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The simple life - women make changes in their careers for the better

Who says you have to keep in step with the rat race? You can enjoy success on your terms and at your pace

If you're a working woman, you know. Whether you're a checkout clerk or chief executive officer, you understand that the world of work can feel like a world without air. The feeling can be tripped by an unforeseen crisis, a high-stakes meeting, a disturbing call from your kids' school or by the crazy, everyday cacophony of ringing phones, humming computers and carping coworkers-all of which combine to transport you to a terrifying place:

Suddenly, there isn't enough oxygen. You look calm, but your heart is racing and you're a gasp away from screaming. You can't fathom going on for another second.

Somehow you do. But still you can't help wondering, Isn't there a simpler way?

Three years ago, as a nationally syndicated columnist for The Washington Post, a wife and mother of two boys, I knew that airless terrain too well. It had motivated me to meditate, work out and work mostly at home.

So when I learned I was pregnant again, my joy was tinged with terror. Where would I find the time to mother an infant while researching and writing two columns a week? How would my new duties affect my limited time with my sons, my husband? What of my then-ailing parents and the friends, relatives and God who sustained me? What about me?

For weeks after my son's birth, I avoided such questions--until a sympathetic editor suggested I return on a temporary, one-column-per-week basis. Despite a pay cut, I jumped at the new schedule.

Amazingly, it worked--barely. But as the date approached to return to full-time writing, I balked. No way could I do it and breathe.

Warily, I told my editors. All were supportive but one--a woman who dissed my choice to "stay home and play with your baby," and scoffed at my insistence on writing an explanatory letter to the 60 newspapers I'd disappointed. An editor warned, "You'll lose 20 papers."

I lost three.

Working women who step out on faith into the barely charted territory of career simplification often learn a lovely lesson: The universe supports such soul-based changes." Out of nowhere will come blessings you couldn't have anticipated," says Valerie Miles-Tribble, 45, who left a harried career as a top California real-estate broker to start her own business. "You meet people, events happen, opportunities present themselves that are so incredible you realize that there could be no way except through God."

The Power of Love

That makes perfect sense when you consider that most women's motivation for simplifying their work lives is love. It could be a sister's love for her children, her health or a relative who needs more time than her 24-7 work schedule allows. It could be her love of the God she's too busy to serve or of the Self whose secrets might be revealed in a less-hectic career. Some women find they've fallen out of love: with jobs they've mastered, corporations that devalue their Blackness or the wan, weary creatures who stare back at them in the mirror.

Ten years ago shutterbug Ella Hamlin's love for her son, Alix, then 7, inspired her to leave New York City to move ten minutes from where she spent childhood summers in rural South Carolina. Though the photographer's main purpose for returning to her roots was to raise Alix "as well as I was raised," Hamlin loves waking up to "birds singing, the wind in the trees, the music that's all around. Driving, I pass goats, cows and horses.... I love that very simple way of living."

Often, simplifying your life begins with finding, and fulfilling, your purpose. The woman who spends her days doing what she was meant to do feels more completed than depleted at the day's end. Take Fadila Muhammad. Evenings and weekends the Adelphi, Maryland, resident found herself twisting, locking and braiding friends' and neighbors' natural hair. But she spent her workdays cataloging books as a library technician, a job that, after ten years, sapped her spirit. "Every day," says Muhammad, "I'd come home drained."

Yet Muhammad, 45, who wears a river of waist-length locks, couldn't ignore her flair for hair or the important ways in which it celebrated her cultural heritage. When requests for her skills exceeded her time to fulfill them, it hit her: Why not do the thing I enjoy most full-time?

Muhammad found work at Oliver, a natural-hair salon in Washington, D.C. Now her happiness at work "spills over into other parts of my life," says the mother of a grown daughter and son. A Muslim whose religion requires five daily prayers, Muhammad realizes, "Now I'm more relaxed, which makes me better about keeping my prayer schedule." She insists that, even with a longer workday, "life feels simpler."

No matter which way you looked at Valerie Williams's life five years ago, it didn't look simple. But, honey, did it look good.

As a customer-service director at Prudential Insurance Co., the happily married Edison, New Jersey, resident was earning more than $90,000 annually. Williams had more than 700 staffers and a closetful of Ellen Tracy suits--not bad, she laughs, "for a little girl who grew up in inner-city Boston."

