Dana Perino has taken her passion for mentoring young women and articulated it with wit and advice in her new book, Everything will be Okay, so well that she has lived up to that promise to be that person the younger you needed; specifically, a young woman just entering the workforce.
The book dives in immediately with all of the twists and turns of Perino’s early journey from a public relations professional, her longing for something different but not quite sure what it was, and even her romantic “meet cute” of her future husband, Peter.
She adapts the lessons she took along the way, which include vignettes about her own personal setbacks, and plots out a smart, simple, modern boilerplate for young women on how to navigate today’s professional workforce landmines.
From the way you respond to an email (no exclamation marks, please) to the flip (no worries) response to someone declining a request you made; Perino really makes you think about how you present your case for yourself, not just in person but also in your correspondence.
She also writes succinctly how you know when it is time to move forward in your career, beginning with understanding what exactly makes a good manager:
And once you get there, she is skilled in instructing the reader on the grace, graciousness, and leadership skills you need to adapt to be successful.
Her chapter on economic anxiety is particularly impactful. When you look at Perino today, she is poised and, by any measure in this country, very successful, but she didn’t start there. She started in a basement apartment in D.C., far from home, with days spent taking books out of the library and weekends filled with “free” activities such as city hikes, rollerblading, and biking.
She knows the perils of economic anxiety:
Throughout the book, the Fox News host nimbly manages to offer sage advice that helps lessen the anxieties many young professionals experience when self-doubt has somehow become their best friend, and every decision they make seems to hold their entire future at stake.
Eleven years ago at a speech at Vassar College, Lisa Kudrow said, “Let me reassure you, it’s not supposed to be easy. You’re supposed to have moments of uncertainty about which path to take, because the 20s are full of crossroads. When one door closes, another door always opens. It really does. That’s what I would tell myself, to keep those moments of doubts, only moments. And it worked. I kept going.”
Perino channels this aspiration throughout the book, published after a year of a pandemic that has seen many young women’s professional lives turned upside down. It is just the clear-eyed read needed for all of us as we begin to restart professional lives stalled for over a year.
