Transcript

 

Conflict Management Strategies for Leaders

---

Here to read instead of watch? Click through the headings to a section of the full transcript, or scroll away!

• How to Show You Still Have Ambition as a New Parent Returning to Work
• What is the “Default Parent” and How Does It Impact Your Career?

• How to Delegate and Set Boundaries at Work as a Parent (With Examples of Language to Use!)
• How to Think About Career Strategy as Your Child Grows
• Closing Thoughts from Our Panelists

Edited, for length and clarity

Holly - So, I'm really excited to have you all here today for this wonderful discussion about career strategy for ambitious parents. We've got three amazing folks who have some really interesting viewpoints that I'm looking forward to sharing with all of you.

I want to quickly acknowledge that WIMDI is largely run out of the land of the Squamish, the Musqueam and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations. I'm very grateful to live and build my life here, and most of our WIMDI volunteers are also located in this same area.

I'm going to get all of our speakers to go around and introduce yourself, and I'd love it if you could tell me a little bit about who you are, what you do, and then, give us a brief overview of what your career journey has been up until this point, and in particular, how that's interacted with your lives as parents.

Samantha - Hi, everybody, good afternoon, I'm Sam Wallace, I'm the founder of re-mom, re-mom stands for "reinventing motherhood".

We're an organisation that works directly with corporations to build systems to protect, support and keep working mothers in the workforce, and we do that by supporting the maternity transition, both as women exit and return to the workforce after maternity leave.

Part of those maternity management systems is offering coaching to working mothers, so they also have the opportunity to shape the systems in the home to support them and their careers as well.

In terms of my personal life, I am a mom, I've got two kids, an 11-year-old daughter and a four-year-old son, quite the age gap.

My parenting journey was very different with each of those, and as a result of the learning that it took between the seven years of having those two children, re-mom came about because I realised a lot of the struggle around having my first child was around the working parenthood narrative and how I wasn't quite fitting in that box.

I suspect many of you may feel that way as well, as it seems to be a very pervasive issue for working mothers today.

I live just outside of Toronto here in Canada, and my career prior to running re-mom was largely in the project management, transformation and change management world.

I did that very same line of work across multiple industries spanning from financial services to tech and to pharmaceuticals, as well as a couple of other short stints in marketing and agency life.

re-mom's been around for three years and I've stepped full-time into the role just this year, and I'm dedicating myself fully to growing the business and making a larger impact for working mothers everywhere, and I'm excited to be here. Thanks for having me, WIMDI.

Zeba - Great to be here and welcome, everybody, to the conversation. I'm a technology consulting leader at EY and a founder of Motherhood by Design.

That was really born through the experience and what I was experiencing as a mom coming back to work.

I now have a six-year-old daughter and it took me a while to understand the complexities of coming back to work, how that shifts and changes, and why we're not the same coming back.

So that's where I spend a lot of time now, coaching individuals, speaking about it, writing about it.

My whole goal and intention here is to spread that knowledge and some of the practical examples we're going to talk about today, and how to make some of this real for parents who have very less time in their days to actually spend time on education and getting ready for this role.

Throughout my career, I've been within the technology space, I've seen ups and downs of how technology is just evolving and I'm just super excited in this age and era of AI to really bring that to parents and hopefully make their lives a little better too, so I'm really excited for this conversation and sharing what I do, and some practical examples there.

Jenny - Hi, everyone, so wonderful to be here with you all, I am based in Missoula, Montana, and I am currently in an interesting career transition right now.

I spent 15 years in tech with a quick stint in management consulting, and I was primarily on the customer-facing side, running customer success teams.

Then I transitioned into HR leadership and I was a former HR executive at my last startup, and it was really interesting. I had grown in my career path as an HR leader after having my first child, my career had accelerated after having my first child, I was promoted from director to VP to senior vice president.

Then, when I was pregnant with my second child, as the HR leader, I was tasked to run layoffs, and by the time I was seven months pregnant, I was tasked to run my third layoff and I really got to this point where I just had no tolerance.

I was just reflecting on my purpose for being in an HR role, which is to develop people and to help them grow into their zone of genius and thrive at work, yet I found myself in a role where I was running layoffs and cutting jobs.

