Working Your Value
Using your professional and inner value to get what you want
I know a woman in the print and broadcast news business, also an author, who was at the top of her game by the time she reached her early thirties. Throughout her twenties she’d written for the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post, had a column in Glamour, was on the original team that launched Time Inc. on the web, and was a playwright. At twenty-seven she was senior editor at US News & World Report; at twenty-eight she was co-hosting and cowriting a popular technology show for public television. At thirty she was married, and at thirty-one had her first child. When her daughter turned three months old — at the end of her maternity leave — she got a call from a bigwig producer recruiting her to be an anchor at a major cable news network.
It was a big job. Possibly the big job. But then she looked at her little cutie kicking her little legs and thought, Can’t do it. She called back and demurred. She would, instead, freelance for magazines and newspapers, write a book or two. And she was fine with that decision. Sure, she would keep a hand in her field, but more importantly she really wanted to be a hands-on mom.
The woman is journalist Susan Gregory Thomas, author of In Spite of Everything: A Memoir, and my collaborator on this book. Now forty-six, her plan didn’t go as expected. Susie, as her friends call her, is divorced from her daughters’ father, remarried, and living with her family of five, all of whom somehow huddle into a two-bedroom apartment (the adults sleep on a couch in the living room, and the kids divvy up the bedrooms). She has elevated her professional value and expertise as an observer of generational differences — Baby Boomers, Generation X, and Millennials — and has also managed to get great book deals over the years. Still, she has spent the past seven years trying to keep her family afloat on a freelancer’s and book author’s earnings. And it has been far from easy.
Now does she wish she’d taken that job?
“I knew as soon as my daughter was born that I would have to divide myself into two people to keep my professional value growing at the kind of turbo rate at which it was careening along back then — and I just couldn’t do it,” she said to me. “I would have been miserable — eaten up with regret. So I’m still glad I made the decision I did. But life hasn’t been easy financially. On the contrary, it is very, very scary. I have to run twice as fast to stay in the same place, and even so, there’s been a lot of backsliding, particularly during the recession.”
Our experiences are so different yet spookily parallel. Where I sacrificed a great deal of my inner value as a mother and wife to feed my growing professional value (and, along with it, getting my financial worth), Susie went exactly the opposite route as a TV journalist and author. I, on the one hand, had seized my “big job” moment with Morning Joe; I love my job, and I’m compensated well for it. But I am haunted by the time I’ve missed—and still do—with my family over the years. On the other hand, Susie had turned down the big TV morning show host offer to be with her children, and she is happy with her work. But she’d lost one marriage and a substantial income in spite of it anyway. We both have enjoyed major gains. And we both have suffered major losses.
So do I dare ask the question that’s on my mind? Hell, yes: Who made the better decision? Or, phrased another way: Who is more successful in merging her inner and professional lives?
I was interested in a point Susie had made about how her work and home overlap. “Since I work from home, it’s possible that my professional self and my mom self are ‘integrated’ to a greater degree than working mothers who have that clear line between office and home. My children are at school mostly when I’m working, but when you’re a freelancer, the work clock never really stops. So my children see me working. And they have to deal with it. Because Mommy has to work,” she explained.
“There have been times when I’m interviewing someone for a magazine story or book, and for scheduling reasons the interview has to happen at dinner time or just around bedtime. My kids start to squabble or laugh too loudly, and I have to say, ‘Excuse me, could you pardon me for just a moment?’ I’ll mute the phone and bark at my kids if they don’t zip it now, we’re going to be living on the street starting tomorrow morning. They know I’m joking, but at the same time, they get that it’s serious.” Does she feel guilty that she has to shunt her kids to the side for work, at home, when family time is supposed to be happening? “Sometimes I do, if I’m really in crunch-down, deadline mode. But at the same time, all of us know that my work keeps the ecosystem in balance,” she said. “What I mean is: we’re like an ecosystem. I may be the dominant animal in it, but all its constituent critters and activities are vital to our habitat’s health and functioning. All of us are constantly adapting to each of its changing needs.”
