. Overall, it’s a heartfelt chat to inspire and uplift women in the industry. 🌟

Order our new book now! https://amzn.to/4iyYm48

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Transcript

Marie 00:00:01  Welcome to child care conversations with Kate and Carrie Carey.

Kate 00:00:06  Have you ever noticed all those business books?

Carrie 00:00:09  I mean, yeah, I've. They're on my shelf back here. I've got a lot of them. These are the child care specific. These are faith ones. And then up here I have the ones that are general business. So I got three piles of them.

Kate 00:00:22  And on all those piles, how many of them are women?

Carrie 00:00:26  I mean, not a majority. I would say a majority are white men in their 50s, 60s and 70s.

Kate 00:00:34  Okay, that's just wrong. So today, Carrie and I are going to talk about what prompted us to write the I got this leadership blueprint. So if you haven't heard, Carrie and I have book number eight now, it's book number eight in child Business development. It is not our eighth book because we both have written a lot of others, and we wrote a children's book together.

Carrie 00:00:57  And I wrote some other children's books by my own self.

Kate 00:01:01  And I wrote some cookbooks.

Kate 00:01:04  so anyway, let's, We were sitting in a workshop. We were in a conference. And in the room over 50% of the room were women. The presenter was a respected early childhood leader, and he was giving everybody suggestions, Carey, of what leadership books they needed to be read, needed to read. And you know, when you and I think about the director bookshelf, we don't automatically think a bunch of 50, 60, 70 year old white dudes.

Carrie 00:01:37  You know, and, you know, one of my oh, I should have pulled out some of my favorite books before we got to talking. And there are books that are my favorite director resource books that are written by people who are now dead. so it's not just him who is like, hey, look, read this book by a dead person. I have some of those too, because just because they've passed away doesn't mean that the information isn't valuable? Like my favorite finance book that I'm obsessed with? And that person wrote it in the 80s? It was one of my first textbooks.

Carrie 00:02:15  I think I.

Kate 00:02:16  Know, and I've got some fun facts on that book, but we'll come back to that later.

Carrie 00:02:20  But, you know, thinking grow rich. He's not around anymore.

Kate 00:02:26  Well, that book does have some issues. We could definitely come back and make that think and grow, you know, rich women's version.

Carrie 00:02:34  So take the misogyny out of it a little bit.

Kate 00:02:39  Okay, so back to my rant. So Carrie and I are in this workshop. The the the presenter did a great job, but I couldn't believe that every resource he gave was a leadership book by a white guy. And in early childcare, one of the things that Carrie and I have really been struggling with over the last couple of years is that representation matters. We say this all the time, but yet we go to conferences and here we are at a conference listening to presenter, and they aren't thinking about who's in the audience. So we have a leadership book for women by women, for women and Child care.

Kate 00:03:21  And we are really, really excited about being able to do that. Now. Do we think this is the End All leadership guide? No. But is it a place to start? Absolutely. And we know that there are some fantastic women entrepreneurs that are in leadership, and we want them to write their books, too. And if you need help with that, reach out to us anyway. So here's.

Carrie 00:03:45  The thing. The books that we do have that are written by women, that are for administrators of child care programs, they are text books. And so they cost 150 bucks and they're updated every two years. So but very little changes because I have one book, I have gotten five different editions of, and very little changed inside from year to year. But it was 150 bucks and I had to get it every time a course I took required that book. It was very frustrating.

Kate 00:04:20  Well, you know, the one thing that I thought was interesting and it wasn't exactly on the book I just grabbed, but a lot of the women's leadership books that I went to go look for were under self-help.

Kate 00:04:32  Why is a women's leadership book under self-help? And a men's leadership book is under business.

Carrie 00:04:38  Because they don't read the statistics at the Department of Labor and the Department, you know, the Small Business Administration. And they don't know that more women start businesses than men start businesses. Maybe that's why they're uneducated. The people.

Kate 00:04:58  Working.

Carrie 00:04:58  In categories are uneducated. They're just going by their bias. Because if you were educated, you would know that between, depending on the year, between 60 and 70% of the new businesses started are started by women. So we should be getting more books.

Kate 00:05:17  Not the guy. We should feel like we have the authority to write those books, and we want you to. We want you to be a guest on our podcast. We want to help you write your first book. We want to help you with your keynotes. we have lots of goals for you, and we hope that this book will be a great opportunity for you to sit down and realize. And again, we are not bashing because we've used them as our own virtual mentors and coaches.

Kate 00:05:45  Right? So we have books on our bookshelf from the Tony Robbins, the Napoleon Hills, the Jack Maxwell's John Maxwell, you know, the Dale Carnegie's. You know, I mean, we have those books.

