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Hi there 👋🏽

I always found going to a wedding as an adult fun.

Going to a wedding as an adult with your own kids is also a different kind of fun. The kind of fun that going skydiving is. It is an extreme sport. Most people know that some people find it fun. You understand that people do it, you find it crazy that someone you know did it and maybe would want to do it once too. It does not look fun but it certainly makes for great story that a future you can be nostalgic about.

I have been MIA for the last few weeks because I have been in the midst of the latter kind of fun and am just catching my breath after attending (& hosting!) two weddings in my family.

Back in Toronto my plan is to enjoy an easy slow summer, the newsletter will pop in sporadically into your inbox before getting back to the regular cadence this fall.

☕ Now, on to today’s coffee chat…

Meet Quinn Emmett

Quinn is a screenwriter, investor, father of three small humans, and the founder, writer, and host at Important, Not Important: science for people who give a shit.

He is a speaker and advisor to policymakers and business leaders, and his critically-acclaimed newsletter and podcast help you think deeply and act decisively about the world's make or break science news, from climate to COVID, heat to hunger, and agriculture to AI ethics.

His work is consumed on a weekly basis by senators and scientists, investors and doctors, students and CEO's, best-selling fiction writers and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists.

Below is my conversation with Quinn which …

**Note: this conversation was recorded some time back, so some things may have changed since then**

Please tell us a little bit about yourself

My name is Quinn Emmett. I feel like I have 12 jobs sometimes …. all jobs that I work hard at, but I’m privileged to have. Being born a white man in America comes with a lot of cheat codes, basically, that enable you to do things that a lot of other folks have to either work much harder to get their foot in the door on, or to succeed at in some way. So I’m very lucky to have those things, to have done a number of jobs. I worked for the Financial Times. I worked for ESPN and ABC Sports for a while. I’ve done a bunch of digital consulting and philanthropic stuff. I do some angel investing for clean fuel, clean food, clean energy.

My wife, Dana Fox, is a screenwriter. She’s been doing it much longer than I have. She didn’t quite bounce around like I did, and she encouraged me to do so, and I started to do that. It was going well, and it’s still going well, which is fun most of the time. Again, you know, a job that I’m lucky to be able to do … certainly the first years were very much supported by my wife’s hard work and her head start on that stuff. So she was very generous with her support and her time. That’s just who she is as a human, whether it’s to me or anyone else in our life.

So I continued to work at that, and then I started this…like you were saying, a small side project, little passion project called it Important, Not Important. And the original idea - it was literally just like a homepage, and there were these “important” headlines, which were: hey, these are the important headlines of things you kind of missed this week. And then there was the “not important” stuff… all the crazy tabloid stuff. The idea was: hey, these are the momentous things, the paradigm-shifting things, the really good and the really not-so-good that we should all be paying attention to in some way. And it was just sort of a static website, and I updated it here and there… it wasn’t much, and I didn’t spend too much time on it.

And then some friends who were really interested in it and loved the idea encouraged me to spend a little more time on it. So I turned it into a very basic newsletter…just a plain-text newsletter once a week, free and I sent it to some friends and family and some folks in government and business and science and things like that, just saying: hey, this seems to be the things that are moving the needle, the undercurrents - whether it’s climate change, or war, or antibiotics, or whatever it might have been. And this is kind of the biggest news of what happened with those things this week, culled from sort of the most reputable firsthand or media sources. And it kind of took off, which was cool…among friends, sort of friends of friends, friends of friends of friends, going out. I didn’t do anything to try and grow it.

And it became something that I think people really appreciated, in the sense that stuff started to be harder to keep up with as more of those things came to the fore, but also as the media started to pay more attention to those things. And so we tried to do the job of saying: hey, I know it’s a lot, but if you just want to pay attention to these things … if you want to just read this in 10 minutes on a Friday … we’re going to give you the curated version of really the most important stuff you need to keep tabs on. And a lot of this stuff wasn’t sort of breaking news, in that it’s something new, because for instance, the climate crisis has been going on for 30 years. You know, antibiotics resistance has been building up, whether it’s war, space, sea level rise, urban heat, whatever they are these things are there. It’s just that we have more data, more people are paying attention, there’s better writing, there’s more journalism. So it was more updates on those things and how they’re moving.

And then what we really transitioned it to was that, but also answering the question I feel like I would get in the back of an Uber all the time, when people say, “What do you do?” and then, “Okay, but what do I do about it? What can I do?” And I’ve always said, sort of, the best answer to that is: well, what can you do? What do you have to offer? What are the skills you have to offer? And I feel like that kind of turns it around to people - are you a graphic artist? Are you a data person? Are you a writer? Are you a filmmaker? Are you a doctor, a nurse, a scientist, a farmer, whatever it might be? And that tends to meet people where they are a little bit, and get them more engaged. And again, that gets them more engaged in what we’re trying to do as well, and makes them feel like: oh, I’m not just doom-scrolling. It’s a place where I can get up to speed, but also take some action.

So we focused on that, and then we launched a podcast to support it a couple years ago. Again, another friend who works in the podcast world said: this is great. I would love some deep dives into these specific things that are happening - not another wrap-up of the news, but something that complements that. Okay, these are the things we’re tracking week to week. Help me have better context for these things.

So we did that. And what we have now … we’ve recorded over 100+ conversations with scientists of every element, farmers, activists, policymakers, elected officials in the US and UK, students, journalists, professors, CEOs, whoever it might be. And what we really do is - instead of “hey, what’s your life story” … we like to say: why is what you’re doing vital? And we try to make it a conversation, as opposed to an interview. We try to stand in for our audience, which is typically under 50, pretty progressive folks who are science-minded. They don’t have to be scientists by any stretch, but they’re science-minded, which is hard not to be these days if you’re paying attention. And people who are frustrated or excited or both, and who keep wanting to take action and want to understand these things so they don’t sound like a moron when they’re at a dinner party. And they also want to feel like, when someone’s telling them to take action, that it’s easy - someone has done the thinking of what they should do, how they should say it, and where they’re sending their money, as opposed to just “help hunger” or whatever.

So that’s what we try to do with those conversations: build context and then work toward action steps that people can take. It’s not just “call your congressperson” or “call your parliamentarian” - it’s: call this person using this tool, say this script, and it will have this effect, and we’ve measured it and double-checked that. Or: donate to this organization, because they’re highly rated by GiveWell and Charity Navigator, and your money will do X, and it’ll solve these first and second order problems. And we try to make that as simple but as impactful as we can.

And that’s been a really interesting ride.

Sounds like you have found work that does not feel like work at all…i love that for you. Tell me more about your family

And to kind of come back to the family side - my wife and I have three kids. Now they are much older but at one point we had three kids under three years, which was an adventure. I come from a big family, so my expectation is chaos, and I enjoy it …. not that it’s not difficult, but I kind of thrive on it. Whereas my wife came from a smaller family, a much more sane situation, I think.

