A little more than a year ago I was on an airplane going back to New York after a book event in Washington State. It was a late afternoon flight, but unless you’re taking a red-eye, it doesn’t matter: when you fly from west to east, you’re almost always riding into darkness. I had worked fourteen-hour days out west, and I wanted nothing more than to do what everyone else around me was doing—curl up with a fleece airline blanket and take a nap. But I couldn’t. My daughter Emilie had begun the process of applying to colleges, a process I’d really wanted to be a part of. In my carry-on bag I had a big folder with her brag sheets, stories, and summer-reading essays. I thought I’d review her writing style so I could be more helpful when we filled out all those applications.
One essay was on Into the Wild, the work of narrative nonfiction about a young man a few years older than Emilie who had essentially disappeared after graduating from college to live in nature. Ultimately he was found dead, alone, from starvation in Alaska. In the essay students were asked whether they would have been able to do what the main character, the self-named “Alexander Supertramp,” had done: abandon their families and lives to do something they really believed in. They were also asked who they would miss the most.
I read my daughter’s beautifully written essay that explained, no, she would not be able to do what Alexander Supertramp had done—she would miss her dad too much. She worried about her father, she said, because he was home alone a good deal of the time, and she wouldn’t be able to leave for fear of making him lonely.
There I was, listening to the hum of the plane, everyone else asleep. I burst into tears. I was proud of her. It was an articulate, really caring piece of writing. I felt the closeness she had with her dad. I was reading about my family. The one that was happening without me.
UP AGAINST IT
Back then, I felt as though my own soul had gone into the wild, alone. What had happened to me? What had happened to my daughter? To my husband? With all my focus on knowing my professional brand, what had happened to any sense of inner value? As wife, mother—even friend and daughter—was my innermost sense of who I was being neglected? I looked at the businessman sprawled in the aisle seat across from me. He had a wedding ring on. His chair was reclined back, and he was asleep with his mouth wide open. Do men feel this way when they travel for work? I wondered.
I don’t think these questions are uncommon. We women often ask ourselves how we can be fulfilled in all areas of our lives. But when we talk about our successes as working women, we spend so much time describing professional obligations and achievements that we miss the boat. The challenges we face along the way are not just professional; we have to admit that they’re personal too.
For some very successful women the gap between their professional value and their inner value—what really matters to us as people, beyond work—is simply a nonissue. TIME’s Nancy Gibbs, for one, seems to have found a way to seal up that crevasse. “Starting even before my daughters were born, I turned down promotions when they would have meant doing a job I didn’t think I would be good at or happy doing. I’ve loved being a writer; loved the flexibility, the creativity, the autonomy, and felt hugely blessed that my role at TIME allowed that flexibility, especially when our daughters were little,” she wrote to me. “I think if you are responsible for producing a product, whether a piece of writing or anything else, you can have enormous freedom so long as you meet your deadlines and maintain your standards.”
For fashion designer Tory Burch the distinction between her professional life and inner values are clear, and the two came to coexist happily. “I had worked in the fashion industry for many years, doing PR and marketing first at Ralph Lauren, then at Vera Wang, and then working for Narciso Rodriguez at Loewe. While at Loewe I was offered the job of president at about the same time that I learned I was pregnant with my third son. I knew I couldn’t do that job and be the kind of mom I wanted to be, so I decided to take some time off to focus on my family,” she responded when I asked her to talk about how she negotiated her sense of worth as a working woman as well as a wife, mother, and human being.
“It was a tough decision. Having a career was incredibly important to me, and I knew it would be a challenge to come back. But having a family was paramount. I also knew at some point I would have to find a way to balance both. It was during that time that I began developing the concept for our company.” I asked Tory how she would characterize her personal priorities—her inner value. “I am the working mother of three boys, and they come first no matter what. I take them to school in the morning, and I make it home in time for dinner most evenings, even if it means having a meeting in the car on the way to my apartment.”
The comedienne and actress Susie Essman, who plays the hilarious, potty-mouthed wife of Larry David’s agent on Curb Your Enthusiasm, is another woman who has found peace with her outer and inner lives. Actually she’s done far better than that. Susie has essentially made a career—built her professional value—out of her MO. “I would say my professional value [is] not caring what people think . . . otherwise I wouldn’t be able to say the things that I say,” she said to Joe and me one morning on the set. “I think that women are way too focused on what people think of them, and you can’t be because you’re up against it. You know, this whole idea that if you’re strong and powerful, you’re a bitch, whereas a guy is just aggressive and ambitious, is really true. And you can’t change that from being the perception, so you have to not care.”
