I love the early hours of the morning. The quieter, darker, more premature the better. I love my cup of coffee, the companionship of my computer, the silent solitude, and how fresh my mind is. With caffeine in hand, I do what I feel called to do every day. Work. Produce. Achieve.
It's routine, no regimen. Or perhaps, all just a bad habit. My body and mind are wired to assimilate into a working professional by 5:00 AM - in thought pattern, in language, in tone. Before the sun rises, before the C-suite on central time awakes, I'm charting my day, putting yesterday's notes into action, driving the result, owning my accountability. Once in position, fingers curved slightly over my keys evoking how I played Turkish March in a piano playing era of my life, I don't often break character. My work depends on concentration and rhythm. Locked in, during the early morning hours, I produce great work.
The one or optimistically two hours that I get are finite and fleeting. I know any minute I will hear the tiptoe of tiny feet coming down the stairs to distract me. I wonder how much more I could get done if I didn't get interrupted. I find myself mid-thought, mid-reach for the right word, and I look up. The view up, not down toward my computer, is a lead paned window that looks out toward the Cathedral of Learning. At first, it's dark and moody with only a blue light streaming from the top of its tower. Then its silhouette starts to emerge as the world warms up, ultimately turning pink when the sun peaks over the horizon. If I look up long enough it can become a moment of awe that forces reflection. Deep thoughts that I swear off so I can keep producing.
There they are. The interruption that I knew was approaching. Those are definitely Caroline's footsteps, not Jacquelines. They are heavier a little more emphatic and ruthless than her twin. I hear her cough as well. Like anything that comes out of her mouth, her hacking is louder than Jacqueline's, louder than just about anyone in the family.
For the past three, maybe even four months, someone in our household has been sick. Peter is now stay at home dad, pharmacist, nurse, and launderer, dealing out doses of Amoxicillin and Tylenol, cleaning eyes with sterilized wipes and medicated eye drops, waking up at all hours of the night to get glasses of water, washing sheets over and over again to eradicate every disease five school age children bring into the house.
I've been under the weather as well this week. Peter rode his bike to CVS to get me extra strength Tylenol on Valentine's Day. It was terribly romantic. I need the peace and quiet of this morning more than ever, but Caroline, in typical form interrupts me without reservation and tells me to make room for her. She wedges her way in, demands breakfast, and my full attention. The prose that was flowing freely into my 6:15 AM email loses its polish. It will be a rushed, frenetic request by 8:00 AM when I finally get to finish it off.
With water and a bowl of cheerios in hand, she watches me type in a disapproving fashion. Her feedback is raw. She is my 3EO. A three-year-old, big girl boss baby with the mission to rule our household. It's her way or the highway. No one knows that as well as Jacqueline.
Right, wrong, indifferent, all of my kids are developing leadership qualities. Perhaps innately, perhaps with some inspiration from me. Mary has the most stereotypical set of skills. She is a diligent, hard worker that settles for nothing less than perfection in her pursuit of academia. Her stalwart focus and ability to get others to work as hard as she does has made her a leader at her school, so much so that they named her Lead Girl earlier this school year. Bobby has the charisma, enthusiasm and zeal of life that encourages anyone to follow him. If Bobby says it's cool, the whole school will catch onto the trend. We are talking with him about using his powers for good. Margaret's kindness, care and pure love wraps you around her finger. Oh, that Margaret. What a sweetheart. The teachers have succumbed to her spell as well. And the twins will just bulldoze you into submission by their temper. We'll need to work on their leadership posture.
My hope is that each of them fuel their blossoming competencies to become purpose driven leaders, change makers, shapers of culture and society. My hope is that they see their potential, that they are inspired by what I'm trying to do in my career, and they go seek their leadership adventure.
I am entering a new year, yesterday turned a more mature age, and am increasingly aware that I could achieve heights in my career that I never really believed possible. In the past month, there have been glimpses of what could lie ahead.
At the beginning of January, the CEO of my company came to visit my region. I spent two days sharing the state of my business, showing him around the territory, introducing him to the talent in the area, and positioning myself as a confident, competent Vice President. During the pressure cooker visit, I was able to sit down with him and talk about my career. He asked two things: how I felt in my current role and what I ultimately wanted to do.
I shared personal reflections and accomplishments, and I leaned in, saying I had the goal of reaching the top. He shared insights about his career journey and underscored my ambition with a couple pieces of advice:
- First, he said, 'no one cares more about your career than you.'
- Second, 'you should always take on roles that accelerate learning.'
- Third, 'when you run a country you have really landed as a general manager - that's when recruiters start to call.'
- Fourth, 'there are windows of opportunity to get into the C-Suite. If you are not there by age 50-55, you probably won't get there.'
After his departure, and on my drive home from Kentucky to Pennsylvania that evening, I thought about his counsel. Both what it meant for my career and what it meant for my family.
I had heard the first piece of advice before and learned it the hard way earlier in my career. The second and third nuggets directed me to take on an international assignment next. And the fourth is the one I'm still thinking about. Still looking out the window in the morning about weeks later.
The notion of windows of time is real. There are windows in a career - windows to grow, to accelerate, to lead, and then clearly to land in the highest positions of corporate America. I have roughly ten years to get there, which arguably is feasible and plausible. 'So I'm good on timing,' I asked my CEO. 'You're good,' he said back to me.
Ten years is also the span of time where my kids will go from preschool and elementary school to high school and college. This is the other window of time that I know is fragile and fleeting. In a decade of formative years, will I be missing things, present, even energetic enough to be a mother and spouse first and foremost? Will I be closing one window to open the other one?
These windows, framing theoretically divergent pursuits, are another way to make you feel like you have to sacrifice one thing to achieve something else. That it's impossible to go after one part of life while cherishing the other one. Like any other paralyzing paradox though, there isn't linear logic on how to manage the conundrum. But what I've found, or at least what I've resolved to do this year, is to stay in check with myself, my peers and team, and most importantly my spouse to assess if I've got life framed up the right way. I spend time reflecting each week on how I could have done better. I've found myself asking Peter a little more often, how are you doing? No, really, how are you doing? I seek constant feedback from my team as well. The answers aren't always rosy, but they aren't telling me to stop what I'm doing. So, I figure there's still a chance I can balance two windows in one and keep everyone around me satisfied with the roles I try my best to juggle. I'll keep trying to do the seemingly impossible if those around me believe I can.
After all, yes, I could probably get a little more done in the morning if the pitter patter of feet and please Mommy please didn't take me on tangents. But that and the many other interruptions of motherhood also force me to stay grounded, humble, relatable, and dare I say motherly as a leader.
Lo.