But we’re incredibly lucky again, we’re incredibly privileged. We had a lot of trouble making our children when we decided we were going to do it. We had a number of miscarriages. We had infertility issues. We had to do IVF a number of times. We tried all these different doctors. And making our first kid - our first successful child - took an incredible amount of time and anguish and money that we were lucky to be able to spend, because infertility stuff is not typically covered by American health insurance, which is a crime.

So, yeah it was a little bit “beggars can’t be choosers,” because when we had our first one and decided we wanted another, they said: look, it was a shot in the dark that you were able to make your first one. So if you want to make your second one, you know, we should try again. We did. And then, of course, our third one was a happy accident … which was in retrospect perfect. My wife was breastfeeding, and we managed to make a baby against all odds.

We have a Boy, girl, boy. And my daughter she pretty much runs the place, as she should … because my two sons, I love them dearly, they’re smart and curious and capable and wonderful and generous and kind, but she is becoming very aware that she effectively lives with two animals, basically. And you can see her just leveling up ahead of them. It’s kind of hilarious to watch.

I think we’ve become much better at understanding the female experience of infertility and IVF, but we still don’t hear many men talk openly about what that journey is like for them.

Looking back, how would you describe your own emotional experience? What was it like wanting to become a father while supporting your wife through such an intense physical and emotional process?

If men are already, by default, about 1% of a pregnancy to begin with - we don’t do a lot of participating for those nine and a half months - it’s even more true with infertility. But every journey is different.

Infertility can happen for any number of reasons. We went through multiple doctors and tried everything, from the initial hormone shots all the way to the full scope of IVF. At every stage, you’re trying to answer the same first-principles question: Why can’t we get pregnant? You’re not just trying to make a baby…you want to understand what’s preventing it.

Sometimes the issue is on the male side. So you test everything: motility, volume, all the baseline fertility markers. Then you start narrowing things down.

What made our journey especially hard was that we never really got an answer. But over time, it became pretty clear that the issue wasn’t on my side. And that’s a difficult place to land, because women already carry enough guilt. My wife was 34 or 35 when we started trying, which isn’t old, but it’s easy to spiral. You wonder: Should we have started earlier? Was it environmental? Was it a cyst, a health scare, something we’ll never know about? We never got a definitive explanation.

Once it became clear there wasn’t anything more to test on my end, my role was obvious: be the emotional support system as much as humanly possible. My physical contribution was what it was. There wasn’t anything else I could do.

And it’s incredibly hard watching someone you love go through that.

By the time you’ve seen five doctors, experienced miscarriages, and had transfers that don’t even make it to pregnancy, it takes a toll.

The IVF process itself is an emotional roller coaster. You stimulate egg production, retrieve the eggs, and at first the numbers can feel encouraging. Maybe they retrieve 40 eggs, and you leave thinking, Okay, this is promising.

Then, three days later, they call and say, “Twelve still look viable.”

A little later it’s eight.

Then they fertilize them, and eventually you get another call: “We have one embryo that looks good.”

You go from 40 to one in a matter of days.

Then they tell you, “If you want to transfer it, we need to do it now. But understand the odds are still low.”

It’s almost impossible not to look back and think, We had 40 eggs a few days ago.

I knew none of this was my fault, but I also couldn’t stop thinking about how my wife must have been feeling. It’s so easy to go down the rabbit hole. She’d wonder, I’m 35. Should we have started when I was 28? But we didn’t even know each other then. Your mind starts inventing alternate versions of your life that never could have happened.

Eventually, we reached the point where the doctors said, “You’re probably going to need an egg donor.”

They sent us home to scroll through profiles…where people went to school, family medical histories, everything. You’re sitting on the bed looking at strangers thinking, Wow. We may not even get to contribute biologically anymore.

That’s hard. And I think it’s hard for men, too.

Most of us grow up hearing, Be careful…it’s really easy to make a baby. Then suddenly someone tells you the exact opposite. It forces you to question everything, even though most of those questions are impossible to answer.

For us, we never got a definitive reason. One possibility was that my wife grew up near a river in central New York where Kodak had dumped chemicals for decades. There was one New York Times article years ago, and she knows other women from the area who later struggled with fertility. It’s nowhere near conclusive, but it’s the closest thing we’ve ever had to an explanation.

Which also means all those hypothetical choices you torture yourself over may never have mattered.

From my side, there was nothing I could fix. I couldn’t change any of it. All I could do was sit next to her while she looked through donor profiles, and when she’d ask, “What do you think?” I’d think, Why should I even have an opinion? It’s whatever you need. Whatever feels right to you.

The whole process is just... gnarly. And it’s remarkable how unsupported it is - not just financially, but emotionally and psychologically, especially in the U.S. healthcare system.

We were incredibly fortunate that it eventually worked. We have our own children, and we’re deeply grateful. We also knew that if it hadn’t, we would have adopted. We wanted to be parents…that part never changed.

So my job throughout all of it was simply to be a rock. To be as good a husband and as good a man as I could be.

What was this desire to really want to be a parent? Was it just that you guys felt like you were at that stage in the relationship, ready to do this? Or.. I mean, you come from a big family …

It’s funny - my mom and my wife joke about this all the time now. As my mom has described to my wife, I’ve wanted to be a dad since I was like nine or ten. My mom’s family was huge - she was the second of nine kids, and I grew up with 30 cousins, most of whom lived in the same town. I was the second oldest of all those cousins. I was a swim coach and taught swim lessons to little kids. I was like a big brother in all these things. So I feel like I’ve kind of always been in that role. And I’ve always been romantic at heart … I’ve just always been excited to do that, to have a little partner of some sort, whoever they might be.

And again, children are certainly not for everyone, and it’s a complicated decision for a lot of folks for a lot of reasons. But for us, it was one of those things where we were just really excited to take this journey together - to look at it and say, yes, there’s never a good time to get married, there’s never a good time to have a kid, or whatever it might be. We were just like: well, clearly we don’t get to choose at this point because of the science being the way it is. But also we were just excited to go on that journey together and see what little weird human we could produce. And they’re very weird very us. It’s wonderful.

That’s wonderful. You did mention that you’re a romantic at heart, and a lot of us have these notions about what parenting is. I mean, I once certainly did … I just thought it would be a lot easier than it really is. Because obviously, when you’re babysitting someone, or taking care of a niece or nephew, you only see a very small sliver of what’s involved.

So for you, what was the hardest part of actually becoming a dad?

I mean, for us at least and it seems fairly universal being exhausted all the time is really hard. But knowing that the kids are allowed to be exhausted - they’re kids, they don’t know what’s going on with their bodies, they don’t know how to recognize low blood sugar … they get to be tired. They’re still forming as humans. You can be tired at the end of the day, but until you get them down to bed, you need to be the adult. You need to be their emotional support person, leading them and teaching them tools they can use. And that’s really hard to do when you’re exhausted all the time and you’re working, and also when you’ve got a partner who is trying to do the same thing but in their own way.

Because there are so many new parents who either immediately become their own parents for better or worse, doing the things the way they were raised or purposefully go in the opposite direction. And that’s even more complicated when it’s two people with different histories, whatever they might be, or different expectations from the books they’ve read or what their friends have said. And then you try to merge those things together when you’re exhausted at three in the morning, going: well, it’s your turn.

