Motivational Leadership Speaker, Bestselling Oprah Author

Work. Life. Balance. Work. Life. Balance. We’ve all heard those words so much it’s as if they have merged together into a simple little mantra which, if repeated enough we will manifest. “Work. Life. Balance.” “Work. Life. Balance.” “Work. Life. Balance.”

Poof!

Look at her! See that career woman climb that company ladder! Look how happy her marriage is! My, aren’t her children beatuiful, successful and happy! She still has time to cook gourmet recipes, clean house and have great sex! Not only that, she still plays tennis, too!

It doesn’t work like that.

Years ago, when I was still married and working as a newspaper reporter, I was drowning in an investigative project that stretched for ten brutal months. It was the most challenging and important work I’d ever done, but as that series became more consuming, I kept moving the mail and my junk to the guest bedroom where it amassed itself into a giant pile of unresolved clutter. One evening, friends gathered at our home before we all went out to dinner. Imagine my horror when my then-husband opened the door to the guest bedroom and said, “Look at this!”  before exposing my secret mess.

In the midst of some of my greatest accomplishments as a journalist, I was exposed for the one failing that trumped everything. I’d failed in my traditional role of wife. I don’t think it was his intent to land that kind of blow on me, but I felt that, if I wasn’t a good housekeeper, I was not worthy. I was humiliated and I was crushed.

 Of course, if you come by my house today, you will see that my office doesn’t look much better than the guest room did on that particular occasion. I’ve grown into my identity and balanced myself out by making decisions that let me define success and failure, rather than tradition or guilt. That is how you achieve life balance. You do it consciously and on your own terms.

Know your priorities and know where they rank. Years after that experience, I’ve got my priorities down. God, family, friends, community, recreation, work, and, if there is time, housekeeping and other details. Whatever. You’ve got to drop the ball somewhere, and I choose where mine drops. That is the first step in balancing your soul.

 I get so amused by the importance people give to the notion of work life balance. Like, once we get it right, we all let out a nice, long Zen Ohm and all will be well. Balance implies some sort of time/effort equity that few ever achieve in life. I certainly don’t, and I don’t even have a husband or children to worry about.

A woman once told me she needed help juggling all the balls she’s got in the air and I said, “let some of the balls drop.” 

I remember former cable television senior executive Gayle Greer showing me how she learned how to balance her soul. As  a working, single parent,  she traveled about 80 percent of the time when her son was growing up. He seldom came along. One day, he asked if he could schedule time for her to meet with a couple of coaches who wanted to talk to her about college scholarship possibilities for him. “It blew me away,” she said. “College? I hadn’t even thought about it. I wasn’t living in the present. I was so intensely holding on to whatever it was, keeping all the balls up in the air. Then it dawned on me, this kid is leaving.” That changed her forever. She never missed one of her son’s football games after that.

Our lives move so quickly that it seems like we are powerless over our schedules. But, we’re not. Truly, if you schedule a day off in your calendar, it doesn’t exist. And you may think you are too important or too busy or too stretched, but you have got to make time so you don’t lose your “self. “ If you think you can’t, or you can’t do it right now, you are wrong. Because, if someone you loved were suddenly in a life or death situation, your current schedule would screech to a halt and you would know what really matters.

 Balance is about identity. It’s knowing who you are and what matters most so that you honor your priorities in the way you want and need to honor them. We sacrifice so much of ourselves to things that don’t matter.

The mantra isn’t “Work life balance.” It’s, “I know what matters and I honor that truth.”

If I had ten dollars for every time someone has come up to me after an event and said, “I’ve always wanted to write a book,” I could be retired. I’m serious.

It is a sad refrain because, almost every time someone says it, I can tell that the book will never be written.

If you really want to write your book, you write your book. If you truly want to go back to school, you go back to school. If you want to take off a year and travel, you take off a year and travel. Whatever. You shut up and find a way. I’m one of those people who believes that, if you really want to do something, you make up your mind and do it. One of my mentors was a single parent who, when left with two small children, drove a taxi to get herself through law school and went on to become a much-admired judge.

