I thought, “you can’t be the only one,” so I decided to write a quick piece for my sisters in anxiety out there. You see, BlogHer is a little like high school. And if for some reason you were not popular in high school, or you were angsty, or you didn’t have people to sit with at lunch or didn’t get invited to cool parties, you might have flashbacks at BlogHer Con. I went to girls high school, and it was vicious at times. Whenever I walk into a room full of women I’ll have a bout of social anxiety. Do they like me? Am I awkward and not worth knowing?

It’s not BlogHer’s fault. The three founders are the most wonderful, down to earth women you’ll ever meet. The women I know from my blogging community are my true friends, my role models and mentors, my colleagues and even my clients. BlogHer has enriched my life in ways I never thought would be possible.

But get any posse of women together (let alone several thousand) and dynamics will ensue. Not to mention that many attendees are selling themselves, making connections, working it hard…and it can get intimidating. Every party you’re not invited to, every elite piece of swag you don’t get, every person who doesn’t know your name. You will meet people more famous/rich/full of Twitter followers than you. It wears on a person, even an adult with a wonderful life back home.

So here is my guide if events like this make you anxious. Every time you feel a twinge, say to yourself:

I’m just here to learn. If I have fun and meet people while I’m here, that’s great. But this is just a learning experience. I’m going to observe, and that’s all. I’m along for the ride.

I try to let go of whatever agenda I had…because if you hang out and observe at BlogHer, you never know where you’ll end up.

If this isn’t enough, think of all the people who love you back home. Think how wonderful it is to be an adult, to make your own rules and your own friends and not care if people like you all the time.

Then, have a glass of wine, smile, and open yourself to the experience.

See you there!

No. Because for a talented young woman, a place at HQ of a presidential campaign will pay dividends for the rest of her life. The truth is, there are some jobs you can take when you’re young that act just like getting an MBA from Stanford or a law degree from Harvard. When you leave them, they allow you to leapfrog several years ahead of your rightful place on the career ladder. Working at Google or Apple is one of these jobs. In my world, it’s working on a political campaign or in an Administration in a staff role.

The recent article on Sheryl Sandberg in the New Yorker highlighted her incredible smarts, drive and people skills. But I also found noteworthy how Sandberg got herself into a leapfrog job (U.S Treasury) at a young age. There, she had the sponsorship of Larry Summers and got experience and exposure well beyond her qualifications. Only from Treasury was she able to jump to Google, Facebook and the stratosphere.

So if you’re young and you have an opportunity to work on a major political race or in an Administration, do it, even though it will be exhausting, full of landmines and extremely aggressive people who’d kick you aside in a second to get ahead.

“Fear Means Go” is the mantra of Ellen and her daughter, Lara Galinsky. It’s a way we can practice taking on challenges, an essential part of life whether you’re 2 or 40.

Cross-posted from the Harvard Business Review blog:

When Deb Dagit walked in to make her first presentation to the Merck Board of Directors, she knew what she was going to say. She was speaking to the Board about the importance of making a commitment to having a diverse workforce and to creating a workplace culture where differences among people are seen as a business advantage. One look at the serious faces of the members of the Board, though, began to erode her confidence. It wasn’t until Dr. Johnnetta Cole, then President of Spelman College and a member of Merck’s board, approached her that her confidence returned. Dagit says:

I had never met her before but she came over to me, gave me a hug, and said, “We are going to have a wonderful conversation.” All the time, I was talking to the Board, I just kept looking at her and I got through it.
Dagit, now the Chief Diversity Officer at Merck, told this story in the context of a business seminar I was conducting on how the skills that help children thrive (skills I identified in a review of the research for my book Mind in the Making) are the very same skills that help adults become more effective at work. The skill we were talking about was taking on challenges.

Adults, like children, look to the faces of others in uncertain or new situations to assess the situation and to figure out how to proceed. This tendency has a name in the research literature–it’s called “social referencing,”

Anne Weisberg, Director in Talent at Deloitte and a speaker at the business seminar, makes the point we are increasingly faced with uncertain paths to navigate in our everyday jobs as our world changes at breakneck speed and as knowledge multiplies exponentially. She says that we are going to have to try new things if we are going to adapt and thrive. Here are some suggestions from the speakers at this business seminar on how they have learned to see making mistakes as a part of taking on challenges.

“Childcare is part of a jobs agenda,” Gillibrand said in the live chat, hosted by the women’s political organization committed to supporting pro-choice candidates, voicing her frustration at a expense that has become a significant burden to numerous families with both parents in the workforce.

