At 13, Kerry Chikarovski decided she wanted to be a politician. Smart, confident and ambitious, she enjoyed school, loved debating and often had the teachers talking about her big plans for the future.
At the time, politics was hardly a career path frequently trodden by women and there were few female role models Kerry could identify with. If she was going to have the career she wanted, along with the family she desired, she’d need to invent her own way for making it happen rather than hoping to follow the course of somebody who’d done it before her. She’d have to improvise her way to the top.
And so she came up with a plan and started chipping away at it. She studied law, worked as a solicitor, and thought about going to the bar where she hoped to work flexibly and then move into politics. She had her two children early, thinking she’d put the time into her career later on. A perfect plan for an ambitious woman who knew exactly what she wanted.
But the plan to become a politician hit a roadblock: Kerry didn’t enjoy being a solicitor. It was a profession simply not suited to the self-described people person. She never became a barrister as she expected and sought different options for a flexible work- ing life instead. She worked part-time for a number of years while raising her family, even running a small legal practice from home doing conveyancing work and wills and teaching at the College of Law. Life happened. Ambitions got put on hold. Plans fell apart. It was more than two decades since having that career epiphany as a teenager before Kerry finally made the move into politics, later becoming the first female leader of the NSW Liberal Party.
Kerry was in her mid-thirties when the personal disappointment of not fulfilling her political ambitions finally caught up with her. And it only occurred after one of those dull, unremarkable moments that somehow set the tone for us to make a significant career decision. Unremarkable moments that can be the catalyst for key deci- sions that become our most significant career turning points.
“I was standing at home one night ironing the school uniforms. And the next thing I started bawling my eyes out,” says Kerry. “My then husband asked, ‘Why are you crying?’ I told him, ‘I’m 34 years old and all I’ve always wanted to do is be a politician and I’m nowhere near my aim.’ Kris, the sensible person that he is, said, ‘Well, do something about it!'”
So Kerry stopped waiting. She organised lunch with her then local member John Dowd and told him she wanted his job. Again she came up with a plan, this time thinking she had four years to prepare and campaign for a political career given she expected Dowd to retire at the 1995 election. And again, the plans unrav- elled and Kerry found herself improvising when Dowd suddenly announced his retirement days after the then NSW premier Nick Greiner called an election. Within months of experiencing that light bulb moment while ironing school uniforms, Kerry was pre-selected for the seat and elected to parliament. By party standards, it was a relatively short time before she was then elected leader of the party, and it occurred just months before a state election, leaving her “flying feet first” into figuring out the role. Determined not to ask for help (something she says she later regretted) she spent three hard years learning everything from how to manage internal party politics to handling the media. Even the best-kept plans couldn’t have prepared her for some of the challenges she experienced in politics.
“I remember walking into parliament and thinking this is just where I am meant to be. It just felt so comfortable…I was really excited to be there. Despite what ensued and some of the awful downs I experienced, I was always excited to be in politics. I loved being a politician,” she says. Kerry didn’t have the easiest time in politics, and there would be plenty more career turning points to come that would determine her time in the role and what she’d ultimately do next — indeed she still has nightmares over press conferences she believes she could have handled better and recalls the treatment she received from journalists that a male in her posi- tion wouldn’t have to contend with. Still, she got what her 13-year- old self wanted all those years before.
“I don’t like to use the word but people tell me it was pioneering,” Kerry says. Her quick rise to the leadership of the party was pioneering — no woman had achieved such a position before — and it required Kerry to determine her own way for making it happen. Her original plans and determined approach to making a name in politics fell apart but Kerry got the political career she wanted regardless. She re-planned, re-grouped and re-evaluated her life circumstances in order to return to those original ambitions. She stopped waiting for the right moment to occur and simply made it happen herself. She improvised her way into parliament, moving well away from the script she’d once written for herself regarding just how she’d make it happen. And even further away from the script those who’d taken the helm of the NSW Liberal Party had read from before her.
And if she was 13 again today, Kerry says she’d do it all over again.
This is an edited extract from Angela’s book, Women Who Seize the Moment: 11 lessons from those who create their own success.
The book is available in all good bookstores, at Booktopia and Jane Curry publishing.