Stand Up. Speak Up. Level Up.

I first met Kelly and Katy Mooney a few years back at an event for WEV (Women’s Economic Ventures). I was impressed that two sisters, with very different professional backgrounds, had combined their collective years of work experience – Kelly as a successful tech entrepreneur and Katy as a lawyer turned career coach – to build a company called “Equipt Women,” which gives women the tools they need to find greater professional success and meaning. The truth is, I was intrigued that two sisters could work together successfully at all, as it’s no secret that sisters can be one of the most special, if complicated, and potentially fraught, of relationships. Now Kelly and Katy have continued their professional partnership by collaborating on a book that aims to share the wisdom gleaned from their years of helping women navigate the complicated and very personal journey of building a meaningful career. 

Billed as a modern playbook for women (or really anyone) who wants a career and a life with more meaning, power, and possibility, UP!: The Playbook for Every Woman on the Rise is worth reading whether you’re starting out, stuck, or soaring. It offers common sense life advice we can all use and demystifies the complicating life-building path we all traverse. On June 2nd, from 6-7 pm, I will have the chance to be in conversation with UP!’s author Kelly Mooney, and her co-writer/sister, Katy Mooney, at Godmothers Bookstore in Summerland. I sat down with the sisters to have a pre-conversation conversation, so that I can share with you what they had to say about writing the book they wish had existed when they were trying to navigate their own respective careers. 

Gwyn Lurie: What motivated you to write this book?

Kelly Mooney: In many ways this grew out of the work we do with Equipt Women. But a couple years ago for International Women’s Day I had this campaign called “A Hundred Days for Women” on LinkedIn. For two years in a row, I opened my calendar to women, and when I analyzed all the themes, there were so many consistencies. It was clear that women were experiencing the same challenges, struggles, frustrations with the workplace. So, it felt like the time is now to provide them a guide that didn’t really exist in the marketplace. 

GL: What about you, Katy? Because you’ve coached a lot of women.

Katy Mooney: Yes. So, we started Equipt Women five years ago. And as part of that, I was leading the cohort for Momentum, which is our eight-week program for women, and I was getting exposed to their challenges. The same questions were coming up cohort after cohort. Kelly started doing her book, and she realized she wanted a sounding board and a thought partner and so she asked me if I would want to co-write the book with her. It kind of made sense because we were working so closely on Equipt Women. I think of Kelly as the visionary and I am a good collaborator and sounding board.

Kelly: One of the first interns we had, Katherine Madrigal, got her first job in the workplace after interning for us. She got there and was so exasperated and she was like, “Why is there not a roadmap for women at the workplace? Why is it so confusing?” There were all these sparks that were telling us that this book hadn’t been written. There were books for women in senior leadership and aspiring to the top ranks of the company, but not really for women who may not want to be in the most senior ranks of the company; so we felt like that was a big hole.

GL:It makes sense to me that you call the book “Up!” because you’ve both devoted a lot of your professional lives to helping women to move “up.” Where does that come from?

Kelly: I think it’s been my whole life’s journey. We’re part of a family of 10 – there are seven girls in our family – so we were used to women being the dominant force in the household. But also, when I left my business, I worked with a coach who told me she wanted me to write my life story in 60 days, stream of consciousness, and then we analyzed it. One of the themes that just kept coming up was: Whether it was in college, or my first job out of college creating the internship program that helped hire more women, or later in YPO [Young Presidents’ Organization] or other things, I’ve always been advocating, unconsciously, for women.

Then when I left my business, it became a much more conscious decision. I think also when COVID came and I started reading more from the World Economic Forum, realizing the gender pay gap isn’t going to close for over a century, I just got really pissed, and I work well from a place of anger because it motivates me to drive change.

Katy: I’ve always been a good listener, and I’ve always had a lot of friends and people coming and telling me their problems; I was better at supporting them than I was at supporting myself. The same thing happened when I was managing people. I loved the managing part – building people up, and coaching them sort of instinctively – that I ultimately went to coaching school and learned more methodology around that. I became more aware of how women are hired, paid, and promoted at lower rates than men; even though they have more degrees, even though there are more of us, there’s still a dearth of women in leadership roles, whether it’s in politics or in businesses. 

GL: Is your reason for wanting to write this book, in part, derived from your own frustrations in business?

Kelly: Totally. We’re trying to teach people to have more agency; to help people discover that they have more agency than they realize and often they just need the tools. Quite honestly, even as I reread it, I was like, “Oh yeah, that’s a good reminder.” For people who are more seasoned, I think there’s a lot of good reminders in the book.

