Congratulations, You've Won an International Women's Day Award

I often receive emails informing me I have been shortlisted for an award and an accompanying cover story in a magazine.?Without fail, I’ve never heard of the award or the magazine.?The recognition is billed as distinctive, but it always sounds dubious.?The Women Achiever Award, with its odd syntax.?The 10 Most Influential Women in Healthcare to Watch.?Or, most bizarre, The 5 Most Impactful Personalities Doing Great on LinkedIn.?The emails inform me that I’m under final consideration for the prize and publication, and all it will take to seal the deal is a modest sponsorship fee of $3,000 or $5,000 or $10,000.?The exact amount seems to depend on the chutzpah of the person pitching me.

One salesman whom I’ll call Chet was especially aggressive.?He wrote me repeatedly about being in what he deemed the Best Online Healthcare Magazine in the World (his superlative and his capitalization), warning me, “We don’t want you to skip this one-time opportunity only for such a reason which we can discuss and make right.”?This sounded ominous enough that I asked Chet to remove me from his mailing list.?

?Given the proliferation of pitches, it must feel good to someone to be on the cover of Look at Me I Paid $5,000 to Be a Woman to Watch.? But on this occasion of International Women’s Day, I would like to celebrate women for far better reasons and not charge them a penny for acknowledging their worth.?It would be easy enough to do.?After all, as my email inbox attests, an award is nothing more than someone deciding who and what is worthy of praise.?Even the Nobel Peace Prize and the Oscars are this kind of invention.?

?I have some inventions of my own.?How about the Working Mother Who Weathered 2020 Award??Or the I Said that Five Minutes Ago prize for those of us who aren’t heard but whose ideas are repeated??Or even better, the I Don’t Need an Award, I Have a Growth Mindset Award for the many resilient women who rightfully draw a distinction between ambition and aspiration??Ambition is being measured by what we do.?Aspiration is being focused on who we might become.?The former is about mastery, the latter is about growth.?

The greatest women I know deserve an award, but they don’t need one.?They have bigger concerns on their minds – like growing their capacity to pursue their lives with health, strength and energy.?These vital women are seeking vitality.?They know life isn’t a cover story as much as it is a work in progress.?And that work is not easy for any of us, especially over the past few years.

?We’ve been studying vitality at Cigna and found cause for concern among women.?Vitality – this notion of pursuing life with health, strength, and energy – isn’t a fixed state of being. Rather, vitality conveys an active approach to living that can be improved or depleted.?For women, we’ve been on the depleted side of the equation lately, according to our 2022 Evernorth Vitality Index study.?Soon to be published new findings on working women help us understand challenges so that we can address this issue, because more than awards, we need recognition that now is time to invest in our emotional, physical and financial well-being.?

Here’s what the Evernorth Vitality Index data say:?

·??????Working women experience lower vitality, resilience and greater loneliness, and face challenges specifically in their emotional and financial well-being, and struggle with feeling as competent or autonomous as working men.

·??????Working women are not in as good health as working men, with the biggest gap in mental health. Working women are significantly more likely to have clinical depression/anxiety, but are less likely than working men to see counseling/therapy.

·??????Working women tend to have a different working arrangement than working men: fewer hours, smaller companies, and more fully remote jobs compared to working men. Women also enjoy a better work/life balance, likely as a result of these differences.

·??????The difference in working arrangement also seems to mean women are less likely to have access to advantageous health and wellness benefits at work, or to earn as much as working men.

·??????While women are less likely to leave their job in the next year than working men (likely due to post-pandemic return to work)great, their lower job satisfaction and satisfaction with work benefits may lead to less loyalty long term, as fewer working women see themselves with the same employer three years from now.

·??????Working mothers experience higher vitality than working non-mothers, but experience different challenges that could impact their long term vitality and health.?

?The pandemic certainly didn’t help these matters.

?Looking at women with high vitality vs. women with low vitality provides some guidance on how to improve matters.?The differentiators identified in the research include: having access to health benefits and wellness programs at work, regularly visiting a health care provider for a check-up, minimizing screen time, spending time outdoors or in nature, eating a nutritious diet, getting high quality sleep and physical activity.

