Career, Personal Life, and Growing Your Value
Iam the Queen of the Awkward Moment—and I love it. It’s a trait that I’ve developed ever since I was a young girl moderating political debates around the dinner table, with my brothers, mother, and White House statesman father. In interviews, discussions, and meetings, I’ve always found that the Awkward Moment tells me almost everything I need to know about any given topic.
When I’m in the interviewer’s seat, I’ll lead with a few softball questions and genial banter, and then I’ll throw a wrench in the works. If the others jump in right away with rapid-fire responses, either in conflict or agreement, you’re definitely in for a great discussion—but you’re not going to get to that brutally honest place where time stands still, the domain of discomfort and naked insecurity. No, the Awkward Moment is a different beast altogether. It’s that uneasy lull that follows a question that’s so controversial, so sensitive that no one dares take it on. When it surfaces, I know that I have suddenly pinpointed a hot-button issue. I’m onto something big.
The Most Awkward Moment of my career came in the summer of 2014 when I was moderating a panel for the White House Summit on Working Families. The subject was very close to my heart: the fact that women, wives, and mothers need to learn how to understand and leverage their value in the marketplace. I was sharing the stage with some of the country’s most powerful and internationally known women. Luminaries such as feminist movement leader Gloria Steinem. Political pioneers like former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. Media moguls like Black Entertainment Television (BET) CEO Debra Lee. Intellectual institutional powerhouses like Judith Rodin, the former president of University of Pennsylvania and current president of the Rockefeller Foundation.
I was nervous to be up there with such incredibly accomplished women. But I was very excited to get an inside look at how they had estimated their financial value at different points in their careers—or, unless they’d been born super-women, how they’d underestimated it. I wanted them to share what had happened in their work lives, what they’d learned, and how they’d used their experiences to maximize their monetary worth in order to accomplish such extraordinary achievements.
But I also wanted to know something else.
To be honest, I wanted to come away with some tips that I could use in my own life. Obviously, the women on this panel had done it all—at least over time, right? But how had they done it? I wanted to know all the mechanisms they’d deployed on their way up. I’m no Judith Rodin or Gloria Steinem, but I do know that more than half the time, between my job, my kids, my marriage—everything—I’m flat-out exhausted. And it doesn’t feel like it’s working. The scramble to take control of the important parts of my life (never mind doing the basics, such as going to the dentist) is relentless. I’m always putting out fires. I’m always on edge. And although I wouldn’t trade my career for anything, there’s no question that it has taken its toll on my family. So I wanted to know: What kinds of tolls had their careers taken on them? And how did they solve those problems? Getting answers to these questions would be the greatest gift of all because, as far as I’m concerned, what is the meaning of what I’m doing in my professional life if my family is not thriving?
So on that blazingly hot summer day, in a football stadium–sized conference room packed to the rafters, I began by introducing the distinguished panel. Then I asked, “What do you see out there in the ranks . . . do women always know their value? Do they communicate it effectively for themselves?” I asked whether they had observed what I have: that women are often their own worst enemies in the workplace. I had seen time and again that we don’t ask for what we’re worth because we don’t know or we’re too scared to find out what our value is.
Men aren’t too scared to ask. And it’s not that men get paid more than women only because they feel that they are more entitled to a bigger salary. Instead, it seems that we women don’t claim our value because we don’t feel entitled to it. We ask for less than what we’re worth when we’re applying for or offered a job or a raise. Not only that, we often apologize for what we assume is the “inconvenience” we’re putting our higher-ups through when we do ask. Okay—now discuss, panel!
Right off the bat, Rockefeller Foundation President Judith Rodin confessed what happened when she was first offered the job as head of University of Pennsylvania years before. “When I was offered the presidency of Penn, the first woman Ivy League president, I think the board believed that I would—and should—feel extremely grateful.” She laughed. “They offered me a salary, and I went home overnight and started to get really angry. I went back to the board the next day and I said, ‘Would you have offered me that if I were a man?’ And to their credit, they paused to think about it, and then within the next ten minutes they raised my salary significantly.”
If that isn’t an example of knowing your value, I don’t know what is. Rodin’s experience illustrates how critical it is for women to advocate for themselves. To know what men are getting paid for the same jobs. To know that if you’re being offered the job, your employers probably have a higher estimation of your value than you do. So you’ve got to step it up, do your homework, and explain plainly and firmly what you bring to the table. That’s the essence of knowing your professional value.
But, I said to the conference audience, it takes a while to learn how to do that. BET’s Debra Lee agreed. She marveled at how different things were now from when she was rising up in the ranks as a media executive. “I’m seeing a growing trend of young women being better prepared, and saying, ‘I’m not going accept a position, if I’m not [compensated fairly].’” She added, “When I was coming along, I didn’t have that many role models, in terms of women and business or female CEOs. I never even thought about being a CEO.” When she was first offered the position of chief operating officer (COO) at BET, she’d learned that three men at the company had already applied for it. But there had been no job posting! How in the world did these men have the wherewithal, the guts, to apply for a position that didn’t even exist?