All of that is to say: patience … extreme patience … is massive. Communication when you’re exhausted. Being open and flexible. Self-awareness - for yourself, for the child, for your partner - just goes a long way. And in the more historically traditionally defined roles of a man and a woman, the best thing you can say as a man is: how can I help? It will go so far. Because even just with the pregnancy and afterwards, there’s only so much physically we can do. But if you open your eyes, you learn that there’s actually a lot of other stuff. The answer is: just do it all. And also just say, how can I help?

And it takes a lot - even for someone like me who’s wanted to be a dad and, like you said, been around kids forever - being in it every single day, and not being able to be the one who gives them a bunch of sugar and then leaves like the uncle … it’s a whole different ballgame. But it’s also, you know, the greatest thing in the entire world. We’re so lucky to be able to do that. It is so hard, and also the best thing ever.

One of the biggest challenges you’ve talked about is just being exhausted all the time. At the same time, you have a demanding career, you’re writing Important, Not Important, working on other passion projects, and you’re in a dual-career household where your wife has her own career as well.

How do you make all of that work? What systems, routines, or agreements have the two of you built that allow you to raise three kids while still pursuing meaningful work individually?

I like to think and it’s been a real relief to see that the systems we’ve spent before we had kids building, both practical and philosophical, have actually held up during this season. The way we’ve learned to communicate, the agreements we’ve made, the values we’ve chosen to build our family around…they’ve been tested, and they’ve held.

Practically speaking, we’ve also been incredibly fortunate.

We’ve been able to afford an amazing nanny who’s been with us since our oldest was three months old. She’s honestly one of the best people we know. She’s incredible with our kids, and while she’s expensive, she’s worth every penny.

Even with that support, we spend more time with our kids than a lot of dual-career households do. I take a lot of pride in that. I never miss dinner or bedtime if I can help it, and I try to be there for breakfast as often as possible. Part of that is also making sure my wife has the space she needs to pursue her own career.

We’ve also had help from family. My wife’s mom lived just down the block from us in Los Angeles for a couple of years, and having that one-on-one support was invaluable. We have a wonderful relationship, and she was a huge help.

Even then, it’s still hard - just nowhere near as hard as it has been for a lot of other families.

The principle we keep coming back to is one we’ve worked hard to build over the years: give each other the benefit of the doubt.

That’s especially difficult when you’re exhausted and both juggling demanding careers. But if your default assumption is that your partner is trying as hard as they can, it changes everything.

Instead of thinking, “You missed dinner again, and I’ve handled bedtime five nights in a row,” you remind yourself: They probably wanted to be here. They’re not on that conference call because they’d rather be there than with the kids. They care about their work, but that doesn’t mean they care any less about this family.

If your baseline assumption is that you’re both doing the best you can and that you’re both just as tired as the other person…it becomes much easier to support each other instead of keeping score.

That doesn’t make it easy. But it makes it a whole lot easier.

One theme I've heard from a lot of parents is that they often hesitate to ask for help, when in reality it's one of the biggest enablers of a healthy family. You've clearly invested heavily in building that support system. Has that changed the way you think about asking for help or valuing the people who help raise your children?

It’s crazy how difficult we make raising kids for most people in America. And we should acknowledge: we are not most people in America. We are incredibly privileged and lucky, largely because of my wife’s amazing career and because of the circumstances we were born into. But even with all of that privilege, the system makes this incredibly hard.

What is it…one of only two countries in the world that doesn’t have paid parental leave as a law? And we’re one of them. I mean, how is that possible?

When we had our first child, my wife was in the middle of running a television show. She works incredibly hard, she’s extremely talented, and she cares deeply about what she does. Running a show is essentially being the CEO of a company - you oversee the writing, production, marketing, all of it.

Our son was born in early December, and because most shows slow down around the holidays, everyone takes a few weeks off. But she had to go back to work running the show eight days later.

And this was after a nightmare delivery - an emergency C-section - and after we had spent a significant amount of time in the hospital. We eventually had to convince the company, who ultimately did help, to put a trailer next to the studio so she could nurse our son every two hours because he was only eight days old.

On one hand, from a business perspective, I understand it. She was the person responsible for this entire operation. On the other hand, you step back and think: What are we doing?

And again, this is someone with enormous privilege. She had support. She had a partner who could say, “Okay, my job right now is to support this as much as possible.” And even with all of that, it was still completely insane.

The irony is that my wife is also someone who believes women should be able to do whatever they want. Paid parental leave should exist, and people should be able to use it however they want. Maybe you take two weeks. Maybe you take a year. Maybe you never go back. Maybe you return to the same company. Maybe you start something new. The point is that people should have the choice.

We do a terrible job creating the safety nets that allow people to navigate one of the most important things humans do: raising the next generation.

And my wife was never someone who wanted to just step away from work and say, “I’m going to take six months and only be a mom.” She did more of that over time, but she genuinely loves her work. It gives her energy, contentment, gratitude, and joy. It’s intellectually stimulating for her.

So she found her way back into it little by little. And she had to figure that out for herself. I had to figure out how to support that while also recognizing: okay, we still have a baby who needs to eat. There are certain realities you can’t negotiate around.

I loved giving bottles and doing those things, but ultimately it’s about figuring out the math together and making it work.

My job has always been and I’ve succeeded and failed at this like anyone else to be as supportive as I can.

My wife is six years older than me. She had a significant head start in her career and has been incredibly successful because she works hard, she’s curious, and she’s talented. So, in many ways, my career has been behind hers.

And I’ve made choices because of that. For example, I had opportunities to join television writing staffs, but those jobs are notoriously brutal hours: in at 7 a.m., out at 1 a.m. If I had been 26 with no kids, maybe that would have been the right choice. But my wife was already working incredibly hard, and I decided: No, I want to be home for dinner and bedtime.

As amazing as our nanny is, I believe kids need consistency. They need someone who is there, who they can depend on, who they look forward to seeing. And sometimes that has meant passing on opportunities.

It also means that when you’re tired and you’re fighting, and you say, “You’re not contributing in this way,” you have to come back to the reality that both of you have made intentional choices about how you want your family to work.

My wife is running another television show now that she created, and it’s wonderful. They’re in their second season. But the first season required her to spend long stretches of time in Vancouver.

Objectively, it was incredibly hard.

Our kids were five, four, and three. At that age, they don’t understand time. You can say, “Mommy will be back in a week,” but a four-year-old doesn’t know what a week means.

There were moments where I would get frustrated and say, “Well, you’re not the one who’s here, so that’s the reality.”

But then I’d have to step back and remind myself: she wants to be here. She also wants to be there because this is something she cares deeply about and, frankly, it’s also what supports our family financially.

It’s complicated.

And that’s where the benefit-of-the-doubt principle becomes so important. It doesn’t magically solve everything, but it helps. Anything you can do to make things slightly easier for each other, to understand each other’s position especially when you’re in a less traditional setup where she earns more and had a head start in her career…matters.

