Jennifer Nadel, Author, WE: A Manifesto for Women Everywhere

Honesty, humility and compassion: healthy advice for professional women from author Jennifer Nadel

How can professional women maintain a healthy balance in their lives? That’s the question that Jennifer Nadel explores in her book We: A Manifesto for Women Everywhere. In this conversation with Women on the Move host Sam Saperstein, Jennifer discusses the burnout she experienced in her award-winning journalism career, her path to healing, and her advice to help other women stay healthy as they pursue professional success.

 

Jennifer describes how satisfied she was in her career in the 1990s as a journalist at ITV. She brought important stories to light—stories that made real change, such as her report on the use of rape as a war crime against women in the Bosnian war. “Privileged is the only word I can think of,” she tells Sam, “I woke up every day feeling so motivated, feeling so driven because I was lucky enough to be in a position where I had a camera and a microphone and access to a nightly audience of up to 10 million viewers.

 

Success, burnout, and healing

But at the height of her success, Jennifer suddenly experienced crippling burnout. “I was so passionate about my work and I loved it so much that really everything else fell away,” she recalls. “I didn't think there was a problem with that because it held so much meaning for me and so much purpose. But in fact, I had driven myself far beyond the point at which humans can function. And, one day I just woke up and couldn't go on. And it came from nowhere. I can remember the weekend before thinking, I'm the luckiest woman in the world. I have two kids, I have this amazing job. And then one morning I just woke up and thought, I can't go on. I rang the office. And I said, I'm really sorry. I can't come in today. And in fact, I never went back.”

 

What followed was ten years “in the wilderness,” that she spent searching for health and a renewed sense of purpose. She describes those years as examining every conceivable religion, teacher tradition, and self-help practice in hopes of finding the one perfect solution. “What I really longed for was that I would find one path and that would be the answer,” she tells Sam. “And that wasn't my experience. What I did was I just took the best from every different teacher that I was fortunate enough to encounter.”

 

Manifesto for Women

That experience of burnout and healing inspired Jennifer to co-write WE: A Manifesto for Women Everywhere with her longtime friend and actress, Gillian Anderson. The book aims to help other women find holistic fulfillment—in a much less circuitous route than Jennifer took. Jennifer says she wanted to help women in high-pressure industries—women who are excited and enthusiastic and driven—enjoy success without risking their health. 

 

The book describes nine principles that women can embrace: honesty, acceptance, courage, trust, humility, peace, love, joy, and kindness. Jennifer describes honesty as one of the most foundational of the nine principles. “Truth matters to all of us,” she says. “And yet there is one person that we are often deceiving, continually, and that's ourselves. We tell ourselves that things are okay when they're not okay. We say yes, when we mean, no. We say, I'm fine. When actually we feel like weeping. And until we come into right relationship with ourselves and have an honest and authentic relationship with ourselves, it just means that we need to know what we really think about situations, what we feel about situations.”