“They just make stuff up! They oversell in every way!” Debra said.
I couldn’t resist breaking in, throwing my hands up in disgust and admiration. “It is an unbelievable talent on the part of the human male!” We all, audience included, had to laugh. Evidently just about everyone in the room had had a run-in with that “unbelievable talent on the part of the human male” at one time or another. Debra confessed that even when she had been invited to make stuff up—stuff like her salary, for example—she had so little sense of her professional value—her skills, her experience, her unique perspective, her earned wisdom and judgment—that she couldn’t even imagine what the number attached to it might even look like. When she’d been taken out for lunch and was offered the COO position and was then asked how much she wanted, Debra admitted that she was astounded. “I was like, ‘Wow—I can pick a number?’” she recalled thinking at the time, chuckling at her naïveté. “I hadn’t thought about that. So I said, ‘Well . . . I don’t know. A million dollars sounds good.’ And he looked at me. And he said, ‘Why so low?’”
On the surface of it, the panel was going great. The speakers were sharing stories of how they’d learned to measure what they were worth professionally and financially in a take-it-to-the-bank kind of way. The audience was getting a lot of information about how these pros had paved the roads to their brilliant careers. But still, women in the audience and online weren’t getting exactly what they wanted to hear. And neither was I. In the moderator’s seat I was being handed stacks of questions from these women. Perhaps not coincidentally, most of them centered on the very theme I was dying to hear these women talk about: How had they managed to do it all on their way up—and what were the consequences in their personal lives? I could feel the Awkward Moment approaching.
“So I’m getting a lot of questions,” I said nervously, flipping through the stack. “I’m going to encapsulate, because they reflect something I wanted to know too.” I hesitated, wondering how I was going to frame this discussion. But even as Queen of the Awkward Moment, asking these women about how their personal lives had collided with their careers was going to be, well, difficult. This question was so intimate that for the first time in a long time, I found myself stalling. “The women who are sending in questions are starting out or half-way there in their careers, and you all are at the top,” I stammered. “You have dynamic careers . . .” I paused—why were my palms sweating? Finally I asked, in the gentlest possible way, “Any unexpected personal strain from that?”
Silence. Replaced momentarily by forced laughter. Followed by more silence. Oh, God. I looked around at each panelist to see who was going to take this question on. Nothing. Nancy Pelosi looked as if she smelled something bad. Some audience members did too. “Well,” Debra Lee finally said, stiffly, “maybe none that I want to talk about.” And clammed up. No one else was biting. I knew it would be a touchy subject, but this was like yanking out wisdom teeth without anesthesia. It was remarkable to consider that these women had chatted about their strategies for increasing their earnings and power as if they’d been swapping vacation stories. But on the subject of how their careers’ successes had impacted their personal lives? Nada. At least there had been one response, so I had something to go on with Debra. I could pull this one out, get us out of this pit of weird discomfort. I had to. The Awkward Moment is only valuable to the extent that it’s followed by a watershed moment in which a surprising and raw truth is revealed. So I persisted.
“Debra, you talked about your life changing and you not even imagining being CEO. So how did you know what that would feel like personally?” I asked. “Do you feel like you have to ‘edit’ around the people around you? Do you feel like you can be who you are at work, at home?” Again, nothing. The panelists shifted in their chairs—some blankly gazed out at the crowd, some smiled politely at me. But they simply would not talk.
This was fast becoming not just an Awkward Moment, but an aggravating one too. I’ll admit it: I was annoyed. I couldn’t believe these smart, gritty professional women would share with complete candor about the discriminatory struggles they’d had in their careers but remain lips-sewn on how their work lives had affected their marriages, partnerships, friendships, family, and children. These were real and important experiences for all working women, mothers, and wives to learn and share about, but the women who were supposed to be role models were refusing to go there. I grew even more insistent. “I mean, these are questions, I think, that we should put on the table—should we not?” I asked. “Or are we all going to say, ‘It’s so easy. We’re awesome. All of our relationships are perfect. And you can do it too!’”
And . . . silence. Not the kind of silence that people are compelled to fill with embarrassed coughing or throat-clearing. A complete sound blackout. Crickets chirping. After what seemed like a purgatorial eternity, former Speaker Nancy Pelosi jumped in and changed the subject entirely. I shifted gears, and the show went on.
But I couldn’t stop thinking about what had happened.
If their work and personal lives were beautifully intertwined, they would have happily shared it. Instead, they’d been mute. The takeaway for me was that successful women evidently felt too insecure and vulnerable to talk about how work had influenced their relationships and their sense of worth in their whole lives. In the end they were not prepared to go on the record about it.
