A TIME TO LAUGH

Every time people are in a stressful situation and someone tells a joke, it instantly lightens everyone up. Amusement is key when releasing and working on making changes in your life. Being too serious and in effort, your mood becomes heavy and your outlook can become down or depressed. It may even feel like you are walking through quicksand and just getting stuck. When you are feeling down or depressed or stressed, it is key to focus on what you want and not on what you don't want.

Take the multitudes of observations on women in the executive suite. At one time, job equity totally consumed the way I worked. It was many years before it dawned on me that the way most jobs are structured, job equity is not so alluring afterall. Mounting frustration about the quality of my life brought me to the real issue: not more, as I had always thought but what form of more it could be. Now, granted, I became enlightened as it became clear that job equity was not happening in my career and as the demands of my personal life remained 80% mine to manage. The fact is that most women in the workforce are non-poster girls for the executive suite anyway. This was true when I began my career in the 1980's and it is even more true today as benefits are down, new jobs are in the low paying service sector and increasing independence from men means more dependence on uncertain job security. Women are not gaining access to executive positions in any proportion to their entry into the workforce.

What's so funny is that I realized that for me CAREER was a job that had gone on too long. What returned my focus in life to laughter was my family. No matter how tired I was or how stressed, I found a reason to smile every time I saw my kids or spoke to my folks. The more I smiled and laughed, the more energy I had to see things from a new perspective-- a clearer perspective too. I saw that the job market had been flexible enough to absorb me and all my cohorts while at the same time suppressing salaries and quashing labor demands across the board. Women in the workforce did not serve to upgrade social institutions with their new economic and political power. Equity, feminism -- both log jammed. And that provided me with enough comic relief to recalibrate my career. And with a smile on my face.