But at the end of the day, my priorities are clear: my kids come first, and my wife comes first.

I’m incredibly proud of my work. I’m proud of Important, Not Important.

My kids could have 101 conversations about what I stood for. They could see that I tried to make the world better, that I tried to support people, that I tried to move things forward. I consider that part of my parenting.

And my wife gives me the benefit of the doubt on that too. She understands that this work doesn’t make us much money…in fact, sometimes it costs us money but she knows it matters.

The audience isn’t huge, but qualitatively it’s incredible. It grew through word of mouth, through our guests. We have policymakers and CEOs listening people who can actually influence change.

So when we’re intentional about who we bring on, especially when we talk to diverse voices or people who don’t always get a platform, that matters. Maybe it doesn’t move the needle financially for our family, but it can move the needle in society.

And I think there’s value in me, as a white man, saying: these people deserve the microphone. I can use whatever platform I have to amplify people who might not otherwise get heard.

I see that as part of my growth, part of my responsibility, and part of being a parent. I’m just trying to learn from it every day.

That’s really powerful. I think what’s interesting is that you’re challenging norms in multiple ways. Through your work, you’re trying to give people a platform and break certain patterns, but as a family, you’re also showing your kids a different model of what a family can look like.

For your daughter and your sons, they’re growing up seeing that there isn’t one way a family has to be structured. It’s okay if Mom has to fly somewhere for work because she’s doing something important. It’s okay if Dad is the one making dinner or handling bedtime. It doesn’t always have to be the traditional model of father as provider and mother as caregiver.

And at the same time, if a family chooses that more traditional structure and it works for them and their children are happy and healthy, that’s okay too.

Exactly. If it works, if it’s good for the children, and they grow up to be good little humans…who cares what the mechanics are?

But we are incredibly privileged, and it’s still really hard. So I try, as much as humanly possible and we try through philanthropy, giving back, and direct support - to keep ourselves grounded in the reality that we are incredibly fortunate.

And then you look around, especially somewhere like Los Angeles, which was already an incredibly unequal and broken city even before the pandemic, and you think: If this is hard for us, I cannot imagine what this is like for so many other people.

We try to help our kids understand that too.

Their elementary school in Los Angeles has about 1,000 kids, and something like 20 to 25 of those kids are homeless. And this is one of the better public schools in Los Angeles. We are privileged to live in a neighborhood where that school is available to us and yet there are still kids there who don’t have a stable place to live.

So when our kids say, “Well, Jeff got a new backpack every year,” we try to put it into perspective. We’ll say: “That’s great for Jeff. But you don’t need that. And I know you’re upset that you got creamy peanut butter instead of crunchy today, but understand that we are incredibly fortunate to even be able to buy peanut butter.”

We don’t want to make them feel guilty. That’s not the goal. But we do want them to understand that there are kids around them who don’t have those basic things.

And in Los Angeles, it’s hard to shield them from inequality anyway. We walk to school and see people experiencing homelessness. It’s part of their reality. So the more we can expose them to service bringing them to soup kitchens, helping them participate, helping them understand the world around them the more hopefully they can become part of creating change.

It’s complicated.

Ultimately, you’re trying to raise little humans who will grow up and make good choices in the world. And I think that’s a really meaningful part of parenting.

A lot of my audience is either made up of new parents - often with kids under five or people thinking about becoming parents.

What’s advice you think new parents should follow? And what’s advice that’s commonly given that they should completely ignore?

It’s interesting because I’m coming from a place of having resources to do this. But there’s a reason that for tens of thousands of years, children were raised in a tribe or a village. Now we expect small nuclear families to do everything themselves and often, we still expect women to carry the majority of that burden, regardless of their careers.

The number of women who have fallen behind in the workforce because of motherhood, and the number who have had to leave the workforce entirely, is devastating.

My wife has absolutely made sacrifices because of this. We’re incredibly lucky that she hasn’t had to step away completely, but it’s still been hard.

So if you have any ability to find support, do it. It could be family. It could be someone you pay. It could even be a 15-year-old or a 12-year-old kid down the street who wants their first babysitting job.

One of the beautiful things about infants is that, once they’re past the newborn stage, they’re not going anywhere. They can’t even crawl yet. If someone you trust can give you an hour to take a walk, lie on your bed, stare at the wall, or read a book, that matters.

Our pediatrician wrote a book called Eat, Sleep, Poop, and I recommend it highly. The basic idea is: if your baby has eaten, isn’t tired, and has a clean diaper, you can let someone you trust simply be with them while you take care of yourself.

Sleep when the baby sleeps. Find help wherever you can. It doesn’t have to mean a full-time nanny. Living near supportive family is amazing. Any amount of support adds up.

The other thing is: don’t create routines you’re unwilling to maintain.

If you decide your child only naps if you drive them around for 25 minutes, guess what? That becomes the thing they expect. It’s the ultimate “if you give a mouse a cookie” situation.

Schedules can feel restrictive, but they pay off especially with sleep. Sleep is everything. When everyone is exhausted, every problem becomes bigger and harder.

And pay attention to your relationship. That’s easy to lose.

Early on, we tried to do date nights every couple of weeks. They were not glamorous. We were leaving the house at 5 p.m. because that was when restaurants opened for old people dinner. But it didn’t matter. We just needed to sit across from each other and remember we were still a couple.

Sometimes my wife would just stare at her cocktail and sigh. But we were out. We weren’t talking about the baby for an hour. We were reconnecting with each other…the entire reason this family existed in the first place.

So: prioritize sleep, give each other the benefit of the doubt, and protect your relationship.

We also kicked devices out of the bedroom about three years ago—everything except Kindles. That room became our little escape from the world. No kids, no work, no politics. It’s easy to lie there and scroll, but having one place where you’re actually present makes a difference.

And what advice should people ignore?

There are philosophical things and scientific things. When it comes to raising kids, follow good science. Reputable science is your friend.

I remember during our infertility journey, when we were desperate, you start grasping at anything - old wives’ tales, random advice, anything that might help.

At one point my wife asked our fertility doctor, the doctor who ultimately helped us have our children, “Some friends told me I should eat six ounces of meat a week to improve fertility.”

And he said, “Well, I think there are probably a billion and a half people in India who would disagree with you.”

Or the idea that carrying high means you’re having a boy. His response was basically: if that were true, it would be science. But it’s not.

Our pediatrician’s book is great because it combines science with his own experience. He’ll explain what the research says, but he’ll also admit the ways he struggled as a parent and didn’t always follow his own advice.

And most of his scary symptom charts basically end with: “It’s probably fine.”

Babies are weird. They breathe weird. They do things that terrify you. Of course, pay attention, see your doctor, do your checkups but chances are, your baby is okay.

Also: give yourself grace.

Let yourself off the hook for your body, your sleep, your eating, not seeing your friends. Life comes back. It might look different, and that’s okay.

Ignore the people especially on Instagram who say, “I got my body back in two weeks.”

First, that’s probably not healthy. Second, who cares?

