For Arianna Huffington it took fainting from exhaustion on her desk, breaking her cheekbone and getting five stitches to make her slow down at work and to learn to “lean back” rather than leaning in as the new Sheryl Sandberg book suggests.
The Huffington Post founder, who spoke today in New York at the National Association of Professional Women networking conference, was referring to an incident that happened five years ago, when she was just building theHuffington Post and had taken her oldest daughter on a tour of colleges. She had promised not to be on her BlackBerry while they were scouting around, but the minute her daughter went to sleep in the evening, she would start working. When she came back from that trip exhausted from the dual roles of daytime mom and nighttime entrepreneur, the fainting incident happened.
"Suddenly, you don’t take care of yourself," Huffington said of the work involved in starting her company. "I’ve made a lot of changes in my life…I now strive to get seven or eight hours of sleep a night. You need time to recharge."
So Huffington, who sold her company to AOL for $315 million in February 2011, should be breathing easier these days.
But the editor told the room, packed with women, that she encourages the same sort of stress-free ethos among her employees. She had two nap rooms installed at the Huffington Post offices, and "they’re full all the time," to the point where there are requests to install a third, she says. There are also weekly meditation and yoga classes for employees.
"We think we know how to breathe, but we don’t," Huffington says, adding that most people take shallow breaths rather than the deep breathing techniques that are encouraged for those who practice yoga or meditation.
The HuffPo editor-in-chief says she tries to encourage an atmosphere where people’s personal lives are respected. Asked about Yahoo chief executive Marissa Mayer’s policy that does not allow working from home, Huffington diplomatically replied, "It should be up to the manager," but at HuffPo, "we are very flexible."
"If someone needs to work from home because, maybe they have a sick child, we allow it," she says.
To help keep people grounded, Huffington Post launched an app called "GPS for the soul" where users can include photos of their loved ones and put their finger on a sensor to get their heart rate.
Among her tips for working women is to beware that a high salary might not be worth it if a job is so stressful that it's affecting your health.
"It’s not how much are you making, it's, 'What is your stress level?'" she says.
Asked to recall a turning point in her life, she talked about a time in her early 20s when she had just published her first book, which was a success. But 36 publishers shot down her second book, which was about politics, and Huffington said she started to doubt her writing abilities, felt "very depressed, and ran out of money."
Then as she walked down a London street, she noticed a bank and walked in and requested a loan. To her astonishment, she got one.
"It made me fell in a really profound way that you can really trust life," she says. "There are helpful animals, disguised as human beings, along the way."
She sends the bank manager a Christmas card every year and strives to see the positive and ignore her inner critic, which she likened to an "obnoxious roommate."
"If you believe life is rigged your way, then stumbling blocks turn into stepping stones," she says.
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