I Shouldn't Be Telling You This: Success Secrets Every Gutsy Girl Should Know (35 page)

One catch: you need to carve out sweet time for yourself because no one will carve it out on your behalf. Lindsay, the mother of twins, goes for a thirty-minute manicure and hand massage every week. And every Wednesday morning she has her “
Sex and the City
coffee hour” with a friend—after they drop their kids off at school.

That’s not to say you don’t deserve a weekend away with your partner or a girlfriend or even alone. But if you schedule plenty of sweet time into your life, you won’t feel in desperate need of it.

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Make Your Back-Pocket Dream a Reality (While You’ve Still Got a Day Job)
 
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D
espite your professional success, is there something you’ve secretly yearned to do but haven’t tried yet? Perhaps it’s a dream you’ve never breathed a word about to anyone. I can relate, because for years I had a crazy back-pocket dream myself. As a young girl I liked reading books, but when I stumbled on a copy of
Nancy Drew and the Secret of Red Gate Farm
—with its spooky cover and eerily provocative title—I suddenly became a ravenous reader rather than simply an avid one. I devoured that mystery and then proceeded to read dozens of others in the series. My passion for the “Titian-haired” sleuth made me long to become a private detective (I used to walk around my hometown in a little trench coat with a rubber pistol in my pocket). Later, as I came to realize what a terrible wimp I was, I vowed instead to one day satisfy my fascination with corpses and perplexing puzzles by
writing
murder mysteries rather than actually solving them.

That desire got tucked away for years as I pursued another aspiration—to be a magazine editor—which also happened to offer more financial security. But as I mentioned earlier, I pulled that old dream out of the back pocket one Saturday morning when my kids were sleeping in. With the encouragement of my awesome agent Sandy Dijkstra (who’d represented me for nonfiction books), I wrote several chapters and sketched out an outline for
If Looks Could Kill.
It was the story of an irreverent true-crime journalist named Bailey Weggins who discovers the dead body of her boss’s beautiful young nanny. She’d been poisoned—and there were plenty of suspects. I
loved
working on it.

I was also motivated, I must admit, by a desire to create a professional Plan B. I knew of so many magazine editors in chief who had been unceremoniously dumped by their companies when they were in their fifties, and I decided that if that happened to me one day, I wanted to have a backup way to earn money. I gave myself eighteen months to complete the book.

But then
Cosmo
Sunday happened. That’s when I was called out of the blue on a Sunday morning, asked to come in to work, and handed the job of a lifetime. As I accepted the position, trying to conceal my angst about it, one of the thoughts racing through my head was “Well, now I’m never going to be able to write my mystery.” I felt heartsick about letting that old dream go.

Five months passed, and the Christmas holidays rolled around. Since I had a few days off, I decided one afternoon to read over the pages I’d tucked away back in August. One of the lines caught me totally by surprise. I’d written that Bailey had found the dead nanny lying on a copy of
Cosmopolitan.
I had no memory of adding that detail—but I instantly took it as a sign from the gods. Maybe I was
meant
to finish the mystery while editing
Cosmo.
So I did it. Since then I’ve written five more Bailey Weggins mysteries and two stand-alone thrillers,
Hush
and
The Sixes.

Whenever I’m invited to give a speech to a woman’s group, there’s generally a Q-and-A session built in at the end. Almost without fail the first question anyone asks is “How do you manage to do both?” What the questioner means is “How can you manage having a demanding full-time job and still write books?” Some women, I think, are simply interested in hearing a few time-management tricks that they can apply in various areas of their lives. But many, I suspect, have a back-pocket dream of their own and really want to have it see the light of day.

If you’ve got a dream like that, pull it out and take a fresh look at it. Does it still excite you? Could you leverage it financially? Your girlhood dream may have been put aside—or, worse, trampled upon—but that doesn’t mean it’s not valid.

