Becoming Super Woman

Let’s say you get a piece of cake. Cool, now you have a piece of cake. Then, you eat it. Awesome. Nothing that special about having cake and then eating said cake, amiright?

When people say, “You can’t have your cake and eat it, too,” I want to smoosh a hunk of frosting in their face to shut them up. Um, hello, you can have your cake and eat it, too. You can actually do whatever you want with your cake—it’s yours. You just can’t do everything you might want at the same time.

The idea behind this clichéd cake analogy you’ve heard a thousand times is, essentially, that you can’t have it all. In this step, I’ll show you that you can. I will also tell you why you shouldn’t follow conventional wisdom about the things you can or can’t have in your life, but rather wise up about your own definition of “having it all.”

WTF IS “HAVING IT ALL?”

The concept of “having it all” both inspires and angers me. The phrase can be traced to the title of OG Super Woman Helen Gurley Brown’s book Having It All: Love, Success, Sex, Money . . . Even If You’re Starting with Nothing. The book came out in 1982, when Ms. Brown had been at the helm of Cosmopolitan magazine for twenty years, and it was intended to be a tongue-in-cheek guide for women who wanted more of the best things in life for themselves. When I read it, her inspiring story of escaping a shitty upbringing to rise to the top hit close to home.

What angers me, however, is that the idea of “having it all,” born from this kick-ass book that encouraged women to be sexually liberated, has been appropriated by TV, movies, and commercials into some unrealistic, punishing set of expectations for women. In the last three decades, this idea went from a much simpler concept of being able to have both a love life and a career to the notion that women have to be all things perfectly—a mom (which HGB wasn’t, and didn’t address in her book, BTW), a wife, a sex kitten, and a career rock star in equally measured parts.

Leading women’s studies scholars point to the ’80s “Because I’m a Woman” commercial for Enjoli perfume as the first depiction of the ideal we currently associate with “having it all.” The campaign shows a woman singing: “I can bring home the bacon, fry it up in a pan, and never let you forget you’re a man.” It goes on to show the woman flip from “business” to “mom” to “sexy” attire: “I can work ’til five o’clock, come home and read your tickity tock, and if it’s loving you want, I can give you the shivers.”

Super Women . . . that was a cringe-worthy commercial. Career-oriented men who are also dads don’t expect to attend every school function, make cupcakes for the bake sale, and look like a Calvin Klein underwear model while they do it. The difference is that we beat ourselves up a lot more for not “doing it all” than they do. “Having it all” is not about being equal parts PTA mom, master chef, seductress wife, and C-suite exec. “Having it all” doesn’t mean “Doing it all.” That’s an impossible, unrealistic, Superwoman-like expectation that’s a recipe for burnout.

We have to let go of the pursuit of trying to be Instagram-perfect in every aspect of our lives. It is draining our Emotional Wellness. Remember the stats from my survey: almost all of us (89 percent) feel we are on the verge of burnout, with more than two-thirds (71 percent) about to experience a breakdown. This endless pursuit of perfection in every single category does nothing for that ultimate pursuit—of happiness—and desire for balance.

Perfection doesn’t work long term. Progress does. So, let’s aim for that.

YOU CAN’T DO IT ALL

It’s only natural to wonder where other women are in their lives, and to compare ourselves to them. We want to know: Do they “have it all?” The answer: Yes, some of them do. Just not in the way social media would lead us to believe it exists. And then we want to know this: How do they “do it all?” And the answer is: They don’t.

No one has exactly your responsibilities and circumstances, and no one else combines those with precisely the same goals. If you are a working mom, looking to get promoted on the regular, comparing yourself to a stay-at-home mom who homeschools her kids and makes her own bread is not realistic. Neither is comparing your career to that of a single business phenom with a multibillion-dollar company, or your health regime to that of a fitness blogger. You can have all of those important pieces—being a good mom, career success, fitness—but you can’t do it like women who have reached the highest levels in each of those areas, often by focusing on just that one thing.

I used to define “having it all” as being the best at everything. Well, that backfired. So I redefined and reclaimed it for myself. If your definition isn’t working for you, it’s time for you to redefine and reclaim your own version, too. Later in this step, we’re going to hone in on our goals and start building our own definition of “all.” You can also use The Super Woman Journal to keep you on track throughout the day so that you can see what you’re focusing on now and forgive yourself for not doing the things you’re not.