As a result of the rising cost of childcare, Gillibrand is proposing legislation that will help to reduce the ballooning cost of care. “In this difficult economy, parents cannot afford the rising cost of child care. Families’ incomes are just not keeping pace,” Senator Gillibrand said. “I speak with parents all over New York State, who tell me that something must be done. In addition to making child care more affordable for parents who work and go to school, my plan will provide special assistance to businesses that help their employees with the tremendous costs.”

Gillibrand’s proposal includes increasing the Dependent and Child Care tax credit to $6000, giving larger tax breaks to businesses that offer on site child care services, getting more workers into the child care industry and encouraging businesses to allow more telecommuting — a proposal that wouldn’t just cut the amount of money needed to be spent on childcare, but would also reduce road congestion, fuel consumption, and business expenditures for keeping employees in an office.

It seems reducing hierarchy in the workplace increases diversity in leadership:

“The introduction of self-directed work teams was associated with a decline in the probability of white male managers by 8% and an increase in the odds of white female managers by 9%, as well as an increase of black female managers by 3.5% and of black male managers by 5%.”

But here’s the problem when you make stories like this about MOMS. People don’t always takeaway the whole story. As Cali Yost and Dan Mulhern show in this recent interview, men are entering the discussion. News flash, men want to work differently too. Dan Mulhern thinks we’re at a tipping point in which the discussion will cease to be about moms. I’m not sure- this article in the Post makes it seem as if people who work flexible schedules are only mothers…even worse, they’re “moms.”

Here’s the truth, from Jane Leber Herr at University of Chicago:
“You would think that, given the rise in education of women, their experience, their presence in high-investment, high-income, high-value fields, the proportion of those who leave the labor force would have gone down,” said Herr, who noted that women now make up the majority in many colleges and professional programs. “What’s shocking is that it hasn’t.”

What people may choose to hear:
“Don’t invest in women of childbearing age. They’re probably just going to leave.”

If I asked you if you work “mother’s hours,” what would come to mind?

It turns out “mother’s hours” is a term of art used to refer to jobs that provide the flexibility around family priorities. It can mean working a compressed day, or working from home while making time to attend a kid’s event during the workday. I’m sure it’s been used with derision more than once. I don’t care. I worked mother’s hours before I had kids, and I’ll do it after they leave home, I hope. It’s how I function best.

Working at home gets a bad rap. People don’t help when they use airquotes when talking about “working” at home, like they’re really watching TV all day. If you do this, please stop. It doesn’t help the millions of us who do work at home and do a damn fine job of it.

It’s true some managers don’t believe their people really work when they are at home, but the research shows the other extreme: people overwork. Ironically, in the digital age, many remote workers report they can’t shut off. They may feel a need to prove they’re actually working when they are home; they might even work more than they would at the office because they feel a need to overcompensate and thank their employer for “letting” them work from home.

Research from Northeastern University finds role transitions are especially challenging for people who work at home. Humans like to compartmentalize: We put work in one domain, and family in another. When you work at home, you will be in your home environment and you will face distraction during the day. A dirty kitchen, lonely cat, sick kid or leaky faucet can be your ruin if you let it. Working at home takes discipline and a keen sense of purpose.

When I tell people I work at home, they always ask me, “How do you make sure your kids don’t bother you”? I always say, first, I have childcare. Working at home while you’re watching the kids isn’t working, unless you run a daycare. My colleague Leanne Chase has a good solution for her home office: “I have two signs for my daughter. She can’t read yet, so I put a sign up. One sign has a smiley face – which means she can knock on mommy’s door. There is also a smiley face with a cross through it, which means she has to go to the nanny or daddy unless there’s a fire.”

It’s important to create what Dr. Jay Mulki calls “segmentation” when you work at home. You need the barriers between your work self and your home self. Many create rituals that allow for these barriers, even if they are symbolic. Why? Because in a world where work is undefined, we’re creating, in the words of Northeastern University researcher Kim Eddleston, new “temporal, spatial and psychological boundaries” to manage the transition from home to work, even if we don’t leave our home to begin work.

