omen have been bearing the burden of guilt since the beginning of history. Adam takes a bite of the fateful apple and—oh sure, blame it on Eve. The original guilt. And unfortunately, we women make it easy. We silently put “getting kicked out of paradise” on a long list of things to feel guilty about over the ages.
Guilt is such a daunting problem for women as they try to change the way they work that we feel it demands a chapter all its own. But this is a good news chapter. We’ll help you see how one insidious emotion can prevent you from getting the professional life you really want. Guilt can stop you from leaving the office at 3 p. m. to make the school pickup, even though you’ve finished your workday’s tasks. It can keep you from turning down those extra assignments your male colleagues just don’t want to do. It can scuttle a day off, even though you’re owed it.
Look—we have a natural gift for emotions of all sorts, and as we pointed out in chapter 1, that can work in our favor. But
unleash too much of a good thing, too much intuition and empathy, and suddenly you’ve fallen into a pitched battle with that destructive menace, guilt, and its evil stepsister, the need to please. Here we’ll hand you a map to guide you around all of these guilt-ridden pitfalls so that you can actually reach your New All.
Believe it or not, there are women out there who have harnessed their emotions and put them to use working for their benefit, instead of against it. You’ll see in this chapter that you don’t have to adopt a program of incense-filled meditation (though again, if that’s your thing, by all means. . . ), but that you can take concrete, realistic steps to banish this cunning, negative emotion, and at the same time, keep the positive, quintessentially female ones that make you who you are.
Like all things, it takes practice and dedication. Fortunately, if you’re a professional woman, you’re probably very good at those two things. In this chapter we’ll take a hard look at your emotional bad habits, give you a process that will get the principal culprit, guilt, out of your life, and then teach you the empowering positivity of the word no and how to wield it. The ability to use that critical little word, no, is the ultimate sign that you have your guilt-infused emotions in check. It means you can really start to ask for what you want.
Linda Brooks, our part-time partner at that tony New York law firm, says the biggest challenge to what she achieved was almost certainly emotional. And she counsels associates who want to follow in her footsteps that they have to be ready to withstand emotional riptides.
“I do think that person is going to need a little bit more confidence than the associate standing next to her,” she says. “You know, it takes balls to stand up halfway to partnership and say ‘I want a life!’ And to say ‘I want a life, and I’m going to be a partner and try to do both things.’ I think that’s wonderful, but I do think it takes a little more confidence, to not get paranoid and feel guilty and throw up your hands when things start to get tough.”
Guilt: The Useless Emotion
Think of it this way—we now know that our brain structure and chemistry make us more evolved, more able to anticipate consequences, and more ready to empathize with others than men are. The proverbial sixth sense is a woman’s sense—it’s the ability to tune in to and understand unspoken things that men don’t even know exist.
But the downside is our guilt. It’s really the flip side of all of that good stuff. Because we are so empathetic and connected, we’re also hyperaware of what could be or should be or what might have been or should have been or who could be feeling what and—of course—why it’s all our fault.
Claire’s typical 5 minute all-consuming stream of consciousness, self-blame soundtrack— aka the guilt trip:
Even as I write this sentence, I feel bad leaving Della with our wonderful nanny, whom she loves dearly. Though I’m off work today, I really should be thinking about that upcoming report on the anniversary of Bobby Kennedy’s assassination—otherwise it might not be artful enough. I have friends coming for dinner and I’m going to have to buy prepared food. Will they be disappointed? I still haven’t called those nice people back from that medical report I did to be sure they were happy with it. Could they be mad? Our house is a wreck, I have ants in my office, my kids will clearly be marred by all of the chaos and disorganization around here. I still haven’t shopped for my husband’s birthday. Are the people putting in carpet downstairs OK? They seem hungry. Should I go buy them sandwiches?
Amazon. com can provide you with hundreds of guilt- banishing tomes to help with these issues. And it takes a tome (at the very least) to excise guilt completely from your mentality. Right now, we’re only taking on a narrow, but critical, slice of the jumbo-size American woman’s guilt pie: you must learn to keep that useless emotion from standing in the way of your goals—from forcing you to say yes to more work than you want. You need to feel good, not guilty, about getting what you want from your career. In fact, guilt is more self-indulgent than self — correcting, since it alone doesn’t actually help you, your coworkers, your kids, or your boss.
This is an area where you are negotiating with yourself not your boss. But if you do it properly we guarantee it will save you huge amounts of time at work.
The key, then, is to be aware that guilt, when you haven’t actually done anything wrong, is a useless emotion. Keep repeating it to yourself: just junk guilt. Just junk guilt.