I Shouldn't Be Telling You This: Success Secrets Every Gutsy Girl Should Know (29 page)

So that was always my vow to myself: to make certain that any success I achieved enhanced my enjoyment of life rather than undermined it. I never wanted to be a workaholic or someone who found herself buried under mounds of work on the weekend or preoccupied with the office while I was on vacation.

Did I manage to accomplish that? I think I’ve done a decent job of honoring my vow. I live in Manhattan, a city I adore and take advantage of. I love to travel, and I have done my fair share of it with my husband and kids—we’ve even been to Antarctica. On weekends I walk, read, and often entertain friends at dinner parties. And I’ve also managed to pursue my crazy back-pocket dream of writing murder mysteries.

Yet I’ll be honest: it took me a while to figure out how to work things to my advantage, especially when my kids were small. Sometimes there was just too much to do. Other times I made it worse by failing to get a handle on a situation or biting off more than I could chew. One night when my kids were small, I gave an outdoor dinner party for twelve at our weekend home in Pennsylvania. I was a fool for organizing such a big dinner when I already had so much on my plate, but I hated not taking advantage of the summer.

It turned out to be a gorgeous night, and because I had a woman helping me in the kitchen, I felt in control. But during one trip to the bathroom, I became overwhelmed with fatigue. I lay my head on the sink to take a very short catnap, hoping that it would revitalize me. It worked perfectly. I returned to the table, feeling completely refreshed. But when I picked up the conversation exactly where I’d left off, one of the guests leaned in and whispered in my ear, “You’ve been gone forty-five minutes!”

Let’s just say I’ve been on a learning curve. And today I’m much better at keeping the craziness at bay and savoring the success that’s come my way. Because it
can
be done—maybe not always, but lots of the time, partly by using some of the great skills you employ at work. In this part I’ll offer some of the strategies I’ve learned—everything from bringing more bliss into your life to wrestling down an insane day to managing your time ingeniously. I even offer a few thoughts on making time for your own back-pocket dream.

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The Bliss Quiz: Is Your Success Making You Happy?
 
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W
hen you’re really, really busy juggling work and life, it can be hard at times to assess how well you’re handling everything. To me it’s a little like riding a bike fast because you need to get someplace in a hurry. You’re pumping and pumping and making the best time you possibly can, but you don’t really consider how you’re peddling or even the ground you’re covering.

Sometimes a wake-up call is forced on you. You leave your wallet on the counter of the pharmacy or your kid’s teacher tells you he failed to hand in a project you didn’t even realize he’d been assigned, and you come face-to-face with the fact that things have slipped out of your control a little—or a helluva lot.

I’ve never forgotten one moment of awakening for me. My husband and I had gone away with our young kids for a family beach vacation (which, when your kids are little, really shouldn’t be defined as a vacation). We’d arrived at the airport and were headed by van on a dusty, hour-long ride to the resort. It had been a tough time for me at work. My company was in the process of being sold, and though we didn’t know it officially yet, there was a lot of weirdness in the air.

All of a sudden my husband, clearly empathizing with what I’d been experiencing, reached over and gave my shoulders a quick massage. It wasn’t until his hands touched my rock-hard shoulders that I realized how rattled and bummed out I’d been feeling. I knew I needed to use the vacation not only to enjoy my family but also to try to find my way back mentally to a less frazzled place.

Many women feel under enormous stress today, even women who don’t have young kids in the mix. In early 2012, I did a website poll at
Cosmo
asking women if they felt they were headed for a burnout. Among women eighteen to twenty-four years old, an absolutely shocking 84 percent said yes, and among those twenty-five to thirty-four, 86.5 percent said yes. And in all age groups, around 90 percent said they often felt stressed and overwhelmed. Those numbers aren’t a surprise when you think how much pressure we’re all under these days as workplaces demand an ever-expanding amount of our time and energy.

