• Imagine the face your boss will make if you take yourself out of the running for that big job. Will he look at you like you are speaking Swahili, as he wonders to himself why he ever invested in you?
• You tell your supervisor you want to cut your time at the office. Will he shake his head and say in that annoyingly paternal baritone that you have such promise and he’s disappointed in your choice, as you awkwardly twist your hands?
• As you walk by the office watercooler will you hear mutterings of "lost her ambition” floating in your wake?
• Will you get only the most boring, meaningless assignments from now on?
• Will you lose your window office, your swagger, your drive?
• Will you stare blankly at people at cocktail parties who badger you about what you are planning for your next career move?
• Will you go broke?
• Will they say no?
• Will you be fired?
You get the picture. Put your own spin on this line of questioning and interrogate yourself until you reach Geneva Convention Limits or you run out of alcohol. And no, this isn’t gratuitous torture. By working through exactly what might happen, or rather what you fear might happen, you will come to see the very worst is not at all likely. And that is a critical realization. If you don’t confront the fears that lurk in your head and ruthlessly unmask them, these nebulous dark feelings can balloon completely out of proportion and paralyze you. Irrational fear may be the worst enemy of Womenomics.
By doing this exercise you’ll have a better grasp of what might actually happen, and be prepared for it. But you’ll likely see that the consequences aren’t such a big deal.
Oh, sure, your boss might not immediately give you the ideal schedule (not to mention absolute freedom). We’ve both faced considerable detours on our journeys. And what we’ve found is that the very worst thing that can happen when you ask for more time is that they say no. No broken bones, no firings. All the rest can be handled. But a practice run-through of the gauntlet of judgment you might face is essential survival training.
Bottom line: once you really feel comfortable with what you want, these “worst-case scenarios” actually don’t bother you so much. You tune out the raised eyebrows and the hallway commentary. And then, guess what, something else happens: people get back to their own career concerns and the gossip about you stops.
Even a super high achiever like eBay’s former CEO, Meg Whitman, has gone through the process of bucking the corporate culture and setting her own parameters. Whitman was working as a young, ambitious management consultant at Bain & Company when she had her first child. (She didn’t even dare tell her boss until she was seven months pregnant—you see, times are changing!) After her son was born she made an executive decision that was almost unheard of in that high-octane business world: she would leave every day at a reasonable hour. “I said, short of crisis, I am going to actually walk out of here at five — thirty,” she told us. “I did not want to hang around as so many of the guys were.” Still, she was concerned. “It was very social, it was very young, not too many of the guys had kids and I was worried about that.”
But Whitman found an unexpected psychological benefit to her new baby-enforced hours—she felt liberated. “In my mind I had a little excuse for not making partner. I sort of said, ‘OK if I don’t make partner it is because I have made this family tradeoff.’ And it had a really interesting effect. I got 20 percent more efficient and actually gained confidence because I had let myself off the hook in a funny way.”