Sweatpants are fantastic. Do your version. Be healthy. But don’t hold yourself to impossible standards after what you’ve just been through.

And remember: you’re going to keep parenting for the next 18 years.

And nobody tells you that it also flies by.

So be patient with yourself. Your friend might have some anecdote about apple cider vinegar that supposedly changes everything. Sure, try it if it doesn’t hurt. But mostly, trust yourself.

Remember: babies don’t create their own schedules. You’re the adult. You set the rhythm.

When they know when they’re eating, when they’re sleeping, when things happen, everyone’s life gets easier. Feed them healthy food if you can. It helps expand their palate and supports their health.

And above all: support your partner.

Support your partner because they’re a wonderful human being, and that’s why you started this journey together in the first place.

🤓 Open tabs…

(I have modeled this section after those “open tabs” that we all have with a few (okay 30-40) interesting links that we promise we will eventually get to one day. These are the links that I had open for sometime that I finally got to …)

⭐Sharenting: What happens when children’s lives are shared online?
From ultrasound photos to graduation pictures, many parents share their children's lives online. For some families, these posts help maintain connections with friends and relatives or build supportive parenting communities. But what does it mean for children to grow up with a digital footprint that begins, in some cases, before they are even born?

⭐Why You’re Better Off Reading a Book Than Learning AI

Most worryingly, though, this surge in AI-generated sludge is also accompanied by something else: the decline in the one skill that could help us navigate it.

Literacy rates are now the highest in history. And yet, they’ve also been falling off a cliff in recent years.

📖 My private thoughts from my very public diary…

(Sometimes on X (Twitter)…. sometimes on Threads)

If you enjoy Decks and Diapers, it would mean the world to me if you invited friends to subscribe and read with us. If that feels like too much then, did you know that liking this post or leaving a comment helps it find more readers?

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🎧 Did you know you can also listen to Decks and Diapers on your favorite podcast app?

Hi there 👋🏽

When men publish ideas, they're thought leaders.
When women do it, they're content creators.

When men turn experience into a business, they're entrepreneurs.
When women do the same thing, they're girl bosses.

When men become executives, they're leaders.
When women do, they're female executives. Woman CEOs.

When men come back from parental leave, their title follows them in.
When women do, a new one gets attached: working mom.

Labels aren't accidental. Words matter. They decide who gets taken seriously in hiring rooms, in promotion committees, in funding conversations.

☕ Now, on to today’s coffee chat…

Meet Deja Riley

Deja is a fitness expert, coach, philanthropist, storyteller, and proud mama whose approach to wellness is rooted in joy, authenticity, and connection. She is known for her dynamic blend of dance, boxing, kickboxing, and strength training. From pioneering the MIRROR home gym community to serving as the face of lululemon’s footwear launch, Deja has inspired thousands to embrace movement in ways that feel empowering, inclusive, and fun.

She was also a former professional dancer who has performed alongside music legends like Britney Spears, Lady Gaga, Katy Perry, J.Lo, and Beyoncé!

Beyond fitness and dance, Deja is passionate about using her voice to tell meaningful stories and uplift others. Her own journey through infertility and motherhood transformed her perspective and deepened her commitment to advocacy, education, and supporting women through every stage of life.

Below is my conversation with Deja…

Please tell us a little bit about yourself

I’m Deja Riley and before I start giving you my profession, titles and credentials I want to start off by saying: I am light, I am love. I am a motivator. I am a beacon of inspiration. I am someone who loves deeply. I am someone who leans into growth, and I’m always looking for opportunities to grow in every area of my life. And I am someone who subscribes to the belief that your mind, body, and soul are a whole - not separate parts.

With that said, I am most known for being a former professional dancer turned fitness pro. I am also a motivational speaker, content creator, and the founder of Modification Mama - which is essentially me helping postpartum and evolving bodies feel powerful through movement, motivation, and community.

Tell me more about Modification Mama

I started Modification Mama thinking I needed to rebrand myself. I am definitely someone who likes to live in my authentic truth, and so much of my work and what I do in support of others is driven by that. I wanted to do something that felt like it met me where I was and would meet other people where they were … something very accessible and empowering.

Prior to this, I had always been very athletic - doing a lot of high-impact movement. I was boxing, dancing, doing strength training, HIIT, cycling, running … all kinds of things.

And then I started having fertility issues - towards the end of 2020 going into 2021 - my husband and I embarked on our journey trying to conceive. We were really just in it, trying to do it naturally. Then about six months in, we discovered it just wasn’t happening. So we went to see a fertility specialist; they ran all these different tests and gave us the green light to just keep trying and not to be discouraged. So we kept trying.

We ended up getting pregnant, but that ended in a loss about two months in. And I think that’s where I first felt the deepest heartbreak I’ve ever felt in my entire life.

From there, I sustained a couple of injuries while going through fertility treatments, and it was the first time I actually had to start modifying my movement … modifying what I was doing with my body and thinking a bit smarter about how I was pushing myself, and about taking rest and recovery seriously. And when I did that, I noticed that it didn’t make me weak. It didn’t make me less powerful.

In all actuality, that’s where my power came from - being wise enough to know I needed to move in a different way, and really acknowledging, embracing, and honoring where my body and my mind were.

So that is really where, mentally, Modification Mama began, though I wasn’t a mom yet. This idea of creating more accessible ways to move your body, more accessible ways to think, more accessible ways to feel good in your skin. And once I became a mom, that became my daily reality - through pregnancy, and then through postpartum, where I experienced things like diastasis recti, a twisted pelvis, being completely out of alignment. I was in a healing place for a very, very long time … longer than I would have liked. And instead of making myself feel like I was being held back, I thought: I’m going to forge forward with what I have.

One of my favorite quotes, which I always share with people, is: “Start where you are, use what you have, do what you can.” It’s by Arthur Ashe. And that quote has never been more real to me than in postpartum, because I really had to utilize whatever time, energy, space, and physical capacity I had to move forward. There was no other way around it.

I am passionate about purpose-driven storytelling, accessible and empowering fitness and wellness, and really just showing other moms that it’s okay - no matter where you are, no matter what your family life looks like - you can be powerful as yourself, as who you are right now.

I love all of this. Thank you for sharing something so deeply personal too. I feel like when we openly share it is a gift.

You’re clearly someone who grew up being very athletic: a dancer, a boxer, incredibly physical. And yet this body you’re now navigating doesn’t feel like the same one.

I was a former competitive athlete myself, so part of why I’m asking is that I relate to this. When you’ve spent years trusting your body - seeing it perform, recover, and do extraordinary things - you develop a certain belief that if you take care of yourself, fertility challenges are something that happen to other people.

I went through two miscarriages myself, and what struck me was the disconnect between the story I had about my body and what was actually happening. We often carry an unconscious image of who struggles with fertility, and it’s rarely someone who is healthy, active, and doing all the “right” things.

How did you make sense of that? How did you grapple with the realization that despite doing everything you could, this was still happening? What was that mental and emotional adjustment like for you?

