Book Review: The Girlboss Workbook

The Girlboss Workbook Summary

A graphic and whimsical easy-to-carry life bible filled with to-do lists, timelines, exercises, illustrations and plenty of scribble room, The Girlboss Workbook is fit for both the dreamer and the doer.

It invites you–hell, implores you–to get in there and mess it up a little. Write in the blank spaces and in between them.

#GIRLBOSS started as Sophia’s story, but The Girlboss Workbook is your story.

It includes the best advice from #GIRLBOSS, of course, and will remind readers of the story of the girl who got her start fumbling and failing hard, but now it is time to take her story and use it to help you write your own.

Use The Girlboss Workbook to design your own freak flag to your heart’s content. Ask yourself (or your mom) what makes you special and then draw in your own special snowflake.

Revisit #GIRLBOSS’s sage career wisdom and then use it to draft your own dream cover letter and answer your own practice interview questions.

Fill in the blanks with your turn-ons and turn-offs, your most badass accomplishments, your mistakes.

Write your own lemonade recipe with your own personal lemons. Use this workbook as a diary, a mood board, a stress ball.

No need to handle this book with care and no need to live a typical, cookie-cutter life. Sophia’s has been anything but. 

The Girlboss Workbook Review

#Girlboss was a good read, but I expected that. The Girlboss Workbook that followed, however, really took me by surprise.

Judging from the cover, I thought that this book would just be a little bit of wacky fun based off Sophia Amoruso’s first book.

I assumed it would adopt a very blasé attitude and be more about rejecting the status quo than actually moving you forward in your career or life. But this couldn’t be further from the truth.

I’ve been interviewed for a wide variety of jobs over the past few years, and can confirm that The Girlboss Workbook will be relevant to all.

I’ve interviewed for retail jobs, law firms, banks, marketing agencies, magazines, publishers and more. Corporate or creative, this book is essential for application, interview and even life advice.

Sophia Amoruso provides example application letters, follow-up emails and more. There are checklists for your CV, the companies you’re applying to, your finances, etc.

You could choose to read this in less than an hour, or you could pore over it for weeks as you complete each step.

You’ll get out of it what you put in.

This is an interactive workbook, so to get the most out of it, you need to pause with each page and actually complete the task at hand.

For example, Sophia recommends that you search on LinkedIn for a couple of people who already have your dream job.

Then, check out how they got there and what relevant skills they had to help them along the way, and jot these down.

This is the sort of task that I’d skip by in any other career advice book and “save for later” (i.e. never!).

The interactive element of this workbook is its biggest selling point and what makes it more useful than other books of this nature out there.

Whilst the first half is mostly about your career and life aspirations, the second focuses more on you and what you want to get out of life in a personal capacity.

For example, thinking about what issues matter to you and researching how you can actually get involved make a difference in those areas.

It covers your biggest screw-ups, your biggest fears and your wildest dreams. It really helps to focus the mind on what you really care about in life and where you want to expend your energy.

The only thing I dislike about this book is the cover. I think it downplays just how genuinely useful and serious the advice inside actually is.

The blurb says: “use this workbook as a diary, a mood board, a stress ball”, but, quite frankly, I think it should say something along the lines of “use this workbook to help you figure out what the heck you want in life and how you’re going to get there”.

This book will probably be most useful for those who are looking for their first “real” job now or for people who have been working for a short while but don’t feel like they’re really getting where they want to go.

That said, if you’re someone going through a mid-life crisis and wondering why the hell you’ve been wasting your life climbing the career ladder in a field you don’t really care about – this book is probably also for you!

I honestly cannot recommend The Girlboss Workbook enough for those who need a little direction in life.

The interactive nature of this book means that you’ll actually start implementing some steps to get where you want to go, which is the hardest bit for most people!

Stop dreaming and start doing with a little help from Sophia Amoruso and The Girlboss Workbook.

Find The Girlboss Workbook on Amazon

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