The concept of the family as ecosystem really appeals to me as a model for working families. I know that I, for one, am grafted to the old idea that the home has to be a castle, a haven away from work, a family-time-only zone. But I run into a lot of problems because of it. That dictum puts a lot of pressure on working parents to transform into a completely different person at home—I would argue, particularly working mothers. You go from being, for example, a hard-driving executive at work, where you can’t talk about home life, to being an understanding and devoted mother and spouse, where you’re not supposed to talk about work for more than five minutes after you first walk in through the door. You have to check a major cross-section of yourself at the doorway at work as well as at home. Your professional value and inner value are completely split. You can feel as if you’re schizoid.
The way we all earn a living now—even if we’re not working from home—means that work invariably enters home. And it shouldn’t be seen as evil. Of course, workaholism is a different issue, but for most of us work is simply a vital part of life, of the ecosystem, and it should be seen that way. If you’re at home and you have to spend half an hour answering an important e-mail or you have to check a text coming in from a different time zone—so what? If you come home and your professional personality is still going at full tilt, what’s the problem? Why should it be so terrible that your partner and children see you in work mode? Kids often have a different persona with their friends and at school—in the public domain—from their persona at home. Isn’t there an argument for working parents to be transparent so kids learn that it’s natural to shift between different styles of interacting in the full spectrum of life circumstances? I find myself pretending to be Mommy at home and Mika Brzezinski at work. Do I have to hide them from each other? Can’t the two overlap without me going into an awkward, guilty dance?
I look at Susie, and I see someone who passed up an opportunity to get paid her worth and, more, to invest in her professional value and secure her future. I see an exhausted woman who’s always working twice as hard, as she herself says, to stay in the same place. But I also see a talented author who has gotten to write fantastic books that she’s loved working on, as well as a mother who is completely comfortable and loving with her kids.
When I look at myself, I see a wife and mother whose relationships with her family seem hinged together by gum and paper clips or whatever spackle or surrogate I can grab at any given moment. But I also see that I am earning my professional value, growing my professional brand, and, through my work helping women to understand their worth, developing a discrete but vibrant part of my inner value. Neither one of us has balance in her life. Neither one of us can be said to “have it all.”
The question is not about who made the better decision; instead, we should ask what we can do, as working women, to grow our value overall so that we can be as successful and fulfilled as possible.
How can we take features of our needs and goals and deploy them in the marketplace and vice versa? Can we work our professional brand into our personal lives? How can we bridge the two in ways that make us feel truly successful as a whole? Ultimately we’ll know we’ve been successful when our two declarative statements about our professional value and inner value are one. We’ll be earning what we’re worth. We’ll accept our regrets, even if they linger. We’ll define and exert our boundaries and limitations, even if they’re pushed. We’ll feel at peace both at work and at home.
But how is that going to happen?
Very Much Me
We’re not there yet. According to our Working Women Study Poll, although the majority of breadwinners in the United States, regardless of gender, agree with the statement that “it is possible to have it all,” one in four (22 percent) female breadwinners and 13 percent of male breadwinners disagree with it. What does a statistic like that tell us?
I know what it tells me. I’ll bet if you were a fly on the wall at their houses or over coffee with their friends, you’d get a much, much higher number. I mean, when you talk with working women and men on the ground, in ordinary conversation, do you ever, ever hear them gloat, “I’m having it all! My work life and personal life are in complete balance!” Are you kidding me? Statistics like the one our poll turned up say to me that this generation of successful working women and men — raised in and around the Feminist Movement — are putting on their game faces and striving for that nonexistent balance.
Maybe we shouldn’t be surprised. This is the generation, after all, who spends as much time with their children as possible to make up, in part, for their own “home alone” childhoods. I don’t blame them for wanting to believe they can have it all — that there are no consequences on the home front for pursuing their careers. To admit that there are holes in the system would be tantamount to admitting that, at least to some degree, they’re repeating their own childhoods with their own children.
It doesn’t feel emotionally acceptable to say this out loud, especially for women. We’re the ones who are supposed to be making the feminist dream come true. We don’t want to fall short. We don’t want our kids to live through anything remotely like what we did. After all, 40 percent of children under eighteen growing up in the 1980s were latchkey kids, wearing the keys to their homes around their necks so they could let themselves in after school because no parent was at home — often, it was their single, working moms who were absent. We don’t want our kids to feel abandoned because of our careers, the way we did, for better or for worse. Who wants to admit this? Only some working women are willing to say “having it all” isn’t going as planned — to the not-insignificant tune of one in four.