We are capable of accomplishing so much if we just dare to commit and get started. When I hear the “I really want to write a book” line, I tell people of Rick Light, the service manager at my local Goodyear store. Rick once saw a box of books in the back of my car and mentioned he was writing a novel. Every time I see him, he tells me how it’s going. He spends every single lunch hour in the public library. He takes index cards and writes several paragraphs or phrases and perhaps sketches out a scene. Then, he goes home and types it all into his computer. He’s been doing this for a few years now, and I’ve always known he’d finish his book, which he did. Unfortunately, a break-in by vandals left him with no original and no backup. Did he give up? No. He started all over and will not stop until he has a new, better draft. He bolsters his vision with the kind of determination needed to create success.

This is an era where millions of people are rethinking what they will do with their careers. If you’ve been pushed to the edge by a layoff, you probably feel like you are staring into the abyss. But, how you rise out of this adversity depends entirely on whether you can do what Rick did.  Figure out what you want to do, make up your mind to do it, and persevere — through anything by doing it one small step at a time.

I know it is easier said than done — and that’s the point. If it is worth doing, and if your success is worth having, you’ve got to suffer the pain to earn your reward. Don’t judge your success by what comes easy — judge it by what comes hard. My motto is “Fall down seven times, get up eight.” It comes from a Chinese proverb that so simply sets the course that one must take in life because the obstacles are inevitable. They just are. When I started writing my first book, I hoped I could have written, sold and published it in six short months before it exploded onto the best-seller list and made me rich and famous. Things didn’t play out that way at all. I suffered humiliating rejections and obstacles that repeatedly tested whether I had the mettle to earn my success. Getting up every time I fell down required me to find strength when I had none.

Fortunately, I had a support group that kept cheering for me when I couldn’t cheer for myself. Count on your friends to keep you moving forward. There were so many key moments when I felt like giving up, but others inspired me to stay in the game. If you don’t seek out that kind of positive energy, you’ll get stuck in the defeatism that destroys dreams. If you’ve been stopped along the way, don’t give in to bitterness. Reach out to your friends and tell them what you need in order to continue toward a positive outcome.

I recognize that many of us feel like we are stuck in the 2009 vortex of negativity that makes it impossible to break through to do what we really want to do. The old notion that we should do what we love seems to be a luxury in a time when people are worried how they are even going to pay their electric bills. But, I still believe that we can do what we are meant to do — if we really want to do it. The challenges of this hard economic year may mean our steps are smaller and our progress slowed. Still, we can do what we truly want to do.

I always tell the aspiring authors the same thing. “If you write a page a day, you’ll be done in a year. You’ve just got to start it and finish it.”

The question is the same for them as it is for you. Do you really want to do it? And if so, what’s stopping you from getting started?

I was 17 years old and a guppy reporter for The Bradenton Herald when my editor sent me on my first assignment in the field.

“You’re going to interview Gloria Steinem,” she told me.

It was 1978 and the normally gruff woman boss I worked for was as strong and courageous as any that would follow. The Steinem assignment? Looking back on it, I think Grace Allen gave it to me in order to introduce a young woman into the world of women’s leadership. She could have sent a real reporter, but she sent the kid.

I spent most of my reporting years exposing things that crooked politicians wanted hidden, writing about difficult social issues and covering politics. I once spent a year digging into the death of a baby that the coroner’s office had written off as the result of an ear infection – rather than the result of a beating from the child’s mother’s boyfriend. In the end, that man was sent to prison for life without parole, and the spinoff investigative stories led to the demise of five senior people in local government.

I never felt the slightest bit discriminated against as a woman. If a story was a great story, it made the front page – whether it was written by a woman or a man.

At least, not until the day I was assigned to do a series on domestic violence. Accompanying the story was a front page photo of a woman with two black eyes. Our top editor went ballistic when he came back from vacation and saw that on his front page. He demanded that the series be killed, but I fought back by finding so many newsworthy stories that he couldn’t bail on the project. When the Colorado Secretary of State and a member of city council both admitted to having been battered, it was news. But, I was suddenly persona non grata at work for having written it.
It was the first time I had ever experienced anything that told me the rules were different for women than they were for men. But, they were. It was a hard lesson I had to learn before I could understand the triumph of the women’s leadership movement in the corporate world.

