Paralyzed: The Life of the Mid-Level Career Woman (Part IV)

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September 22, 2004

Paralyzed: The Life of the Mid-Level Career Woman (Part IV)

Nope, I'm not done yet...

For women who decide that they want to leave the corporate world there are two options: one that I mentioned earlier, full-time motherhood (or in the cases of those who can afford to leave but who don’t want kids, full-time philanthropy) or entrepreneurship.

A woman I know started her own IT consulting company in the wake of the imploding tech boom. What balls. Here most of us were sending 200-300 resumes to companies for underpaying contract positions in the Bay Area, and she just up and decides to start a company.

I asked her how she did it. She looked at me, as if to say, “What did I do?”

“I just started the business,” she said. I’m sure that hard work and brains helped move things along, but what was key is what she didn't have, what so many women (and men, too, I suppose) feel they must have—total security and a guarantee of a payoff—before taking the leap.

I know this woman because, for a while, I worked for her consultancy. The work wasn’t a perfect fit for me, but I enjoyed her casual, confident style with the consultants and the firm’s underlying premise that people are capable beings and don’t need hand-holding or scolding. I went to the project sites, completed my work, attended team meetings and got paid.

A few months into working with this woman a full-time position came up and I figured I should go for what was certain, not an occasional project here and there. Shortly after starting the job things began to wear on me—office politics, constantly shifting directives and the toxicity that so commonly grows like mold in companies with new management. Like the bitter party in a messy divorce, the old guard feels threatened by the new regime and makes stupid decisions out of spite or to stay on the payroll. Or the new, often younger management charges in and disrupts the household, however dysfunctional it was in the first place. In either case, the cubicle kids suffer.

A year or so later I ran into this woman and we agreed to meet at her house for a drink. Her house was huge—too large for someone living in the Bay Area who wasn’t seeing her business pay off.

She asked me how things were going. I didn’t have much to say. I hadn’t felt passionate about what I’d been doing for a couple years. She could tell.

“Why don’t you quit?” she said. She didn’t ask me in an accusatory way; she seemed genuinely perplexed that I would stay someplace that I wasn’t utterly excited about.

“It’s not terrible,” I said. “Things will get better. I just need to keep working and build their trust.”

“So that what?”

“So that I can start doing more work that I want to do.”

“What do you want to do?”

“Change the way things are done.”

“So then do that.”

“I have to learn the rules first.”

“Why?”

“Because they have to respect me, and to respect me I have to know their rules.”

“Why don’t you just do your own thing, without them, and they can respect that?”

The thought hadn’t even crossed my mind. But now I could understand how she succeeded. She didn’t question her route, or the sanity of her decision to take on her own business. Her commitment to her vision made her succeed. Things fail when people start to question themselves or create hoops to jump through in order to feel worthy of manifesting their vision.

I just read an interview in the Times
with professional ass-kicking female Rosabeth Moss Kanter, whose new book, "Confidence" is now available in book stores.

According to Kanter, "someone with confidence, defined as a belief that persistence and hard work will yield results, will win out most every time over equally talented but insecure people."

Case in point: Another friend of mine also started her own consulting business and is reaping rewards—much higher income, meatier projects (after all, she chooses them), and more respect for her knowledge of the industry.

She almost kicks herself for not having left sooner. Unlike my other friend, who simply decided to start her own business, this woman was forced out of her previous position, having been caught in some heinous political struggles that left her a scapegoat and branded by her management as a failure. Anyone who knows this woman or has worked with her knows she is bright and capable. She built her knowledge base in her industry for years and developed a strong reputation, yet she took the situation at her last job very personally. So personally, in fact, that she developed a stress-induced heart murmur.

“I was forced to leave for several reasons,” she tells me. “The job was, literally, making me sick.”

We met the other day and I could SEE the effects of her new life. There’s calmness in her face; she smiles more; she has integrated a new diet and fitness regime into her life. The venomous words she had for individuals at her old company are forgotten, irrelevant really, in the wake of what she’s carved out for herself.

I told her, when I grow up, I want to be her.

Posted at 09:59 PM in Career, Meaningful Work, Paralyzed: Life of the Mid-Level Career Woman, Women | Permalink

Comments

Epistolary?

Posted by: Marg | September 24, 2004 at 05:36 AM

You live and learn...sometimes sooner, sometimes later. I'm enjoying this series.
Joy

Posted by: Joy | September 24, 2004 at 12:43 PM

please give me more..

Posted by: sarah | February 12, 2008 at 06:07 PM

I totally disagree that there are two choices: motherhood or entrepreneurship. That's dualistic thinking. I took a sabbatical and I'm bartending while in holistic therapy school. I found one thing that makes your life transition easy: humility. Besides, corporate jobs are just lame. People with ambition who stay there are mediocre plain and simple.

Posted by: Emily | January 13, 2011 at 11:01 PM

Hi Emily! Wow--I wrote this post SIX years ago! My world has shifted, and while I still believe strongly in entrepreneurism (go to my new blog www.jorydesjardins.com to see what I mean--I write a blog about entrepreneurism and motherhood), I agree that it ain't all black and white. You are living proof!

Posted by: Jory Des Jardins | January 14, 2011 at 09:40 AM

Everything can be taken from a man but one thing; the freedom to choose his attitude in any given set of circumstances.

Posted by: Nike Dunks | April 24, 2011 at 11:34 PM

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