Once listed as one of Canada’s Top 100 Most Powerful Women, author Susan Allen shares events in her life that helped shape her career with PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), one of the Big Four accounting firms. Initially hired as an intern in its Mississauga, Ontario office in Canada, she ended her impressive career thirty-four years later after having served on the company’s global board of directors. Allen faced many obstacles on her path to a senior management position at PwC—some of them self-inflicted. In COUNT ME IN (A Trailblazer’s Triumph in a World Not Built for Her), she discusses these stumbling blocks and advises others as to how to avoid making the same mistakes she made along the way. Her candidness and willingness to share copious details of her personal and business life lend credence to the advice she offers.

Each piece of advice Allen offers in COUNT ME IN is based on one of her real-life experiences, evidence that she speaks from first-hand knowledge as opposed to theorizing from a distance. The book is sectioned into eight parts, each one embodying a different time frame. At the end of each one, Allen lists the lessons she learned followed by a series of reflective questions to help readers clarify what they had just read. Major topics include balancing home and work life; being a female in a male-dominated business world; taking risks; overcoming self-doubt and self-imposed limitations; learning to ask for things you want; and being true to oneself. Allen shares not only her accomplishments, but her mistakes and missteps as well, taking complete ownership for her decisions and giving credit where credit is due. The hindsight, emotion, and self-reflection with which Allen authored the book reveal her personality and vulnerabilities and bring her advice down to a personal level. With the exception of a few places where Allen discusses periods of her life out of sequential order, the narrative is well-structured and easy to follow, making the book especially helpful for females who lack confidence in taking their career to the next level.

Susan Allen’s COUNT ME IN (A Trailblazer’s Triumph in a World Not Built for Her) is a well-written self-help book narrated by an author who has worked around difficult circumstances to achieve a fully satisfying career.

~Florence Osmund for IndieReader