It was this inflection point where I had to soul-search and really think through, in this season of life, what do I want for myself and my family? When I came back from maternity leave, it was very clear to me that this wasn't my home anymore, I'd been at that startup for six-and-a-half years.

I decided to start my own company and work for myself, that's where Chief Mama Officer was born out of and it was expanding my coaching practise that I had always had as a side hustle, I coach founder and executive moms.

Oftentimes, the topics are around integrating work and life, a lot of the times, it's around some of the dynamics that they're facing with their founding teams and interpersonal dynamics in the workplace.

It's honestly been a humbling and challenging experience running my own business the past year-and-a-half, especially having my whole identity was in startups and corporate for 15 years.

I’ve starting working on something new and I am helping steward a micro-school that is designed for the post-AI world, it's the intersection of AI for early-age education.

I'm actually opening up a micro-school campus here in my hometown in Missoula for kindergarten, first grade, and I'm also working with other founding families in different cities like San Francisco and Berkeley, possibly Bozeman, Montana, Portland, Oregon.

It's really exciting to see the intersection of my career converge right now and have this opportunity to build a school for my son, who is five years old, and then, my daughter is two, it's a really timely conversation, thanks for having me, Holly.

How to Show You Still Have Ambition as a New Parent Returning to Work

H - Something I hear a lot about in my own coaching practise and folks in the WIMDI community talk about, is this idea that when you're in that early stage of becoming a parent.

Maybe you've gone on leave when a kid is born, and then, you're coming back to work, how to really show your workplace that you still have that same ambition that you had before.

Or at least still have any ambition because sometimes, the workplace will just assume, "Oh, they don't want to do anything, they want to just be put out to pasture and, you know, transition into the stay-at-home mom life, and never take on any really exciting work."

I want to have a picture from you all about what are the sort of actions or conversations that you can have as you're coming back off of a leave to set up the expectation that you still want to have an exciting career, what does that look like?

J - Yeah, I'll go back in time, it was 2021 and I had a pandemic baby. Luckily and gratefully, I had 16 weeks of maternity leave. I actually went back to work early, at 12 weeks or 13 weeks because I was so excited to continue to contribute to the company.

I think I had made a mistake and I attended the company virtual retreat kick-off and I was just felt like, "Actually, I have momentum now, I want to keep going."

I was able to take the rest of the leave by the time my son turned one, so I took it in two different parts, but when I came back from leave I was still so excited about the job, so excited about the company, and it turned out that my manager was exiting the company at the time that I was coming back in.

We all reported to our chief people officer, a month went by and the team was a wreck, it was just disorganised and I noticed that there was a huge opportunity for me to step up.

Obviously, I was sleep-deprived, it was four months postpartum, just you know, just sort of operating from maybe a quarter-cup filled, and at the same time, it was the mission of the company and my job that really excited me to continue to contribute.

So I pitched and advocated for myself having seen this business gap of, "Hey, what would it look like if I back-filled my manager's VP role? What would it look like if I were to support you on growing and scaling this team, and supporting our business?"

It took some self-advocacy in the moment of identifying what the business need was and what the gaps were, and how I could help fill it and being proactive about it, that got me the job really.

I think part of the impetus too was that there were two of my peers who were being promoted from director to VP, and the job I was offered was a senior director role.

I had to advocate for myself and say, "Hey, I have been demonstrating the competencies of a VP for the past two years that I've been at this company, yet I was in a director role and I have been operating above and beyond," right?

It was probably one of the greatest opportunities for me to just make sure, one, I was speaking to the results that I've accomplished for the business, and it wasn't coming from a place of being overly confident.

But it was, these are facts of what I've helped drive for the company and here's a gap that needs resolution.

H - Something I love about that, Jennie, is so often, when we think about these conversations, we think about it as going and asking permission or asking, "Where do you think I can fit?"

You did something here that I think is really amazing, and it works whether you're coming back from leave or whether you're just trying to move into a new role at any time in your career, which is to spot a gap that the business needs filled, and then, make a proposal for how you can do it, right?

Really advocate for the value you can create in that role, and I think that's a really good way to think about it coming back in, to sort of put that strategic lens on and say, you know, "Where can I provide a really good opportunity for this company?" Not to do a favour for me, but to get an amazing result.

Zeba, what do you have to say?

Z - That's a great, great story, and I just want to underline something before we move on, is that the clarity in your ask is the critical thing here, right? How clearly are you asked for what you want and what your ambition is.

