The Quest for Salary and Satisfaction

Eileen McDargh has nothing against a healthy paycheck. In fact, she is quite in favor of the idea, for herself and anyone else.

But not at the expense of “living.” And living, according to the Laguna Niguel woman--and according to her new book, “How to Work for a Living and Still Be Free to Live” (Prentice-Hall, $9.95)--means balance: “acknowledging and celebrating the power we have to touch and claim all those areas of life: intellectual, professional, physical, material and spiritual.”

If the checkbook is healthy, but that life balance is missing, something needs to be changed, McDargh said--even though such change may affect that plump paycheck.

True success involves both “mastery” and “pleasure,” McDargh said. Mastery relates to work, with “your sense of accomplishment, using the talents you have”; pleasure, to relationships with those you love and with friends.

‘Golden Star of Work’

“I think (that) sometimes professionals get so activated to that golden star of work that they forget there are other parts of living,” McDargh said. Her advice: “Go where you’re aiming, but keep in mind that it won’t be enough when you get there.”

However, McDargh does not advocate vows of poverty. People who apparently have found balance include some of the rich and famous, she said. For instance, former “MASH” stars Alan Alda and Mike Farrell both have managed successful careers, loving marriages and community involvement, McDargh said. Actress Joanne Woodward is a success at home, in her profession and in her community.

Examples of less famous balancers are sprinkled through McDargh’s book. One of those is Huntington Beach’s Hazel Gaines.

Gaines, McDargh said, took over an international transportation company “at the age of 36, with eight employees and about $1.5 million in business.”

Ten years later, revenue hit $14 million. In rising to president of the company, Gaines left behind earlier posts within the firm as clerk, packer, secretary and sales representative, McDargh reported. She also divorced her husband.

But some years ago Gaines found a new love interest. “Within the last five years,” she told McDargh, “he’s changed and so have I. He left his yacht and million-dollar house and said, ‘What’s it for? All I want to do is to spend the rest of my life with you.’ He’s teaching me to let go. We need time, and now I’m starting to claim it. And I’m learning that my company will be better for it.”

For some, McDargh suggested, balance can be added to an existing life style, like “the executive who sleeps outside sometimes just to watch the stars or the general manager of a country club who slings his backpack across his shoulders and heads into the High Sierra for two weeks.”

For others, the added ingredient is spiritual. McDargh quotes psychotherapist Robert Wendorf of Laguna Niguel: “Before, my ego attempted to derive its sense of goodness solely from me: I am bright, I am nice, me, Robert. That’s the opposite from drawing my sense of goodness from that which is universal. . . . I am part of life. . . . How then can I be steward of talents for the planet? It’s a pretty big rearrangement.”

McDargh wrote about a senior executive at a Fortune 500 company who took early retirement to develop other interests, and about a pre-med student who decided her real interests would be satisfied by something much less involved: She became a manicurist.

“How to Work for a Living and Still Be Free to Live,” which is just hitting the local bookstores, is meant as a supportive book for those involved in that process of change, realizing that they “want more out of life than a paycheck,” McDargh said.

Many of the book’s stories are personal reminiscences by McDargh. Although she now seems satisfied to be head of her own McDargh Communications, through which she offers workshops, personal appearances and consulting services to such clients as Libbey Glass, Marriott Corp. and Allergan Pharmaceuticals, McDargh has done her share of shedding good jobs with financially rewarding paychecks.

Left Florida Job

Before moving to the West Coast in 1978, McDargh was in charge of marketing and public relations for a Florida resort and residential community. Shortly before she left, the company began a reorganization, she said. She had been “offered a good salary” if she would stay. But her marriage had just broken up, the job no longer was satisfying, and “I decided I needed a whole, brand-new everything.”

“I came out here,” she said, “with basically what would fit in my Camaro and with $2,000 in the bank.”

It took two weeks just to conquer the Southern California freeways, she said, laughing. But before long McDargh was on a new career track, this time in corporate communications with a national health-care management company.

Her success there led to an offer from a major Orange County public relations firm, and McDargh soon was an account executive whose clients included multinational companies.

And then, five years ago, she left that job to make another start.

“Something inside my heart didn’t feel right. . . . I just woke up one day and knew I needed to leave,” McDargh said.

“Life had as much gusto as stale beer,” she wrote in her book. To use her term, it was out of balance.

Part of the balance she added at that time was personal. There was a new marriage, which brought her a husband, management consultant Bill Elvins, and three stepchildren.

Part of the change was professional. She took a major gamble, starting her own firm, McDargh Communications. There would be a drop in income, at least at first, McDargh knew, but she would be in charge of her own career.

‘Lima Bean Book’

Many friends who called to congratulate her on the new firm had a question. “I was amazed at the number who wanted to do the same thing but couldn’t figure out how,” McDargh said.

And that, it turns out, was what helped launch McDargh on yet another career track, writing her book, to answer those questions. “This is a lima bean book,” she wrote in the introduction. “It has grown from the seed of my work experiences and research into a supportive guide for individuals seeking balance within their careers.”

But real success--real happiness--also means discovering and utilizing our individual “giftedness,” she said, “the unique talent we each have.”

That is when things begin to happen, she said.

“When we begin to truly uncover the unique ‘work’ which is ours alone to do, the universe is there to support the effort,” she wrote in her book.

“I admit it does sound all rather mysterious and magical, but I’ve personally and professionally seen too much to discount that reality. As soon as we begin to do that which energizes us and gives us meaning, a host of seemingly serendipitous people and things come to our aid.”

One proof of that notion, she suggested, is her own book. “I didn’t have an agent,” she said. “I wrote one query letter and got the publisher to say yes! . . . The book is here because it is supposed to be here.”

Not that such help from the universe does the whole job for you, McDargh said. She cites some of her own experience with the book as an example of that, too.

While the beginning was so fast and simple that she was “petrified”--she had yet to write the first word of text when she got her go-ahead--the publishing world soon showed itself to be full of pitfalls. Prentice-Hall, her publisher, was sold to Simon and Schuster, and the division that had approved her project was eliminated. Staff members who had spoken of plans for a splashy poster for the upcoming American Booksellers Assn. convention and for other promotion suddenly were gone.

Fearing her project was in danger of falling through the cracks, McDargh made it a personal mission to get the book on its way to consumers. She maneuvered her way into the ABA convention in San Francisco last spring, pushing her way up to the publisher’s representatives. Simon and Schuster assured her that they would support the book.

Still, she said, she has found that “if your name’s not Norman Mailer,” a lot of the work of book promotion falls right back on the author. McDargh enlisted her communications skills to help sell it.

Since then, she has had the satisfaction of a book-signing party at the B. Dalton store in South Coast Plaza, she has seen members of a Rotary Club she addressed snap up 28 copies of the book, and Marriner’s Bookstore in Laguna Beach reported selling 50 books simply through a window display.

Brisk Business

And there has been a satisfying show of interest among her McDargh Communications clients. Requests for workshops and speeches often specify “the book” as the preferred subject.

While writing the book and getting it published, her own life slipped somewhat out of balance, McDargh admitted. But now she’s working on that, too, sharing her time among the book promotion, McDargh Communications and her personal life.

Writing a book--even publishing a book--does not necessarily do a lot for the paycheck, she said, but the response among readers has added to the balance in her own life:

“It has been good for my heart.”