Make Your Career Your Guilty Pleasure | Mackenzie Roebuck-Walsh | TEDxCherryCreekWomen
URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6NDZW56D_F0 Video ID: 6NDZW56D_F0 ============================================================ [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] you