Avoid the Happiness Trap of Circling the Career Track

By Cathy Greenberg

In my book, “What Happy Women Know,” I talk about several happiness traps, one of which is “Circling the Career Track,” or focusing too heavily on career to the detriment of personal life. Losses of personal opportunity do not often become obvious until it is too late. Many women tinker on the edge of infertility before they question their lifestyle and how much time their career is actually taking.

Why is circling the career track a common happiness trap for women? Work can take the place of the need for relationships and satisfy women’s greater needs for communication.

Women have a biological need to communicate more than men according to medical brain research. Females have 11% more neural brain cells for language and hearing than men according to Luanne Brizendine, MD. Also, females develop language skills earlier and prefer communications-related activity as children. Male children prefer problem solving activity and puzzles where female children are inclined toward stuffed animals, dolls and toys with faces.

As service industries in North America have grown and manufacturing has declined, women serve in more communications and relationship oriented positions. Combined with women’s other needs which do in some cases overlap with the needs of men: to feel successful, needed, contribute, have a sense of identity, and have a sense of belonging, women find themselves satisfying relationship and communication needs with work relationships in place of personal relationships.

“He loves me, he loves me not.”

Another reason for women neglecting personal life is work can simply be more predicable and real. Thoughts of what a woman might be missing out on may not be as appealing working toward a tangible reward waiting in return for a work commitment.

Appreciation feels good, and so does anticipating appreciation. Sometimes appreciation is more guaranteed at work.

Women must detach from their work and consider their own individual evaluation of how important family, children and personal life are to them. They need to keep their priorities straight when work competes for personal time. If the costs of losing the chance to have children are higher than the costs of losing out on a work opportunity, the woman needs to keep that priority clear and live it.

Early career women can learn from women in their late thirties and early forties, many of whom feel a need to play catch-up. They have either lost track of focusing too heavily on a career at which they succeeded and now want a family, or seek both career success and a personal life after having tried to please ex-husbands and family members by pursuing careers with which they did not identify in their earlier lives. Both are particularly tricky situations as the first predicament requires careful rebalancing, and the second requires reassessment, restarting knowing that the success is the courage to restart, while also paying new attention to creating and maintaining personal life balance.

Today more than ever, a woman does not have to choose to have a career or to have a family. With technology and research, there is more ability to work smarter rather than harder, take advantage of flexible time work positions for mothers, for entrepreneurial activity that opens up freedom, and a teaming bevy of corporations competing to gain status as family friendly companies and “good places to work.” Also with more women in leadership in business than ever before, there is more insight in management as to women’s interests, differences, desires and needs.

Early career stage professional women can decide and commit to work life balance priorities from the start. They can exploit opportunities for work life balance while continuing to firm these supports for their successors.

One way to commit to work life balance is to envision the kind of life balance desired. Think about family, partner, children, grand parents, cousins, aunts, uncles, holidays, and picnics. Think about daily life and where nuclear and extended family fit. Think about geography. Where do you want to live? How far from family do you see yourself located? How much time do you wish to devote to transportation, to spending with personal relationships, to building family, to building work relationships, to building your network of work related friends?

Consider the personal rewards of family that you would like to experience. Make a tangible note of them just as you would your career and professional goals. Keep them present in the mind as real and attainable objectives. Make personal life desires priorities. Even though personal life goals can often not be as clearly aimed for and met as structured work goals, time to “let it happen” can be set aside. Time to build new personal relationships; maintain existing private life relationships and opportunities to balance work and life can always be arranged.

Today more than ever the chance to avoid the happiness trap of circling the career track to the detriment of personal life is ever present. See your life, see your full life, believe you can have it, and go for it!

Every registered attendee of the Pennsylvania Governor’s Conference for Women will receive a free copy of speaker Cathy Greenberg’s book What Happy Working Mothers Know (Wiley, 2009) which tells the stories of real working moms who have juggled and struggled their way to happiness. The book provides an inspirational and instructive look at how working moms can add “happiness” to their list of achievements. Applying the science of happiness to honestly told stories of working mothers, the authors show how happiness is not a luxury but a necessity for working mothers. In fact, happy working mothers are good for families, for employers and for everyone in between.

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