Decide Your Source Of Greatest Pleasure
It’s a paradox of our times that the more successful we become, the less successful we feel.
Elizabeth Perle McKenna has a theory about why.
Women, and a growing number of men, feel they can’t measure up to competing standards set by society.
Women in particular are torn between different images of success, each based on a different value system. One version of the successful female is someone who is “pretty, popular, married and the perfect mother,” McKenna said. Another version of the successful woman is the career woman “who makes lots of money and has a job with prestige.”
Even if you succeed at one, you are invariably failing at the other, she said.
McKenna was one of those “successful” women. Over the course of 18 years, she worked her way from the ground floor of the publishing industry to become a publisher with Prentice-Hall, Addison-Wesley and William Morrow/Avon Books.
Her career consumed her - it was her financial independence and her creative outlet, her constant companion and the source of her self-worth. Then, as she puts it, “work stopped working.” Married and with a young son, she was feeling increasingly dissatisfied at work and inadequate at home. She quit her job and decided to take a summer off to get her bearings.
That summer stretched into an indefinite sabbatical. The result is her book, “When Work Doesn’t Work Anymore: Women, Work and Identity” (Delacorte Press, 1997, $23.95).
What McKenna, 41, discovered by quitting work cold-turkey is how psychologically, financially and emotionally dependent she was on a job that was in turn tearing her apart.
“I had a work life,” she writes. “I had a personal life. Together, however, they made not one but two separate lives. Each wanted a hundred percent of me. I wanted one hundred percent of each. Unfortunately, my self-esteem depended on succeeding in both lives equally well.”
The problem was not working, which she loved and needed to do, she decided. The problem was the culture of work itself.
“The way we all work is a vestige from another era when men had wives at home,” she said. “Today, only about 3 percent of American families live that way. But we’re too frightened we’ll lose what we have if we start standing up for what we know we need - a more humanized work environment.”
Changing the work culture is going to take speaking up, she said. It means suggesting a staff meeting at 9:30 a.m. instead of 8 a.m., if it’s easier for people to attend. Change is going to require people not being afraid to bring their personal lives to work with them, she said. “When someone hires you, they’re also hiring your family and your home life.”
Ironically, many employers now offer a variety of “family-friendly” benefits. But options such as reduced work schedules, job-sharing, flex-time and leaves have not been as widely used as you’d expect given the level of dissatisfaction people express about balancing their work and home lives.
That’s because people still get the unspoken message at work that to take advantage of those options will hurt your career, she said.
And it won’t change until people decide for themselves what success means to them, rather than chasing after standards and expectations established in another era.
“We have a very narrow and antiquated definition of success in this country,” she said.
McKenna isn’t proposing any quick fixes, and she doesn’t advocate a single solution. Quitting your job isn’t always the answer, nor does she think everyone needs the same ambitions.
What she does argue for is a redefinition of success. She urges anyone who feels as though their work isn’t working to sit down and figure out what’s really important in their lives.
Re-evaluating can lead to creative solutions, whether it’s “stopping out,” working part-time, working for yourself, or redefining how much money you really need.
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