Fortune Magazine published an article earlier this year entitled “What successful women want in 2015“, in which women from Fortune’s Insider Network shared goals for this new year. As things like diversity or promoting other women were sorely missing from the list, what occurred to me (and others, judging by the response tweets), is that we haven’t succeeded yet at even defining what success means for professional women (or even scraped the surface for that matter).
Success for me is fulfilling my purpose while helping others. For my mother, it meant raising successful children on her own. For my grandmother, it meant staying strong in the face of adversity, even if adversity slept in the same bed as you. Each generation of women, and each woman, defines success differently.
Success on the job, at home, or both? As a professional, or stay-at-home mom? While men’s answers to how they define success may be much simpler (no offense), the additional variables for women make it harder to narrow down our options.
Our search for meaning, need to be valued, pressure from work and home, not to mention the dear price many women pay to make it up the corporate ladder, all make for a difficult (if not unsolvable) success equation.
Ultimately, it’s up to us, all of us, not just the few women (and men) at the top, to define what success means to us. Didn’t we watch our parents work hard only to fall victims to the recession? Are we willing to do the same, or instead choosing our own definition of success?
How do you define success?
The Corporate Sis.