I look at my audiences now and see young women who can’t even conceive of a time when women couldn’t get charge cards in their own names, or could be fired if they got pregnant or wouldn’t get hired because they might get pregnant. The notion that there would be two sets of classified ads – one for men and one for women – seems preposterous. That some bosses would demand sexual favors in exchange for promotions? Implausible.

And yet, ask a woman in her 50s, 60s or 70s and she’ll respond with a knowing nod. “Yep, hard to believe – but true. That’s the way it was.”

They had to fight so hard just to get in the game. Now, so many of us are making the rules. It’s amazing.

I do get discouraged by the lack of women working as CEOs of Fortune 500 companies (just 15) or the scarcity of women on boards of those companies (less than 15 percent). But every time I do a speech at a women’s leadership event, I come out invigorated. The notion of a woman vice president, senior vice president or executive vice president is not one that raises too many hackles at most companies these days. They are there. Many – if not most – are working hard to mentor others so there will be more success to spread around.

Kind of like Grace did for me, way back when Steinem came to town.

My mother has had Alzheimer’s Disease for eight years. At least. She is 83 and living in a nursing home, fed through a stomach tube.

A few weeks ago, she was sleeping when I arrived for a visit. I nudged her awake, then climbed into bed to cuddle with her as I have done on every visit since she moved there. It is the closest human contact she has, since my father’s bad back won’t let him get in bed with her. I have cherished those moments because of the way it makes her smile and how her eyes twinkle, and because I feel her love radiate life from my sweet, lost mother.

On this occasion,  I didn’t see the usual joy. I saw fear.

My mother didn’t know who I was. She was afraid — there was a stranger in her bed and she was powerless to protect herself. She tried to say something, but her words came out as jibberish. I showed her pictures of us when I was a child, but she didn’t make the connection like she’d done on the other occasions when she couldn’t quite get who I was. So, I climbed out of the bed.

Then, I dropped my shorts and mooned her. I have always been the joker in the family, and this made Mom laugh harder than I have heard her laugh in years. That bare bottom could only belong to her daughter. “You are beautiful,” she said. A full sentence. She finally knew it was me.

I think she recognized me the other day. I am dogsitting for a tiny little Chihuahua mix, and since Coco is so darned portable compared to  my two big dogs, I brought her to visit my mom. Mom’s left side has been paralyzed since a major stroke 17 years ago. The Alzheimer’s has frozen most of the rest of her body, so she does not move much. So, I put the little dog on the bed. She didn’t say anything and she didn’t smile. Coco wagged her tail and kissed my mother, but there was still no real reaction.

A Florida afternoon thunderstorm started brewing, and with the first rumblings from the sky, tiny Coco started quivering in fear — trembling, all over. I tried to calm her, but she kept shaking. Mom watched this, transfixed. “It’s okay,” I told Coco.

After a long moment, Mom moved her right hand. Slow and unsteady, she moved it closer and closer to Coco and finally rested it on the little dog’s side. She kept it there, holding her, trying to comfort her.

Coco didn’t stop shaking until the thunder stopped. But, she didn’t move away from my mother to be closer to me. I will never forget the innocence of that tiny dog, or the slow awakening of my fading mother.

When there are no words, there is touch, which says more anyhow.

Coco meets my parents. Sorry about the quality. Blame my cell phone.

The past year has really done a number on people. Truly good human beings are writing me and telling me that they feel like failures. They are worried about their finances and their futures. They are starting to define themselves by what has happened to them.

Several years ago, I quit my job to chase my dream of writing a book, but that book was rejected repeatedly. I was demoralized. If I wasn’t going to be “Fawn Germer, Author,” who would I be? Everybody was asking, “How’s the book coming?” “When’s the book coming out?” I felt like such a failure. I was so embarrassed.

