There is one little hitch in this process of redefining success on our own terms. Or for some of us, one stubborn, out-size hitch. Our egos. Even if you feel the satisfaction and clarity of knowing what you really want, and you understand it won’t mean the end of your professional life, your ego, well nurtured as a successful professional woman, will keep popping up to undermine your evolution.
Ego can, of course, be a powerful and positive force in life. But the status trap forms when we start to measure ourselves by standards not truly our own. Evaluating your life by someone else’s goals provides just enough drive to keep going—to seek the next promotion, the bigger bonus, the nicer car, or the better job title—but it doesn’t provide enough satisfaction to make you happy. You’ve probably experienced the feeling of getting a raise, a promotion, or a nice bonus, and instead of being elated, as you expected, you feel a bit let down. The shiny new thing that you earned seems, in hindsight, more like bait than a reward. And what you now face is more hours, more meetings, more stress— and less of what you truly enjoy.
The status trap is like a pool of professional quicksand that, the farther into it you get, the more it pulls. The force that sucks you in is a mental one that springs from your sense of responsibility, your desire to do “more and better,” your personal connections at work, and, simply, your misguided ego. Getting out of the professional quicksand requires that you first become aware that you’re in it. And then you can employ a set of concrete defenses that will let you defeat the status trap altogether.
When we first met her, Christine Heenan was being asked to interview for a top job running Harvard University’s communications and public affairs departments. Christine had spent the last seven years running her own communications company in Rhode Island. She was also teaching at Brown, where she used to be a senior administrator, and before that had worked in the Clinton White House. Up in Rhode Island, she had been feeling left out of that alpha loop.
“I remember being at a wedding in Quebec with former colleagues from the White House. There were lots of women my age I reconnected with at this wedding who were doing fascinating things. There was one who’d just finished law school and was now working on human trafficking issues. There was another who was head of communications for NBC and did all sorts of incredible things, and I sort of felt, ‘Oh, let me tell you about my boys Alex and Colin.’ Don’t get me wrong, I am so proud of my kids and proud of what I’ve done professionally with my company, but without question, in my field, there is just this professional corridor from New York to D. C. that I was outside of.”
So when that interest came from Harvard, Christine was flattered. It was an ego-boosting call from her previous top-tier life. It was also, ego aside, a very appealing job. But Christine had spent years in Rhode Island building a career that gave her a perfect fit between her office life and her home life; she had made workplace flexibility a real cornerstone of her company, and she was very reluctant to give up that freedom. The Harvard job would mean working for someone else again, with someone else’s hours. It would mean good-bye to control, and hello to corporate restraints. She was torn.
“One of my reactions was relief.” She says, “I’m glad I’m still thought of for a job like that. I’m glad I haven’t taken myself out of sight for those kinds of professional opportunities.”
But as Christine looked her ego solidly in the eye, she realized she didn’t need the Harvard job. She told the recruiters it was a dream job for her, but a dream that would be best to pursue once her children were older.
Sarah Slusser is a divorced and remarried forty-five-year-old mother of two boys and a senior vice president at AES, an energy company in Virginia, where she puts together deals to build power plants all over the world. She is smart, effective, and would be a big catch for any high-powered financial firm. Sarah works in a world of multimillion-dollar business transactions. She is very good at what she does and could make significantly more than her current salary if she switched to any number of financial firms. She should know, because she’s in the habit of having to turn down well-paying job offers—and every time she does, she finds it’s hard on her ego.
“The ego issue, it’s very difficult,” Sarah acknowledges. “When I’m having lunch with friends, it’s fine. It’s when I’m at work that it’s harder to reconcile. I used to lead a team, but I scaled back, and now I don’t. You sit in these meetings with people who are executive vice presidents and you know you could do the job just as well but you’ve chosen not to, in order to have time for the kids. It is hard.”
Sarah has a tip for reconciling her professional ambition and shaken ego with her decision not to take those promotions. “I deal with it by frequently reminding myself of why I’ve made these choices—of all the reasons for not being at the position I was before. I keep telling myself it’s worth it, so that I can pick my son up from school or whatever. But I do have to remind myself.”
The very fact that our energy star entertains these offers is testament to her ambition. And maybe the offers themselves, even if they’re not accepted, serve as a useful psychological boost. “I think that’s why I like getting these job offers,” Sarah says. “Maybe it’s part of why I entertain them. It feels good to be wanted. I’ve just been appointed director of the board of a New York hedge fund I worked with—when they sent me the press release, it felt good. I hadn’t realized they were going to send out a press release. And it was nice.”
But Sarah is clear: while her two boys are still young, she won’t move, even for a job that recently offered her multiples of her current salary.
“You earn flexibility by staying at one organization and rising up and that then becomes really hard to trade in. Really hard,” she says. “Anyway, you only need so much money, right?”
The important part of this mind adjustment is not just knowing what you want and what you don’t want, but it is also living that realization day to day.
katty Ego is a big, big problem in television. Our careers feed off being seen. The more recognized we are, the more well-
known we become, the more our organizations value us and the more they pay us. It is a seductive and very slippery slope. Because once you’ve tasted a little fame, you tend to want more, and as with all addictive confections, there can never be enough. Soon you are trading far too much to get your pixilated features on a TV screen. As my television career began to expand I discovered the pitfalls of this status seduction. People began to recognize me. Not Katie Couric recognize of course, but just occasionally someone in the local Safeway or someone in the airport check-in line would say, "Hey, don’t I know you from somewhere?” or, even, "Wow, I’m such a fan. I just love your British accent/ pink jacket/new hairdo, or (rarely) your views on politics.” I have to admit, though I’m embarrassed to do so, I liked it. It made me feel somehow important, and I stupidly started to fall for the dumb idea that if more people recognized me, I wouldn’t just feel more important I would actually be more important. This made me susceptible to job offers that clearly fell way outside my personal goal posts. Sure, I’d muse, I can work sixty-hour weeks, fifty-two weeks a year, be on call round the clock if it just gets me more of those pixels and the prospect of my face on the back of that bus. Believe me, I understand the draw of ego. And even now, when I’m offered more airtime or more blog time I still have to deal with the internal battle between the demon voice of my ego and the sensible voice of my life-balance. I can still be seduced by the flattery of my boss saying how great it is that his boss wants more of me on air. And I still have to go back to our gut check and assess whether this new offer really suits my life. Fortunately the voice of life — balance usually wins over the voice of ego and ends up shouting, "Are you CRAZY? You have too much on your plate already, just get a grip!” I try to listen to that voice.