Carrie 00:05:58  The chicken soup guy. Yeah. the the the like the love languages guy. You know, we've read Covey.

Kate 00:06:08  Yeah, we have all of them and I'm looking for more of the women's ones. And I do have Brené Brown, and I have a couple others that I've ordered because I was like, there has to be more. And trying to search for women's book, women's books on leadership that aren't textbooks, that aren't in self-help or aren't full of that kind of language, but most of them that were were in the self-help category. And I found ten carry ten in the last ten years by women, only two by major publishing houses.

Carrie 00:06:47  Well, I mean, we could go on a whole other rant about publishing houses, and I, I can do that all day long because the publishing houses aren't taking on new authors, unless that new author has a whole bunch of following.

Carrie 00:07:05  And even if they do take on, like I have a friend who is absolutely a leader in her industry, and she sent out over 100 pitches to different publishers, and she had a decent following, and she had a successful business behind her and they all passed. So she's self-published the book and has sold plenty of copies because she knew there was a demand, but she didn't know how to self-publish, and I didn't reach out to her early enough in the process to be like, hey, I can help you with that. But she got it done. And here's the thing self-publishing or publishing with a small publishing house ten years ago was considered, oh, you're not good enough for the big publishing houses. But that's not the case anymore. The big publishing houses aren't taking a risk on people that they don't know are going to. Dan Brown could not get The Da Vinci Code published today, without a doubt.

Kate 00:08:10  The other thing to think about, though. I mean, let's be realistic. If you look at how little per book those authors make out of the big publishing houses, even what we make when we self-publish on something like Amazon versus some of the other, you know, book by me and stuff like that.

Kate 00:08:28  Right? Like there's a lot of different ways, if you're looking at that as a true revenue stream versus a way to build your authority.

Carrie 00:08:36  So because if Suzy Orman and, what's the other the money guy who talks about the snowball, Dave Ramsey, Suzy Orman and Dave Ramsey, they both quote unquote, self-publish their books. So if these are two of the leading lights in personal finance and they self-publish their books or use small publishing houses, in Dave Ramsey's case that he owns the publishing house.

Kate 00:09:03  Wouldn't know anything about that.

Carrie 00:09:05  Yeah, I don't know.

Kate 00:09:06  Anything.

Carrie 00:09:06  About that. But if you've got people who their whole deal is personal finance and most of their books are not traditionally published by the Big Five. It's because of finances. They can get more of the revenue if they self-publish, than if they're with the Big Five and the Big five. It's really just a vanity metric because you wanted to be a New York Times best selling author. I don't know that anybody in early childhood is going to get to become a a best seller by those vanity metrics, because it's not who has sold the most books in a category.

Carrie 00:09:46  But again, that is another soap box I will get off of, because if they were bestselling authors, then Harlequin Romance novels would always be at the top of that list or other books like that, because they sell way more copies. Stepping off my box now.

Kate 00:10:04  Okay, well, I'm glad you've stepped off yours. I've stepped off my. Hopefully folks who are listening will go grab our book, and I want you to pause and think. I want you to reflect on what's on your director bookshelf. And have you got books from leaders in our industry? Do you have Vernon Mason's book? Do you have somewhere because book? Do you have Kathy Liggins book? Do you have all eight of ours? Well, probably not all eight because one of them's in Spanish. But do you have ours? I'm gonna just say it. Why not? You know, Chris Murray, we have a lot of people in the industry who've written a lot of books and not just read Leaf Press. Read Leaf Press is a, again, a great boutique publisher that focuses on publications.

Kate 00:10:48  But it's not the only place. And if you pay attention and you follow us on social media and you follow our podcast, you'll probably hear some other authors coming on board over the course of the year that'll be doing some guest spots because we are helping them write their book, and we're excited about seeing where that goes for both of them. And, well, for those two, we've got some others that are coming down the pike and we can't wait to hear your story. And if you need help with that, let us know. Carrie, where do we want to take it?

Carrie 00:11:21  Well, I think that you need to embody the front cover of our book. You need to know that you are secretly a superhero. so we use that imagery a lot in our book covers because we think every director, every school owner is secretly a superhero. So you're secretly a superhero. Get out there, read books that help you feel like a superhero. And if you learn something from today's show, please share it with a friend.

Carrie 00:11:52  And, go to your podcast player of choice and write a review, and we will talk to you next week.

Marie 00:12:00  Thank you for listening to Child Care Conversations with Kate and Carrie. Want to learn more? Check out our website at Texas Director. Org and if you've learned anything today, leave us a comment below and share the show.