I couldn’t agree more with Susie. I think women do care way too much about what people think of them. Particularly mothers. And I’m the worst offender. I’ll bet I spend more time judging myself as a mom than I do sleeping. Former White House director of communications for President George W. Bush, political analyst, novelist, mother, and my friend Nicolle Wallace put it more cogently than I could. “Mothering isn’t more important than fathering, but it’s a standard by which we’re measured. Mothering always makes us more vulnerable in how we’re seen as women,” she said in a conversation for this book. “I don’t want to say ‘judged,’ but we are, mostly by ourselves.”
No kidding. Many of us worry a great deal about our work lives eclipsing our family lives, and we buckle under the weight of our guilt. We are distracted by and worried about what people think. (“She’s such a selfish, neglectful mother—she’s away from her kids all week, and she still wants time to do her yoga classes!”) We are worried about what we are doing and what we are supposed to be doing. (I should be picking my daughter up from track practice instead of writing this book.) Our visions of what our families look like and feel like—and the image we had for ourselves growing up and the path that we’ve actually taken—don’t match in our own minds. The soft, embracing landing we thought we would find at home—the happy kids, the proud husband, the family rituals and adventures—is glaring at us when we enter the TV room after a long day at work. Your daughter is too busy snap-chatting to say “Hi” and hang out for a little while. Your husband is already engrossed in his favorite show. We’re afraid they resent us and think we take all the air out of the room; that because we spend so much time away at the office, we don’t belong there. We have chosen against them.
Then again, maybe there is good reason to be worried that our career track has paved over our personal lives, that we’ve focused so intently on grooming and working our professional brand that our inner personal life is slowly withering from starvation. How do you know? What about the relationships that are sacrificed or take serious hits because of our career, our drive, the sheer hours on the job?
Be honest. Are your connections to your partner and your children suffering? What about doing the things that are important to your heart, mind, and spirit? Volunteering regularly at a women’s shelter. Attending church, temple, mosque—whatever your place of worship—and being a vital part of that community. Launching a business or organization that you’ve always had a passion for. Drawing, painting, singing, sculpting, playing music. Even attending to your physical and mental health by exercising. There are activities that nurture us on many levels, that can sustain us through a demanding and stressful work life, and these can simply fall by the wayside. When we allow that to happen, we dismiss our inner value.
We don’t really talk about it, but we have to. Now that we, as women, are working, succeeding, thriving, starting to negotiate for equal pay, and ascending into the upper ranks of leadership, I think we’re confronting this issue head on. Remember the awkward moment at the White House Summit when I asked, “Any unexpected personal strain from that?” All the women on that panel knew what I was asking about: What happens to our inner lives as we achieve professional success? And no one wanted to answer the question. It’s the part we won’t discuss. And it’s also the easiest part to lose when you’re working like crazy. Most importantly, we will never fix this damaging cycle. But it should be fixable. After all, men seem to have this down.
A REALLY STRONG COMPASS
Sometimes we have to go back to the narrative of our own lives to remember who we are at our core, what our inner value is. I find that it helps to recall an early mentor who taught us something that shaped our perspective. I think about my own mother, for example. She, like me, was a late bloomer in finding herself in her career, and when she did, she positively blossomed. Unlike me, however, she has never been a people-pleaser. My mother has always been unapologetically herself. She steadfastly went her own way when my father was serving as national security advisor in President Jimmy Carter’s White House. She preferred to do large-scale pruning (including felling trees) on our property and mucking around with our family’s menagerie of farm animals than to attend the luncheons and soirees of Washington socialites. Whenever I start to overapologize, I think of my mother. That reminds me to tune into one of the chief prongs of my inner value—to advocate for myself and do what I think is right.
Dr. Judith Rodin had a wonderful story to share about how she came by her guiding star when I caught up with her after our meeting at the White House panel—she was much more willing to talk about the conflict between her career and personal life during a tête-à-tête than she was in front of an audience. “I had great advice from one of my elementary school teachers, and this is actually part of a rather embarrassing story. I was riding, and this shows my age, a trolley car in Philadelphia with my mother on a Saturday, and I was telling her that I was the teacher’s pet and going on and on and mentioning my teacher by name and so forth,” she laughed. “Well, on Monday I went to school and my teacher called me in and said, ‘My mother was sitting in front of you and your mother on Saturday on the trolley car, and I wanted to tell you something that I hope you’ll take throughout your life. I love you, I do, and I think you are wonderful. I love all my students. But the important thing is not whether or not I love you, but for the rest of your life, the key to success is to be your own most loyal fan and your own strongest critic. If you can rely on yourself to be both, you will surely succeed.’ And I have never forgotten that. She took me away from always having to please others as a marker. I think part of my success was that I wasn’t only focused on that, and it gave me a much truer North Star.”