My friends got together one day and I blurted out, “I don’t know my purpose in life.”  The outburst was met with silence and stares. Finally, Pam said, “I don’t know, either.” She was in a job she hated. Teresa said, “Me either.” One by one, we went around the room and every single one of us confessed that we didn’t know our purpose in life. I was sure that, by the time we got to Bette, we would get an answer. Bette was in the throes of chemo for ovarian cancer and, surely she had figured things out since she was facing a likely terminal outcome. But, she shook her head “no.”

Not one of us knew our purpose in life.

Time passed. I sold my book. Pam switched jobs, Teresa went back to school and Bette kept on living as best she could.

For two years, Bette lived the best life possible. Once, we went kayaking to Caladesi Island. The Gulf of Mexico was cold, yet she dove right in because she said she “thought the water was pretty.” She got a grant from the city to build a butterfly garden in her neighborhood. She spent time with family and went hiking and laughed and lived.

My book was finally published and Bette and the gang made it to my first big signing. It was a big deal for her, and she’d forced herself to rally so she could be there to support me. A day or two later, she was in the hospital again. I left on tour for several weeks, and when I got back, she began her walk into death. One day, she told me she’d seen Jesus and she wasn’t afraid.

The day came when her brother called to let me know Bette had passed away. He asked if I would write her obituary. As a journalist, I have always thought that obituaries are the most important things we will ever write because they are the last word on an individual’s life. I spent a lot of time writing Bette’s. I thought about how she’d lived her life as she faced her death. She filled every moment with as much joy as she could find. She was from a huge family and every one of her brothers and sisters took turns of coming down for a week and caring for her. I know that, when she died, there was peace. She’d defined her purpose in life by simply living her life. That obituary was not a list of accomplishments. It was the story of a woman who lived. Regardless of what life threw at her, she lived.

That was when I realized what I’d learned through her passing. Our purpose in life is to live our lives. In the end, the only thing that matters is that we breathed in our moment here and filled it with life.

I was flying off to St. Louis for an event the next morning and everything was so rushed because I’d taken time to write the obituary. I had to get my hair cut before my trip and was going to a new hair salon. I passed right by it as I sped through the darkness, then turned around on the busy six-lane road and kept searching for the salon. I moved into the two-way turn lane so I could see the numbers better on the left side of the street, but that was a terrible, terrible miscalculation. Another car was coming straight toward me, blaring his horn. We had no time to stop and nowhere to go because there was so much traffic whizzing in the other lanes.

Miraculously, a space opened up on his side and he moved into it, flipping me off as he sped past me.

Seconds later, I turned into the salon parking lot. My heart was pounding harder than it ever had. I’d come within a split second of being killed. How tragic it was, because my friend had just died after spending two years fighting so hard to live, and I had almost died because I hadn’t been paying attention.

What a profound lesson. We lose so much time by not paying attention and don’t realize what we are wasting until we face losing it. It doesn’t matter what you do for your job or where you are living or where you think you rank in society. What matters is what you do today to live and enjoy your life.

It’s so simple. Your purpose in life is to live your life.

One of a kind. Meet David Bailey.

David Bailey hated it when people would tell him the day would come when he’d see his adversity as the best thing that ever happened to him.

“What an asinine, terrible thing to say,” he says.

Months later, he tells this story without realizing that he keeps recounting all of the things he’s learned and done since the day he was laid off at age 61.

Not long after he left his job as executive editor of Sky magazine for Delta Airlines, he sent me an e-mail that ended with this bombshell: “Did I tell you that I’m going to start work as a dishwasher in a fancy French restaurant here on April Fool’s Day?” I was dumbstruck. He was one of the most talented journalists I’d ever worked with and a larger-than-life character. I could not believe this gifted man was going to wash dishes for $9.50 an hour.

His story has a happy ending. He was promoted to cook. And then, to something much better. But, it’s the lessons learned in the middle that are worth sharing.

When we talked last night, he’d just come back from a fine dinner at the French restaurant where he’d been the dishwasher. He’d just dined on beef bourguignon on the terrace by candlelight, but before leaving, he stopped back by the dish room to visit two men from Niger, with whom he’d washed dishes.

