March 26, 2023

Every time I tell myself I might take a week off from writing a column, something like this happens.

“American teen girls are in crisis: Suicide, violence and mental health,” read the headline of this Washington Post piece I stumbled on as the week wrapped up.

It reported on recent federal research that found nearly one in three high school girls said they had considered suicide, which represented a 60 percent increase in the past decade.

“Nearly 14 percent had been forced to have sex,” the article said. “About 6 in 10 girls were so persistently sad or hopeless they stopped regular activities.”

“It’s alarming,” Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said in the story. “But as a father of a 16-year-old and 19-year-old, I hear about it. It’s real. I think students know what’s going on. I think sometimes the adults are just now realizing how serious it is.”

The incredibly sad irony, as noted in the piece by Lisa Damour, a clinical psychologist and author of “The Emotional Lives of Teenagers,” is that we are raising the best-behaved generation of teenagers on record. They drive with seat belts, they smoke less, they have less sex, they wear helmets.”

And yet, so many of them are dealing with such big, real, adult struggles.

I thought about them as I reflected back on my own week, which included sitting on a panel at the Sales & Marketing Executives’ annual Women in Business event. More than 1,200 women attended at some point during the daylong event. My fellow panelists and I were amazed at how many came to listen to us talk about the highs and lows of our business journeys.

Nearly every woman in attendance, I’m guessing, came because she hoped to improve something for herself in some way. Maybe it was finding motivation, or taking away tips in a certain area of her work or personal life, or meeting that person who might become a valuable professional connection.

Our panel included four local business owners, and we covered a bit of everything — what we did well in our business and what we would do over, what reality shows like “Shark Tank” miss about actually being an entrepreneur and what’s next for our businesses.

But, like most events of this nature, we didn’t all get to every question, and I left without saying something I had hoped to — so I suppose it was meant for this column instead.

One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned both as a business owner and in covering them is that there is no universal definition of success. Not even close.

Of course, there are indicators. Revenue, net income, employee count, number of locations — they all help measure success in certain ways. But they never tell the whole story. For any of us in business, it’s easy, maybe tempting, to compare ourselves to others. Same goes for within your own workplace, neighborhood, family or friend group.

But success isn’t universally measured any of those places either. Part of the journey is in figuring out how it’s measured, uniquely, for you. We all inherently have our own ruler to measure success; we just need to remember to use it as we continually seek that self-improvement.

This is far from an issue only for women — and, let’s face it, men. It’s pronounced for girls too.

Jean Twenge, a psychology professor at San Diego State University and author of the book “iGen,” said that in the same Washington Post piece that “increases in most measures of poor mental health in the past decade were more pronounced for girls than boys.”

She noted that digital media has displaced the face-to-face time teens once had with friends and that teens often don’t get enough sleep. Adding to those detrimental influences are the hours teens spend scrolling social media. For girls, she said, this often means “comparing your body and your life to others and feeling that you come up wanting.”

I suspect many who are no longer girls can relate to that, too, but add to it the insecurity and immaturity of a teenager and you get the mental health crisis some of today’s teens are experiencing.

I think about them, years from now, maybe sitting in the audience of an event like the Women in Business program. What type of insecurity or anxiety might they carry with their future selves if their teen years are this isolating? “Success” in high school looks different from success in business, but the idea that it is calibrated uniquely to each individual is one that I think needs to be discussed more often. Instead, too many of us are barraged by artificial comparisons and unrealistic expectations — at an increasingly young age.

The world can put a lot of pressure on us if we let it — to look or act a certain way or desire certain achievements because that’s what we’re “supposed” to do. But when we encourage ourselves and others to look and listen inward about what truly fulfills our unique needs, we take a big step toward true success.

Jodi’s Journal: At 6-year business mark, media industry experiences rapid change