But in this book we do. Dr. Judith Rodin and Senator Claire McCaskill will talk about how a burgeoning career can cause stress in relationships and even harm marriages—their marriages. You’ll hear from PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi, who says she “leaves her crown at the door” every day. How tossing out her CEO persona at the threshold and playing the role of an acquiescent wife and mother is how her marriage has survived the intense demands of her career. Wow. Their honesty gave me the guts to say that I am struggling too.
PROFOUND PERSONAL CONSEQUENCES
What is success, really? Is it making a lot of money? Being at the top of your field? Fulfilled in your career? What are we chasing? And what about your personal life—doesn’t “success” have a role there too? What are the deeper undertones in the meaning of “value”? We should certainly calculate our profits in terms of work experience, expertise, and money. But what about outside the workplace? What’s the calculus for that? And how does our inner sense of purpose compare, qualitatively, to the value in our careers? Are they oceans apart or next-door neighbors? Can they complement each other? Or at least coexist without our having a nervous break-down or massive identity crisis?
These questions—and so many successful women’s reluctance to go near them—haunt, baffle, and, often, just plain elude me. I’ve speculated that one of the reasons these women skate over their personal lives or simply refuse to talk about them altogether is because women are still unrepresented at the highest levels of power: corporate, political, academic, scientific, and more.
For example, less than 5 percent of the top companies have women as CEOs. Slightly more than 10 percent of the 1,645 “Forbes’ World’s Billionaires of 2014” are women. As of this writing, there are only fourteen incumbent female heads of state. Perhaps their lips are sealed about their wrenching inner conflicts because no established woman would ever want to say anything to discourage younger women from aiming higher than the glass ceiling. One of the most powerful CEOs in the world told me that men are always bringing their wives to family retreats, yet women managers never bring their husbands. Never. Think about that. What is that telling your boss? What are we hiding? Why do we feel that we have to keep our personal lives and professional lives separate, even when we’re invited to merge them for a day or two? Is it because we, as women, don’t want to be seen as “wives” in a workplace setting? Are we worried that the presence of our husbands would somehow compromise our authority in the eyes of our colleagues?
We know that many Millennial women are burning out before they turn thirty. So the question must be asked: If the life of a highly successful, working woman is so complicated, why would anyone want it—much less to be a full-stop, executive, all-consuming “success”? And yet is it right for women who have been handsomely rewarded for their relentless work ethic to claim that there haven’t been profound personal consequences in other areas of their lives? As I blurted out at the White House panel, “Are we all going to say, ‘It’s so easy! We’re awesome! All of our relationships are perfect! And you can do it, too!’”? Come on, now. If that were true, there would be many more of us making it to the top.
I think we all know firsthand—or, if you’re young, you’ve at least suspected—that such toss-offs are flat-out frauds. In my life, the reality on the ground is that it has never, ever been easy. It has not always been awesome. And my relationships—perfect? Where do I even start?
My daughters have grown up often feeling annoyed because I am not like my friend Beth. Beth is an awesome stay-at-home mother of twin girls in my town. She was always able to have Halloween parties and show up at all school events. As our daughters got older and all became runners on the high school track team, Beth was the leader of the “parent pack.” I never knew where to go during cross-country meets. No worries: Beth had mapped it out. All I had to do was follow Beth and her camera (yes, she took all the pictures at every school event). My older daughter, Emilie, once asked me, “Why can’t you be like her?”
It’s true: I’ve missed school plays, birthday parties, sporting events, back-to-school nights—you name it. You can’t be in two places at once, so you have to do the math. I often made decisions with the big picture in mind. It has paid off in terms of my career, but not without many moments when my heart hurt. There have been genuine consequences, some so distressing that I don’t want to go any further because it would compromise my family’s privacy. Suffice it to say, it has been crushing on more than a handful of occasions.
As for my husband, I suspect that he is fed up with the demands of my career. It used to be funny when friends and colleagues would laughingly call Jim, whose last name is Hoffer, “Mr. Brzezinski.” It isn’t funny anymore. Jim would tell you that he spends too many nights eating dinner alone while I am still in Manhattan at some gala or work-related event, surrounded by a gaggle of strangers whom I will never see again. I regret every second I am away from my family at night, but I feel I am required to be at these functions. At first, going to such glam affairs was exciting, I guess, but after a while it all blurs. I feel awful about missing family time, and I often overcompensate when I’m home by lavishing too much attention on my family, buying them things, or trying to stuff ten conversations into one.
But at the same time, if you want to be at the top of your game, long hours are nonnegotiable. Just ask Indra Nooyi, who worked eighteen-hour days when her children were small. Being successful isn’t just a question of doing a killer job during business hours. You’d better be out there networking on behalf of your organization—and yourself. You’d better be mentally, physically, and sartorially “on” for professional events. You’d better be ready to travel—maybe a lot. And for some reason, we feel like we have to fill the same amount of space at home. Later you’ll hear from my friend Senator Claire McCaskill about how she would finish a case as a prosecutor—putting away a man for life—and then rush home to frantically make dinner from scratch. Talk about an exhausting double life.
