By Jean Hollands
In the most affluent region in the world, in the homeland of some of the highest paid working women, we still have an amazingly abundant field of women who have the secret “bag lady syndrome.”
Men have this worry too, but they don’t have the word-picture as prominently engrained in their working souls as women do. Perhaps women can articulate the worry more easily.
The bag lady syndrome occurs in the following profiles:
• She has a doctorate, and MSEE from MIT, and she has never been unemployed in her adult life.
• She is a prominent lawyer from one ofthe best firms and is married to a wealthy CEO.
• She is a renowned artist shown in famous galleries all over the world.
• She just passed the bar the first time, was a high school valedictorian and is a star on her softball team.
The syndrome has nothing to do with job title, income, family background or accomplishments. It has everything to do with a tiny, secret worry, never talked about– that things could go bad for her, and she would end up on the streets.
What we do to change the Bag Lady Worry Syndrome is actually ask this woman to tell me the exact path downward she imagines. We construct a scenario that could bring her failures to the moment she dreads.
The next step is to visualize this scene with the skills they possess. Without fail, these women eventually imagine the scene in which they are picking themselves up, little by little, one step at a time, one lucky break, one humble request, one eager listener, one keen helper who directs her back - often to heights never imagined.
This is not hocus-pocus or hypnosis. This is just a rational exploration of an irrational fear that starts in a very dark corner of one’s confidence. It could have been seeded by a movie line, a parental statement, a woman with a sign on the street or just a thread of confidence that had been unraveling in a circuitous and quiet route.
The worry is simply a worry - not the facts. Sometimes you just need to share the fear with someone. The worry can stifle your career - with uncertainty, suppressed ambition or panic when something changes in your company or in your life. Give it up. You could not get down there if you tried!
Jean A. Hollands, M.S., is founder and chairwoman of the Growth & Leadership Center in Mountain View. For more information, call 966-1144 or logon to www.glcweb.com.