?Of course for many, these are privileges beyond reach, and so for those of us who can, it’s important to advocate for all women to be able to obtain the benefits, access and time to pursue their vitality.?

?In the meantime, the real award I’d like to see all women achieve is the space and self-compassion needed to support each other in this journey.?Here are some practical things we can do to help each other:

1. Reduce the stigma of being imperfect.?By "making it OK to not be OK," we can normalize conditions like depleted vitality or burnout.?
2. Name how you're feeling and encourage others to do the same. There is incredible power in simply sharing your emotional state and inviting others to do the same. Sometimes we struggle to do that well. In fact, most people only identify three emotions -- bad, sad and glad.?Dr. Marc Brackett, the director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence and author?of?Permission to Feel, talks about the value of building our emotional intelligence and more precisely naming our feelings as the first step to understanding their origin in our own lifetime of experiences, learning how they matter, and regulating them.
3. Recognize everyone copes as they uniquely need to cope.?Burnout for example, like any mental health issue, can take many forms, each of which requires a different kind of mitigation approach. Self-care helps with exhaustion. Connecting with others can mitigate the alienation of cynicism. A reduced sense of value can be addressed by helping others, finishing a product, or otherwise taking actions of agency. There is no one thing that helps everyone -- which is why shining a light on the complexity of our human conditions is important to navigating what will help for whom.
4. View emotions as signposts.?Dr. Susan David?speaks of?the power of not only naming our emotions but also reflecting on what they're telling us. We can view them as useful signposts that suggest what is the best next action for ourselves or our teams. For example, if we're angry and upset, maybe it's because our values are being challenged, and our next best action is to step toward those values in our response.
5. Be compassionate to yourself so you can be compassionate to others. If you struggle with self-compassion, ask yourself what a kind, wise and brave friend would recommend and try to channel that inner voice rather than worrying that self-compassion is self-indulgent. "Compassion — whether towards yourself or your colleagues — is a muscle that can be trained, and developing and practicing compassion is the key to combatting burnout,"?according to?Yu Tse Heng and Kira Schabram.

?I’ll close with a personal story about what happens when we don’t attend to these critical ingredients of vitality, with a story about baking.?Some years back, on the eve of St. Patrick’s Day, I found myself in my kitchen late at night, butter knife in hand, prying off the hardened swirls of green frosting on Safeway cupcakes with the steely precision of a surgeon. I was replacing the store-applied icing with intentionally sloppy store-bought frosting that I dyed green.?Once I threw away the plastic store containers and placed the cupcakes on a plate, they passably resembled the homemade baked goods I wanted to bring to my daughter’s school for her birthday the next morning.?She’s a St. Patrick’s Day baby.

?There’s a work of fiction that starts like this.?Allison Pearson’s I Don't Know How She Does It: The Life of Kate Reddy, Working Mother opens with the heroine distressing Sainsbury mince pies ahead of her daughter’s school carol concert.?It’s a posher, British, make believe version of my situation.?

?The character Kate Reddy asks, “How did I get here??And could someone please tell me that?”

Good question.?Over the years, I’ve looked back on that night in the kitchen, when I was a single mom, working full time, in a writing panic over a contract to finish a book on marketing, and going through a divorce.?I wasn’t exactly living a life of self-compassion.?This whole situation was a recipe for the opposite of vitality.

This story makes me sound slightly crazy, but most women I know have some version of this kind of contorted effort to be and do everything.?I suppose I was trying to be eligible for some kind of Top Working Woman Achiever award in my own mind.?How I want my younger self – and all of us – to be freed from paying the price for this kind of recognition.?I wish I could say to my younger self: Leave those cupcakes as they are and let yourself be as you are.??There may be times to fake it till you make it.?This is not one of them.?Don’t fake it.?Don’t make it.?Don't bake it. Just bring those cupcakes as-is, straight from the store.?

The real recognition you need – that we all need -- is We Are Doing Great, All Things Considered and that We Are Worthy of Vitality.?Today, I proclaim we all get those awards, which are both priceless and free of charge.