Story of the Month: May
Listen to the Wisdom of Your Body
To attain the stature of Senior VP and the top-ranking woman at Motorola, Janiece Webb learned to grin and bear it in a hyper-masculine, slash and burn environment. In spite of bouts of sex discrimination and often feeling isolated, Janiece managed to survive and at times even thrive in this environment. That is until her body literally stopped her in her tracks, insisting that she face the truth about herself.
“I was trying to brute force my way through things at work,” Janiece told me. “It was a matter of pride, wanting to do the right thing, not wanting to fail, not wanting to admit to a mistake, not wanting my family to see me as not strong. I was being macho, running around the world, flying 75,000 miles in two weeks, back and forth to Europe, Asia, Latin America. Working on the plane, not listening to my physical self, not listening to my emotional self, not listening to my spiritual self. Just busy showing how I could go and get it done. Even though I was working in a hostile environment where rocks were thrown at me, I was going to show them! I sustained that pace for eight years, and then I got hepatitis. I became really sick.
“I was bedridden. The hepatitis taught me I had no control. The more I fought the disease, the worse I got. The more I said ‘I can do it,’ which had always worked for me, was my mantra, the harder I got knocked down. Being macho and being tough was absolutely the worst thing I could do. My body was telling me that I would not win this battle with that set of tools; I would need to grow new ones. I was raw emotionally, spiritually, physically and I had to work on all of them simultaneously. I realized if I didn’t take care of these aspects of my life that I was, in fact, killing myself.
“During that time I realized that I couldn’t fix everything like I used to. I realized I didn’t have to climb every mountain. I realized those ways were really an egocentric view of life. At the time I thought I was doing it for a good reason, proving I could handle myself, that I cared, but it was driven by the ego. It’s not my job to make it okay for everybody.
“For me, power used to be macho, bravado, I can go through the brick wall. Power now is quiet, centered, a balance of masculinity and femininity. What a transformation! I now have to be intellectually growing, emotionally growing, physically, and spiritually, to be fully healthy. I can’t give them up any more. By choosing to be vulnerable enough to open myself up, I didn’t need this muscling out anymore. I realized that all this, ‘I’m going to show you’ is not me. I’m not the macho man. I knew it was bull shit, but I was too pig headed to walk away. Only in the last few years do I think, ‘I don’t need this.’ If that’s what I have to be in this work environment, I don’t want it. It was a relief.”