Make Your Career Your Guilty Pleasure
[Music]
[Applause]
it’s 7
55 a.m on monday morning i
quickly hand my child off to his amazing
caregiver
and run downstairs to spend four minutes
putting on my makeup
and logging into my computer it’s 8 a.m
and the day has started
but my heart has this feeling this
aching
it’s a feeling as a woman i know to be
guilt
it’s a feeling as a mother i’ve learned
a lot about
it’s a feeling as a catholic that i’m an
expert in
but this new guilt from being a working
mother
i know won’t be solved by going to
confession
so i jump online to see what might be
out there
and there’s good resources from the
tactical to the philosophical
don’t look for work life balance make it
work life
integration this is all good
but what i really really need to know is
how do i change this feeling
what do i need what does society need so
i go to the experts
other working mothers who have been
doing this
their whole lives like my mother
and from them i have three really key
takeaways the first and it’s universal
what your child needs most is to feel
your love whether that’s for five
minutes as you tuck them in
a few hours at the end of the day on
saturday
when you can give it they just need to
feel
that love the second is
you can’t do it all you have to have a
village
people that you can rely on to help you
and these people
will actually make your child better
these people will also make you a better
business woman
and third and very importantly
do not step back do not
quit keep climbing
stay on the ladder why is this
important it’s important for several
reasons
one you’ve spent your entire life
working towards your career college
40 60 80 hour weeks
and you love it it builds you up
it’s also important for our larger
society
today one in four women is thinking
about
stepping back one in four
we can’t let this happen because we’re
already
underrepresented at the manager level
for every 100 men there are 85
women and the air gets thinner the
higher up you go
now this is a problem for a lot of
reasons
but let’s focus on what’s good about
having women
at the top what’s good
is that that diversity makes our
companies stronger
not only do they nurture a culture and
help build people up
but they bring real dollars to the
bottom line
when corporations have an equally
represented male
female ratio at the top it is proven
that both their revenue and their share
price
go up by 50 percent 50
come shopping with me for a second no
we’re not
going to shop for shoes we’re going to
go shopping for stocks
which if you haven’t done it is the best
thing out there and you don’t need
more than a price of shoes to get into
the stock market
we’re going to take a hundred dollars
and we’re gonna put it in a really good
company
run by awesome men over time that
hundred dollars
might become two hundred wonderful
let’s take that same hundred dollars and
put it into a company
with equal representation of women at
the top and guess what
we’re gonna get three hundred dollars
back now with that three hundred dollars
we can
reinvest a hundred have it work for us
use a hundred to go shopping and invest
a hundred
in our children and their future
you may be asking how do i know so much
about stocks
for that we have to turn to my mother
and in this story you’ll also hear about
the fact
that love is what we really need and it
takes a village
my mother is a senior vice president of
investments
she has been for as long as i can
remember
she also picked me up from school
the bell would ring everyone would run
out most kids would jump into doors that
were already open
and drive off i’d hang out with a few
other kids
their parents would arrive they’d go
and i would be the last one left
this is where mom guilt tends to come in
but know that
while i was waiting i was having fun
practicing my pirouettes
singing doing all the things kids do
and sure enough every day like clockwork
here she would come in the 1991 hail
damaged buick
pulling up screeching to a stop throwing
the door open
i’d get in she’d smile i’d smile
and she’d turn back to her car phone
dial her next client
and do business for the 20-minute ride
home
now that is where i learned about stocks
which was great and when we got home
it was all about me she was totally
focused on me and that did require
a lot of support from my amazing father
and she also had support who were like
family
but that she brought into our household
to help and i had aunts who picked me up
from school and helped with spelling
my life is similar i am married to a
great husband
we have got a whole village surrounding
us
and that’s how we’re making it all work
but it’s not enough just in our personal
lives
we also need society to help us
we need corporations to recognize that
keeping women
in the workplace growing that 85 to 100
and moving them up to the top
does bring this real value to the bottom
line and so it’s worth investing
in the hardest times becoming a new mom
and trying to go back to work is so
hard your brain is wired differently
your body is still broken
you’re probably not getting much sleep
but yet you want to and you want to
engage
we need to invest in the time we need to
make the transition
i’m lucky enough to work for an amazing
company that did this
and i now live in a state who recently
passed
12 weeks of family leave that’s amazing
it needs to be the norm and we need more
we have to keep leaning in there and
provide the support
now what else can we do
pay equity we know the statistic
81 cents on a dollar for women
the statistic we don’t often know is
that once that woman has a child and you
compare her to a man with a child
it goes down to 70 cents that’s right
having a kid
loses most women 11 cents on the dollar
that doesn’t work in our society because
today
so many women bring home the bacon and
their husbands cook it
so we need to be equal it’s better for
all of us
and let’s return to where we started
that feeling of guilt what do we do with
that
guilt you know there’s another type of
guilt
it’s usually associated with
ice cream maybe a martini binge watching
bad tv
it’s called a guilty pleasure and i want
to leave you with this
idea that career you’ve worked so hard
for
that really does fill you up
it could become a guilty pleasure
and it will be better for your child
to see you thrive to listen to you to
learn from you
to feel your love to get the support
from
other people who can also fill their
world up
if we stop and in those moments
when we’re transitioning we don’t feel
the pain we feel the joy
and we say this is my guilty pleasure
my moment to shine and i’m so proud of
myself
i am so proud of all of you who are
making this happen
out there today and we are so thankful
for everyone that supports
us so take a minute and make your career
your guilty pleasure thank you very much
[Applause]
[Music]
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