Katy: We all need support. We all need coaches.As I matured as a human, a professional, and as a woman, I made better decisions and I realized: “Oh, I do have choices.” But I just stumbled through the first 15, 20 years of my career assuming that I would be promoted and that opportunities would present themselves. I didn’t realize how you need to have intention and you need to make some moves, you need to build relationships, and nobody’s going to come and say, “Hey Katy, here’s an amazing opportunity and I want to pay you a lot of money.” You have to make that happen and have difficult conversations and think about, “What do I want to do?” 

GL: You write how many of us tend to hold ourselves back, despite growth, and getting feedback externally. Do you think it’s the same for men as for women?

Kelly: I don’t think it’s the same for men, typically. I think women are wired to prioritize and care for others first, and we are wired, socialized, and reared to care for ourselves second, third, or fourth. I think when you take that into the workplace, it makes sense. 

Katy: Also, from the beginning of time men have been in charge. They’re still in charge in most parts of the country and most parts of the world. There are exceptions for sure, but that’s what we see. We tend to model what we see – whether on TV or in movies or in our own communities. It’s hard to think beyond what we are seeing.

Kelly: People keep saying to us: “Oh, this book would be so great for men, too.” And I hope that they discover it and find examples they can translate and make the context work for them. But all the books we had to read in the ‘80s and ‘90s, really until Sheryl Sandberg’s book Lean In, were written for men. We can debate the merits of Sandberg’s book, but before that there really weren’t any books written for women. We constantly had to extrapolate male examples from military or sports and say, “How does this relate to me as a woman?” 

GL: I think it’s hard for young people to answer the question: “What do you want to be?” But you’re asking: “Where do you want to go?”

Kelly: Yes. Because that’s directional, and what do you want to be feels
so finite.

GL: But isn’t that something we ask young people all the time?

Kelly: I think it’s a terrible question for a kid because it’s demanding an answer that they’re not ready to give. We have 20-somethings. And my daughter is like, “Oh my gosh, I should find my path by now. I should know exactly what I want.” And I was like, “No, actually this is all about exploring, discovering, and learning what you love – and what you don’t; the kind of people you want to be around – and who you don’t. And in what kind of environments you want to be.”

I don’t think you have to know what exactly you want to do. I think you learn from every experience that keeps pointing you in a direction. I think that we do a disservice, especially to juniors and seniors in high school and maybe even juniors and seniors in college, in asking them, “What do you want to do?” Because really the only thing they should want to do is work with really talented people who are going to help them grow.

Katy: And learn a lot. What do you want to be when you grow up makes it sound like it’s one thing… and then you get there and then there’s nothing else. We’re all constantly, if we’re lucky, growing and changing, and what we might want to be is going to be different when we’re 20 versus 30 versus 40.

When somebody says, “I just don’t know what I want to do with my life or I’m just stuck,” one of the things I have them start paying attention to is, what are you attracted to? What topics do you find yourself attracted to in social media or news or conversations or in your job? … And that’s what you start paying attention to because that’s where some of your strengths are. What gives you energy? Pay attention to that and to the people that give you energy. 

GL: There’s a theme about leaning into what you’re good at, what feels good, what inspires you. You say that you don’t need to know your destination to make a change in your life, but I don’t think generally people are comfortable building the plane as they’re flying it. 

Kelly: I like to ask people to think about what problems they want to solve. So, some people are really drawn to “I want to help feed more people.” Or, for me, I knew in my life I wanted to be in a creative pursuit. I didn’t know what that looked like or what that meant. My parents thought I was going to starve. “You’re going to be an artist that doesn’t make any money.” I never worried about that. I just knew I needed to be in a creative environment making things and thinking about the future. That is very different than some of my siblings who were like, “I want to care for people in a medical environment and I want to heal them.” And I go into a medical environment and I have palpitations. So I knew that whole career track was not interesting to me. My son is focused on climate change, and he wants to be really involved in solving for rising sea levels: how do we mitigate that and how do we plan for that? There are a million jobs that could be in and around that, but he knew that was the problem that he was drawn to solving.

GL: There’s a chapter where you write about the importance of recognizing what inspires you in moments. But often those things are fleeting. It’s a song, it’s a sunset. How does one turn those fleeting feelings into some greater manifestation in their lives?