Yeah, honestly, Rashi - I’m still grappling with it, just maybe in a different light now. Sometimes I look at my body in the mirror and I’ve been very transparent about this on my social media and I think: how is this even possible?

I’m still holding on to weight in certain areas, my stomach isn’t flat yet, and I’m almost over two years postpartum. And I’m still so active, as moms in general, if you have kids, you are active just by nature. But I also set aside so much dedicated time to move my body - cardio, strength training, all of it. And I was really starting to doubt myself in a lot of ways. Especially in those earlier years, going through my fertility struggles …I had that miscarriage, I had an ectopic pregnancy, I did four IUIs, I started IVF …and my body was just saying: you need to hit pause.

And mentally I was really grappling with: how is this possible? I feel like I’m doing everything right. I’m eating well, I’m implementing movement and rest and recovery into my schedule, I’m hydrated… you go down the entire list of everything you’re doing right for yourself, and you still hit this wall.

And that is actually where I’ve developed such a deep sense of empathy for others, because it doesn’t matter. Infertility doesn’t have a name on it … it could creep up on anyone, enter anyone’s life. I’ve also watched friends deal with other health issues, a lot of them also in the wellness industry, and they have that same moment of questioning: how is it possible that I’ve poured so much into my health journey, and yet I’m still experiencing these struggles?

It’s a bit surreal. And it’s something I’m constantly working on mentally. I talk about it with my therapist, with my husband, with my friends. I’m just very vocal about communicating exactly where I am, because it’s a very real thing for people.

We come from these deeply athletic and healthy backgrounds, and sometimes end up in the same position as someone who never took their health that seriously. And I find that unexplainable - it’s just different for everyone. But yeah, it’s definitely something I’m still working.

And for women like us pregnancy is not easy too … when your body starts changing, you feel this beautiful thing you wanted so badly, and at the same time you look in the mirror and don’t recognize yourself.

And I think especially as women and I know you were in showbiz before this, a dancer who performed with big stars, you’re just used to looking a certain way, or the world seeing you a certain way. And then one day you look in the mirror and think: “This body doesn’t feel like mine. I used to be able to do all these things, and now I can’t.” So I’m wondering if you ever felt that through pregnancy and if you have women reaching out to you saying they feel deeply uncomfortable in their own bodies right now ….how do you navigate all of that?

I felt the same way. It is something so beautiful: a deeply desired gift that I think so many women experience in their lifetime: that feeling of wanting this thing so badly, and then walking through the transformation. What I like to call it is a metamorphosis, and a metamorphosis is never easy.

The way I reframed it in my mind was: I’m going into my cocoon right now. In a lot of ways, we kind of have to hibernate when we’re pregnant and through those early days and months of postpartum.

So I always thought: okay, if I’m going to come out as this bright, beautiful butterfly … what is the cocooning season supposed to look like? It’s probably not going to be pretty. It probably looks like tucking into a shell, going inward, really paying attention to the internal side of things. Listening to your heart, taking time to journal, just really going inward.

I did a lot of meditating, a lot of yoga and stretching … things that required me to move a lot slower than I was used to. With my athletic background, and a very intense one, I was not used to slowing down.

If I get the blessing of another pregnancy, which I truly hope for, I think I’ll just slow way down and pay attention to every little part, because it really is so beautiful.

Because the thing is: at the end of the metamorphosis, you do want to be that big, beautiful butterfly. But if you rush the process, maybe a little piece of your wing won’t be there. Maybe you won’t fully develop, and you won’t be able to use your wings. I really believe that what you pour into those moments of slowing down, remaining present, and going inward … you reap the benefits of later.

I love that.

And I know so much of this has been focused on the body, but I feel like there’s just so much wisdom in what you said, beyond the physical … in how you show up in the world.

And I’m curious: has motherhood, or this entire journey of becoming a mom reframed what success and ambition mean for you? Because I suspect the version of you before all of this operated in a certain way. What’s your relationship now to those words … “I’m ambitious,” “I’m successful,” “I have this thriving, growing business”? How do you define all of that for yourself in this season of life?

You know, Rashi, to answer that I kind of have to go back and talk about how I used to define success, and how I used to speak of ambition … so much of it was defined by my accomplishments, my accolades, and the credentials I’d acquired over time.

And then I look at this little human who thinks the world of me, and he knows nothing about any of those things. He looks up at me with these starry eyes, and I am everything in his world and he doesn’t know that I danced on stage with Beyoncé and Britney Spears. And he doesn’t care.

So when I think about it now, I’ve simplified the definition of success. For me, success is showing up with what I’ve got. Success can happen on a minute-by-minute level, a month-by-month level, a year-by-year level, or over the course of a decade but as long as I’m showing up, being present, and using what I have inside of me, that is success.

It’s less about being everything to everyone and being this huge star on a stage, and more about being present in the moments that matter. Showing up for my family. Showing up for my friends. I feel successful when I take the time to go to lunch with my girlfriends, stay fully present in the conversation, put my phone down and when I leave, my heart feels so full. That was successful. And I don’t think I would have looked at success in that same way had I not become a mom.

And the other thing I want to ask about is identity shift …because for a lot of women, becoming a mom brings this massive change in identity. For you, it sounds like it was more gradual, since even before becoming a mom you were already transitioning away from the world of dancing and being around stars, and moving into fitness and wellness.

But showbiz is notorious for being a really hard place for women … it tends to treat women a certain way, and unfortunately there’s this idea that women have an expiration date, and the industry literally puts a date on them. And I know there’s a lot of literature about it.

But how did you navigate all of that? Because it is, in some sense, like a drug, isn’t it? Being on that stage is infectious. I haven’t danced behind Beyoncé or Britney Spears, but I’ve grown up loving their music.

I was at the Eras Tour watching Taylor Swift and thought, oh my God, what a life. It has to do something to you when you’re on those tours, surrounded by those performers.

And then the contrast must be really jarring when you walk away from that life. How did you navigate the identity shift? And I’m curious … do you still hang out with some of the people from that world? Have a lot of them made the transition too? How do you do it in a healthy way?

Well, it’s interesting. The ones I’m still connected to from the dance industry and entertainment … they’re all parents now. So we’ve all kind of gone through this shift, at different times. And I think that’s what keeps us connected - we’re able to talk about this level of ambition and this desire to perform, and also this other side of our lives now: parenthood. That level of responsibility, keeping your family together, keeping your family healthy and safe, being at the core of everything you do, being at the center of your “why” and why you go out and do the things you do.

I’ve also noticed, not just in myself but in a lot of them, that it kind of shifts. Not necessarily your level of ambition, but more your desires. For me, dancing on the road would not have been a life that fit well with having a family. I was literally touring all over the world, sometimes in rehearsals for eight-hour days for a week or two weeks straight, then hitting the ground running into a show, constantly auditioning. I know there are people who make that work, but I knew, for me, it wasn’t going to work. It wasn’t the life I pictured with a family … being a mom, being a wife. I met my husband back when I was dancing in my mid-20s, so he’s gotten to see that version of me. But I don’t know that my son ever will, because I have made a complete pivot in my career.