Take it from another OG Super Woman, former secretary of state Madeleine Albright. She said, “Our life comes in segments, and we have to understand that we can have it all if we’re not trying to do it all at once.” It was only after she got divorced that she started focusing on her career in a big way. While her academic life was taking off (she earned a master’s and a PhD shortly after her third child was born), she was once asked to participate more at her kids’ school, to which she said: “What in God’s name does a woman have to be so that she doesn’t have to worry about the carpool?”

You can do anything you want. You can run a mean carpool. You can run diplomacy for the free world. You can run a marathon a month. You just can’t do it all at once.

PLEASE LEAN THE FUCK OUT

Sheryl Sandberg wrote the wildly popular book Lean In. She preached that women should “lean in” more, meaning dig in to work more and push harder. In theory, that can, well, work. In practice, I’ve found that it’s not always the healthiest move.

CONFESSIONS

OF A SUPER WOMAN

The Time I Leaned In Really Hard

I’ll never forget when I finally got the call from a Big Shot TV executive, someone I’d been asking (er, politely stalking?) for a meeting for months to talk about a new show pilot I was jazzed about. I had spent weeks building out a presentation pitching my idea, researching the subject, and carefully outlining the legal parameters for our partnership. I had really leaned into this project, putting it ahead of everything else—including my sleep, health, and personal life.

And then, there he was (well, there his assistant was) lighting up my iPhone screen. It wasn’t just the cold February air that made my breath catch in my throat.

“Hi, Nicole. This is Zoe, from Mr. Big Shot’s office. He took a peek at your pitch and would like to talk to you about the project.”

“Wow, of course! I’m so flattered!” I said, looking around for a quiet spot to duck in, out of the cold and noise. “Is he available for a call tomorrow morning between, um, ten AM and twelve PM, or three to five PM?”

I was proud of myself for suggesting an actual date and time for the call, despite my excitement and frozen fingers. I knew that would show how assertive I was (and also, let’s keep it real: I wanted the extra time to prep!).

“Actually, no, he’s available right now. Okay for me to put him through?”

Shit. “Yes, of course!”

I picked up the pace (no small task in stilettos!), hoping I could make it back to my apartment before the small talk ended so that I could pull up the presentation on my laptop and go from my notes. But then:

“Hi, Nicole. It’s Mr. Big Shot. I’ve taken a look at your pitch and have a few questions about the format. How many panelists would you suggest per show, and which of the guests you mentioned in your pitch can you get ahold of by Friday?”

My mind went blank. I tried to remember the details of the presentation, but no dice. Then, stalling, I talked through the show concept again—which was silly, since he had clearly read it already—all while breathlessly trying to pull up the deck on my phone with my numb fingers. Scrolling, scrolling . . . my adrenaline was high; my heart was racing. This was my opportunity, and I wasn’t going to blow it. Ah, here’s the PDF, finally! Loading, loading . . . almost there . . .

SMACK!

My feet flew out from under me, and I went down. Hard.

Turns out, black ice is super tricky to see, especially when you’re staring down at your screen. Is it sad that the first thing I did when I came to was to reach around frantically for my phone? Well, it was—and it was pointless, as I found my phone a few feet away with the screen smashed into a million pieces.

If I hadn’t been so fried and frazzled, I might have been able to remember the details of the presentation I’d worked so hard on, or at least stay calm enough to make a better impression. Instead I’d leaned way in, determined to make this opportunity a reality at all costs. I stressed out and sacrificed the other important parts of my life trying to make it happen. Did it blow up? Yes. Did I end up in the ER with a broken elbow? Yes. Did I hear from Mr. Big Shot again? Hell no.

While my injured elbow was painful, I knew it would be just fine. But healing from my harmful addiction to leaning in to every work opportunity like it was my last would be much harder. Having my arm in a sling for the next month wasn’t fun, but it forced me to lean back (for a while, at least) in a way I likely wouldn’t have otherwise.

