Lots of women, ourselves included, dread saying “no” because of the tangle of emotions that we discussed above. For many women, there is an added barrier to the self-affirming no: it’s the social, or maybe we should say sociological, obligation.
Melissa James understands the emotion of sociological obligation as well as anyone. Melissa is a rare individual in many ways. She’s one of the few African American women who have risen to the upper echelons at investment banking powerhouse Morgan Stanley. In fact, she’s one of only a small group of African American women in the whole cutthroat, macho financial industry to have reached those kinds of professional heights.
Beyond her professional achievements, Melissa also managed to get smart about her life, about balance. To speak in the language of this book, she managed to change her perspective and came to look at her life and job through the Womenomics lens. At one point early in her career, she took the initiative, sat down with her boss, and asked for “more flexibility.” After explaining what she had in mind by that somewhat ambiguous two-word phrase, her boss said something mildly shocking: “That’s great.” They had no intention of losing her.
She’s since moved back to full-time work as the global head of loan products for the company, but she remembers that at the time, it wasn’t bosses’ guilt or professional self-doubt that she had to deal with. For the most part, it was something else.
“I think there are a whole bunch of issues about being a minority of any kind,” Melissa told us.
“Whether you’re a minority by virtue of your gender, or by virtue of your ethnicity or whatever, there are issues. There’s more baggage, there are more challenges, there are more obstacles. It’s more difficult in certain respects. Maybe it’s easier in others, but on the whole it’s more difficult. And you can feel a greater sense of obligation to achieve or to do things well, like, ‘I have to do things well because I am such a rarity, or I’m doing this for the entire race, or all African American women, or whatever, so I can’t give in now.’”
Think about this for a minute. Melissa is a person who had overcome all the odds to get to where she wanted to be. Not only this, but she also had managed to take control of her life, get time off, pare down her workload, and still remain a valuable player at a high-stakes financial firm. And yet, she still felt
guilty.
Women’s emotional waters run deep. Melissa, despite years of hard work and substantial, traditionally defined success, didn’t become the ball-busting corporate ice queen that you see
in the movies. After jumping (or, in her case, leaping) the professional barriers, she went on to face personal ones—years of troubled pregnancies and negotiations about work-life balance. After getting past the personal barriers she went on to focus on her obligations to society as a whole. But she emerged the victor.
“I’m extremely happy about where I am,” she told us, “and that is not to say that I have everything I want or there is something that is ideal or that is perfect or that there’s not angst or ambivalence, but when I look at things in the scheme of my own life and I look at the success that I’ve enjoyed and the seniority that I have, the responsibility that I have, the money that I get paid, the whole package of workplace flexibility that I have, this package really works for me.”
We couldn’t dream of a better example than Melissa James of what can be achieved, both professionally and personally, with the right approach. Melissa, and all the rest of us, need only go one step further: instead of feeling an obligation to do more and more, we need to turn that driving emotion toward feeling pride for what we’ve already done. Instead of feeling guilty, as we imagine what our female predecessors might think about our choices to scale back the work hours, or what our ethnic community or even family might think, we need to understand that most of those people would be awed by what we’ve already accomplished, which is that we’ve earned the ability to decide. Exercising this ability means saying “no” when you need to and not falling into a guilt trap for doing so. And, in fact, exercising this ability will help to build a world our successors will be thankful for.
Over the next three chapters, we’re going to map out the path to building this world for you—the world of work-life freedom— from the baby steps of buying minutes in your day to the gigantic strides of completely overhauling your work deal.
We’ll start small and accessible. There are things you can do today, with no confrontations or meetings or favors asked, to win yourself more time. We’ll look at your home lives and your work lives to see how you can cut tasks down and be more efficient. Then we’ll get strategic and, yes, psychological again, and look at how you can buy freedom for yourself and help your employer with an attitude change. You’ll learn, for example, to pick those plum assignments to maximize your impact and the company’s benefit. And then we’ll talk about how to really renegotiate the whole deal. How you can plunge in and shake off the tyranny of nine-to-six, or eight-to-seven, or seven-to-nine, or whatever your personal prison is, once and for all.
news you can use
1. Guilt is a useless emotion that keeps you from achieving work-life sanity.
2. Changing the guilt soundtrack in your head will open the door to a powerful, life-changing little word: No. It’s one you need in order to master Womenomics.
3. If you don’t say "no” to some things you will end up doing everything.