There may be a certain time in your life when it’s better to tackle that dream than others. I never wanted my mystery writing to infringe on my kids, so the best period to start was when they were sleeping later on weekend mornings. I dragged myself out of bed at six and wrote for a few hours before they came padding downstairs, hunting for French toast. You don’t have to do everything at once. Think of yourself as a
serial achiever
, someone who will probably live a long life and can take on different goals when the timing is right.

But one day you’re going to have to take a breath and
plunge in.
Begin with a very simple task, such as writing the first sentence (I did that) or prepping the canvas. See how it makes you feel.

It will help if right from the start you realize that some stuff in your life is going to have to go and then decide what that stuff will be. I used a lot of time-management tricks to help me build writing into my day (see “Terrific Time-Management Tricks”), but I still had to jettison certain routines and activities. I gave up my plan to become a decent tennis player. I never again spent a Saturday afternoon prowling around Saks or Bloomingdale’s in search of booty. Instead I started shopping online at night and began to use a personal shopper for major fashion purchases (they’re available free at major department stores). And when Facebook took off, I decided I would have to postpone using it, except for my author page, to another time in my life. Last, I read far fewer books than I would have liked. But the pleasure I’ve experienced from being an author has outweighed the losses.

You might also have to shape-shift your dream a little to make it more doable. I did. I’d always wanted the lead character in my mysteries to be a private eye, but that would have meant a ton of research, and because of my full-time job, I didn’t have time for research. So I made my character a magazine writer. It meant I would still have to research all the forensic and crime-scene material for each mystery—which I enjoy—but I didn’t have to spend ages learning what it was like to be a private eye. I could even paste snippets from my job right into the book.

It also helped for me to integrate my mystery writing with my family. I introduced my kids to many of my favorite mystery movies, including the four fantastic Miss Marple films of the 1960s with Dame Margaret Rutherford. I once even had my daughter, Hayley, follow me through the woods so that I could hear the sound of someone tracking me. Needless to say, today they both have a love for the macabre.

So as I said, plunge in. You will be tired at times, even cranky, and at some moments you will wonder if you are nuts for doing it. But I bet you won’t regret it.

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Reinvention: A Brief Course
 
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Y
ou may have read, as I have, that the average person will have at least five careers during his or her lifetime. But guess what? That statistic turns out to be completely untrue. Or rather, it
could be
true, but nobody knows for sure. There is actually no data on the subject of how many careers the average person will have in a lifetime. Someone just threw out that number at one point, and it stuck.

Yet, despite the lack of research, I’d say there’s a more-than-decent chance that many of us will end up changing careers at
least
once. Even if you love your work and your field, there may come a time when you’re no longer being challenged or excited and you start to grow restless, eager for something new. And you don’t have to be plugging away for twenty-five years to feel that way. The Atlanta-based psychiatrist Dr. Ish Major says that he’s had plenty of thirty-something patients who find themselves at a crossroads. “Maybe you blazed through ten or fifteen years of your career, and then you find yourself asking, ‘Is this
it
? There’s got to be more.’ ”

And of course sometimes the need for reinvention isn’t a choice: it’s thrust on you because your field runs out of steam or suffers a setback.

So let’s start with the idea of you in charge of the situation. You used to love what you are doing, but now you’re feeling bored or discontented by the area you’re in, and you’re ready for a switch. Yet you’re not sure what your shiny new career should be. It would be nice if you had a eureka moment—and those do sometimes occur. But since you may not have time to wait for it, why not hurry it along?

That’s sort of what my friend Amy Archer did. Amy and I were writers together at
Glamour
magazine when we were both in our twenties. In her late twenties, Amy took off to see the world for a while and then ended up teaching, at Brown University and at several prestigious prep schools. One day, sitting at her desk at a school in Portland, Oregon, she had a startling epiphany.

“It was three days before the first faculty meeting,” she says. “I was thinking about school projects, and I realized—I can’t do this. I was almost shaking. I knew then that what I wanted to do was become a photographer. I went to the head of the school and told him I had to leave.”