“I hugged them both. They said, ‘When are you coming back?’ I had a stab in my heart. That’s the thing about a kitchen. You have this relationship with these people and it’s just like being in the newsroom. You are working extremely hard. You are producing something excellent. It feels good.”

That was more important to him than taking time off, collecting unemployment and coming up with a new career strategy. “I just had to get back to work,” he said.

“The real irony of unemployment is it robs you of your ability to do the thing that makes you feel good about yourself,” he said. “Taking a job that may not be, in many peoples’ view, worthy of my skills, gave me a place to go and a thing to do to validate myself and feel good about myself. That was a good thing. It gave me a community of people I could be around. Those people are still good friends. They are still very important to me.”

When he started this odyssey, he feared he would lose his house. Now, he says, “If I’d lost the house, I would have gotten over that.”

He didn’t find the comedown from the white-collar world to the kitchen sink demeaning in the slightest.

“What’s demeaning about washing people’s dishes and cooking people’s food? What’s demeaning about cleaning a toilet? I don’t find it demeaning. We were put on the planet to serve others.” He’s not defensive when he says this. It comes from his heart.

The French restaurant where David worked is owned by Dennis Quaintance, a man who was fascinated by his willingness to start out at the bottom. Most of the people who wanted to work for Quaintance in a transition capacity wanted to walk in and be maître d’ or sous chef.  David just wanted to work and learn the business – even if it meant pushing a broom. In time, Quaintance promoted him to be marketing director for his company, which also includes two Greensboro, N.C. hotels. One of the hotels houses the restaurant where David started.

“I’ve had people tell me that, ‘We knew you’d come out on top.’ Well, damn. I didn’t. I was worried. I’m still not comfortable. But, maybe that’s good. Maybe we’re not meant to be comfortable.”

He’s not making half of what he once made, but you can hear excitement when he talks about the company’s efforts to make the Proximity Hotel profitable and sustainable.

“Sustainability is a metaphor for my entire life,” he says. I wanted to live a sustainable life. I never wanted to be rich, but I wanted to be sustainable. When this whole thing came down, I was unsustainable. I was a person who could not sustain my family.”

But, he did. And he sustained himself. Not such an asinine lesson, after all.

I just had my first post on The Huffington Post today. Check out the story, comment and  (if you’re feeling especially helpful today) please sign up to be a fan. This is great and I have to thank Arianna personally for making this possible.

Click here for my story.

She’s a year older than I am. When we were teen-agers, I looked up to her. I wanted to be her.

I was an awkward and nerdy teen, and Mackenzie Phillips was not. She was rich and famous and cool beyond words. What I wouldn’t have done to trade places with her.

Ten minutes ago, I read the report that Phillips said she had a long-time, incestuous relationship with her famous father, John Phillips,  which began with rape and then turned consensual. He injected her with heroin. He violated every boundary.

Several years ago, I was supposed to interview Phillips about her highly publicized rehab efforts for my second book, Mustang Sallies. She was in town appearing in the Vagina Monolouges and I called her hotel room at the scheduled time. She was so incoherent that I couldn’t decipher her mumblings before she hung up. I called back again, barely making out that she wanted me to call back in an hour — which I did, wondering if she was just a Hollywood type that slept until mid-afternoon and had trouble waking up. But, an hour later, she didn’t sound much better when she gave me her home number and asked me to call in a week. When I called again, she was just as unintelligible. I kept saying, “Mackenzie, you asked me to call. I am doing a book on bold women and …” It was useless.

A year ago, she pled guilty to a felony charge of cocaine posession.

I know people will speculate on whether her stories are true, made-up or the product of years lost to a drug haze. I believe her. If she were going to make something up to get attention, she could have stopped with incest allegation without taking that leap into the admission that the sexual relationship became “consensual.”

What a sad, tortured life. It’s amazing she’s made it to 49.

I keep thinking how I looked up to her when I was a kid. That whole time that I was wishing I could have traded places with her, she probably would have done anything to trade places with me. Sure, I was a bit of a goober back then, but I grew up surrounded by love and trust and faith. I had good parents. I had a good home.

I was safe.  I feel so sad that she wasn’t.