My story was slightly different, and what I've seen a lot in consulting is it's a very high-pressure job, so when I went out, I had great reviews, great feedback, and I'm doing really well. My practise lead was super excited, "She's coming back," but I had a new manager.

The new manager I'd never worked with, and they just said, "Oh, I don't see that output and I don't know what..." and "I mean, I've heard so much about you, but I don't see it,"
He actually said that, which is strange, but... (laughs)

I was in the phase where I'm already questioning whether I'll be able to do this, and sleep-deprived and not having enough hours to even think about myself, right?

So, then I thought, "Maybe, yeah, he's right, yeah, I don't think I'm ready for this, I don't think I can do this."

My daughter was born in May 2020 just at the beginning of everything, you know, I was a pandemic mom, I feel like there should be a cohort of pandemic moms.

I went through this whole cycle of getting help and understanding, and going through therapy as to what is wrong with me, what just happened to me? This was almost a year after the birth and just going through the cycles of emotions.

One of the best tools that I got out of therapy was really talking to myself and giving myself that confidence back, why did I get that last promotion before birth? What was the feedback? How was I performing? What was my level of performance?

That really helped me build that confidence back that there is a reason why I'm here, there's a reason why they want me on the team, right? And it's not that I have lost it all of a sudden, it's still there, we just need to believe in it and we just need to work from it.

I thought that was such a good tool that my therapist shared with me that anybody I coach or anybody I work with, I always do that with them, "Don't worry about what the biases in other humans are talking about that women can't do or new moms are".

We don't have to believe in that, just start to rebuild where you came from and why you're here, so that definitely has been very helpful.

H - Yeah, that's a really good insight to not just convince the people out there, but to really do the work internally, to remember who you are because you go through such really big changes in that time.

Your whole life has turned upside down in every way, what part remains untouched? None of it, you know?

It's really important to be able to grab onto that foothold and remember, "Yes, all this change is happening, but fundamentally, I still have all these amazing skills, I still create all these amazing things and I'll find a way to do that too from here, I just have to,"

Make sure you have faith in that because if you don't, somebody else isn't going to find that faith for you.

What is the "Default Parent" and How Does It Impact Your Career?

So, Sam, we've spent some time a little bit talking about this idea of the default parent.

Some of you in the room I'm sure will be nodding your heads, knowing what that means, and for anybody that isn't familiar with that term, that's this idea that quite often, women, female-presenting, or assigned-female-at-birth partners are viewed as the default or sometimes only parent that is worth engaging with.

You'll be the first person that the school calls when the kid is sick and needs to be picked up, people will assume that your partner is babysitting instead of just parenting, you end up being the first person on call, the keeper of the knowledge, the default parent at all times, both within your household and according to everybody that orbits around you in your life that interacts with you as a parent.

And so, Sam, I know this is a big focus of your work, this default parenting concept, and I want to hear what your thoughts are on what the career effects can be from being viewed as the default parent, and then, what can you do if you want to avoid that or if you're already stuck there yourself?

S - It's a great question, I think we operate in a work system where sometimes, we take for granted that there is a direct correlation between being a default parent and identifying as a default parent, with the detrimental effect that has and that belief system has on our actual careers and in the workplaces we work at.

The way that I'll tie it all together is a term called the motherhood penalty. I'm not sure who here has heard of that term, but essentially, what the motherhood penalty is, it's an inherent bias that exists in many, in, I would say, most workplaces today that deem working mothers or mothers in general as less capable, less ready for leadership, less promotability and less worthy of being equally paid for the same amount of work than non-mother counterparts or non-parent counterparts in the workplace.

The reason that the motherhood penalty persists in our workplaces is because default parenting is so widely accepted and assumed to rest on the shoulders of the woman or woman-identifying person in a relationship.

To answer your question, it's been studied over and over again, there are actual surveys and actual data behind this. It says the default parenting status, so what goes on in your home, directly relates to how the world views you in your workplace and directly contributes to things like the gender pay gap and whether or not you are up for that promotion versus someone who's not a mother.

It's very real, it definitely has direct impact. Now, what you can do about it is something that re-mom holds very near and dear to our hearts, so at re-mom, we have a programme called Harmony School.