And the real reason was that it was deeply affecting my mental health. You touched on it …about women not necessarily being well respected or valued in that industry. For me, the biggest part was feeling rejection, feeling small, feeling insignificant, feeling replaceable.

These were things I came to know are not the truth but it’s how the industry made me feel. And I literally remember the moment - I tell this story over and over - I was on the field at Super Bowl 50 performing behind Beyoncé, and I knew this was going to be my last job. It was amazing, I wanted to go out with a bang, it felt good but standing on that huge football field, I had never felt so small in my life. You think about the universe and sure, we’re all tiny specks. But when you’re in an industry that’s supposed to be about using your gift, being big on that stage, performing for the world and what you’re feeling on the inside is the complete opposite… because of the lack of respect, the lack of appreciation, the lack of compensation … all of that factors in.

And I looked at it and thought: I have had this career for over ten years, over a decade. It’s been amazing. I grew up as a competitive dancer - I’ve been dancing since the age of three, classically trained in ballet, jazz, tap, Flamenco, lyrical. And I will always be connected to the art in some way. But it was so important to me that it feed my mind, my body, and my spirit in a positive way. And I just woke up one day and it wasn’t doing that anymore. So I said: let’s pivot. It doesn’t mean I’ll never dance again but dance may look different for me.

And when I did pivot into the fitness industry, dance cardio became the center of what I teach. So I still get to move my body in a way I love, and I still get to inspire and motivate others on their journeys. It’s a really beautiful thing for me. I think so often we get stuck in an identity and feel like we can’t break out of it but I really believe we can be so many things in this lifetime. You don’t have to be stuck in one box for 40 or 50 years.

If you have a passion… like what you’re doing with Decks and Diapers …why not chase it? Go after it. Let your heart lead.

I’m really glad I did, because it led me to the fitness industry, and the fitness industry led me to hosting, meeting different people, networking, sitting on panels, speaking at different events. I feel so fulfilled by everything I do. And I also know this isn’t the final destination …I’ll probably make another pivot at some point. And I think that’s healthy. It’s really important to stay true to who we are, and we don’t stay the same person our entire lives. We are constantly evolving, and I think our careers should evolve with us!

There’s just so much wisdom in it, because I see so many similarities across the different industries I’ve spoken to. I’ve talked to women who are, say, lawyers doing very well in big firms. From the outside it looks like a really successful life, but so many of them are miserable and broken inside. And I think there’s a real fear to walk away from that life … because for a lot of people there’s this sense of: “But you have it all. Why would you leave? Maybe give it another year.”

Because when you tell people what you do, when you have certain titles attached to your name, there’s this aura that gets created around you. And so for a lot of people, there’s enormous fear in walking away. But I really applaud and respect that you were able to say, “This is not going to serve me well … I’ve done this, and now I’m moving on.” And you’re not trying to constantly make it a defining part of your identity, because that was - to use Taylor’s language - an era of your life. It’s over, and now you’re on to the next chapter.

I was also reading about your family background …your dad was, in his own right, famous and musically influential, and you navigated your own version of that kind of public life. So how do you think about your son growing up and carving out his own identity?

You’re building a business, your family has this creative legacy - how do you think about your son still being hungry and ambitious and wanting to forge his own path, versus thinking: “My mom did this, my granddad did this… the world owes me something because of the family I was born into”? I know it’s a big question, but I think you’re following what I’m asking.

I think about those things very often, and I’m still trying to figure it out. I think so much of parenthood is like that. And I’m sure even more so once you have your second … a lot of my friends with multiple kids say you think you’re figuring it out, and then you figure it out again and again, because every child is different, every experience is different, every stage and phase of their life is different.

So when I think about it, one thing my dad did very well - even though he was very prominent in the industry and had this incredible rapport with others in it - was instill a work ethic in me and my siblings that I truly value and appreciate. And though I think I’ll do a lot of things differently from my parents, as most of us will, there is one thing I will say clearly: I will instill a work ethic in my son.

And in the same way my parents allowed me to feel limitless … letting me try different things, even things outside their wheelhouse … if something seemed completely different from anything they knew, they were willing to grow in that area and learn more about it, and find ways for me to be educated and supported in whatever I wanted to do. My parents never forced me into anything.

And what’s really amazing is that I built up my own excitement and desire for the things I do. It wasn’t because my mom was a dancer …though she did dance, she didn’t turn it into a career because she became a mom and was full-time at home with us. But there are certain things that are just in your DNA that you naturally gravitate toward. The musical inclination that came from my dad and a little from my mom too is in me. But I also had the beautiful opportunity to explore and really find what I gravitated to on my own.

It’s interesting, because I’m the oldest of ten, I have nine siblings, and we all do something somewhat creative. All of us, except for one: he’s a full-on sports kid, completely. But the rest of us do something creative. One of my sisters is a makeup artist. Another is a choreographer who does advocacy for dance. Another one’s a DJ. We all just kind of do our own thing. And my parents always celebrated whatever it was that we did.

What I want to pass on is a very strong work ethic … really working for whatever it is that you want, pouring your heart and your energy into it, and having that dedication and determination to become what you want to be. I want to be able to teach my son that. And then, you know, his dad is a school teacher, so we already have that balance in our household we come from completely different worlds. But I want to make sure he feels supported in whatever it is he loves, while also knowing that whatever you do, you have to work at it. You have to be intentional about moving in that direction. So yeah, I haven’t figured out exactly how that’s going to go yet, but this is definitely something I’ve given some thought to and something I really respect about what my parents did with me.

Any last words of wisdom or advice

I guess I can just give my little tidbits of advice and share what I think is the most amazing part about being a parent and a professional. I’ll start with that, and then I’ll give the piece of advice I had.

So I feel like the hardest parts of being a parent and a professional are finding balance and that may not always look like 50/50. In fact, sometimes I feel like I’m pouring maybe 5% of my energy into work, and 95% into parenthood. And then on other days, it tilts in the other direction. There’s a bit of that identity tug of war. Because, though I know that being a mom is one of the greatest roles I’ve ever been given in my life and it is such a great gift, I sometimes feel reduced to just being “a mom” especially because, as of recently, I’m getting back into freelance work. But for that first year and a half, I was really at home with my son, not really doing anything else. And I was having a hard time with that, because I am a very goal-oriented person so attached to my career and I was just having that tug of war constantly, in my brain and in my body too.

So I’d say that’s one of the hardest parts: the emotional toll and the mental load of carrying both of those things. And then there’s learning to rest without guilt - that’s a really big one for me. I think, oh my gosh, rest is a part of the program. That’s what I would always tell my friends: rest is a part of the program. You have to insert it into your week somehow. I even tell some of my friends, “Look, put it on your schedule. Block out this time to this time. You’re not going to do anything you’re going to rest. You’re going to allow your body, your mind, and your spirit to recover.” So resting without guilt is a really hard thing to do.

The most rewarding parts are what I model for my child - the strength and the joy I’m modeling for him every day. I can see it reflected in him. I honestly got the best compliment at a birthday party a couple of weekends ago: my son was running around, laughing and playing and falling, and someone said, “He’s such a happy kid.” And I was like, yeah, that really makes me feel good… thank you for saying that.

