The Third Path

How ambitious women can continue to build a meaningful career without leaning in harder or walking away

I vividly remember reading Lean In. I was in my early twenties, living in Boston, and had recently started my career as a management consultant. I climbed into my green armchair, put my feet up on the ottoman, and started to read.

At the time, it all felt novel and exciting. Here was a book for ambitious, career-oriented women, written by an ambitious, career-oriented woman who had been wildly successful. At a time when career advice was still dominated by white, cishet male business gurus, Sheryl Sandberg was talking directly to women and saying: Here is how I did it. Here is how you can do it.

I devoured the book. It affirmed a lot of what I already believed and how I was already operating. I worked hard, and I could work even harder. I was leaning in, and the book gave me additional firepower and direction on how to lean in further.

Its message fit neatly into the playbook I had been given by my parents’ generation, by my managers, by business leaders, and by the institutions I had spent my life trying to succeed within. Work hard(er). Go above and beyond. Sit at the table. Take the stretch assignment.

And for years, that playbook worked extraordinarily well for me. I worked nights and weekends. One Labor Day weekend, when the weather was absolutely beautiful outside, I spent twelve hours a day, every day, sitting in my apartment building a 60-slide deck. I said yes to the extra project, the difficult assignment, and the constant travel.

And I climbed. I received promotions. I took on bigger roles. Eventually, I became a vice president at a global organization.

In retrospect, it’s perhaps a bit funny to realize that I never really questioned whether striving for that next level, working harder, and making sure I showed up perfectly in every meeting was “right.”

Over time, as we know, Lean In increasingly came under fire. I remember seeing that backlash and thinking, yes, that makes sense. This model is flawed! But then I continued to largely follow it. I continued to work overtime, sometimes because I “had” to and sometimes because I wanted to. I continued to equate success with the next role, the next promotion, the next impressive career achievement, and the ability to carry an ever-increasing amount without visibly dropping anything.

I did not realize how deeply I had internalized that playbook until I hit a point in my life that made it impossible to keep following it. For me, there was not one single event. It was a confluence of events unfolding over several years: caring for my mentally ill father as he experienced serious health and financial crises; living with extreme chronic pain; going through a divorce and experiencing the grief and upheaval of leaving my home and my city; and beginning to understand that I was neurodivergent and that everything I did at work was just a bit harder for me.

It took being repeatedly hit over the head with the message that “this playbook does not work for you!” before I finally heard it and accepted that I could not just keep doing more, pushing harder, and achieving in the same way.

People who struggle with addiction sometimes talk about having to hit rock bottom before they can make a fundamental change. For me, this period felt like hitting rock bottom. Because who was I if I could not continue pursuing my career and achieving in the same way? If I could not continue climbing, overextending myself, and deriving my sense of success from my capacity to endure it?

What made that moment even more overwhelming and frightening was not only facing the possibility that I might be forced off the career path I had imagined, but also losing my sense of certainty. For most of my life, I had been so clear about what success meant, what it looked like, and how to achieve it. And countless times, others mirrored that back to me, lauding my successes and being impressed by the institutions I belonged to or the roles I had taken on.

I was trading in my playbook without having another to replace it.

It reminded me of my rough transition from college into the working world. Until that moment, school was all I had really ever known. I knew how to be a good student. I understood how to do well on assignments, how to succeed within the grading system, and what the other markers of success were.

So when I entered the workplace for the first time and realized that the playbook that made me an exceptional student was not the same playbook that would make me a successful professional, I was bereft. Disoriented. Terrified.

I think many of us experience something similar when we realize the career playbook we have followed for years no longer works for us. We know how to be successful within the old paradigm. But we don’t yet know how to build a career, and a life, outside of it.

When we face this moment in our careers, as women, we then search for another playbook. And for those of us who are high achievers and can’t follow the “phone it in at work” playbook, the seemingly only other option is the “leave the workforce” playbook. We can become a stay-at-home parent or partner and devote ourselves to being high-achieving in a different part of our lives.

For a long time, I thought they were the only choices. I have seen many incredibly intelligent, ambitious, accomplished women in my circle reach a point where the old playbook really no longer worked for them. They either leaned in harder or decided to leave altogether.

When I was standing in my rock-bottom moment, I couldn’t take either option, nor did I want to. And so I tentatively began to explore what I found to be the enormous middle ground between leaning in and leaving.

But for high-achieving women, I found that there is no simple or clearly defined playbook for that path. You have to create it yourself. And that is incredibly hard. There are almost infinite options and decision points between the two. You have to determine, step by step, what the right path looks like for you.

One visual I often use with clients is a pie chart. Imagine that the full circle represents the total allocation of your time, energy, and attention. In the traditional Lean In model, as much of the pie as humanly possible is allocated to work and career. A smaller, typically required, portion goes to family. Very little, if any, goes to the remaining parts of the pie: sleep, self-care, friendships, community, hobbies, spirituality, etc.

