The Nine Rooms of Happiness: Loving Yourself, Finding Your Purpose, and Getting Over Life's Little Imperfections (13 page)

How do you reconcile following your dream and having to move away from the people and things that you love? How do you find that balance? Is there such a thing?

Catherine’s answer: Balance is a beam you try to walk in grade school. The notion of “balancing” sets women up for falling off the beam. You may for an instant hold everything in the balance, but eventually it will come toppling down on one side or another. So rather than feeling like you’ve failed, you have to pick things up one item at a time, and learn to prioritize.

What gets attention first should tell you something. But that is a rotating list, since one day your child may need you and the next day your boss will. That is the natural flow of your life. So the important thing is to fully engage yourself in this moment before the next comes along. We say: Being present is the new balance. The key to being happy is not trying to do it all, all at once. The goal is to just do—and enjoy—what you’re doing right now.

Kristi is coping with a typical twentysomething conflict in a healthy way. She is making the transition between being a girl and being a woman, but her conflict is intensified by living on a separate coast from her family. This separation makes the transition more acute than if she’d done it in her hometown. Catherine explains that Kristi is experiencing separation/individuation as she creates her own life and career, and it’s painful but appropriate at this stage of her life. Your twenties are often fraught with the push and pull between the bonds with your family and the drive you feel to create a new independent life and career.

The office and the family room are too close for comfort in Kristi’s emotional house, but she doesn’t have to see this as an all-or-nothing proposition. In this case, it’s not either/or, it’s both/and. Which means she
can embrace the conflict and try to both tolerate the pain of missing her family
and
enjoy her life in New York. Of course, with new technologies it’s easier to try to close that gap, but obviously she can’t live in two places at once.

You don’t have to live close to your parents to stay connected. Kristi can count herself lucky that she enjoys these emotional ties, and they can continue to thrive from across the country.

Catherine explains: One sign of emotional maturity is to recognize that there is no perfect solution, and that life is full of compromises. You can simultaneously be thrilled that you got a byline in your New York writing job, and also sad that it meant not being with your family that day. That’s maturity, and Kristi should celebrate the fact that she is getting outside her comfort zone, feeling good about her accomplishments, and still being close to family members, who, after all, are so proud of her.

Cynthia laughingly describes her job as being in the mind-numbing world of retail accounting. Despite that grim outlook, she has fun in the office, mainly because she gets along so well with her colleague Alice. They are inseparable and spend many hours e-mailing each other about dates, online shopping, and everything but the job they are supposed to be doing. “It’s so much fun to go to work, it’s like being at home with my best friend, but if I had to be honest about it, I share more with her than I should. If the boss criticizes something I do, I run over to her and show
it to her and ask her to tell me if she thinks it’s good. Of course she does, and we then decide the boss is all wrong, and instead of doing my work better, I just feel defensive. I know I should be talking to my supervisor about how to improve, but it’s so easy to get Alice to validate my work instead.”

Cynthia knows this tactic is standing in the way of her success, and she would really love to be promoted. In fact, Alice did get a raise a year ago, and Cynthia was both thrilled for her and jealous. She realized then that she wasn’t being taken seriously, but she was reluctant to change her attitude about her job. And then came the slippers…

One day Cynthia and Alice decided to have a sleepover after work to watch their favorite TV show together, so Cynthia brought her pj’s and slippers to work. She broke a heel before lunch and had nothing to wear around the office but her slippers. “That’s when it dawned on me that I had turned my office into one big cozy sorority with my friend, and as I walked to the vending machine for cookies while wearing my slippers I realized I was acting like a five-year-old in the office and I had to shake that attitude and put back on some heels, before I got fired.”

Catherine says that this broken heel was the best thing that ever happened to Cynthia. It helped her realize she’d conflated her office and her family room. She was actually struggling at her job and feeling insecure at work. But instead of focusing on doing the job better and rising through the ranks, she found comfort in oversocializing with her colleagues and creating a dormlike atmosphere at work, reverting to a collegial mind-set and not a professional one. In and of itself, being friends with co-workers isn’t bad, unless it interferes with doing your work. And if a pal does get promoted over you, it may adversely affect not only your career but also your friendship.

Cynthia has to learn that she can have relationships at work, but she needs to create boundaries. She and her friends have to understand that if they hope to get ahead, they need to focus on their jobs and behave professionally. It’s not that they can’t socialize or have fun, but if that’s the main thrust, and the work is secondary, you have to believe some
thing isn’t working. Perhaps she should even consider a new job where she is engaged and rewarded by the work and not just the workmates.

Cynthia is in the wrong room: She should be in the office, but she’s actually in her living room and using work as a big party.

Catherine says Cynthia is “fossilized” or in a state of arrested development, and the way she needs to break this pattern is to grow up at work or leave the place entirely. Her boss isn’t holding her back, nor is her colleague; no one is holding her back…except herself.

Or put more simply, if you want to get promoted, be taken seriously, and treated like a grown-up, you need to act like one. Cynthia’s key process here is that actions speak louder than words, and she is acting like a child. She says she wants a promotion, but she is acting as if she wants to go back to her childhood home or sorority house and be taken care of and have fun. Her pearl: Go or grow. Go along as you have been or grow up and change. It’s your choice to make.