So I doubt I’m being presumptuous in saying you want less stress and more pleasure in your life as a working girl. The first step is to assess what your stress-to-bliss ratio is. Take this quiz for a quick evaluation.

1. A long weekend is coming up, the kind where you get Monday off as well. What will you use the extra day for?

a. To take a long bike ride I haven’t had time for lately.

b. To get a jump start on an upcoming work project—dressed in my PJs

c. To catch up on laundry and finally repaint my bedroom.

2. What’s the most recent piece of advice a friend gave you?

a. “You ought to write self-help books—your advice is that good.”

b. “I think you’d enjoy our nights out more if you weren’t always checking your e-mails.”

c. “Try to get more sleep. The bags under your eyes are big enough to pack for a weekend trip.”

3. When you have a ton on your plate during a certain period, what word or phrase would your romantic partner, use to describe you?

a. Crazy busy

b. Crazed

c. Crazy

4. If you have kids, how do they generally grab your attention when they need it on a busy night?

a. They just say, “Hey, Mom?”

b. They start nagging or whining.

c. They give the cat a bubble bath.

5. Look down at your nails—how are they holding up these days?

a. I make sure to keep on top of them because it’s an instant confidence boost.

b. The polish is a little chipped, but they’re not
hideous
.

c. The manicurist would need a weed whacker to deal with my cuticles.

6. What’s the last part of your bedtime routine?

a. Slathering on some rich body butter before slipping between the nice new sheets I treated myself to

b. Catching up on reading in the tub

c. Checking e-mail, Facebook, and Twitter one last time

7. Everything is going wrong at work today. How do you calm down and regroup to make it through the day?

a. I step out for a short walk.

b. I take a deep breath and remind myself that in a few hours the day will be over. Till then, I just keep trying to fix anything that goes wrong as fast as possible.

c. I drain a double cappuccino, run damage control for the rest of the day, and apologize the next day to anyone I snapped at.

8. When was the last time you called your best friend or sister to catch up?

a. Yesterday. We try to swap stories at least once a week even with our hectic schedules.

b. Does texting count as an actual conversation?

c. When I wished her happy birthday—three months ago.

9. Your partner whisked you away for a BlackBerry/iPhone-free weekend at a country inn. How many times did you secretly check your messages?

a. None. The only electronics used were the toys in the bedroom.

b. None while we were
there.
But I used the whole drive home to catch up. That wasn’t part of the agreement.

c. Whenever he went to the bathroom or stepped out of the room—just to make sure my in-box wasn’t blowing up.

10. Your favorite thing to do alone is:

a. Read a fabulous novel

b. Check out all my saved-up Pottery Barn catalogues

c.
Alone?

If you answered mostly a’s, can I please meet you? It’s clear that you’ve brilliantly managed to find a way to savor your success and not let craziness from work bleed over into your personal life. You are excellent at fully engaging in what you’re doing without mentally being dragged elsewhere. (And your friends and family appreciate it.) Plus, it seems that not only do you make time for yourself, you also know how to find the bliss in everyday moments. You’re helping to keep the body butter industry in business, but hey, you deserve it.

If you answered mostly c’s, I’m probably not telling you anything you don’t already know: work and stress are getting the better of you. You must be working tough hours, or maybe you’re under an extreme amount of pressure right now, or you may have more on your to-do list than seems humanly possible to manage. There’s a good chance you also have kids under five years old! You may know you need to do something about your situation, but you feel so under the gun that you don’t even try. You arrive home from work feeling crazed, and that sensation has barely subsided by bedtime (and checking your messages before bed doesn’t help).

If you answered a lot of b’s (with a few a’s and c’s thrown in), I can relate. I was a “b girl” for many years. B’s mean that despite how busy your life is, you make an
effort
at least to keep things balanced—even programming in some “me” time. The trouble is, your approach is kind of catch as catch can, so you end up never allowing yourself to fully savor and enjoy. Skimming the Pottery Barn catalogue is good, but it’s never going to bring you lasting pleasure.