Recent research on remote workers and telecommuters brings all sorts of new rituals to light. For instance, if you don’t commute into work each day, how do you make the transition to start your workday? For some, it’s going out for a cup of coffee. Some complete the school run, then return home to work. I bet a lot of people walk the dog. I might start the day early, doing “check-in” work — check my email inbox, review my schedule, do billing or administrative tasks — while still in my pajamas or workout clothes. But I’ll hold phone calls, writing or doing any serious thinking work until I am dressed in some semblance of grown-up clothes, and my face has to be made-up, or at least moisturized.

For many who hold “mothers’ hours,” there’s an evening back-to-work ritual, as well. Put the kids to bed, log on. Watch the evening news, then pick up again.

Many of us, and not just mothers, structure a workday that meets our needs. But work is still work, and we’re creating a new set of rituals to create a semblance of a workday with a beginning, middle and end. About a third of American workers have flexible schedules. Only 11 percent of wage and salaried employees currently work from home, but almost all employees would like the ability to occasionally work at home. Big companies like BlueCross Blue Shield are heavily investing in the at-home workforce, and then there’s a whole “tribe” of people like me who work for ourselves and work at home. With mobile technology, the number of non-traditional information workers will only increase.

But even when you’ve forgone the traditional nine-to-five, a routine is important to most of us. Otherwise, work doesn’t feel like work. And that’s not always a good thing.

***
Thanks to the New England Work and Family Association for access to this research on engaging the remote and telecommuting workforce.

Working moms. I scoff at the Internet’s idea of a working mom. Sorry Internets, but I do.

I have been a working mom for the better part of three years; and by working I mean dragging my ass out of bed at 4:45am to get showered and dressed, waking my child(ren), getting breakfast going, dropping off at daycare and sitting in traffic ALL to get to the office by 7:30am.

I work through an eight and a half hour day of telephone calls, emails, meetings, reports, proposals, arguments, disagreements while someone with a higher authority, a boss, dictates my time.

After those eight and a half hours, I get in my car to sit in traffic, pick up my kids at daycare, get dinner going, oversee bath time, read stories and put my children to bed.

I see my children for a total of – at the MOST – three hours a day – and most of that time is spent doing chores like the cooking and bathing. I very rarely have the luxury of sitting down and actually interacting with them.

Let’s talk about being a REAL working mom shall we? Not this fluff about working from home because I’ve been there too. I’ve too worked from home, designing, freelance writing, and trying to manage my house at the same time. I was doing what I could to keep us afloat while home with my children.

There is no comparison. None. I don’t care how high up on the blogging ladder you are: working from home is not even in the same realm as being a Working Mother.

Is this what it is? Who is their right mind would sign up for this? If this is what being a working mother is like, why don’t we all just stick with pets?

President and Mrs. Obama, something’s gotta change here! Employers, something’s gotta change here.

The cost of all our prosperity-

What families, even those who are prosperous, typically lose in the exchange are the small grace notes of everyday life, like the ritual of having a daily dinner with everyone present. The more substantial thing we sacrifice is time to experience the joys and mysteries of nurturing the children, the small pleasures of idle curiosity, of learning to craft things by one’s own hand, and the satisfactions of friendships and social cooperation.

These are made to seem trivial alongside wealth accumulation, but many people know they have given up something more important and mourn the loss. Some decide they will make up for it later in life, after they are financially stable. Still others dream of dropping out of the system. If we could somehow add up all the private pain and loss caused by the pursuit of unbounded material prosperity, the result might look like a major political grievance of our time.

More important than all the other losses is that people are also denied another great intangible–the dignity of self-directed lives. At work, at home and in the public sphere, most people lack the right to exercise much of a voice in the decisions governing their daily lives. Most people (not all) are subject to a system of command and control over their destinies. They know the risks of ignoring the orders from above. Not surprisingly, many citizens are resigned to this condition and accept subservience as “the way things are,” and their lives are smaller as a result. Many find it hard to imagine that these confinements could be lessened, even substantially removed, if economic organizations were informed by democratic principles.

I’m thinking about a question I’m supposed to answer soon on cnn.com: in these times, should we be launching a mission in space to fix the Hubble? And I was thinking about iconic images I’ve seen in the past of early space launches, and how I felt in 6th grade when I heard about the Challenger going down. Those were times when we could all coalesce around something like space travel: watch it all together on TV, mourn the loss of a crew together. Get excited about America’s future together. Now, I’d bet most Americans don’t even know the shuttle is launching because our news consumption is so diffuse. The days of shared experiences around national events feel over. In part because of what Greider discusses (families simply have no time to digest and share experiences like a space launch), in part because of our new media landscape.