“Lean back” or “lean out” doesn’t mean “be lazy” or “compromise your goals.” It means “make mindful choices about how you spend your time.” Overextending and trying to do everything often results in actually accomplishing very little except for draining your energy and motivation. Take it from these Super Women who leaned all the way into burnout or near burnout territory:

• Tiffany Haddish, the comedienne, openly talked about her burnout only after she was criticized for bombing a New Year’s Eve performance. She said, that year, she only slept in her bed twenty-eight days and worked almost every single day.

• Lilly “Superwoman” Singh, one of the most popular YouTube stars, announced to her fourteen million subscribers in 2018 that she needed a hiatus because of burnout. She said, “I’m mentally, emotionally, physically, and spiritually exhausted.”

• Selena Gomez, the singer, actress, and most followed woman on Instagram, has been refreshingly open about her burnout. She took time off work and social media to focus on her health, saying that dialectical behavior therapy (or “DBT,” which I will talk about in Step 12) changed her life.

• Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, the youngest woman ever to be elected to Congress, has been outspoken about slipping into “eating fast food for dinner and falling asleep in my jeans and makeup” since entering politics. She said on social media that “we live in a culture where that kind of lifestyle is celebrated as ‘working hard,’ but I’ll be the first one to tell you it’s NOT cute and makes your life harder on the other end.”

• Hilary Duff, the child star, has spoken honestly about her bouts with burnout over the years. In 2005 she said, “It’s the type of exhaustion that one night of sleep doesn’t fix.”

• Beyoncé, “the queen,” has even struggled with burnout at different points in her career, canceling shows and taking a year off in 2011 to focus on her mental well-being.

We have to help each other heal from and break the cycle of burnout by pulling back the rhetoric of leaning in. While promoting her book Becoming, former first lady Michelle Obama said, “I tell women that whole ‘you can have it all’ [idea] . . . hmmm, nope, not at the same time, that’s a lie. It’s not always enough to ‘lean in’ because that shit doesn’t work.”

What she—the ultimate Super Woman—said.

GET IT ALL

In order to “have it all”: 1) acknowledge that “having it all” and “doing it all” are not the same thing, and 2) define for yourself what “it all” means to you—then come up with an action plan to have that. You get to decide what that looks like for you and no one else. To achieve success, you have to set yourself up for it. If you don’t define what winning means, you are destined to feel like you’re losing even though you’re not.

ANOTHER F WORD

As you know, I love me some F words. And as you may remember from my first book, Rich Bitch, I preached my three Fs of goal setting and planning: Finance, Family, and Fun. I encouraged you to come up with one, three, five, seven, and ten-year goals in those three areas of your life. I’m a big believer in first figuring out where you want to go in your life, and then reverse engineering to figure out how you are going to get there. I mean, you can’t just jump in the car without knowing the address and expect to magically arrive at your destination.

FYI

A major ten-year study on goal setting found that only 3 percent of people set clear intentions and actually wrote their goals down. But, on average, those people earned ten times (!!) as much money as the other 97 percent.

When I first created those three Fs, I messed up. Mea culpa. It’s not the first time, and it won’t be the last. I forgot the most important F word: Fitness. And by Fitness, I don’t mean a sick six-pack, I mean taking care of yourself—all of yourself: your physical wellness and your Emotional Wellness. Because, in fact, when your Emotional Wellness suffers, so does your physical, and vice versa. For instance, depression can lower your immune system, which means you get sick more often.

In failing to include Fitness in my grand plan of planning, I failed myself. And I’m not going to let that happen to you (or me) again. So, let’s revisit my goals for the four Fs.

A lot has changed in the decade since I first started writing these down. (And, as I first discussed in Rich Bitch, we all maintain the right to adjust our goals as frequently as we want to, as long as we’re creating a corresponding plan to get where we want to go.) I still suggest breaking each list down into one, three, five, seven, and ten-year goals. I like the shorter time frames because “What do you want to be doing in ten years?” can be a very daunting question. Those smaller, more manageable pieces make planning the future feel far less overwhelming and much more doable.

