This content is locked. Please login or become a member.
Internalizing Your Strengths
Our greater society and culture undervalues parents in the workplace, particularly moms. There is something called motherhood penalty, and essentially, it shows that a mother’s earnings dramatically decrease after having one baby. They continue to decrease after two and three and four. When you look at fathers and you look at those same charts, they’re barely impacted in terms of their pay.
The irony, of course, is that when you look at who actually performs well at work, women come back to work more capable than they were before they left in many, many cases. They have a hard end stop to their day, but this actually makes them more efficient. If they’ve been home with a baby on leave, that baby has been the toughest drill sergeant boss you will ever have in your life and has taught them to pivot between tasks without really any transition time between. Baby needs one thing. Baby needs the next thing. You go, you go, you go, you do. And that directly translates, it’s been shown, by women when they come back to work, they don’t need transition time between tasks.
So you hear a lot of women say, “I’m more efficient because my day is shorter.” Well, actually, they’re more efficient because they compress things, and they do things really efficiently, actually the real definition of efficient.
Women also sometimes like to say, and I think sometimes we undersell ourselves, they say, “After parenthood, I am much better at saying no to things.” And that is true, and that is valid, but I also ask the women who I speak to turn that around as well. So yes, you’re better at saying no to things that don’t matter, that aren’t going to ultimately benefit your company, benefit your life, help you move you along in your career, fine.
However, when a new working mom says yes to something, she has done that compromise already, that compromise math is what I call it, in her head to figure out how am I going to make this work? What am I going to steal time away from so that I can say yes to this? So by the time she gets to yes, it’s an incredibly strong, incredibly real, dedicated yes. And I think that so much of the way we present ourselves coming back to work requires an internalization and an understanding of our strengths and of what we can contribute to the workplace.
Internalizing Your Purpose
When I surveyed these mothers, I really wanted to have a diverse array of a lot of different things in terms of income and geography, where they lived. What I actually didn’t anticipate is that there would be an enormous diversity of ambition that would know no bounds. It wasn’t necessarily economic how these women sort of lined up. What ended up happening, though, is that almost everyone, regardless of how deeply ambitious they felt in that moment coming back to work, everyone had at least one little blip of feeling like, “I have to quit.” Whether it was one bad commute or a three-month long period of torture, they felt like, “This is just not going to work. I don’t know how.”
So I would say, first and foremost, give yourself at least that three months. We live our lives in seasons. Know that most women are back at work months before their bodies are physically meant to be there. And so as much as you can, give it a little time before you make any big decisions. However, the other thing you can do is you can actually… this is going to sound so… there’s almost nowhere in the book do I say, “Make a list.” In this part of the book, I say, “Make a list” because I actually found a couple of studies that showed that that’s what helps.
So if you can make a list, no joke, of the things that you get out of your career and absolutely, that includes a paycheck because I don’t know anybody who wouldn’t put that on the list, but it can also include being able to meet someone at a party and say, “This is what I do for my job,” and it feels like part of your identity. That goes on the list too. All of those things.
So research has shown that if you can feel like you get some value out of your job, that it helps with your focus during re-entry, and focus is something that, particularly if you’re not getting a lot of sleep, that can help you feel like you’re doing a better job performing which ultimately tends to any sort of feelings of lack of confidence and ultimately helps. So there’s that.
The other thing you can do is to make a commensurate list of what your workplace gets out of you. And I love this study too because it essentially showed that if you can rattle off all the things that your workplace gets from you, which is not just your list of job duties, but the things that are more emotional too. They get that you’re a team player. You’re a really good mentor. You bring things along. You’re a good peer. All of these… your great ideas. If you can make that list, so that list internalizing that actually has been shown to help women who coming back to work feel, and I love this was the exact phrase from the study, “Feel more confident in their compromises.”
And I really, really love that because the acknowledgement that there are going to be compromises is really important because when we really get messed up in the head is when we have super high expectations, and we don’t acknowledge the fact that we’re not going to be everything to everyone at once, right? But if you can see what your job gets out of you, you feel more confident making those compromises that every new working parent has to make.