Quotes from Rachel Simmons

From childhood to adolescence, girls face mixed messages about displaying power and authority.

When you're motivated by external rewards, it's often because you're trying to accomplish goals you didn't create yourself.

Happiness doesn't just happen. It must be pursued. And if the pursuit of the 'ultimate currency' of happiness helps us choose occupations that confer present and future benefit, and these choices, in turn, motivate us to succeed, this strikes me as perhaps the most powerful non-cognitive skill of all.

Jealousy is unavoidable - it's part of the price we pay for intimacy.

Despite girls' sparkling resumes - including rates of college enrollment and high school grades that outstrip boys - sexism is a barrier that still leaves girls ambivalent about power. Opening doors has not amounted to ambition to lead for many of them, even those with options, networks, and resources.

Before I became a parent, I was a bestselling author and speaker pounding up the escalators of a different airport every week.

Prom drops girls squarely into the beauty spending pipeline.

Empathy isn't the same thing as expressing emotions. It's not about sharing your feelings - it can be really uncomfortable if a parent cries or loses strength at the moment her daughter needs it most. The message sent is that you need to be taken care of, not the other way around.

In the so-called age of girl power, we have failed to cut loose our most regressive standards of female success - like pleasing others and looking sexy - and to replace them with something more progressive - like valuing intelligence and hard work.

Prom culture is now painstakingly documented on sites such as Instagram and Facebook, exacerbating the angst of the uninvited.

My experience is that aggression is a universal trait in human beings - girls feel it in any sort of environment, same-sex or co-ed.

Girls must understand not only their moral obligation but their power to be allies to each other at parties and other potentially unsafe spaces for girls.

If more students use self-compassion to reframe their failures, they may discover more nourishing sources of motivation and healthier strategies to pursue their goals.

Ours is not a culture that cares much for the work of care.

The Internet foments outrageous behavior in part because it is a 'gray area' for social interactions.

Small changes lead to big ones. But big changes - trying to become a different person overnight - usually lead to defeat.

Many girls aspire to a version of selfhood that puts a psychological glass ceiling on their potential to succeed. They suffer from what I call the Curse of the Good Girl: the pressure to be liked by everyone, generous to a fault, and flawless at everything you do.

Girls who use jokes to be nasty are often hiding other feelings they are struggling to express.

All around me, I see girls forced to become rat racers in the College Application Industrial Complex, the subculture where students must craft themselves into the perfect specimens for college admission and often lose their authenticity, love of learning, and sense of self in the process.

Our friends are barometers of our own lives: We look to our BFFs to better understand how we're doing ourselves. Our friends help us make sense of what we have, what we aspire to, and what we truly long for.

There are many ways to be the odd girl out. Your pain can brief or lasting, visible to all or none, with one or many. One of the longest, quietest ways to be the odd girl out is to be friends with two girls who are closer to each other than to you.