I’m not saying that women whose partners’ jobs regularly involve travel don’t feel the unnatural silence that settles on their homes, don’t feel abandoned at times because it feels as if their husbands prioritize work over family. But when it’s a woman walking in those career shoes—a wife, a mother—the fallout is far, far different, and the fallout begins with how you feel about yourself.
For one thing, as a society, we’re still not used to successful working women—not by a long shot. There have been many changes, for sure, and one of the most interesting to me is that the number of powerhouse women in finance with stay-at-home spouses has climbed nearly tenfold since 1980. The Mrs. Executive Homemakers, Wives-in-Chief, and all those Mrs. Robinsons—women who historically hosted fancy networking dinners and organized the executive male golf outings, all to support their Wall Street husbands’ careers—might be fading from view. But still, there’s no question that in our culture, we’re more comfortable with the idea of men making the lion’s share of household income.
According to our exclusive MSNBC Working Women Study Poll conducted for this book, male breadwinners are more likely to have always held this traditional role in the relationship. To be specific, eight in ten (84 percent) male breadwinners have always been the primary earner, compared with just six in ten (58 percent) female breadwinners. And I still detect a whiff of suspicion, even of disapproval, toward working women, specifically mothers. Although I am capable of feeling guilty and paranoid where my working-mom status is concerned, according to statistics, I’m decidedly not. Americans are still remarkably entrenched in Eisenhower-era thinking when it comes to their attitudes toward working mothers.
More than 70 percent of mothers in the United States work outside the home. Yet according to a 2013 Pew study, only 16 percent of American adults say that the best growing environment for a young child is to have a mother who works full-time. Forty-two percent believe that it’s best for mothers only to work part-time. And fully one-third of Americans declare that mothers should not work outside the home at all if they want what’s best for their children.
So we’re not imagining it when we’re in the presence of those who seem judgmental about our work and family lives, who seem to believe that we should insist, misty-eyed, that if we could, we’d quit our jobs to be stay-at-home moms. And indeed, studies have shown that a majority of American working mothers are on record as saying that they would drop out of the workplace to stay at home with the kids if they could afford to do so. But is it possible that this is merely a failure to communicate?
Because that same 2013 Pew study found that women’s feelings about working outside the home have changed markedly in recent years. Among mothers with children under age eighteen, the percentage saying they would prefer to work full-time has increased from 20 percent in 2007 to 32 percent in 2012. Moreover, according to our MSNBC poll, breadwinner moms are more likely than female breadwinners without children to say they enjoy making most of the family money (41 percent moms, versus 32 percent non-moms).
My reading of the statistics convinces me that because many mothers have to work—and a growing number actively want to work—we have to openly address these hard questions about the enemies to working women’s success. Women want to succeed at work, and most must work, yet we’re getting the message that our career aspirations are not acceptable, that we’re actively damaging our children, our families. That’s an extremely worrisome message.
And really, who can’t help internalizing it? If we even begin to start trying to live an integrated life, one in which we feel at peace with our professional and inner values, we can’t help but feel shame and guilt. We have to talk about the fact that our sense of worth in the workplace is often worlds apart from what we mean to our families and close friends. We have to discuss how to grow our value in all areas of our lives so we can truly claim to be—and actually be—successful.
The problem is that no one is talking about those issues. Yet.
NOTHING SHORT OF STAGGERING
Before we get into the business of women, value, and the price of success, I’d like to pause briefly to reflect on how far women have come in terms of education and career parity in a relatively short period of time. Obviously we all know that women are catching up with men in the workplace—at mach five. But it makes sense to start the discussion of growing our value with how the United States came to recognize that women had any value outside the home to begin with. Because let’s face it: women’s growing labor parity with men—and all of the economic, sociological, and other forecasts say that young women coming up through the ranks now will supersede their male counterparts—is profoundly changing our social history.
So let’s just take a minute and really think about this. Only about fifty years ago, in 1960, if you used the phrase “female breadwinner,” people wouldn’t have had the slightest idea of what you were talking about (or they might have suspected that you were an anarchist). Back then only 11 percent of mothers were the primary family earners. And probably most of this 11 percent were those social taboos—single mothers. But by the 1970s, thanks in large part to women flooding into colleges and the Women’s Movement, females entered the labor force in droves. In the 1980s, because of ever-increasing women’s education—not to mention the spiking divorce rates, which left nearly half of America’s children being raised by single mothers—women flooded the workplace in far greater numbers than the decade before. (Anyone who remembers Working Girl starring Melanie Griffith can easily visualize that piece of women’s history—Reeboks, power suits, and all.)
To wrap your mind around the leap we’re talking about, consider for a moment the following US Census data. From 1940 to 1969 the number of female managers at work went up from 11 to 16 percent. Fine: that was then. But from 1970 to 1989 the percentage of female managers skyrocketed from 17 percent to nearly 40. And from then on, women’s steady climb up has been nothing short of staggering (although, as mentioned, there are still comparatively few women at the helm of the state or big business).