It's dedicated to dismantling default parenting, that's all the programme does, we work directly with couples to equitize the home, meaning you take all the duties that require the default parent's time and attention.

So, things like project management of the home, all things around the kids and you split that equally amongst the partners in the home and any other contributing adults.

Whether there's in-laws, if you have a nanny, whoever contributes to the household management and the childcare management, we then build an equitable split of duties so that it frees up time and energetic capacity for the mother so she can apply herself in an equitable fashion in the workplace.

Until we can tackle default parenting in the home, we are always going to have that motherhood penalty persist, because the bias of default parenting is what carries and supports the motherhood penalty.

There's absolutely something you can do about it, whether it's through Harmony School or not, even just shifting the mindset of your role as a working mother, and just being cognizant that what you do in the home and how you operate in the home has a direct impact to how you show up in the workplace is a good starting point.

H - I think when you become a parent, I think this becomes even more so the case, but I've seen over and over again over the years in my own coaching practise how the way that household responsibilities are set up has a huge effect on how far my clients are able to go in their career and what they're able to do about it.

I remember years ago, having this call with a woman who said she'd like to become a CEO, but she can't because her husband's never learned how to cook. She's said, "He's never going to learn, we're in our 50s, it's just not going to happen, and so, as a result, I'm going to stay here at the VP level until I retire."

And that's one discussion, but one of many, that I've had over the years. It's really, really important to have those conversations at home.

I mean, hell, not that she's the feminist ideal or anything, but Sheryl Sandberg even talked a long time ago in "Lean In" about, and later on in her book, which I can't remember what the second one was called, about how much of an effect it had on her that she had a supportive partner at home that effectively was a stay-at-home, not parent, but spouse.

It's really important to set yourself up for success there.

S - At the end of the day, if we want to challenge how the world perceives us and our capability, we must also challenge the systems in our home that perpetuate those biases, they're hand-in-hand, they're related.

For far too long, we've separated home and work, and what I see my duty and all of our duties to do is to show just how integrated they are and challenging them from as many fronts as we possibly can.

How to Delegate and Set Boundaries at Work as a Parent (With Examples of Language to Use!)

H - On a similar note and talking a little more about the workplace, I want to talk a little bit about the sort of combination of delegation, saying, "No," setting boundaries, being able to negotiate flexibility, all of these sort of things come in as concepts to help manage the time demands that show up when you're a parent.

Because you have pickup you've got to manage and maybe you have a little kid that needs your attention in the middle of the day if you're working from home as so many of us did in the pandemic.

I would really love to hear, Zeba, and then, Jennie, about what do you think the do's and don'ts are for delegating, setting boundaries, saying, "No," and negotiating flexibility in the workplace that set you up for success or maybe put you into a more tricky situation?

Z - So I'll start with the dos, right? I think one thing I have learned over the years is delegation especially, you have to be a delegation master when you want to manage time.

There is going to be limited time that nobody can change, you have to be there at the pickup, you have to be there at the drop-off, you have to take care of those things, right? There's just no way around it, we can't have extra 20 minutes on the call just because, that doesn't exist anymore.

I have honestly become extremely good at delegation, and that has come with practise. Just having the ability to release the control, which is super, super hard and it's a skill that comes with practice.

I'd suggest starting with smaller tasks, if you have to submit a status report every day, 5:00 PM, but you have to go pick up your daughter or son 4:30, try to delegate one simple task of sending the email to your teammate,

Starting with small tasks, and then, believing that you could build a system within the workplace to be able to do that. Delegation is going to take you places so that's something you should always practise.

The other thing I really learned was setting boundaries, and this really came about after pandemic, where early morning calls become a norm. It's fine to have a call at 6:00, 6:30 because nobody's travelling to work anymore, so it just became so normal.

When I came back from maternity, I was like, "What is happening?" There's no way I can join a call at 7:00 AM, that's just not practical. I just blocked my calendar for the morning hours and the evening hours because that's when I'm working, or preparing my child for daycare, or picking her up, basic things.

But then, I also started sharing more about what's happening in my personal life. Not overly exaggerate details, but just to share that it's so nice when I go pick her up from daycare, she gives me a big hug, and everyone starts connecting with you as a human being and not as a mom who's trying to make excuses.