Lynn has been in and out of clerical positions and feels stagnant in her career as a high school administrator. She assists the head of the school, but her days are full of making appointments and answering phones, and she doesn’t see a career path out to whatever it is she would find more rewarding. Lynn has been doing this for twelve years, and she still doesn’t know what she wants to do with the rest of her life.

She lives with her boyfriend and is happy in that relationship but feels
empty at work and isn’t sure what her next step should be. “I always thought about starting a business, but I don’t have the personality. I am too sensitive and can’t take the criticism. I tend to talk myself out of things. I can’t initiate anything.”

Lynn lacks confidence but not talent. After talking to her for a while it’s clear that she is at her happiest when she is baking. Her face lights up just talking about it…but she doesn’t think she’s an amazing baker, or that she could make a living at it. But if she had a purpose—for example, to sell her pies to a local bakery or maybe someday even start her own company—she would be driven to work at it and improve.

Lynn feels lost. She says she might go back to school and learn a new skill but doesn’t even know what she would study. Her boyfriend just got a better job in another state, and she is going with him because there is nothing to keep her where she is. She is rudderless. “My parents always told me, Just be happy. Their parents had really pushed them, and they didn’t want to put that kind of pressure on me. But I don’t know what it takes to be happy.”

Catherine says Lynn is stuck in the basement, where her parents still just want her to be happy. Self-esteem is developed in childhood, through pinging from parents, siblings, teachers, and friends. You learn what you are naturally good at and what you have to work at. Some people stick with the things they are naturally good at for the rest of their lives; others find that the most rewarding pursuits are those they had to work hardest at in the beginning.

It’s a fine line for parents—you want to compliment your kids but also teach them how to handle criticism and disappointment. It all comes back to authentic pinging. Lynn’s parents never gave her harsh (or realistic) feedback, so she never learned to be discerning about her talents, and never dared to fail at anything. She couldn’t risk the possibility that someone wouldn’t like her work, so she chose to freeze rather than move forward. Lynn’s ambivalence—“I guess baking is my passion”—is troubling. She doesn’t own up to it, because that, in itself, would be a risk. What if she says, “This is my passion,” but no one likes what she
bakes?

Yet she won’t go down that path because she doesn’t want to hear critical feedback, since her parents never gave her any and she never learned how to receive criticism in a productive way. Part of being a grown-up is taking risks and getting feedback and understanding it isn’t a personal affront if someone says, “Your apple pie is great but your blueberry pie is a little soggy.” Successful people use this kind of criticism to improve. This is a life skill Lynn doesn’t have. She doesn’t have a career she cares about because she’s not willing to put herself out there.

“I enjoy coming up with recipes and figuring out good flavor combinations. That is my passion.” So why doesn’t she find a job at a bakery and learn how to run a business? On the other hand, if she knows she could never take that path there’s nothing wrong with putting a paycheck in the bank and spending all her leisure hours baking. Just because you love to sail doesn’t mean you have to be a professional sailor. Be honest with yourself and recognize that your job is a means to an end. Define your purpose (making money or whatever it is) and feel good about it.

By floating through life, following her boyfriend, or just not making a break from her job, she has allowed her life to be determined for her. She’s defaulting on her own ability to self-determine. Her inner compass is not pointing anywhere, so she’s adrift and allowing the tide to take her where it will.

Her life is being determined despite her own lack of direction. The key process here is that she needs to recognize she is making choices by not making choices. We say, Not to decide is to decide. If she gets up from her chair at work in order to go do something, anything, that she cares about, where does it lead her? To the grocery store to buy ingredients? The farmers’ market for the freshest berries? These are clues, and she needs to follow them like bread crumbs to her new life and passion. Her pearl: Take the first step. Then the next. Allow those baby steps to be the start down a new path to a meaningful life.

Lydia is a copywriter at a large Manhattan ad agency. She’s successful, clever, and charming, and clients generally love what she does. Despite that, it makes her physically ill when she has to walk into a room full of people and let them pick apart her work.

The night before a presentation she wants to throw up. She has headaches and neck pains and is unable to sleep. To soothe her nerves she finds herself eating ice cream around midnight and will sometimes polish off a pint. Finally, at around 1:30 a.m., she drifts off to sleep.

Other than these Sunday night anxiety spells, Lydia loves her life. She has great friends, entertains on weekends, and travels. She is the ultimate go-getter, and right now what she is after is a rocketlike career. Sure, she would love to be in a serious relationship, but she’s only twenty-eight, so she figures she has time to work on that. There are still too many other things she wants to do: start her own agency, buy a weekend house, and travel more. The most important thing, though, is her job: She wants to get ahead and make a name for herself so that she can take some of her big clients with her when she goes out on her own.

She knows her inability to take criticism is a problem, since she sees the same kind of behavior in her own father. He always taught her to try to be perfect. And that’s a trap—who can be perfect all the time?

The solution lies in her past. Catherine finds out, after talking with Lydia further, that this all stems from a painful childhood memory (the basement). A screen memory is holding her back. Lydia’s underlying problem becomes clear when she tells the story of the “first big critical moment” of her life. When she was seven, she wanted to learn to tap-dance, but her parents forced her to promise she’d try ballet for a semester before she could try tap. Lydia agreed, reluctantly.