Let’s do a snapshot of the state of educational status between the sexes. In 1991, after fifty years of profound inequity, parity between young women and men in their twenties who had earned a college degree (or more) converged at about 23 percent. Less than twenty years later, young women outpaced their male counterparts in higher education, representing about 37 percent to guys’ 27. And this trend is projected to soar.
While we’re at it, let’s get back to working mothers. That 11 percent of mom breadwinners in 1960? Today more than 40 percent of all US households with children under the age of eighteen are supported solely or primarily by mothers. Several years ago scads of shrill, anxious reports came out about women dropping out of the workforce altogether to raise their young children. But guess what? The current US Department of Labor data says that just ain’t so. On the contrary, by far most mothers work for or work to contribute to a living. Seventy percent of mothers with children under eighteen work. Moms with infants? Fifty-seven percent of them work. Moms with kids under three years old? Sixty percent of them work. Sixty-four percent of moms with three- to six-year-olds are bringing home the bacon (and the paper towels, tonight’s dinner, and probably a whole lot more).
And in terms of knowing our value as women in the workplace? Ladies, if I wore a hat, I would definitely take it off to you. Nearly every week or so there’s new data on how women are starting to outearn men. This one, in particular, was mind-boggling to me: the total family income among married couples with kids is highest when the mother is the breadwinner, not the father. Go, Mom! And Millennial women? In regard to knowing—and getting—your value in the workplace, you are flat-out rocking it. Even though women as a group still make only 77 cents to men’s dollar, women in their twenties without kids at home earn a reported $1.08 to the dollar more than men, by some estimates.
As far as the workplace goes, women have definitely arrived, or at least we’re on the way up. We have stretched ourselves to take titanic strides, whether we wanted to initially or not. We have achieved astonishing successes. Hopefully you know your value as a career woman and are getting paid what you’re actually worth—or at least, you’re well on your way.
And so here we are, competent and, increasingly, compensated. We are getting there, at least in the numbers.
So . . . anyone know what happens next?
WHO’S GOING TO TAKE CARE OF THAT?
Working women are feeling, shall we say, highly conflicted, especially if they’re breadwinners. According to our poll, female breadwinners generally have mixed feelings about being the primary earner and are less likely than male breadwinners to enjoy that role. The poll also disclosed that female breadwinners are less likely than male breadwinners to feel “proud,” “content,” “emotionally secure,” “financially secure,” and “relieved” about being the primary earner in their relationship.
Well, that’s a shocker. So I am not as alone as I thought. These numbers opened my eyes. You feel that way too, don’t you? And why wouldn’t you? Because of today’s more egalitarian partnerships and marriages, you probably assumed that you and your life partner would share managing your home and family life. The children’s needs, from the logistical and physical to the emotional and intellectual. The cooking. The laundry. The housecleaning, bill-paying, repairing damaged parts of your home (or arranging for them to be repaired: “I called the plumber, and he’s coming tomorrow”), and everything in between. Moreover, because you assumed that you would be dividing up these jobs, you had probably also assumed that this partnership would allow you both to flourish in your careers and to enjoy the comforts of an efficient, harmonious home. That is, you never imagined that you’d be more or less expected to handle all these things alone. Because—no offense, guys—studies show that even though married dads are helping much more with household chores than ever before, working moms still do the bulk of it.
Yes, we’re cooking, cleaning, caring for children—even if we are earning more than the men. Even in this relatively post-sexist age, you’d be hard-pressed to find the successful, working mother who wasn’t resentful that her spouse gets an all-but-free ride when it comes to family and household duties . . . unless, of course, we’re talking about one of those stay-at-home-dads (SAHDs) so popular in the media these days. But I think that we are the problem. We think that we should to do it all—and if not, we are failing.
Speaking of which, can we look at this phenomenon a little more closely for a moment? The number of men who stay at home with the kids is actually slightly less than it was in the late 1990s. So why didn’t the zeitgeist get much—if not more—play then? Why is it that we’re hearing and reading so much about these all-business alpha women and emasculated beta men now? Hypothesis: back in the nineties women were not taking over in the workplace—thereby assuming traditionally male roles—in the record numbers that they are today. Viewed through more than one lens, whether they actively want to or not, women are toppling our normative ideal of breadwinners, heads of household, families, and husbands. Men, it has been noted in more than one media report, are getting left out, they don’t know where they belong anymore, and more than a few are resentful as hell. And speaking of husbands, it seems as if the trouble really starts when she makes more than he does. Even the most gender-enlightened couples wrestle with the power dynamic triggered by a fatter paycheck for the wife—and that tension can play out in the quality of their communication, love life—even both of their senses of identity.
I’ll state the obvious: success for women has a much higher price than it does for men.
Even if our work invigorates us, most of us are still stressed out. As mothers, we are exhausted and wracked with guilt when we come home at night to the angry and distant children. Or are they truly angry? Is it our own guilt, our own feeling of not doing enough that they are playing off of? Are they really distant, or are we feeling a little left out, wishing someone actually missed us? My point is: Who is getting the short end of the stick? Maybe it’s not the kids.