What a gift it is to learn early on how vital it is to avoid people-pleasing. Judith’s wisdom itself is a gift—her deep knowledge of her worth as well as her limitations. As she spoke I could feel her radiating that kind of confidence. If you’re looking for a role model, consider Judith. She speaks her mind, whether she’s involved in a personal discussion or a boardroom meeting. There is no sense that there are two of her, the way I feel there is “work Mika” and “home Mika.” You don’t have the feeling that her professional value and inner value are at odds with each other; instead, they’re blended.
To that point Judith went on to talk about how important it had been to her to develop her personal goals before she launched her career—to cleave to it throughout her brave albeit rocky path. “I think the one thing that worked most effectively was that I had a really strong compass, that I wanted to accomplish something. I wanted to make a difference in the world, and I felt that really early on,” she said in her signature tone of absolute authority combined with compassionate wisdom. “I really felt that I wasn’t going to be willing to give up, to not take the obstacles in my stride, and I knew it wasn’t going to be easy.”
No, it isn’t easy. Over the years my observation has been that, as working women, we often feel massively guilty about not being with our families because we’re working like crazy. So when we do manage to find some precious time just for ourselves, we don’t take time to discover what—besides our families and our jobs—really motivates us, gives our hearts and souls a fire that burns with mission and meaning. It’s as though we’re not entitled to that part of our inner value, the part that belongs to us alone, as women, not only as mothers and wives. To develop it would be to neglect another, more important, part of our lives—like our families. Or so we tell ourselves at our own peril.
We have to stop doing this. (And in the upcoming chapters you’ll read how Judith and many other amazing, powerful women have avoided this pitfall.) There is a massive divide between our professional worth and our personal goals. It has to be bridged if we are going to make it in life with any sense of purpose and heart. We will not be happy and we will not be truly successful until the two aspects of our lives are blended.
THAT INCLUDES LOTS OF OTHER PEOPLE
I have spoken to many women who have made it to the top of their game. Many of them have not made it without some personal failures along the way. There are strained marriages or divorces. There are children who miss their mother, are angry at the relentlessness of her career, and take it out on her when she’s at home. There are passions that have been put on hold or extinguished. There is loneliness. But these women don’t want to talk about it publicly; it’s too private, too negative—too painful. Maybe they’ll talk about it behind closed doors. They might discuss it with their closest friends. But that which we call the “work-family balance” is far, far from balanced—in fact, it’s out of control.
And let’s be honest: that is, if they’ve been able to nurture those relationships with their close friends between negotiating work and family time. More often than not, we’re too busy to nurture friendships, a core feature of—in fact, studies have shown that friendships and community are essential to—our inner value.
Honestly, much of the time we’re going it alone. It reminds me of something my mother said to me just this past summer when we were talking about the difficulties inherent in blending our professional and inner lives in a way that leaves us energized as well as peaceful. She put it so succinctly: “I think women have less chance than men to find their bliss.”
One major part of our inner value that suffers is our commitment to our friends, our support network. In my experience it is your friendships—and maybe even more importantly, the sense that you have a strong community behind you and your family—that are often the most vulnerable links in keeping you grounded as a person. You work and work and work. And when you don’t work, you want to be with your family every waking minute—or feel you should because your career has eclipsed your time with them. Moreover, you believe that all those waking minutes should be warm, happy, and close, spent doing fun, family things. When is there time to have coffee with a woman you’ve met and would really like to get to know better as possible friend material? The answer is that there isn’t. You’re too busy even to have long catch-up calls with old friends. You might not have spoken to them for close to a year. You assume they’ll be there when you need them. But will they? And why should they be? I mean, I’ve developed friendships through business relationships. But to stop and have a new friendship outside of work? Honestly, there’s no time.
When I was in labor with my second child and needed a backup ride to the hospital in case Jim hadn’t come back from being out of town for work, I had to ask a woman I barely knew if she wouldn’t mind driving me. Even then she agreed mostly because she was a longtime colleague of my husband’s. And let’s face it: because I’m working so much, I don’t have a major sense of community in the town where I live; there isn’t anyone there I could call on as a real friend.
I have some friendly acquaintances—mainly stay-at-home moms who used to think I wasn’t so great for working when my kids were little, but who have been encouraging about my work now that we’re sending our children off to college. But some of my encounters with the parents in town have been difficult because they’ve mainly revolved around our kids getting into trouble together. And because no one knew me, I became known as the crazy mom who went nuts on the parents in whose houses there was unsupervised drinking. Not the greatest way to meet your neighbors!