So then, whenever I had to step away, I didn't have to make any excuses, I just said, "I need to go pick her up," and everybody just knew that "Oh, she goes to daycare, this is this, this is happening, this is pickup time."

It just became very normal and part of the routine, which was fine, and even today, I do not take calls after 5:00 PM. We're not saving lives in any capacity, so it doesn't matter…

H - If there's any doctors in the room, it might be different, but, (laughs)

Z - It might be different, but “Sure, this presentation can wait".

H - I love both of the things that you said there because when you're sharing a little bit about the big hug you get when you do the pickup and stuff like that, it's like a little slice of cake, it's not just, "Oh, there's this constraint on the schedule."

At least for me, when I hear about the big hug, I imagine it, I feel a little bit of that joy myself, and now, when you're saying, "I’ve got to go," I think, "Oh, yeah, get the hug, it feels good," you know?

You get people a bit invested, I think that's really smart, and the delegation thing, I think it's one of these amazing opportunities that comes with parenting because you're really forced to work on that, you just don't have a choice like you said.

I see so many leaders, even in the C-suite, who are not masters of this at all and who are still working on this. As a result, they're jumping in, they're playing superhero, they're doing too much for their teams, they're flying all over the country, and they have no life.

And because they've never had that hard constraint or they've never placed it themselves to force them to really prune and go, "This gets delegated, this gets delegated, I'm going to be happy with this result or I'm going to train this person better so I can get the result I want," their life becomes a mess.

So, I think there's this actually amazing opportunity to leverage in parenting in getting really good at that.

And it's, I think, one of the coolest ways to build your skills to make you more senior through this kind of thing, which I love, thank you.

Z - 100%, I think being a parent makes you a better leader. I think there's so many things you learn, explaining things simply to a toddler, you learn how to talk to CEOs better, for sure.

H - Yeah, very cool, all right, Jennie, let's hear your thoughts on this.

J - Yeah, I loved how you equated delegating as pruning, Holly, I've never had that metaphor before and I just, like, see it, you're literally pruning plants. Less is more.

I think to your point, Zeba, the whole part of it is looking within yourself and understanding, "Why do I need to have control of certain things or needing things to be a certain way?" Definitely what gets in the way of people feeling comfortable with delegation.

There is this element of self-examination, "What is it about control or perfection that I want it to be done in a certain way as long as the outcome is the same."
The dishes are washed or this deliverable is done, the person might have a different process. So just coming to terms with that.

I agree as well, Zeba, around boundaries. I train organisations on how to set effective boundaries so that they can create more time and capacity for themselves and taking care of themselves.

The thing that gets in the way of setting boundaries is fear and guilt. What I have shared with organisations is that with the fear and guilt, it's an inquiry around what are you actually afraid is going to happen if you are to set a boundary?

Is that fear or guilt you experience based on evidence, or is it a story that you're telling yourself? For guilt specifically, it tells us that we're violating an expectation, but the question here is whose expectation?

Oftentimes, once someone has the cognizance or the awareness that, "Oh, okay, the fear was keeping me safe, or the guilt is keeping me safe or keeping me small, holding me back from setting boundaries or delegating," that's when they realise, "Oh, okay, actually, that was a narrative and story, and I can actually set this boundary and just test it." It's an experiment, stick with it.

The key aspects to setting boundary, and the framework that I teach is three steps, clarifying the boundary that you want to set, why is this important to you that you set this specific boundary?

The second step is to communicate what that boundary is, stating them directly, kindly, without blame, and then, the third step is to commit, to follow through consistently and practise self-compassion when guilt does arise.

There are some best practises in terms of communication, and I'll say specifically in the workplace, best practise is to frame the boundary as enabling better performance, not reducing commitment.

Then, connecting to outcomes that leadership cares about, so whatever metric that you're tracking around quality or customer satisfaction, being able to connect that boundary to the business outcomes.

Here’s a couple of specific examples for communication, best practises of what not to say when you set a boundary, "I'm sorry, but, you know, I need to leave at 3:00," or, "I know this is asking a lot, I need to log off at 3:00, you know, if it's really necessary, I guess I could take on that project and..." Or, "I'm just too tired, stressed, overwhelmed to take that on,"

What to say instead is, "I've been thinking about how to be most effective in this role," or, "This will allow me to have the greatest impact on the team or our goals," or, "I'm committed to this business outcome and here's how I can best deliver that," or, "I want to be in this role, company for the long-term and this approach makes that possible,"

You can notice the nuances there. You're coming from a place of, "I'm here to enable better performance for the company, and this is how I can best do it."