But around her fortieth birthday, Williams realized "the work didn't jazz me." What did jazz her was coaching people on their management skills while leading seminars outside work. Each time Williams imagined exploring her gift for training, she remembered the excellent salary and treatment she already was receiving--and stopped imagining.

One day during a personal-development class Williams confessed her dream. Over and over, the teacher asked why she didn't follow it. Exasperated, Williams finally yelled back, "I'm not good enough to be a trainer!"

Williams was astonished. "It wasn't the job that was holding me back," she recalls. "It was my lack of confidence."

Two months later Williams resigned. Today she's head of Professional Coaching and Training, Inc., serving clients in the United States, London, Paris and Australia from her home office. "I have time to do my yoga, to exercise ... Often I work four-day weeks." Each January she escapes to Orlando, Florida, for "total self-renewal. I check into a hotel and focus only on me. Afterward, I'm very clear on my goals for the year."

Four years after leaving Prudential, Williams has exceeded her former salary. But the best part "is that I love, love, love the excitement of helping other people learn to do new things."

Move at Your Own Pace

There's that word again: love. But how does a sister get from being in love with her vision of balance to making it real? Some, like Williams, experience a distinct "Ah-ha!" moment in which their hazy dreams acquire a guiding clarity. Others are like me, taking a baby step here, a medium step there. Some uproot themselves entirely from their boring career comfort zone. Others retreat just briefly, so they can return, refreshed, to corporate life.

Loraine Binion of Oakland resigned from her job as director of finance for Levi Straus & Co. last June after nearly 20 years with the company. "I wasn't continuing to learn and grow," she explains. "And I hadn't had more than two weeks' vacation in 19 years."

A divorced mother of two girls, 12 and 15, Binion vowed to take her time, to wait for "the right, exciting opportunity" as she supports her family on her severance and income from consulting.

"I'm loving my life now," says Binion, 46, who ferries her girls to soccer practice and drives to the wine country to meet friends for lunch. In addition to volunteering her financial expertise to the Bay Area Black United Fund, where she's a board member, Binion is reading--"I've got Oprah's books all backed up," she says--and tackling household jobs she once paid people to do. "I'm actually sealing my own deck."

Typically, the woman most likely to question whether her established career really is "all that" is in her late thirties or early forties. Ambitious younger women may have similar concerns, but it's usually more seasoned workers who have tasted enough "success" to crave something more substantial.

Then there are women like Conchita Burpee, who are just hitting their stride when life throws a dizzying curve.

In 1994 Burpee was a 40-year-old national retail division manager for a property owned by Knight-Ridder, Inc., the media corporation, in Philadelphia. Burpee was juggling $55 million in revenue and 19 employees when, in frightening succession, her 13-year marriage crumbled, her mother became seriously ill and her sons, 12 and 7, began showing that they needed more of her time than she could give.

Burpee amazed herself--and everyone else--by walking away from a 20-year career. "I didn't know what I was going to do," admits Burpee, whose bitter divorce had exhausted her savings. "I went from making six figures to zero. But I had to choose between making money and spending more quality time with my children, my mother and myself."

Thus began "the toughest year of my life," says Burpee, who received no severance, alimony or child support--her divorce wasn't final and her ex didn't offer. She and her children left their $175,000 home to move into a one-bedroom apartment. Telling her boys to forget about $100 sneakers, she applied for food stamps, reminding herself, "I've paid taxes for years; I'm not going to feel bad about this." When her mom's condition became worse, Burpee rented a larger place to accommodate her.

Slowly, Burpee built her own enterprise advising major publications on business strategies, figuring, "If I could do this for a company, I can do it for me." After two years Burpee could buy the lovely home in Princeton, New Jersey, that's her "sanctuary." Though she earns 20 percent less than before, Burpee--who recently got engaged and is taking classes on the Internet to become a doctor of naturopathy--has no regrets. She's thankful for the time spent with her mother, who recently passed away.

Had she stayed at Knight-Ridder, says Burpee, who now works three days a week, "I wouldn't be able to drop my kids off at school, pick them up, be an involved parent.... But the main thing I couldn't pay attention to was me.... I just answered that call from within."

Trading One Power for Another

Many women who are led to simplify feel a powerful sense of being guided by Spirit. Once upon a time, Norice Rice, an institutional investment sales rep in Columbus, Ohio, got off on the power, "the incredible rush," of deciding whether to buy, sell or hold the millions in investments entrusted to her by more than 100 clients. A very different power guided Rice to the comparative calm of her current job as director of investments for the Ohio state treasurer. "Finding out what God wanted me to do led me to spend more time with my family, and with Him," says Rice, who recently preached her first sermon at church.