I am working on this now. I am calling it my personal PR effort in town. One mom and I recently had a good laugh about this. I used to know her only as “Lily’s mom.” Now she’s Betsy Grass of Tommy Hilfiger. I discovered that we have a lot in common. We may even have dinner together with our girls!
In terms of close friends, I have one from growing up. I love her to death. But her story is so different from mine: she quit work after her first child, and she’s been miserable. She openly talks about how her professional value and her inner worth plummeted. She has a business degree, had a great career. She’s been out of the work force ten years. She’s totally hirable, but she’s going to have to take a big step back. I am coaching her, and she is always there for me. She doesn’t live anywhere close to where I do, but even if she did, I’m not sure we’d actually see each other as often as I would want to. Again there just isn’t the time. And if you haven’t invested enough in your own personal life to make time to nurture and affirm those close friendships, they can easily fade away—like a language that you used speak fluently but haven’t practiced for years. You can stumble your way through it, but you just don’t know it like you used to. I thank God for the few friends who have held on to me and the few I have made at work.
But, according to Judith, we must maintain our friendships, our support systems. They are critical to working women’s success, both as human beings growing our inner value and as professionals growing our professional value. Without friendships we can become isolated, lonely, humorless, and even depressed. “I think that you want to enrich not only your own relationships, but you need to enrich other relationships as well, whether that is in your work life or friendships. I think that when women are on that career track and working so hard, they do feel guilty at the time they’re not spending at home—and are made to feel guilty—that what they give up even more are really good friendships and really good relationships and good supports. I think that actually worsens the tension at home, and has the potential to make you less successful at work,” she pointed out. “So I think when you talk about balancing, I think balancing not only work and family life but balancing toward a more fulfilled life that includes lots of other people. And encouraging your spouse to have friends . . . because if you only focus on what the other is or isn’t doing for you, the tension worsens.”
Talking with Judith and reflecting on that anemic part of my life, I realized that I needed to make the time for friends. We all need to make the time—for our very health. In fact, when I looked into it, I found a major body of research that shows how important friendships are. For example, a study conducted by the Centre for Ageing Studies at Flinders University in South Australia followed nearly fifteen hundred older people for a decade. It found that those who had an ample, solid network of friends outlived those with the fewest by 22 percent. Close relationships with family, however, had no impact on longevity. Other studies have shown that having more friends reduces your chances of getting a cold, even though you’re probably exposed to a greater number and variety of germs than those who have fewer social companions.
I also found research saying that people with a number of friends live longer after having major heart attacks, and they also have fewer cardiovascular and immune problems to begin with. Evidently friendship can even help women beat cancer. A study published by the journal Cancer showed that those women with advanced ovarian cancer who had reliable support from friends had much lower levels of a protein—known as interleukin 6, or IL-6—that appears in most aggressive types of cancer. Lower levels of IL-6 also improved the success of chemotherapy. But women with little support from friends had levels of IL-6 70 percent higher overall—and two and a half times higher in the area around the tumor. Amazing. Friendships can literally be lifesaving.
LOVE YOUR CHOICE
I am lucky to have forged friendships on the job with smart, ambitious, engaged women who teach me so much about the meaning of value. The amazing Arianna Huffington has become a good friend, as has the aforementioned designer of the Milly label, Michelle Smith, as well as presidential adviser Valerie Jarrett. Another awe-inspiring woman I’ve met over the course of my tenure as a broadcast journalist is Nicolle Wallace, who often joins us on Morning Joe in our panel discussions. Sometimes we are most closely put in touch with what matters most to us when we have hit bottom. No one, perhaps, understands this better than Nicolle.
Some years after her service at the White House, Nicolle went to work as senior adviser on the high-wire act that was the McCain-Palin campaign of 2008. At the outset of the campaign Sarah Palin had famously stumbled over herself. The shocking gaps in her knowledge of financial and political affairs were laid bare on national television, and her gaffes were constant. Then, however, she had gone on to enjoy popularity among voters leaning toward Tea Party affiliation—and she started to speak up in surprising and from-the-hip ways that had the ring of off-script vamping. When the press started sniffing out the story, Nicolle was accused of anonymously leaking that Palin had “gone rogue,” disobeying campaign managers’ orders in order to advance her own career.
That was when Nicolle retired from politics. With the professional reputation that she had worked so incredibly hard to define and polish now tarnished by the worst kind of rumor mongering, she had to hang onto her sense of worth to get her through a dark and difficult time. But first she had to process the very political, very public firestorm she had walked through. A major part of finding her inner value was coming to terms with letting go of her professional value as it had been in that incarnation.