Archer had actually been nudging herself toward that moment for a while. She loved photography and always had her camera out. The summer before the new school year began, she’d taken a pretty serious photography course in Aspen. So the idea of finally doing it full-time had begun to crystallize long before that shaky moment at her desk. Her reinvention, like many, was really an evolution. If you see a thread of something beginning to run through your thoughts, follow it. Take a class, explore on the Internet, have lunch with someone who’s already doing it.

Shock Reinvention

What if a need for reinvention isn’t a choice but something that’s been thrust on you—because, for instance, you’re downsized out of your job and you realize that opportunities in your field are drying up. You come to sense that it’s time for a whole new ball game.

The first step, says Dr. Major, is to begin to let go of your former self. “You have to deal with the finality of who you used to be. It can be like grief. What I hear a lot is ‘I don’t know who I am without that.’ But what I tell patients is that whatever it was, it wasn’t the biggest part of them. They need to get in touch with their essential self.” How do you do that? Dr. Major suggests asking five friends and five family members to describe you in one word. “In most cases,” he says, “seven out of ten people come out with the same word. And that word will say far more about you—your essential self rather than your social self.”

It may not be necessary to totally shift gears. The executive coach Terri Wein suggests meeting with people who “value your skill set” and who can brainstorm with you about how to take it in another direction. A friend of mine who was let go after running a big special-events department found great happiness as a freelance consultant who specializes in generating concepts for events.

What if it
is
time for something brand new? How do you begin to figure out what that is? The “threads” probably are there, but you’re going to have to tease them out. Note the everyday moments when you are “in the zone”—when you have total focus and single-mindedness of purpose. Maybe it’s when you’re doing something with your hands. Also, think about what captivated you as a girl, what captured your fancy then. “If you have to reach outside of you, you’ve gone too far,” says Dr. Major.

Another good strategy is the “taking the bus to Cairo” approach I talked about in “What Are You
Really
Lusting For?” in part I. You’re looking on the outside but letting it connect with your internal longings and needs.

Your First Foray

Now to begin. Archer’s advice: “Find something easy and minuscule to get you over the hump of ‘Where do I start?’ ” Instead of going out and just shooting pictures, Archer dug out old notebooks of hers in which she’d made notes about photography and also found the negatives of pictures she’d taken years before, including a series of candid shots of the singer Tom Waits. Her first step was to make prints of those photos. She was working with something familiar, and that made plunging in easier.

She also found it helpful to place herself in an environment where people were doing what she now wanted to do. “There was a wonderful darkroom in Portland run by a group of women, and I went there to develop my photos,” she says. Before long her work began appearing in café shows and then in one of Portland’s best art galleries. Recently she shot all the photographs for interior designer Bunny Williams’s enchanting book,
Scrapbook for Living.

Reinvention almost always involves a learning curve, and once you jump in, you’ll have to be teaching yourself at the same time. “For me, that was one of the hardest parts of reinvention,” says Andrea Kaplan, who started her own PR firm several years ago. “I’d been in corporate jobs in the past and always had assistants. When I went out on my own, I had to suck it up and go to class to learn Excel. Then I took classes and read books on social media. But now I’m really enjoying the new rhythm of life that comes from not being connected to the same place every day.”

Does that sound good? Then go for it!

Acknowledgments

I
’m so very grateful to everyone at HarperCollins and HarperBusiness who supported and guided me with
I Shouldn’t Be Telling You This.
In particular I want to thank the awesome Kathy Schneider, who sensed my secret wish to write this book and then told me to go for it; Hollis Heimbouch and Colleen Lawrie for their incredibly valuable direction and editing; Rachel Elinsky for her unrelenting and imaginative efforts on the PR front; Robin Bilardello for kick-ass art direction; and Emily Walters for her generous patience with such a micromanager.