Then there is the leave model. Work and career go to zero, and the rest of the pie is distributed across family, home, relationships, community, and self.

Again, there are valid reasons someone might choose either model. Neither is inherently right or wrong. But what if the pie you want looks different? What if you still want a substantial, intellectually engaging, and meaningful career, but you no longer want, or can have, work consuming nearly the entire pie?

You may look at your ideal pie and say: I want 30% to go to work, 40% to family, and the remaining 30% to sleep, health, friendships, community, and myself. That sounds straightforward and workable. Just reallocate the pie and then operationalize it. Work fewer hours. Set better boundaries. Become more efficient. Prioritize more carefully.

But this is where we get stuck. The underlying challenge is not really how much of the pie goes to work. You cannot simply take the career version of yourself, with all of the habits you’ve carefully crafted over decades to enable your career success, squeeze it into a smaller section of the pie, and expect it to work for you. Just ask any woman suffering from burnout who is told, “Just do less!”

We cannot operate in the same way we always have while spending significantly less time and energy doing it and still feel that we’re achieving our definition of career success and satisfaction. And if you do, you realize that you are actually still following the same Lean In playbook. You are simply attempting to create a more optimized version.

This is not ultimately a time-management problem or an “allocation of the pie” problem. It is not just about having better boundaries, higher productivity, or more efficient prioritization, which all of us wrestling with shifting our playbook have been told in one form or another, am I right?

Of course, those things can help. They absolutely can create incremental gains. But ultimately, they do not address the foundational issue because you are still operating according to the definitions, rules, expectations, and identity of your old playbook. And that playbook does not fit the life you have or are trying to build.

To create a different pie, you have to step into self-authorship of your own playbook. You have to redefine success and achievement. You have to ask how much of your identity and sense of self-worth is tied to being the person who can carry the most, achieve the most, respond the fastest, and endure the longest. You have to decide which ambitions truly “belong” to you and which ones you are carrying simply because you inherited them from others. You have to examine your values, your identities, your relationships, your needs, and the realities of your life now, rather than the life you had when you first adopted the playbook.

I wish there was a Lean In 2.0 written by an enlightened Gen X or Millennial woman who had already done all of this work and figured out a new universal playbook that could serve as a compelling third option. But as far as I know, that universal playbook doesn’t yet exist.

Maybe it cannot exist. The path is too personal. The identities we hold, the responsibilities we carry, the opportunities available to us, the support we have, the constraints we face, and the lives we want are all fundamentally different.

I want to pause here to acknowledge that having the time, resources, support, and mental space to undertake this playbook-authorship process is itself a privilege. Not everyone has the ability to stop, reconsider, and redesign. Some people have to keep going because their financial, caregiving, health, or family circumstances leave them no alternative.

But for those who are able to do this work, I have personally seen what it can open up. In the absence of being able to pick up a new “universal” playbook, I took one scary step at a time into the vast middle ground between the two options.

Imagine the Lean In path as a trail on your left going straight up a mountain. The Leave path runs to your right alongside a river. Ahead of you, between the mountain and the river, lies a vast stretch of fields and forests without a clearly marked trail. Building your own playbook means stepping into that landscape and beginning to pick your way through it.

You move forward with your ideal pie in mind while simultaneously adjusting key aspects of yourself: your definitions, your assumptions, your identity, and the internal rules you have followed for years. You make one decision. Then another. You discover that a path you thought would work does not. So you turn around and try something else. You continuously reconcile the life you want with the beliefs you still carry about what a successful woman is supposed to look like.

As I did this, I often encountered enormous cognitive dissonance as I attempted to operationalize my new pie chart before I had really wrestled with the inner work I needed to do to successfully support it. For instance, my chronic pain and disability forced me to reduce my hours. Intellectually, I knew this was the right thing for me and my body, but my inner voice, and the identity I had held my whole life around achievement, told me I was failing and not valuable. That version of myself that worked the full Labor Day weekend and produced 60 slides struggled to accept it.

Deciding on the new allocation of your pie is the relatively easy part. The deeper, and in my experience harder, work is becoming someone who can live inside that new allocation without feeling as though you have abandoned yourself.

Sometimes I think about the young woman sitting in that green armchair in Boston, eagerly deepening her understanding of the Lean In career playbook, the playbook that carried her such a long way - through a decade of consulting, to Harvard, and to her VP position. It led her well for years. But eventually, it could take her no further.

The work of this next chapter has not been learning how to lean in, but more effectively. It has been learning to close the book and write something of my own. 

Putting aside the playbook can feel like failure. It can feel like losing your ambition, your identity, the future you were building, even yourself. But perhaps the absence of a marked path does not mean that you’re lost and there is nowhere to go. It may simply mean that, for the first time, the direction is yours to choose.