Finance

You probably have career goals in your head, but have you actually spelled out what they are? In order to hold yourself accountable, clear metrics are important. In my typical spirit, here are my current Finance goals first:

Year 1: Create a meaningful conversation and business verticals around Becoming Super Woman

Year 3: Launch a platform of e-courses

Year 5: Option my books into other mediums

Year 7: Pilot my own show about money and career issues

Year 10: Develop and host my own events series

And, look at that, I’ve already nailed my Year 1 goal (hey, reader!) and am well underway with my goal for Year 3. Having a clear outline for where I want my career to go has helped me to remain laser focused on getting there, even though I know I will adapt these goals as the industry I’m in changes and, of course, as I change.

Notice that Finance goals are not dollar amounts. Realistically, the money from your career should power the rest of your goals (unless you have a trust fund I don’t know about). So as you flesh out the rest of the Fs, check back and see if your career choices cover what you want to achieve in all areas of your life. I recommend doing it this way because while it is cool to have actual money numbers as goals, whether it’s a target salary or the bonus you’re working toward, it’s more constructive to determine what you would do with that money first. Based on that, you can determine what you really need instead of focusing on an arbitrary number like “a million dollars.” If you need a million bucks for what you want to do, great. But, maybe you need more or less than that. You won’t know until you determine the life you want to live.

As for spending that money, the sweet spot is somewhere between living like you’re going to die tomorrow and believing you’ll live forever. A similar principle applies to spending your time: you shouldn’t put off your passions, but you still have to show up at the job that makes them possible. You want to enjoy the life you have now while making sure you also have the back of your future self. Our brains were developed to favor living in the present more than saving for the future because for most of evolutionary history we needed all of our resources to survive day-to-day. But while the jury is still out on the nuances of whether money can buy you happiness now or later, we know for sure that it can help you optimize for it. In order to do that, though, you need crisp clarity on what you want your life to look like in the near future and the long-term.

Family

Not a lot of business books talk about goal setting regarding family planning, but as one of my earlier mentors, MSNBC anchor Mika Brzezinski, drilled into my head, nothing is more money-, energy-, and time-consuming than having kids and/or caring for family. And for women, not much else is more time-sensitive and affects your career more. In my case, I’ve adjusted my family goals more frequently than any of the other Fs, depending on who I met (or didn’t meet). So, here are my Family goals today:

Year 1: Be in a committed relationship

Year 3: Have my first child

Year 5: Have my second child

Year 7: Consider having more children with the eggs I froze at age thirty-one

Year 10: Transition into an advisory role at work to travel and spend more time with my kids

It doesn’t matter whether you want to have ten kids or ten cats, or whether you are caring for an elderly family member or are just trying to be more available to your friends, the point of this exercise is to outline what “having it all” looks like for you.

Fun

Lifestyle and fun goals are also an important part of what your complete “having it all” picture looks like. After all, living a full life means taking the time to hit the pause button and enjoying the fruits of your hard work. My Fun goals at age twenty-five were not so fun at all. I was a card-carrying workaholic, and only over time—and way too many beautiful summer weekends spent huddled over my computer screen in a dark apartment—have I learned to prioritize fun. For me, that comes mostly in the form of adventure travel. So, here are my Fun goals these days:

Year 1: Travel to a new country alone once a year—in first-class

Year 3: Take a road trip once a month to a new town

Year 5: Start an annual girls’ retreat somewhere fun and active, like Bali

Year 7: Work and travel abroad for a few months a year

Year 10: Buy a beach condo to spend summers in

Sure, fun is fun—but it can also be expensive and time-consuming (as any busy person who has tried—and failed—to book a proper vacation will tell you). Again, it’s best to work backward. First, think about what kind of life you want. Do you want to take quarterly vacations? Monthly girls’ weekends? Weekly date nights? Decide that first, then figure out what the dollar figure is to live that life.

Fitness

Of course, my F lists have changed a lot as life (and shit) happened. But what was missing—although it only became noticeable when I had my breakdown—was staying healthy in all aspects of the word. When I started this goal-setting exercise, I didn’t even have Fitness as a category—and my physical and emotional health both suffered as a result. So, here’s what my Fitness goals look like now:

Year 1: Go consistently to weekly psychiatrist appointments

Year 3: Train for and run a half marathon

Year 5: Go on one retreat per year (i.e., a trip that’s totally centered around Emotional Wellness)

Year 7: Train for and run a marathon

Year 10: Attend a seminar or institute that teaches a new skill or practice in mental health

Now, it’s your turn to list out your four Fs: your goals for Finance, Family, Fun, and Fitness. Once you’ve come up with your answers, you’ve basically created a list of what “having it all” looks like for you. And if (when) you start to feel envious of others, go back and look at your list. Is it on yours now? Nope? Then, that’s not what “having it all” looks like for you at this point in your story.