Sadly, the working world often discourages women from turning to, or from even mentioning, spirituality. "You have to worry, Who will I offend?" Binion says. "Sometimes your values go against what the company would have you do--perhaps lie, mislead clients."

Binion's weekly prayer partner is Valerie Miles-Tribble, the Oakland real-estate-broker-turned-consultant who says that her refusal to listen to the inner voice that screamed, "Slow down!" led to a health-related wake-up call. Miles-Tribble was amazed when marriage and her son's 1990 birth made her begin to rethink her job's unyielding competition and nonstop travel--challenges she used to relish.

By 1995 she was suffering from a debilitating combination of asthma, allergies and a malady similar to chronic fatigue syndrome. Barely able to leave bed, Miles-Tribble thought, If I don't get a grip on my health and my time, I may not be here for my son.

Focusing on the part of her job she most enjoyed, Miles-Tribble conceived Miles Ahead Consultant Services, through which she provides technical and financial advice to churches and nonprofit organizations. Like me, she took baby steps. After sensing she needed a change, she took her time getting clear about exactly what she wanted from life, and how best to reshuffle her priorities. In 1997 she resigned from corporate life. "I felt like this brick had been lifted from my shoulders," says Miles-Tribble, who started divinity school in September. Most of her physical problems were eased.

Start by Looking Within

Sisters who've pared down their lives agree: Our problems usually begin, and end, with us. "Everything starts with the self," says Burpee. "We put ourselves in these negative environments. You say, `No, it's my boss; it's my coworkers who are the problem.' But we each have the ability to remove ourselves."

But aren't there times when it really is difficult coworkers, bosses or clients?

Yep. The solution is still to turn within.

Ask Andria Hall, who knows what it's like to have the "perfect job"--and see it evaporate in a mist of coworker bitterness. In 1995 this award-winning correspondent on a national TV newsmagazine earned the coveted six-figure job of weekend anchor-reporter for the New York affiliate of a major network. Because adjusting to local reporting was bound to be difficult, Hall expected to make mistakes. So she at first blamed herself when she received misinformation to read on the air and was directed to look at the wrong camera. At some point, she says, "I saw a pattern emerging. But I kept trying to turn things around."

Making matters worse was Hall's guilt over her children, then ages 8, 6 and 3, whom she left at 7:00 A.M. and seldom saw before 8:30 P.M. Totally stressed, Hall lost 25 pounds, missed her period for six months, and one anguished night opened her Bible in desperation.

"My eyes fell on the passage in James that says, `Rejoice, and be happy when you are tested,'" she recalls. "`Endure until your testing is over.' And I told myself, I get it."

Silently blessing her coworkers, Hall forgave herself for contributing to her problems and vowed to leave the job "when God asked me to." Two weeks later her agent negotiated a release from her contract--"on my own terms."

Today Hall is an Edison, New Jersey, media coach and coauthor of the new book This Far by Faith: How to Put God First in Everyday Living (Doubleday, $19.95). She also runs This Far By Faith Enterprises, Inc., with business partner Linnie Frank, which provides motivational programs to businesses and individuals, and operates a bed-and-breakfast retreat center near Newport, Rhode Island, where guests and clients "shed the burdens of world." Like many women who work out of their homes, Hall sometimes feels busier than ever. "But it's my choice," she says and sees herself as a role model for friends "who are too scared" to move toward balance.

The Journey Toward Peace

The desire for balance and control inspires some sisters to create lives of radiant independence. Ella Hamlin, the photographer, spent six years building the kind of client base and support team in New York that would allow her to leave and run her business from South Carolina, where her family has lived for more than 100 years. "I have a calm life," says Hamlin. "I can go into my parents' garden, pick field peas, string beans, collards. The family comes over for Sunday dinner; we eat and talk and laugh."

Then there's the flip side of control, in which a woman becomes so petrified of losing hers she can't see what's best for her. California flight attendant Barbara Perkins missed her two children so bitterly when she flew that she began having stress-related panic attacks. Though she feared raising a, family solely on the salary of her husband, a firefighter, another thought kept her with American Airlines, her employer for 16 years: "Not working" just wasn't an option.