Still, to admit that there are problems with that premise takes real guts. In a period of US history fast becoming the Age of Women, I think it takes a lot of courage to say publicly: “This isn’t working for me.” Interestingly, however, our poll did ferret out a lot of “this isn’t working for me” responses by rephrasing the question. When they were asked whether or not they enjoy being the breadwinner, fully two-thirds (63 percent) of female breadwinners said they don’t enjoy being the primary earner or that it is a “mixed bag,” compared with four in ten male breadwinners (38 percent). Not only that, but female sole earners are twice as likely as male sole earners to say that their role as the breadwinner in the relationship is a “mixed bag” or one they do not enjoy (79 percent versus 39 percent). My guess? Women are, as Susie said, working twice as hard to stay in the same place.
That does not sound like “having it all” to me. Women cannot possibly have it all if our professional values and inner values aren’t closely allied and aligned.
For some of us those values do coexist and intertwine — even if it has taken a lifetime so far to get there. Me, for example. I spent decades trying to be what I thought people wanted me to be at work and then having nothing left when I got home. I had no sense of my professional or inner worth. After years of trial and lots and lots of error, now what I do for a living is very much me. I am myself on Morning Joe. I am very much myself in passing along the message to women of knowing and growing your value. It’s in doing this work that my values converge. Helping women talk and learn about this is something that I do not just for the sake of expanding business, but because it is a natural facet of who I am. Writing books about women’s value and helping them get what they’re worth. Hosting live conferences, where real women join me onstage to struggle through articulating their value. My professional bona fides as a straight-dealing (and kind of funny, or so I’ve been told) news talk-show host overlaps with the part of my inner calling that cares about working women, empathizes with them, and wants deeply for them to flourish. In this area of my life I can honestly say that I feel successful.
The discovery along the way of who the inner and outer Mika are and encouraging them to be friends is not a chore for me — it’s what I want to do. It’s my most favorite thing to do. Even better, my girls are getting involved with this movement I’m trying to build, and I am getting involved with their lives in a very real way. As they wander into adulthood, I am finding that they think their mom is useful, possibly even cool. This feels really good. It is helping them question early on what the substance of their inner value and burgeoning professional value really are. And I finally feel like I’m doing something for my girls. It is all coming together for us as a family.
You Should Go For That
I had an amazing conversation about integrating personality and professional value with Cindi Leive, editor-in-chief of Glamour. “I remember when, pretty early on in my career, I was in some ways a very ambitious young editor, but I wasn’t really thinking about the job I wanted to end up with. I just always knew that whatever job I had, I wanted to get to the next one. But I didn’t necessarily think of myself as someone who would become an editor-in-chief. . . . I was sort of senior-editor level, and most of the editors-in-chief were quite a bit older than me,” she said. “There was an editor-in-chief position open at a magazine at a competitive company, and I had heard about it — I had engaged in gossip about who would get that job. It literally never once occurred to me that I should raise my hand for that job. I remember a friend of mine e-mailing me, a former colleague, someone who had been a mentor to me, saying, ‘Hey, I don’t know if you know that the editor-in-chief position at such-and-such place is open. You should go for that. You would be great.’
“And it was like this light bulb went off in my mind. . . . It literally had not occurred to me that even though I knew about that job, thought it was a great job for someone else, but that that someone else could be me.
“It seemed so obvious afterward that yes, I was a completely legitimate candidate for that job,” she said with enthusiasm. “I didn’t get it. It probably was a little bit of a stretch for me to apply for it. But not a big stretch. A teeny stretch of the sort we should all be doing every day. And it’s like that classic thing they say about how women have to be tapped on the shoulder and asked seven times before they run for office, before they do it. It was not until someone literally, virtually, tapped me on the shoulder that I thought, ‘Oh, duh . . . why not me?’”
Now, as editor-in-chief of one of the most successful women’s magazines of all time, Cindi reflects on how one aspect of her personality that she’s always had has helped her in her career: native cheerfulness. “A part of succeeding in any kind of top job is being confident, being fairly optimistic,” she said. “[You can’t] run a successful business if you are pessimistic or cynical, because there are going to be things that go wrong every day. You have to believe that you are going to find a way out of them, that your team is going to find a way out of them.”
Excerpted from Grow Your Value: Living and Working to Your Full Potential by Mika Brzezinski. From Weinstein Books, May 2015.
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Top image credit: Mattias Weinberger, via creative commons.