F YOURSELF

In order to set yourself up to reach your goals and get it all, you have to get it together and create a flight plan. One of the (many) nice benefits of having once dated a pilot is actually knowing what that looks like:

1. Find your destination. Check! We did that with our four Fs.

2. Figure out what you’re working with, like storms and air traffic. (We will dig into how to identify and manage external challenges in Step 5.)

3. Create the best path to get to your destination based on the conditions, knowing that even the best plans have to change on, well, the fly. (And I’ll talk about keeping a level head no matter what in Step 9.)

4. Get there. Fly your course while monitoring your controls, keeping ’er steady, and making sure you are level with the ground along the way. (We will discuss how to check in on yourself in Step 11.)

You don’t have to know anything about planes to understand how to reach your life goals while dealing with real-life complications. There is a lot of improvising as you go. But improvising doesn’t have to mean flying by the seat of your pants.

Doing improv looks easy but (and I never thought I would know this from firsthand experience) it actually takes a lot of skill to make it look effortless. I’ve tried a ton of alternative therapies and taken a ton of classes over the course of my journey to become a Super Woman and strengthen my Emotional Wellness. One of the hardest was actually an Improv 101 class. The class focused a lot on the basic rules of building a scene. Yeah, I didn’t realize improv had “rules,” either, and I also didn’t realize how complex making people laugh could be. The gist of the Comedy Improvisational Manual, created by Amy Poehler and her team, I read (seriously) is that in every good sketch, you must identify three things: 1) Who you are, 2) Where you are, and 3) What you’re doing. After you’ve determined who you are, where you are, and what you’re doing in an improv scene, you need to convey those answers to the audience—ideally within the first four lines of your skit. No pressure.

Since life is one big improvisation and a comedy (of errors) of sorts, I started asking myself these questions as regular check-ins off the stage, as well. Sometimes, when you ask yourself who you are, you’ll find that what you want has changed, and you need to chart a path to a whole new destination. More often, you just need a course correction. Having clear goals is great, but determining them is just the beginning. It’s easy to get blown off course—checking in with them and yourself ensures you’re still heading in the right direction.

It’s one thing for an actor (or moi, who was the one weirdo non-actor in the class) to know her part in the scene unfolding onstage; it’s another thing to be able to articulate it clearly and quickly. But as soon as you do, the scene can go anywhere and everywhere you want to take it. There are no bad ideas. The only way it ends badly is if someone holds back. Doesn’t go full out. Half-asses it.

The best shows (and lives) have full asses in them. And how do you get a full ass? Having cake. And eating it, too.

BOTTOM LINE

Conventional Wisdom: I can “have it all” if I work hard enough and never complain. Put up, or shut up.

You don’t need to work like crazy at home and at your job, never breaking a sweat, in order to “have it all.” I get asked the “How can I have it all?” question at pretty much every event I go to. “Easy,” I say. “You decide what ‘having it all’ really means to you and then get that.”

Conventional Wisdom: I’ve gotta do like Sheryl Sandberg and “lean in.”

Don’t go overboard “leaning in” or you’ll fall over. Lean In also said that you need a good, supportive hubs or partner to “have it all.” Well, that’s not the most helpful advice for single moms who don’t have one of those and can’t afford a full-time nanny (or all the other luxuries wealth can buy you). What I’ve found more actionable is to “lean out” of the things I’m not focusing on right now and not shame myself for it. Perhaps we can start replacing the phrase “chillin’ like a villain” with “chillin’ like a superhero.” I know it doesn’t have the same lovely rhyme to it, but it’s time to celebrate the dare I say heroic moments when you “lean back.”

Conventional Wisdom: My goal is simple: be successful in all parts of my life.

Well, first of all, that’s not simple. And, second, that’s not a specific enough goal. If you don’t know exactly where you’re going, you won’t be able to get there. You’ll also set yourself up for failure by comparing yourself to others who are focused and specific about what they want.