"That was something White women on soap operas did," the 42-year-old says she believed. And depending on her husband's earnings, she feared, would make her "subservient." But when Perkins found herself snapping at her nanny out of jealousy over the nanny's closeness to her children, she knew something had to change, With her husband, Stan, she analyzed how their family could thrive on his salary alone. They withdrew their kids from private school; Stan hit the books, angling for a promotion.

Two years after resigning from American, Perkins is home with her kids and has completed a master's degree in human development. Her "absolutely wonderful" life is symbolized by her morning ritual of awakening her kids with a foot and leg massage "so they wake up with a smile instead of my screaming, `Get up!' "She's also running for the Los Angeles City Council.

Like other women who've built more balanced lives, Perkins feels she was "on a long journey" before she arrived at such peace. Almost nothing has turned out as she originally planned. But life, she is learning, is about riding the wave that affirms and supports you, trusting it to deposit you in the right place.

In a material world that values being in charge, getting your props and kicking major butt, it takes courage to let go and feel your way to a new kind of esteem. "In TV," says ex-newscaster Andria Hall, "it was about playing to the audience, about Nielsen numbers. Then I recognized that the only rating that mattered was the one within."

Perkins, like other sister-simplifiers, is sure that "the journey isn't finished. There's so much more.... "She breathes, slowly, deeply. "I don't know if this life is for everyone," she says finally. "But it works for me."

RELATED ARTICLE: making time for what matters

You may not be ready for a career overhaul, but who couldn't use more time--and less tension--to enjoy and evaluate life? We asked Debrena Jackson Gandy, organizational consultant, wife and mom, and author of Sacred Pampering Principles (William Morrow, $12), as well as other busy women for their best simplifying strategies:

* Meditate at least once a day to get centered and put problems in perspective. Even ten minutes helps. Still your mind by breathing deeply. Close out the world and focus on the sound of your breathing.

* Plan your escape. A night or two alone at a quaint bed-and-breakfast or inexpensive inn will lift you out of your too-familiar existence into a place of perspective. So will a lunchtime visit to a park or garden. Getting away from your hectic life helps you see what works and what's missing.

* Invite positive energy into your life. Take a hard look at your friends and associates. Do they enrich and expand you, encouraging you to be your best? Limit your time with gossips and those with defeatist attitudes.

* Go low-maintenance. Why spend precious hours in a salon? Nix the acrylic nails and elaborate do. Opt for easycare natural hair or a clean cut with style mileage. Keep nails natural, buffed and active-length. To hook it up in a hurry, look to makeup and accessories.

* Ease up on errands. Buy nonperishables in bulk to cut trips to the grocery. Bread can be frozen for later use. Shop by catalog. Order stamps by mail (call [800] 782-6724). Find a dry cleaner with pickup and delivery service, or use a drive-through cleaner. Bank by phone or PC. Piggyback errands you can't eliminate.

* Pare down paperwork. Set up automatic payment (electronic funds transfer) of your bills with your bank. Check with your bank or utilities, credit-card and insurance company.

* Pick a play day each week when you never conduct business--no business, frivolous phone calls, errands or work-related reading.

* Don't be tech-obsessed. The more avenues of access you have (cellular, pager, E-mail, fax), the more there is to respond to. Let voice mail or caller ID help you screen calls.

* Eliminate the wait. Phone before dashing out to that appointment--and make sure things are running on schedule. * Clean your closet. A cluttered house, closet or office clogs your mental space. Clear out your handbag too--it makes room for money.

* Retire that iron. Hang up your laundry the instant it's dry. Build a wrinkle-free wardrobe of knits, synthetics and blends.

* Keep a journal. "1 have five different journals," says Gandy, who believes that people's lives seem cluttered because we have too few outlets to purge and record our thoughts. "Getting them down on paper clears out your mental space."

* Rethink recreation. Gandy suggests shifting away from passive entertainment to spend more quality time--impromptu gatherings, dinners, evening classes--with people you care about. "Movies and other passive entertainment decenter us," Gandy continues, "showing us what we `should' look like or the love relationship we `should' have. Entertainment creates desire; interaction fulfills it." --D.B.

Donna Britt is an award-winning nationally syndicated columnist for The Washington Post.

Donna Britt, syndicated columnist and author of "The Simple Life" (page 96), offers this to those seeking to calm a hectic lifestyle: "Get on a spiritual path. When things get crazy, you can always return to that."

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