Two days ago, I wrote how cynicism and negativity were defeating a former co-worker’s spirit in the midst of sudden unemployment. Leave it to Rosemary Goudreau to add another dimension to it.

“Maybe more than cyncism, what your friend faced was depression,” wrote Goudreau, who I worked with a million years ago when we were both reporters for The Miami Herald. “There’s a lot of it going around these days as journalists, even optimistic journalists, face the loss of their occupation…Few of us find the perfect opportunity out of the box. But as we explore this and that, we will find our way…Defining small steps might help your depressed cynic find a sense of direction again.”

Goudreau was laid off last November from The Tampa Tribune as its editorial page editor, but quickly regrouped and positioned herself as a communications consultant specializing in public policy and advocacy. She got her first contract two weeks after she lost her job.

And, she’s right. Instead of pointing out how destructive cynicism is, I should break down the re-invention process into manageable steps.

 So, that’s what I’ll do here. If you want help figuring out what you need to do with your life, check out the column I wrote earlier this week. I really believe the answers are really “out there.” But, so much of the re-invention process comes down to making the decision to play to win — then positioning yourself to actually do it.

10 Steps from Depression into Career Transition

1. Get dressed in the morning. Look good. Feel good so you can deliver. 

2. Exercise. Do you stop exercising because you get depressed or do you get depressed because you stopped exercising? Do whatever you need to do in order to keep your depression at bay. Take your meds. Pray. Take care of yourself so you are able to deliver at your greatest level of performance.

3. Take charge of your brain. If you put negative in, you get negative out. Put positive in, get positive out. You have tremendous power to control what you are thinking and, when you start hearing the negative tapes, just give yourself a verbal “Stop” cue. Deliberately replace your negative thoughts with something positive. It’s easier if you have a list of five positive things to go to for those low moments. For example, “I’ve been so successful in the past. I’m smart enough to get through this.”

4. Know that these tough times will not last forever. As much as it feels like you are sinking into a bottomless pit of quicksand, you aren’t. Don’t let yourself slide into the mentality that says you may never get another job, that you may never make as much as you once made, that you will have to work until the day you die. All that does is make you struggle more.

5. Remember who you are and who you are not. I see a lot of people who experience rejection and then process it as failure. They forget how talented and viable they are, so it becomes harder to project themselves as desirable. That poises them for more rejection. You have not lost your talent. And your setbacks have not erased your successes. They are just obstacles. You have succeeded in the past and you will succeed in the future.

6. Choose your friends carefully. If you surround yourself with hopeless people, you’ll lose hope. This can be hard if most of your friends are former co-workers who were also laid off. And, that can be even worse if you are competing for the same jobs against your friends. You’ll constantly wonder why someone got an interview or job that you didn’t. For the time being, be around people who will propel your success.

7. Network. Duh. We’ve all heard “It’s not what you know but who you know.” Well, it is also how you know them. Don’t network to make business connections. Network to make relationships. It is more important that you know that somebody likes to watch Grey’s Anatomy and loves pizza with anchovies than it is that you know their job description. Make important people fall in love with your personality and leverage those friendships so they take care of you professionally.

8. Listen. What are you supposed to do with your life? The universe will send you many prompts. Great turning points often present themselves in passing.

9. Don’t limit yourself to the classifieds. Executives are constantly asking other executives, “Do you know anyone who can…” They don’t want to advertise jobs because they don’t want 8,000 resumes. Network, network, network. Figure out where you want to work, then start writing key people to introduce yourself. There is a lot more on this in my book, Finding the UP in the Downturn. 

10. Know your weekly goals and achieve them by setting daily tasks. Then, DO THEM. Do something every day to move you closer to your goal. Whether you spend time networking or writing letters or taking classes or attending job fairs, do something to keep yourself in the game.

The most important thing is to have faith. Things will work out. I am not being flip. I am not shrugging off your pain or uncertainty. Things do have a way of working out. I don’t want to minimize anybody’s suffering or delude myself into thinking that hope conquers all, but the truth is that there are very few of you who will wind up eating out of garbage cans. There’s so much you can’t control, so give it to the wind.