In the next chapters you’ll find some strategies for preventing work pressures from infringing on your personal life and increasing the amount of blissful moments. If you answered mostly a’s, I bet you’ll still find inspiration. If you answered mostly c’s, I hope the advice will help you begin the process of taking back your personal life. You’re going to need more than a few scented candles to make it happen, but once you start, you’ll have momentum.

If you answered mostly b’s, you may need the advice more than you realize. I suspect that most women fall into the b category. We think we are doing okay, but our efforts are only skin deep. It’s great to have a wake-up call. Mine was when my husband gave me that massage. Maybe this quiz will work like that for you.

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Why You Must Absolutely Be the Boss of Your Personal Life, Too
 
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A
s successful working women, we’re good at managing people and projects and making things run as we want them to. We know how to delegate, ask for help, close out a project, and set aside time for what matters. But we don’t always bring those great bossy skills to our personal lives. Thus we sometimes find ourselves stuck doing tasks we can’t stand, dogged by unfinished projects (such as the overstuffed hall closet or the unopened Rosetta Stone), and with not nearly enough time for the activities that give us pleasure. Lately a professional friend and I were trying to arrange a lunch, and she sent me the following e-mail: “The twenty-sixth isn’t good. How about the thirty-seventh?” It was as if her subconscious was telling her that she needed many more days in a month to fit everything in.

Did you take the quiz in the previous chapter? If you did and the score made you see that you’re not savoring your success, it’s time to make an adjustment. Because the opposite of not savoring is often mega stress and misery, and that not only keeps the pleasure away, it also hurts your health. Here are the best solutions I’ve learned.

8 Ways to Reduce Craziness and Stress

1. Stop using the phrase “I’m so busy.”
This is a tip from my longtime friend Judsen Culbreth, former editor in chief of
Working Mother
magazine and now an editor of
Mobile Bay
magazine in Alabama. As she points out, “words have this tricky way of becoming our feelings.” Meaning that if you say you’re busy, you will certainly feel busy. If you say you’re crazed, you will feel crazed.

2. Regularly pose the question to yourself, “Why am I doing this?”
Followed by “Does it have to be done at all?” If the answer to the second question is yes, ask, “Could anyone else do it?” These questions help you see that there is much you can actually let go of, allowing you to focus instead on your priorities. For instance, asking myself the first question forced me to realize that I was sending out Christmas cards because I thought I should rather than because I wanted to. How great it felt to let that task fall by the wayside.

3. Nail down your “no” phrase.
It’s so darn hard to say no. Therefore women end up saying yes when they don’t want to simply because they can’t spit the word out. Figure out a phrase that’s going to work for you whenever you need to decline graciously, and rely on it every time. It should be concise (so you get it out quickly), polite (you don’t want to be rude), slightly vague (you don’t want the other person to offer an alternative for you to say yes to), and unequivocal (you want to sound sure of the decision). One phrase that works well is “Thanks for thinking of me, but unfortunately I won’t be able to at this time.” Do
not
elaborate.

And say no right away. Don’t tell the person you’ll get back to her because then not only will you agonize about the decision, you’ll disappoint or annoy her because she thought it was a possibility.

4. Be open to reengineering.
I’m sure you’ve developed some terrific routines for accomplishing personal stuff. But it’s good to step back from time to time and question them—even the ones you have down to a science. Ask yourself: (1) does this work as well as it should? and (2) is there possibly another,
better
way to do it?

Judsen Culbreth’s husband taught her about reengineering after she’d had her second child and was balancing being a mother and wife with a demanding job. “I asked my husband what more he could do to help now that we had a new baby,” she says. “One of the things he picked was shopping for my older child’s clothes. But instead of taking her to the store with him—always stressful—he took out a tape measure and measured her arms, inseams, etc. He wrote the information on a two-by-five card and took
that
to Macy’s instead. He’d reengineered a task and made it far less crazy. I learned from watching that.”