Embrace the Power of You
Owning Your Identity at Work
Embrace the Power of You is a timely career guide that’s packed with suggestions for creating inclusive workplaces.
Drawing on her eye-opening experiences working in corporate America as a Latina, Tricia Montalvo Timm’s career guide Embrace the Power of You shares valuable lessons about self-acceptance and inclusivity.
As a first-generation professional, Timm felt like an outsider in the high-tech world she worked in. To fit in, she tried for years to change and conceal aspects of herself that made her feel different. The changes only left her feeling frustrated, though. She later learned about the value that she added to her workplace by embracing her uniqueness. Indeed, her book asserts that anyone who accepts who they are adds value to their workplace.
The book names the benefits of workplace diversity with clarity, including improved decision-making and creativity. It uses keen examples to support its claims: having a woman director in a software company, Timm says, led to its first-time gender wage gap analysis. In contrast, not having women and Latina leaders in the workplace had negative effects: there was no one to understand the difficulties facing working mothers, for example, and Timm felt that she had to hide her heritage to fit in. Such stories put a human face on the negative effects of exclusion.
In addressing managers, the book suggests accessible strategies to help their employees show up in authentic ways, including examining personal biases, listening, remaining informed about social and political events outside of the workplace, and creating space and time for employees to share their personal stories. Anecdotes such as those of a Black industrial and organizational psychologist who had to straighten her hair to try and belong in the corporate world, an engineer from Colombia who developed two identities to fit in, and a biracial man who struggled with trauma from not feeling accepted during his childhood result in a wider picture of what it feels like to be invisible and not to belong in one’s industry.
To help its audience through the process of accepting their unique attributes, the book includes suggestions such as listing the adjustments one makes to fit in and choosing to drop one of them, or letting the world know one small quality that’s different about them. These are the first steps to executing changes and embracing one’s identity. Still, this work is somewhat hindered by its repetitive nature: discussions about self-acceptance and belonging are returned to, as are negative responses to affirmative action in the US, among other subjects.
Embrace the Power of You is a timely career guide that’s packed with suggestions for creating inclusive workplaces where employees can show up as their authentic selves.
Reviewed by
Edith Wairimu
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book and paid a small fee to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. Foreword Reviews and Clarion Reviews make no guarantee that the publisher will receive a positive review. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