Kelly: That’s a good question. I mean, it’s about learning to pay attention. Think about how often you go for a walk without your phone, and I think that’s the biggest thing I would encourage people to do. I know that we become headphone dependent and all the things, but being without your phone means really looking, so that you’re internalizing what you’re paying attention to, and at the same time capturing it. Katy and I are both big fans of journaling so that you’re capturing things that happen or that make you feel a certain way.

Then we have this discipline that we say: make a move. And make a move is really one little thing. If you were inspired by something on a walk that made you think differently, come back and write it down; come back and make a commitment to one thing you’re going to do next, one step you’re going to take that gets you a little closer to what just inspired you. 

GL: One of the strong themes in the book is what I would call “intentionality” – pay attention. Get offline, stop spending hours on your couch scrolling through other people’s lives.

Kelly: I’m glad you had that takeaway. The editor thought we had too many of those get off your phone things in there and we took out about half of them, so the fact that you still took that as a theme is good.

GL: I thought about this a lot when the kids were little and we’d be in the car. They’d be online and I’d think about when I was a kid, we would be on road trips just looking out the window and how much came out of boredom.

Kelly: Totally. I think you’re spot on. I think that when we get busy, which is a word I really try to avoid, that “busy” just means we’re on autopilot mode and not paying attention – being intentional is just taking that five seconds to just sit with something. And the only way you can do it is when your phone isn’t a part of you. I have to thank my own kids for helping me reduce my own time because our son is very disciplined with his phone. He has no social media except LinkedIn and when we go to dinner he will say, “Can everybody just leave their phones at home and can we all just be present?”

He’s really pushed us to have those kinds of behaviors. I think our daughter lost her phone, or it broke in college, and she went a whole semester without a phone. I think it was very liberating to her to figure out, how do I do this? So, it’s just made me less reliant. I think all of us of every age group are spending too much time on our phones and that’s why that theme comes out over and over.

GL: Why do you think so many capable and successful women find it hard to talk about money?

Kelly: Because I think we were socialized to believe that it’s not proper, that it’s private, and a lady doesn’t speak about money. I recently had a newsletter that was called Get Good with Money. And it was like, “Hey, it’s a day after tax day. Now it’s time to take a breath and really just take stock of what you earn, what you spend, how you’re investing, where you’re getting your financial influences from, all the things that keep you in control of your money and having a healthy relationship with money.”

Numerous people pulled me aside and said, “I read your newsletter and I’m one of those women that has made a lot of money but abdicated financial control to my partner or spouse.” My jaw just dropped because these are very successful, seasoned women. Sometimes you can imagine if you’ve been a stay-at-home parent, and you haven’t worked in the workforce, you can understand how that might happen… In some relationships that’s how things are divided up. He takes care of the money, and she takes care of the caretaking… But I think we’re drawing the lines in the wrong way. It should be a horizontal line, not a vertical line of dividing money.

We have this whole module we teach around money in our eight-week program and one of our interns said, “the topic of money is so stressful,” because her origin story is that her parents were constantly fighting about money. They didn’t have enough. So she said, “Just the concept of money is so stressful. I’d rather avoid it than to have stress.” And I was like, “But what if you understood it better? What if you could manage it better? What if you could unlock your money mindset to be healthy and constructive and serve you in your life?” And she was like, “Oh, I’ve never talked to anybody who had a healthy money mindset.” So, I think that’s a big part of it too – we’re not groomed to have a healthy money mindset.

Katy: And it’s not just about having money, it’s about – even if you have a small amount – how do you manage it? 

Kelly: Well, that’s one of the reasons we created a bunch of free tools that are on our website. We have a thing we call the Budget Genius. We realized a lot of women in our programs weren’t budgeting. One of the cool things we did with this tool is that we did nationwide averages of low, medium, and high on every category. So that you could get a budget that works for you. 

We realized that so few people were doing that. We created a tool and we made it free. Then we created a whole course – and made it free – about how to negotiate your compensation and talk about money more openly and freely. 

GL: We’re living in this moment where things that we came to think of as normal, like DEI, are being challenged across the board and women fall into that in many cases. Do you notice in your work with corporations that there’s less support out there for boosting women?

Kelly: I think there’s less overt support. A lot of companies have said what they think is expected to be said by them, especially public companies, so that they don’t get activists coming after them, especially after the executive order that was issued. But I think privately, enlightened leaders know that they need a diversified leadership pipeline to have an organization that is going to be successful and relevant and attract good talent. I have yet to meet a single leader who doesn’t believe that women aren’t critical to their leadership pipeline.

We recently had a very large company who has publicly said that they abolished all their DE&I programs, but then proactively reached out to us and asked to pay us in advance for the cohorts that we have delivered for them that have been so successful. So publicly they’ve said one thing and internally they’re operating in a completely different way.

