Former Lehman Brothers chief financial officer Erin Callan has gone public with her regret. She regrets the time she devoted to her brilliant career at the expense of her personal life. There was no such thing as work-life balance during the peak of her career and therefore nothing to juggle other than business meetings. For all of her career, until the Lehman Brothers collapse in 2008, she virtually slept with her Blackberry.
Isn’t regret an interesting beast. While women like Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg and Princeton Professor Anne-Marie Slaughter have offered up the regret that women can’t do everything the way they would like and be a success, Callan is regretting that she didn’t even try.
At the age of 47, Callan is now married to her second husband and she is trying to get pregnant. If she succeeds it will be her first child. Callan’s first marriage apparently ended due to her singular work focus.
Don’t we all know women like Callan? Maybe it’s generational. I have a close girlfriend whose career and financial trappings I envied in my twenties and thirties as I worried about how I could possibly afford to take unpaid maternity leave when my sons were born 19 and 15 years ago. My friend has since confided that she envied my young family. Like Callan she was so devoted to her brilliant career that by the time she reached her forties and tried to fall pregnant it was all but impossible without assistance from science. The grass always looks greener in someone else’s garden.
I regret that I took work home for the weekend to catch up when my sons were young. I regret that I didn’t say no to after-hour work events when my sons were in primary school and old enough to notice my absence. I regret that I still take work home on week nights and that my sons see me staring constantly at a screen.
But what’s the point of regret? There is nothing that I could go back and change. And if I want to do the role that I currently do then screen-staring 24/7 goes with the territory.
We should stop beating ourselves up about the choices we have made. Ellen Callan should instead be focused on her future. The point about poor choices is that we can learn from them.