What Happy Working Mothers Know: How New Findings in Positive Psychology Can Lead to a Healthy and Happy Work/Life Balance

Introduction

Motherhood is the most satisfying and powerful job any woman will ever have. As moms we nurture and shape the lives of our children and our families. Fathers play an important role, yet as mothers, we are the CEOs of our families, and just like in the corporate world, we set the tone. The way we feel affects how our family feels.

Watching and nurturing our children as they grow brings us great joy, and many happy moments. Healthy kids, a good job, and a loving spouse or partner, friends, and family all are part of a happy life. True, deep-down lasting happiness is more than being grateful and it’s more than the absence of suffering. Happiness is a view of the world. It comes when you align your life to your values, learn to love and forgive yourself and others, and find true joy in the small details of everyday life.

Sometimes working mothers find the joy and fulfillment of raising a child can be overshadowed by the responsibilities of a full- or part-time job. You have the choice, however, to be energized by the balancing act of family and employment demands or to let it drain you. By taking care of your own happiness, you will be better at everything you do, as a mother, a worker, and partner.

Millions of us happily and successfully mix motherhood and a career day in, day out, and our happy, well-adjusted children, close-knit families, and satisfying jobs are living proof. Work plus motherhood is not a zero sum game. They enhance each other.

Guilt is an enemy of happiness. We feel guilty because we believe that we somehow hurt our children by having a job outside of motherhood. We feel guilty when we work fewer hours than our colleagues who don’t have child care responsibilities. Society tells us that by working we jeopardize the well-being of our children and the stability of our marriages. We’re given the message that we can’t have a happy marriage and happy children along with a career. In reality, though, we can, and we do.

If we embrace the abundance in our lives, we can truly enjoy a happiness that endures even through hard times, whether we’re hourly employees or top-level executives, whether we’re struggling to make ends meet as a single mom or happily entrenched in a partnership relationship.

Happiness is an energy force that makes a positive difference in your life, and in the lives of your kids, your workplace, and your career. This isn’t about fixating on instant gratification or demanding that the world be a perfect place. It’s about setting the stage to do and be your best for yourself, for those around you, and for the company you work for. A working mom’s glass truly is half full, sometimes overflowing, but certainly not half empty.

Right about now you’re probably thinking, Yeah right! I’ll have time to get touchy-feely happy and sing ‘Kumbayah’ in another lifetime, maybe, if I’m lucky. But before you give in to cynicism, consider this quick test of the power of your happiness on those around you.

Think of a very happy time in your life, when you felt your best, and felt full of joy. How did you behave? How did you talk to people, and how did they respond? You probably felt that everything seemed to go right and, when there were setbacks, they didn’t upset you. If you smiled, others likely returned the smile because happiness is a positive energy force that makes a difference in everyone’s lives.

It all starts with your choice to be happy or not. Each of us can choose to be positive in our approach to life, to make the most of what we have, to see all that is good, and to enjoy our work, our families, and our lives. Or, we can opt for the rat race, the exhaustion, the excuses, the guilt, the anguish, the misery, and the self-pity. This is a book of triumph, about helping working mothers look beyond the negative energy that swirls around all of us, and to instead embrace a positive way of being. It’s a life-changing shift in focus that can empower you to live a life of joy.

In today’s hard-nosed world—especially the numbers-based realm of business and today’s tough economic times—it’s easy to dismiss happiness as an unimportant luxury and a time-waster that saps our energies and drains bottom lines. Reality, however, is just the opposite. A positive approach positively affects bottom lines, whether in the boardroom, classroom, or at home. And lack of happiness exacts its financial toll.

Consider some of the numbers:

♦ Working mothers have plenty of company. Nearly 25.7 million mothers with children under 18 were part of the U.S. workforce in 2007. That’s nearly double the number in 1975, according to estimates from the U.S. Bureau of Labors Statistics and the Census Bureau’s monthly Current Population Survey.¹

♦ U.S. businesses lose more than $300 billion annually due to employee stress as manifested by increased absenteeism, employee turnover, diminished productivity, medical, legal, and insurance expenses, and workers’ compensation payments. Put into perspective, that’s 10 times the cost of all workplace strikes combined.²

♦ A big chunk of that stress, and therefore cost, is a result of less productive working parents worried about what their children are doing after school, according to a 2006 study from the Community, Families, and Work Program at Brandeis University and Catalyst, a leading nonprofit research and advisory organization.³

♦ Worker fatigue—more common in women than men—costs employers an estimated $136 billion-plus a year in health-related lost productivity, according to a 2007 study from the American College of Occupational and Environmental Medicine.⁴

What Happy Working Mothers Know is all about how you can be the best mother and best worker possible by investing in your own happiness. You can learn to find happiness no matter where you are in your life, how overwrought, how overwhelmed, or how unhappy you are. Even if you’re already happy, you can learn how to make that happiness last even when things don’t go smoothly. We’ll show you a few simple steps to take, ways to shift your attitudes and approaches, and techniques to find happiness in the life you have rather than the life you wish you had. By realizing your happiness, you’ll be a better parent, better spouse, better employee/boss, better person, and feel better about yourself, too.

