Jen Badie
The University of Maryland, Baltimore (UMB) featured two keynote speakers March 13 during its in-person UMBrella Women’s History Month Symposium, which featured the theme “Championing Change: The Role of Allies in Women’s Advancement.” Randi Braun, MA, founder and CEO, Something Major, and Wall Street Journal best-selling author of “Something Major: The New Playbook for Women at Work,” discussed self-care and prioritizing well-being. Gloria L. Blackwell, MA, chief executive officer of the American Association of University Women, talked about advocacy and the risks she’s taken in her career.
Here are four takeaways:
Grocery Shopping Is Not Self-Care
Braun went through what she calls the five myths of self-care: the myth of indulgence, in which we think we don’t have the time for self-care; the myth of self-discipline, in which we feel like we need to be more productive and disciplined to make the time for self-care; saying “It’s just this phase of life,” in which we just have to get through a deadline or a college application; thinking “I should be grateful”; and the myth that maintenance is self-care. She described a woman she was coaching who told her she went to Target to shop for groceries and didn’t take her work cellphone and thought of that as self-care. “That’s how much we’ve lowered the bar,” Braun said. “I know how broken this is. I personally have seen myself at any given time in all five of these myths.” She balanced the myths with self-care truths. “You can feel stressed and blessed. You can feel grateful and completely overwhelmed. Maintenance is not self-care. That Target run is groceries,” she said.
Even Coaches Need Help Sometimes
Braun noted that the day of the symposium coincided with the five-year anniversary of the country shutting down because of the COVID-19 pandemic. She talked about how she had just quit her corporate job to start her coaching firm and her husband also had just left a stable employer to work for a tech startup. She had no family nearby and two small children. “We were like, ‘What are we going to do?’ I was in survival mode,” she said, adding that her grandfather was living by himself in a Manhattan apartment, the epicenter of the pandemic in the United States. “I thought that I had my exhaustion under control. That was until on a sunny morning in June, driving in broad daylight, when I fell asleep driving my car in Washington, D.C.,” she said. She described the harrowing experience, when she crossed six lanes of traffic and was inches from hitting a pedestrian. No one was injured, but it was a wake-up call. “It was a reminder that our well-being — all the stress, all the deadlines, all the headaches, all the priorities, all the stakeholders, all the politics in any organization — is literally the only thing that we do at work every single day that’s life or death.”
Risks Can Help Build Careers
Blackwell described how she didn’t want to take on risks early in her career when she was working for nonprofits. She would be asked to take on duties she did not have the skills for or hadn’t done before. “I would take it on, knowing that I was already overwhelmed, knowing that I didn’t have a clue how to do it. It was a huge risk,” she said. “It helped me grow. It helped me to be more successful, and it helped me to become a leader, because I knew that as a Black woman, I had to constantly prove myself.”
Now Is a Time to Act and Learn
Blackwell was asked for advice on how to lead during the current challenges facing women in the country. She said she had just been in New York for a meeting of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women where they encouraged people to build community. “This is the time to educate yourself,” she said. “It really is the time to connect with others and take stock of where we are. If we as women don’t come together at this pivotal moment, we are doomed. If this doesn’t help you to step up, to educate yourself, to act, and to learn, to really find out what your community needs are, then we won’t be able to manifest all the power that we’re going to need to move forward.” She added, “Are you about apathy or are you about action? Make your choice.”