H - I love this, Jennie, it's about framing it as enabling a win, creating the outcome that they want, not about setting a limit, even if it is also setting a limit, it's really showing them what they get out of it as opposed to what they lose out of it, I think that's amazing. Amazing. Love it.

How to Think About Career Strategy as Your Child Grows

I want to talk about how you think about career strategy as your kids go through their various growth stages, from being a baby, to being a toddler, to getting into elementary school, to moving into their teen years, even as they go off as new fledglings trying to learn how to fly past that point, how does the way you think about career and your career strategy change over those eras?

S - I call them seasons, so I can start there. Motherhood is super seasonal, we understand that if we're mothers, right? Like Holly just said, you have your infant years, your toddler years, your small children, your big children, teens, and then, eventually, empty-nesters.

One of the key things that I think is important for us to really be able to understand and know is that while it feels heavy in whatever chapter or season you're in right now, zooming out and seeing your career as one long, expansive ebb and flow of who you are and what you are capable of over the years and throughout the seasons is a much more friendly way to look at your impact, your growth and the ways that you've succeeded time and time again.

As opposed to sitting in the, let's say, toddler years and feeling like the next five years are really heavy and awful because I can't go for that promotion because right now, my physical time is limited or I got passed up on that promotion because the motherhood penalty was really strong in my workplace and they didn't even ask me or consult me because they assumed that I was going to have a second or third child in the next two years.

Those things are very real examples that I hear from my clients by the way, but again, the mentality of the seasonality and the ability to zoom out and just recognise that while each specific season might require something different from you.

So younger years might require more of your time and physical energy, and leaving you super fatigued, and the older years might require more of your mental capacity because of social situations that you're helping them through or you're helping your child navigate learning how to be a teen, and the hormonal shifts and all those different things.

There's going to be different requirements of you. So, recognising what you can give and contribute to your overall zoomed-out career over the span of an average 40-year career is a much more friendly and valuable way to look at how you can approach your career.

Then, from a practical perspective, I do an exercise as part of our coaching practise with the working moms we work with, where we do a timeline exercise and draw circles around when your children are specific seasons, and around those circles, you identify, "Well, what can I do that feels really good to me in each season for my career."

Right now, I mentioned I have an 11-year-old and I also have a four-year-old, I'm smack-dab in the middle of two very different seasons, it's a very confusing time for me right now.

I am a business owner though, and that means I'm able to apply myself according to how I'm feeling at any given day and according to what my children need from me because they need very different things from me in their phases right now.

Now, what does that mean from a success perspective? Success to me just might look like setting up a business and getting a couple clients this year, and that's it. Being able to drop the kids off and pick them up from school every day.

What success looks like in maybe five years might be radically different, maybe it's scaling to a massive team, maybe it's embedding myself into the top five banks here in Canada, whatever that goal is might look very today, but it doesn't mean I'm no less successful today than I will be in five to 10 years.

I think taking that zoomed-out look overall at your career and your life timeline is incredibly valuable, it puts things into a little bit better perspective.

H - The thing that we always forget is whatever we're reaping now, we were sowing before. It takes time to grow these things, and in particular I think the perspective of somebody who started a business makes this really crystal-clear because I went through that starting my own business when WIMDI got going back in the day.

The early days of WIMDI, whatever we think a glamorous business owner life is, it was not that, let me tell you, it was, "I have one client, I'm a winner!"

That's how it gets started, just like how your very first job, what were you doing? Data entry probably, but data entry taught you skills that you needed later on down the line, right?

And so, it's about what you're building for the long run as you go, not just what's happening now.

S - One more thing I'll add is letting go of that upward linear trajectory model of what career success looks like, as a mother, as a human, I'm just going to say flat out, as humans, it doesn't look like that.

We may have been sold a dream that it does look like that, and we may think that the C-suite members of the corporation we work at went on this upward trajectory from 24 years old up until however old they are today.

Chances are if you really dig, it's not like that at all, and so, I think embracing the very jagged loop-de-loop look of what your career trajectory will look like is critical, you must, in order to succeed in the long run, let go of that linear trajectory.