“To be a political campaign professional, to be accused of hurting the candidate, is a capital offense in politics. That’s something I never would have done and something that crushed me to my core,” she told me. “I spent twelve years sort of as a ‘tip of the spear’ position on campaigns and for politicians who were very well respected. I mean, I was twenty-five when I worked for Jeb Bush. When I went into the White House, I was twenty-eight years old. I had never made a mistake. I had never had a public misjudgment. I had never been suspected of doing anything other than my best for the politicians for whom I worked. But to work toward the end of my political campaign experience for someone who suspected me of doing what is really the gravest sin in politics was just professionally and personally disorienting and devastating. And in terms of my brand, you are unemployable in politics if people think you might be a person who reveals secrets of the campaign. You are unemployable,” she repeated.
After the McCain-Palin campaign, Nicolle took personal inventory. She reflected on the brutality of politics and what it does to smart, committed, tenacious women, what it had done to her and, as she had witnessed, to the full spectrum of female politicians. Is it possible to maintain your integrity in politics? How do you keep control or let it go? How do you save your dignity when mud is relentlessly slung in your face?
Nicolle decided to explore these questions through writing fiction as a way to process all that she had endured and witnessed. “Instead of trying to rehabilitate my political brand, I thought that maybe it was just a sign or an opportunity to do something else. So that was when I got the idea for writing the novel. When I thought I could put it all into sort of a fictional place,” she said. “I became obsessed with what happens to women in the meat grinder of politics. Obsessed. Not just because of my own experience, just because of Palin, but because that was the year of the Hillary Clinton primary where I felt—and maybe because it wasn’t my political party—I felt like I was watching people root down the woman. And because I was neutral—I wasn’t rooting for Obama, I wasn’t rooting for Hillary—I really saw it that way. So that really inspired . . . I don’t want to call it a creative process . . . it just made me want to sort of deal with all this stuff.
“I think after Palin I was either going to therapy or write three novels. I’m happy I decided to write three novels. I got to play with all this stuff—people being obsessed with what you wear, women warring with women. All these things that sort of became my life. I didn’t want to talk about them in a tell-all way, but I did want to play with all those topics.”
After the novel was published, Nicolle had her talent and inner value affirmed by women she met while traveling around the country, giving readings and making appearances. “When I went on book tour, all these women who were Democrats would come up to me and say, ‘Oh my God, what happened to Charlotte [the name of Nicolle’s first female president character] is what happened to Hillary,” or they’d see themselves. So I really feel like—and your books deal with this too—women are so silent about something that we all see. And then when you start talking about it, heads nod. It’s such a common experience, and it’s not unique to politics or television. It’s literally every workplace, and I think women struggle to form tribes and bands as easily and neatly as men do,” she said. “The Palin experience, in the moment, was horrible, but professionally and personally nothing that came after it would have been possible without it. Nothing.”
Wow. It’s a powerful story (and this was the first of several of Nicolle’s rebranding turning points, as you’ll read in Chapter 9). Frankly I stand in admiration of how Nicolle was able to recognize her inner value during some of her most harrowing moments, to transform both her pain and wisdom into creating a fictional world that mirrored her own—and in the process launch a whole new brand as a novelist and TV commentator! But that’s not all. During this period Nicolle and her husband also had a baby boy.
When she became a mom and a novelist, Nicolle made the decision to work from home, getting babysitting help on her four writing days out of the week. Being with her son and getting the full experience of motherhood for the first time are hugely important to Nicolle, and switching gears professionally and personally has allowed her to grow these aspects of herself. She almost feels, she says, that her life is “too good.” “I think it’s important to love your choice, realizing that men don’t get to make it,” she said. “There’s no expectation that men may choose this or may choose that. No one asked my husband what he was going to do when the baby came. And getting to choose at all is an elite problem.”
Does she feel like she has it all? Nicolle was circumspect. “The model for ‘having it all’ is the Sarah Jessica Parker character as the investment banker in I Don’t Know How She Does It, and we see her sacrifices. For every woman who wishes she could put on a fabulous suit and a five-hundred-dollar pair of Manolo Blahniks and go to the office, there’s a working mom walking away from the school bus with tears in her eyes because she never gets to see her kids,” she said. For Nicolle, having it all always meant something different. “I think I always knew I wanted to put the brakes on when I had kids. Having it all never meant doing it all at the same time.”
Nicolle Wallace is an example for all women. Her life is an incredible illustration of professional value overlapping with inner value, and I love how it frames the central question of this book—certainly of my life and quite possibly yours: How do you combine your professional and personal worth in your life? How can you bridge the two in ways that make you feel truly successful, as a whole, while still making a profit?
Answer number one: not perfectly.