And then there’s the business of running a household. What about managing its relentlessly expanding, morphing needs? Who’s going to take care of that?
And speaking of earning, who’s going to manage our family budget, finances, and investments—who, exactly, is going to make the important decisions about them?
To put it in even starker terms: Who is going to take care of, to nurture this home, and who is going to feel valued in it? What does it mean when the person at the helm isn’t sure of her place there? What impact does that have on the harmony of the household? I know that in my own home I walked on eggshells, overcompensated for not being around, and then paid the price because I was going through the motions of what I thought I should be doing. In some ways I wish I had settled for less but better in terms of connecting with my family. Instead of trying to cram in “being a mom” and doing “mom” activities with my kids (running the school fundraiser, being the classroom parent representative, hosting scads of sleepovers), I would have been better off putting on sweats, ordering pizza, and watching Modern Family with them like my husband did.
Finally—and this shouldn’t come last because it’s certainly not least—what about your relationship? Where’s the time for your partner and you to unwind and genuinely connect with each other? In my case, if my husband and I can wolf down a quick bite at the end of the day in each other’s presence, exchanging monosyllabic code words, we basically consider that “connecting.” He’s in the television news business too, and we learned a long time ago that it stops for no one. But is there a stop sign anywhere in this landscape? Relationships may survive this, but I can’t believe that they will thrive. And, as you will read in this book, some don’t survive. Many don’t. We need to talk about this.
I BARELY HAVE TIME TO GO TO THE BATHROOM
You know that your effort at work-life balance really isn’t working out very well when you find yourself pulling out one of your temporary crowns in front of hundreds of people because you hadn’t had a second to go to the dentist. It’s a gesture that just doesn’t illustrate “having it all.”
My adventure in public tooth-pulling began when Arianna Huffington—astonishing businesswoman, journalist, thought leader, and friend—invited me to cohost a conference based on her book Thrive: The Third Metric to Redefining Success and Creating a Life of Well-Being, Wisdom, and Wonder. Essentially written as a mission to help extremely successful people achieve a work–personal life balance, the book exhorted power brokers to move beyond goals of money and influence and to take time instead to focus on a sense of inner peace. I was flattered to be asked, especially as the struggle to balance work and life describes my world and personality. I was ripe for this assignment! I had a lot to say about it, and I did say a lot about it. Only it wasn’t exactly what was on the conference program.
This is how the promo copy on the Thrive website billed the conference: “Hosted by Arianna Huffington and Mika Brzezinski, Thrive: A Third Metric Live Event, brings together leaders from a variety of fields, including Tory Burch, Katie Couric, and Julianne Moore, to join them for a conversation about their own experiences and steps they’ve taken to live a more sustainable, fuller and more impactful life.” Speaking to an audience of big names, executives, and other intelligentsia, Arianna and I would be hosts who were, she had written, “evangelist[s] for the need to disconnect from our always-connected lives and reconnect with ourselves.” We would share our own experiences. We would talk with an impressive circle of speakers about a new way of working and thinking that could help financially flourishing people soulfully thrive—which, as Arianna described it, is the willingness to “make room for well-being, wisdom, wonder and giving.” Right. Just set me in front of a teleprompter, and I was ready to go.
I had been up since 3:30 a.m., hosted Morning Joe from 6 to 9 a.m., and then raced to the City Center to get on stage for Thrive. I was exhausted, but reading a prompter is second nature for me, and we had spent a month planning every aspect of this event. So up came the lights, and Arianna and I stepped out on stage. Surprise! The teleprompter did not have the correct script. And what’s worse, I was then told via headset that it couldn’t be fixed until the conference was all but over. So I had only one option, and that was winging it—all day long. “Thrive” had just turned into a live, extended, onstage version of Morning Joe.
For eight hours I improvised, but with no script to follow, I felt weird. If I had been fed the lines by the prompter, I would have been able to slip into a role of a “successful” but “mindful” person, espousing the imperative to cultivate self-care and inner knowledge. But sans script, I didn’t feel like that person. I felt naked! Revealed! I felt like myself. And honestly, among all these distinguished women and meditation gurus, I felt like a complete fraud. I began to panic inside. I started to sweat. There were more than two thousand people staring at me, expecting something. I was going to have to dig deep.
I just couldn’t relate without being honest about the fact that I was not thriving. Speakers were exhorting the audience to thrive by appreciating that “the only time you have to be alive is now,” “it’s time for you to stand up and sing your song,” and that you should “give yourself permission to step into your gifts and share them with others.” Because we were ad-libbing, I went with the truth. “Arianna is thriving; I am a work in progress.”