Z - I definitely agree with looking at the bigger picture. And I think what typically happens in reality is, as I was sharing my example, nobody's really prepared you that this is what's going to happen.

Especially the first time around, when you have your child and you just say, "Okay, I'll take the four months off and I come back, and then, like, boop-boop, nothing has changed or shifted," right?

I think that is what's causing this whole big gap between expectations versus reality of what happens to you. All of the things that are happening inside your body, inside your mind.

What I'd suggest is as you're thinking of this career path, one, yes, definitely looking at the big picture, but then, setting expectations for yourself, like resetting your own expectations internally to say it's okay that right after you come back, you may not be up for promotion right away.

That is fine because you have literally gone through a miracle of life, giving birth, it's not easy and you have a human in your life now.

I think a lot of work is around setting expectations at each stage of your child's life and what your family needs, like Sam was explaining. What your family needs and what do you need in that phase of life to then align, "Okay, what, where is it that I can really press that pedal on my career versus push that brake for a little bit?"

I think a lot of what I work with, the people I coach, and what I went through myself was just around the setting expectations of that phase of life you're in.

H - I think it's really important to think about what's reasonable, and fair, and do-able by you. What can you do to make this livable and enjoyable for yourself, not just a straight-up shot to some narrative of success you're supposed to have?

And I think it's really important as well, Zeba, that you're including this in those discussions you’re having about where can I put brakes on, where can I put accelerators on?

As you're having those conversations at home in particular, really have a good think about what Sam was talking about earlier with the default parent. It's easy in those early phases to naturally accelerate the non-default parent's role and naturally decelerate the default parent's role.

There will be places where that does make sense and is the right move, and there will also be places where you'd be surprised how much that can shift.

I think it’s important to come at that, not just from what's the default, what's the easy way to see this, but how can I really make this work for me so that when I'm building that long-term career picture, I've got the things I want to have in the mix by the time five, six years rolls around.

Closing Thoughts from Our Panelists

S - You're allowed to prioritise your career, I don't think we tell each other that enough as mothers that you are allowed to prioritise your career, no one's binding you to anything other than that.

You've worked hard to get here, and I would encourage you to continue. The reason being is if we ever want to change the narrative of what working motherhood looks like, we need to be at those decision-making tables, we need to be leaders in this space, we can't be relying on non-mothers to make decisions for mothers.

So, I would encourage you to stay there, keep working.

Z - My only advice would be to trust your gut. You have had a successful career so far, you're ambitious, you want to build something, if something doesn't feel right, don't do it, if something feels right, go for it. Just trust your gut.

I wish I got that advice as a new mom and I really hope that you take that away from this conversation and start believing in yourself.

J - Believe that being a working mother, the greatest skill that you can have is energy management. Meaning that, obviously, you're pouring your energy into your family, into your work and there's an opportunity to pour energy back into yourself.

So, getting crystal-clear on what your values are in this season of life, what you want to prioritise, whether it's flexibility, freedom, building wealth, whatever it is, and just get crystal clear on that and have that be your North Star.

H - Before we head out, can we just quickly tell these folks if they have loved you, loved what you have to say, maybe someone has a question and they want to get in touch with you? What do they hire you for? Where do they find you?

J - Feel free to add me on LinkedIn, reach out via DM, happy to connect, and to find out more about my coaching practise, it's on chiefmamaofficer.com.

S - You can find me on LinkedIn or at re-mom.com, that's my website, and I love emails, I know that's a weird thing to say 'because we have thousands of emails a day, but I really do love them.

H - We're very different, Sam.

S - I think it's a great form of communication, moreso than instant message in my mind, samantha@re-mom.com, I would love your feedback, any questions you have for me or anything that I mentioned today, you want to dig deeper 'because I can talk about this for hours, I'd love to connect, but thank you, it was great meeting you

Z - Feel free to reach out, you can connect with me on LinkedIn, reach out to me, my website link is on my LinkedIn page so you can get there and just read about what I do, and happy to connect with some of you there.

H - All right, well, thank you to the three of you, this has been a wonderful conversation full of really great practical strategies that folks can take on, I know I've got new things I've written down and a couple of frameworks that I'm going to be using for myself and with my clients, so I really thank all of you for coming here today and having this chat with us.