While on the presidential campaign trail, now-First Lady Michelle Obama summed up what we hope to convey to you in an address to Women for Obama in Chicago, Illinois, on July 28, 2008:

. . . For working families trying to balance jobs and kids and maybe even aging parents of their own, the American Dream can feel like it’s slipping away. Over the course of this campaign, I’ve had the chance to sit down with so many working women across the country. I’ve talked with mothers struggling to make ends meet because their salaries aren’t keeping up with the cost of groceries or the price of gas. I’ve listened to the moms who are nervous about taking time off to care for a sick child, and the moms-to-be who are scared of getting fired if the boss finds out they’re pregnant . . . .This [Women for Obama booklet] is about helping women reclaim their dreams for themselves and their families. It’s about giving them a helping hand, not a handout. . .

This isn’t a book of technical doublespeak or catchy phrases, complicated jargon, or unrealistic scenarios. Instead What Happy Working Mothers Know is stories from and about real people, real experiences, real moms, real jobs, real workplaces, real hardships, real issues, real solutions, and real happiness. We address the science of happiness, too—it’s not a manufactured state or the stuff of pipe-dreams, but is based on scientific fact.

Of the approximately 1,000 women we interviewed for this book, the vast majority agree that motherhood makes them better in their jobs. Motherhood, after all, is great leadership training. As CEOs of the family, mothers set the tone, establish the rules, and do everything they can to make every member of the family successful. We talk to these working moms about how they run their families, how they cope, how they triumph, and how they’ve achieved happiness, often despite seemingly insurmountable odds, impossible hardships, and hopeless situations. We talk to their kids, too, who are quick to refute the myths that they’re somehow slighted because their moms work.

We’ll also show you how to direct your energies to find and create joy in your life and forget about the guilt. It’s an obstacle to your happiness as a working mom. No matter how the odds stack up against you, think about the joy you get from the beauty of your daughter’s smile. Or the satisfaction you get from a well done! from your boss or if a project turns out beautifully. Sure it’s a hassle to drag your son to baseball practice rain or shine, but the grin on his face when he gets a base hit is worth the trouble. These small moments of happiness, the little joys and triumphs that we sometimes overlook make up our lives. We’ll show you how to find the joy and beauty in the life you have rather that wishing for something different.

Working moms are moms first and foremost. Nearly 81 percent of mothers say mothering is the most important thing they do, according to The Motherhood Study: Fresh Insights on Mothers’ Attitudes and Concerns, a 2005 study for the Institute for American Values.⁵

In What Happy Working Mothers Know, we’ll discuss the science behind why happiness boosts our personal and business bottom lines. We’ll talk to the experts about the power of positive psychology and help you recognize how focusing on what is good in life as opposed to what isn’t can transform your life, your job, and your family.

Others have done it, and so can you. A few of the many people who share their stories throughout this book include:

♦ Kim Martin, president and general manager of WE tv, and mother of two. Despite a boss who discouraged her from pursuing the network’s top job, and some self-doubts of her own, she persisted and triumphed. How big a triumph? Her youngest daughter wants her job someday!

♦ Sharon Allen, mother of two and assistant police chief, Tucson, Arizona, sacrificed the direct path to her career goals to spend more time with her children. She achieved her goals anyway, crediting great time-management skills. . . . And I never gave up being a good mother.

♦ Long before she called the White House home, now-First Lady Michelle Obama was a career woman whose income helped her family stay afloat. As a mother, too, Obama says she couldn’t have done it all without a support system that centers on her own mother’s help in raising her two young daughters. She keeps me and the girls grounded, she says.

♦ Benita Fitzgerald Mosley was the first U.S. African-American to win Olympic gold in the 100-meter hurdles. Yet the media all but dismissed her achievement. Instead of resentment, Mosley stood proud and parlayed what she had learned on the field into a highly successful career, motherhood, and life happiness. Today, she’s the mother of two and longtime president of Women in Cable Telecommunications. You learn from all your experiences in life, and the experiences get better, she says.

♦ Yolanda married at age 16 and had her first child a year after that. Today, 14 years and four children later, she’s still happily married and works at the same Wal-Mart distribution center as her husband and extended family. She’s the one who sets the tone for her family. Setting the tone is like changing my shoes. At work, I am the boss. At home, I put on my flip-flops, and I’m laid-back. When I put on my stilettos, I’ll dance all night.

The dilemma of finding happiness as a working mother isn’t unique to the United States, either. Different cultures face their own sets of problems and circumstances. For this book we talked to more than 1,000 women across the United States, in Brazil, China, Argentina, the Netherlands, Great Britain, France, and beyond—senior executives of global companies, women in middle management, and women who drive forklifts in warehouses. Each of us manages our work and our family in our own way, but the similarities among this diverse group of working mothers are striking. Almost all of us love our work, adore our children, and struggle with busy and often competing schedules, high demands, and the occasional emergency that always seems to land on our shoulders. In these pages, we share our stories, struggles, and hopes to motivate and guide you to your own your unique path to happiness.

Throughout the book we’ll also include easy exercises, Self-Coaching Breaks—as well as longer exercises at the end of each chapter, Bottom Lines. These exercises and tools can help you learn to apply the concepts throughout the book. Our goal is to give you the tools to engage your whole brain, help you develop awareness, and learn to perform at your best every