Most days I barely have time to go to the bathroom. On occasion I haven’t even had enough time for that. At Thrive I figured I’d keep that to myself but share my dental disaster. My life was always so relentlessly overwhelmed with work and family responsibilities that I couldn’t even make it to a dental appointment. In fact, I’d been putting it off for so long that, on stage, I could feel, in my mouth, one of my crowns wiggling perilously out of its socket. It had come out a few times, and I set it back with my tongue to keep it there until I had time to go to the dentist.
And then, just like that, it actually popped out. Into my mouth. While I was trying to shove it back in with my tongue discreetly, I had a thought: What if I were to say out loud, to the audience of a couple of thousand people, that not only did I not have time to stop and wonder and be wise, but I couldn’t even get a broken crown replaced? So I did say it. And I pulled out my tooth to demonstrate that I was not thriving. There was a hush and some incredulous laughter.
I told them that Arianna was my inspiration, the true symbol of the Thrive movement. But I was not quite there. Together we made for a great event. Arianna was aspirational. I was definitely relatable—with a slightly comedic edge.
PEOPLE-PLEASING IS POISON
Really—just stop it. People-pleasing? Trying to make everyone at home and at work happy all the time, killing yourself so that you never have to say “no” for fear of letting down your boss, your children, your spouse? It’s poison. My mother told me the same thing that day in the hospital in her own special way. “You are just annoying. Stop it.” Again, the best advice she ever gave me. I find this especially difficult to do because it is a quality that is great for your very first or second job. But I find when I am overscheduled and questioning my own worth as a professional—or as a wife and mother—I scramble around, trying to please everyone without taking care of myself. It is extremely destructive and pleases no one, least of all me.
People-pleasing will eat you alive. So stop it. Trying to pull off some Zen work-life equilibrium is like getting sucked in by a pharmaceutical ad that shows a woman so joyful and relaxed that we don’t really pay attention to the underlying voiceover reading off all the pill’s hair-raising side effects.
I did learn a great deal at Thrive. Arianna challenged me to redefine success. The definition of “success” is highly subjective. It means a zillion different things to a zillion different people: money, power, status—you name it. But probably you will ultimately reach a point in your life as a successful working woman, hopefully sooner than later, when you will realize that earning real success—success that will truly make you happy—is an outside and an inside job. You need to grow your value in your career as well as the one in your heart. That is why this book turned out to be about so much more than money. “Value” needs to be redefined and explored as we learn to develop our professional worth and rise to the top.
PROFESSIONAL VALUES VERSUS INNER VALUES
Women are pretty much doing everything, trying to be all things to all people. If that’s actually working in any household, my guess is that it’s doing so by the skin of its teeth. But in the advertising and marketing business such a scenario would be the kiss of death. Advertisers and marketers know that a brand that tries to be all things to all people falls flat on its face. It has no goal, no message. It doesn’t know what it is—and because of that, no one else does either. How can a product that has no specific message, style, mission, and target audience ever succeed? The answer is that it can’t. That’s why new businesses often start out by developing the precise core and nuances of their flagship brand before they do anything else—and why the fiscal health of established businesses often depends on launching an overhaul of their brand’s value to sharpen, freshen, and continue to sell.
As women, we need to do the same thing.
It might sound calculating, callous, even Machiavellian, but no matter where you are along your career path, it is absolutely essential that you know your “professional brand.” You might not like to think of yourself as a can of Pepsi, but let me tell you: knowing your message is one of your most powerful assets in the marketplace. Consider the cola brand “Pepsi Max,” for example. Its actual ingredients are nothing more than carbonated water, caramel coloring, the artificial sweetener aspartame, and a handful of other chemicals and natural ingredients. But no one’s buying Pepsi Max for its ingredients. They’re buying it for its brand value.
The message of Pepsi Max’s ads is clear: guys are cool and tough enough to deal with anything—including Pepsi Max. It’s a message that we end up unconsciously internalizing because we’re drinking it through the media well water. There is a dedicated, brilliant ad and marketing team behind Pepsi Max, constantly creating, testing, and launching the most effective, clever, and clear ways to communicate the product’s brand value. Its website, commercials, Facebook page, social media platforms, and a commercial relationship with rapper Snoop Dogg are all extensions of that brand value.
In one ad, for example, guys are placed in a variety of perilous and excruciating scenarios, and after each montage shot, the “maimed” actor says: “I’m good!” In another commercial guys call out so-called ingredients that make Pepsi Max manly and dangerously cool: scorpion venom, mace, pulverized Viking bones, rabid wolverine spit. Another has Snoop Dogg magically showing up at the supermarket to sex up Pepsi Max and make the competing diet cola look fuddy-duddy. All these campaigns comprise the scaffolding that supports the heart of Pepsi Max’s brand value. But that brand value is encapsulated with the catchy, straightforward catch-phrase: “Maximum Taste, No Sugar, and Maybe Scorpion Venom. Pepsi Max, the First Diet Cola for Men.”
