Christy Runningen, a Best Buy corporate talent coach in Minnesota, learned just how destructive and hard to shake guilt can be, even though she is one of the lucky ones. She’s working in what Best Buy calls a ROWE—a Results Only Work Environment. It’s the brave new world we mentioned in chapter 2 and that we’ll explore further in chapter 7—where time on the clock has become irrelevant, and all that is measured is output. A mother of three young children, and someone who struggled with capricious bosses for years, Christy has seen her life transformed by ROWE. But, she says, the hardest part of making even this fully sanctioned flexible situation work has been changing the guilt-inducing voices in her head.
“I’m guilty of wanting to be that supermom. Even my mom gets on me like, ‘Relax, you don’t have to be the best at everything you do.’ But I don’t want people at work to start saying ‘Oh well she’s got kids, so she isn’t really going to be performing well, or she’s got graduate school so I guess she can’t handle all of that stuff at once.’ And I had felt the need to prove to everybody that I can do it all, you know, I’ve got straight As in my Master’s in psychology, and I’m doing well at work, and I’m trying to be a supermom and all of this other stuff. So it’s been gradual for me to get to the point where if I have to leave work early I don’t worry whether people are looking at me funny."
Listen to all of that. It’s just an incredible waste of time. Think about all of the time you sit around obsessing like Christy, wondering what the “right thing” is, what your boss or colleague or whoever might think, instead of focusing on getting your work done or hanging out with your family. It eats up our minds, and it saps our energy. Enough.
We put some of the most guilt-ridden and guilt-conquering female minds to the task of developing a method of getting over time-consuming guilt. Almost all of us agreed that the onset of unreasonable guilt is like an emotional attack— something that gains its own momentum and is driven by its own logic. Fending off any attack requires that you gain the initiative, which means you need to quickly identify what’s going on and then confront it. Our Guilt Bashers help you head off guilt fast.