GL: What are some of the biggest challenges facing women today versus when we were in our 30s and 40s?

Kelly: The biggest one I think is the ease of comparing yourself to what looks like a perfect curated life. You can go on Instagram and Katy and I could pick out examples of people we know who post a lot, have beautiful photography, and beautifully curated lives, and you would expect that they are 100% pulled together and happy. What you realize, though, is that it’s a façade for a lot of difficulty that they’re going through. When we were coming up, we didn’t have that. All we knew were the people who lived next door and the people we sat next to at our company. We were all just working hard and doing our thing and so I don’t think we had that pressure.

GL: So, the easy road is not always the best road. You’re advocating taking the path that’s going to be the most interesting and the most broadening. Would you agree with that?

Katy: Our message is: Create the career and life you really want, not what I want for you, not what society wants for you. What’s difficult to tease apart is: What do I want apart from what my parents want for me? What do I want apart from what my siblings want for me? What do I want apart from what the culture is telling me I should want? That’s what I think the book is saying.

Kelly: And it’s trying to teach the reader to be more expansive in considering those possibilities.

Katy: And it’s not necessarily taking the hardest road. It’s taking the road that interests you, based on what your values are, based on what your strengths are, based on where the growth is in different industries; based on the problems that you want to solve. It’s based on knowing yourself, because part of the problem is that we don’t know ourselves. I didn’t know myself really until my 30s, I’d say, and I continued to get to know myself in my 40s. As I got to know myself and was honest about who I really was instead of what other people wanted me to be, I became much happier. What we’re advocating for is create the career and life you want.

Kelly: That’s why there are no “shoulds,” in the book. You know how difficult that was to write a book without the word “should.” Because it has such an obligatory and confining set of expectations around it versus what could you do? What might you do? What do you want to do? What could you consider doing? As soon as we start changing that lens for people, they’re like, “Oh right, I don’t have to go to that party. I could actually read a book and feel nurtured tonight instead of obligated into something I don’t really want to be a part of.” So being really choiceful I think is what we’re suggesting, instead of just being pushed into something that everyone else thinks we need to be doing.

Katy: There’s a chapter in there that’s called “Take Aim.” You don’t have to make some major move just because you have an instinct about it. Maybe you want to get your MBA. Well, before you do that, talk to some people who have gotten their MBA. How expensive was it? How did they manage it? Did it create more opportunities for them? Is there a community college class you could take? Is there a weekend program so you don’t have to give up your job? There are steps you can take to get more confident about whether that is the right decision for you before you make a major move.

GL: In this book you quote Marcus Buckingham: “Strength is an activity that strengthens you, and weaknesses an activity that weakens you, even if you’re good at it.” Can you explain that?

Katy: It comes back to energy and when you feel strong, when you feel confident. If you enjoy public speaking, maybe you get energy from it, maybe you feel like you’re pretty good at it, then that’s a strength. The example I like to give is: I was really good at project management, not because I wanted to be, but because I had to be, of necessity. When I changed careers and I was working in agencies and other situations, there were complicated projects and there wasn’t a project manager. So I just needed to organize information for myself, and I became very good at that, but I hated it. The distinction that we draw is: you can be good at something and if you don’t like it, or if it drains you or you’re bored or you just don’t enjoy it, it’s not a strength.

Kelly: We’re trying to help people see the difference between a competency and a strength. A strength makes you go, “Yes, I killed that today.”

GL: What do you hope people take away from this book?

Kelly: I hope they take away that they have the ability to create a full career in life, the one that they truly want, that the power is already within them, and that this activates them to pursue it.

Katy: I would echo that. I would say optimism, that they have agency, they have choices. We were talking about the title of the book Up! It’s also heads up, we were talking about heads up from your phone, heads up and be conscious, be intentional, look at what’s in front of you, look at all the opportunity, and then take action.

GL: So really “Up” means not necessarily getting the bigger job, but feeling more fulfilled in your life?

Katy: Yes. It’s all the ups. If you look at the cover, it’s like, “Stand up, speak up, step up, level up, show up.”

Katy: Move up.

Kelly: It’s about self-responsibility, and the power that comes with that. We want people to level up in all the ways – Up your income, Up your happiness, Up your career, Up your awareness. Up is intentionally vague but also inspiring.

GL: Thank you so much. I hope everybody reads this book.  

Visit https://tinyurl.com/Mooney-Up-Book for more information and tickets.