If you want to carve out a successful route for yourself in any career, you’ve got to do what Pepsi Max does. You’ve got to do what any good brand advertising or marketing executive does. Obviously you’re not launching ad campaigns to showcase and extend your brand value. Your equivalent of a commercial is bringing your professional expertise, point of view, and worth ethic to the job. Just like each of the Pepsi Max ads that show different marketable attributes of the cola in various appealing ways, you harness your own expertise and style to show your boss and colleagues what you can do by working your butt off.
Focus on improving what you’re doing now and not on some complex project you’re planning for the future. Know the right time to present well-thought-out and professional proposals for changing what systematically hasn’t been working. Describe new ways for the organization to better hone or extend its reach. Even wearing the right wardrobe can convey your brand’s message. You get the idea. Essentially your efforts at work and the extent to which they are favorably noticed and appreciated are like Pepsi Max commercials. Moreover, just as all those ads support a single slogan that captures the cola’s brand value, you need your own slogan of sorts that communicates your professional value.
To develop your own professional value—your brand—you must create a pithy, cogent compendium of those particular adjectives and expertise that describe what you bring to the table as a member of a work team (or as a freelance contractor, as the case may be). It might take you months or even years to gather enough experience to nail it down, but ultimately you must be able to encapsulate your professional value in a few short sentences. It’s got to be as powerful as the pitch you’d deliver to the top honcho at your organization if you had the chance to bend her ear in the elevator for a few seconds. With your “ads” and pitch together, your professional value will be able to do for you what it’s designed to do: get you noticed, differentiate you from the pack, and communicate quickly and articulately what you bring to the table—so that you become known as the right person for the right job.
But it is simply not enough to know your core, professional message. As women, we need to grow our value in all aspects of our lives to be nourished, energized, and successful—not simply in material ways but also in authentic joy and gratitude. To be a truly successful working woman—with or without kids, in or out of a committed relationship—you need to know your inner value. The value of your relationships, of communication and harmony in your marriage, of your home life, of your spirit, of yourself as a human being.
You need to stop simply reacting to work, to your husband or boyfriend’s mood, to your desperate need for a new handbag. You’ve got to ask yourself hard questions about what you really want in life. You will need to have hard talks with the people you love about what they want from you—and from their own lives in general. You have to learn who you really are—your very core sense of self, which extends far beyond your professional worth.
To accomplish this, above all else, you must be absolutely honest. Don’t just parrot the values you think your parents, social circle, workplace, or society wants or expects of you. Don’t allow yourself to cop out and turn out a boilerplate answer: “My inner value is being an attentive, loving wife, always there for my children, and taking my career as far as it can go.” That’s overgeneralizing. It could very well be over-reaching. And it might not describe you—or your goals and dreams—at all. If you are not specific, if you do not authentically connect to what you believe to be your inner value, you will never understand the contours of your mind, heart, and spirit. You will probably not be happy. You will definitely not be successful in the most complete sense of the term.
I realize that this is a tall order. I mean, after all, I’m telling you to take an enormous chunk of your time—and a major magnitude of mindshare—to determine your value from the outside in. Who has the time? Most of us, I’d hazard a guess, are barely keeping it together now!
And that is precisely my point. It isn’t enough to barely keep things together as they are—not for you, and not for me. It is precisely because I pulled my cracked tooth out of my mouth and held it up in front of a live audience and am always frenetically trying to connect with my husband and family, that I have had to assess my professional value as well as my inner value. I have made mistakes. I pray my daughters will do better for themselves. Perhaps you can avoid some of the pain and emptiness that I have brought upon myself.
You may try to ignore evaluating how important your professional life is compared with your personal life. But you will always be reacting and catching up to the inherent vagaries of life. You will always find yourself buffeted around in a whirlwind of chaos. You may end up living a life whose major cornerstones are guilt, stress, and resentment. Think about it. That is what I am doing as I type the pages of this book—for the first time, maybe in my life, I am stopping and asking: What is my true value? What “profits” will I be left with after all is said and done? What will be my legacy?
You can criticize yourself endlessly. Or you can grow your value. You can decide to strategically, confidently maneuver your life in the direction you choose—the direction that reflects your goals. To the extent that her many roles blend—and even fuse—a woman can say that she truly feels successful. I honestly don’t believe that as working women, spouses, and mothers, we should be condemned to live two completely separate lives, juggling multiple personalities that leave us feeling crazy and exhausted. Some incredibly powerful women disagree with me, so I will lay out all sides of this conversation, and you will decide what is best for you.
I sometimes think that if our lives could be mapped, they would look like Venn diagrams, those charts that illustrate the connections between different groups by assigning circles to them and showing how those circles intercept each other—or, in some cases, not at all. In the case of our lives as working women, the circles represent our overall identity and dreams. We can create a map that looks like a night sky with densely packed constellations of circles in one area and with other circles floating completely on their own, like orphan planets. Or the circles on our map can overlap so closely that our Venn diagram looks like a picture of a world.
The question is: How can we get them to overlap more seamlessly? In the following chapters we’re going to find out.