And then seeing your community feel seen and heard … sharing experiences like the ones we’re sharing with each other right now. I feel like that is one of the greatest rewards I’ve gotten: this deep sense of connection with community on a whole other level, especially now that I’m a parent. So it’s really beautiful to be connected to platforms like yours, where there are other parents out there feeling some of the same things and riding some of the same waves. We are all connected, united in a very special way, and I think that’s really beautiful.

If I had to give advice to other working parents, I would say: you don’t need to choose between being a great parent and being a great professional. You get to be both, in your own way and at your own pace. And I’m taking that advice myself too because sometimes when I feel like I’m really crushing it in motherhood, I think, “Oh, but you’re not doing anything in your career.” And I’m really hard on myself in that way, and then vice versa. So that would be my advice.

🤓 Open tabs…

(I have modeled this section after those “open tabs” that we all have with a few (okay 30-40) interesting links that we promise we will eventually get to one day. These are the links that I had open for sometime that I finally got to …)

⭐Are all husbands “Strangers”?
The disaster that Burden finds herself is due to the fact that every woman in a patriarchal society enters into a relationship that will shape and determine her entire adult life in many ways, with someone who has been conditioned to see himself as superior to her.

Most men wouldn’t articulate this and aren’t even consciously aware of it—they have feelings of love for their wife so of course they would naturally treat her equally, right? Well no, he naturally won’t—not because he’s a terrible person, but because male superiority is the water that we all swim in, and it requires a conscious, uphill battle to push against it. Many won’t.

⭐What It Takes to Get a Job at Anthropic
“We ask people like, what are some unusual beliefs that you hold and how have you defended those beliefs in kind of uncomfortable situations for yourself because you felt it was the right thing to do,” she said. “It’s not like we’re looking for a particular belief system. We’re looking for the ability to say, ‘Hey, I felt this was the correct thing and maybe it wasn’t popular, but like, I really stood by this.’”

Another trait the company is looking for, career coaches and former recruiters say, is intellectual independence. Rather than reward flattery, “they actually want you to be skeptical” of the company and how it’s pursuing its mission.

📖 My private thoughts from my very public diary…

(Sometimes on X (Twitter)…. sometimes on Threads)

If you enjoy Decks and Diapers, it would mean the world to me if you invited friends to subscribe and read with us. If that feels like too much then, did you know that liking this post or leaving a comment helps it find more readers?

Leave a comment

P.S. If this email landed in your Promotions tab, please take a second and drag it to your Primary tab. It makes a big difference to the inbox gods, plus you’ll never miss a post!

Disclaimer: All views expressed are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of my employer

If you’re reading this but haven’t subscribed, you may want to consider doing that. This will ensure future posts land straight in your inbox.

Subscribe now

🎧 Did you know you can also listen to Decks and Diapers on your favorite podcast app?

Hi there 👋🏽

A question I keep thinking through in this human + AI enabled world: what does good leadership actually require right now?

I explored this with Angela Nguyen on The Leader Within Podcast focusing on the micro aspects of this shift, not just the org-level ones.

A few things we got into that might be useful for you:

✦ How your values become the “source code” for decision-making in gray areas
✦ A future-forward way to ask for more useful feedback
✦ Why managing energy (not time) changes everything
✦ The real difference between a mentor and a sponsor and why women need more of the latter
✦How to navigate micromanaging bosses
✦Why build a Personal Board of Advisors

If any of that lands…you will enjoy the full 30 mins conversation.

Today our guest writer is Nitza Jimenez

Nitza is an educator, facilitator, and founder of Kinected Coaching who helps parents, educators, and family-serving organizations build stronger communication, deeper emotional intelligence, and more meaningful connection. Drawing on more than a decade of experience supporting children, families, schools, and communities, she creates spaces where people can navigate difficult conversations with greater confidence, empathy, and understanding.

Through workshops, coaching, speaking, and educational resources, Nitza helps families and the systems around them better understand what lies beneath conflict, emotional overwhelm, and communication breakdowns. Her work is grounded in the belief that when people feel safe enough to learn, communicate with care, and build trust with one another, stronger relationships and stronger communities naturally follow.

Now, let us head to The Balcony…

The Invisible Influence of Family Culture

As a child of immigrants, I grew up with family rules that were never formally explained.

No one sat me down and handed me a guidebook, but I learned them anyway, through what was praised, what created tension, what was expected, and what was left unsaid.

Some of those lessons were beautiful. Hard work mattered. Family mattered. Sacrifice meant love. Resilience was admired.

But some lessons took me longer to recognize. Growing up, hustle was not just encouraged in my family. It felt like survival.

My father worked tirelessly to provide for us. During certain seasons, we barely saw him.

As a child, I understood that as love.
As an adult, I began to understand something more complicated.

It took time, reflection, and eventually honest conversations to recognize that gratitude and self-abandonment are not the same thing.

That is part of what makes family culture so powerful.

And so invisible.

1. What We Learn Without Being Told

Family culture is rarely passed down through formal lessons.

Until it doesn’t.

Because eventually, most of us step outside the emotional ecosystem we grew up in.

We make friends whose families communicate differently. We enter relationships that challenge what we assumed was normal. We encounter people who rest without guilt, disagree without disrespect, or express emotion without shame.

And suddenly, things we never thought to question begin to come into focus.

In some families, children learn that love looks like sacrifice, conflict means yelling, respect means obedience, and good children listen without question. They learn that feelings stay private, strong people do not complain, and family comes before everything.

None of these messages are universal.

But many are familiar. And not all of them are inherently harmful.

That nuance matters.

Some family patterns are shaped by love. Others by culture, faith, necessity, or survival.

2. What Survival Passes Down

This is especially true in immigrant and multicultural families, where what gets passed down is often about far more than personal preference.

Sometimes the values children inherit were built to help a family survive scarcity, instability, migration, discrimination, or profound uncertainty.

Hard work may not have been an aspirational trait. It may have been survival.

Emotional restraint may not have been emotional neglect. It may have been protection.

Privacy may not have meant secrecy. It may have meant dignity.

Collective responsibility may not have been control. It may have been interdependence.

That complexity deserves respect.

And still, survival patterns do not always translate cleanly across generations.

The work ethic that created stability can become workaholism. Loyalty can become guilt. Respect can become fear. Resilience can become emotional suppression. Family closeness can make boundaries feel like betrayal.

For children of immigrants, there is often another layer.

We are not only inheriting family culture, we are often negotiating multiple cultural worlds at once: the culture of our family, the culture our parents or grandparents came from, and the culture of school, peers, media, and the broader society around us.

That can feel like walking a tightrope.

Too much of one world, and you risk feeling disconnected from the other.

Too “foreign” in one space.

Too “American” in another.

Trying to honor sacrifice while also becoming your own person.

Trying to preserve identity while also adapting.

Trying to figure out what to carry forward and what to release.

This tension is deeply personal.

But it is also incredibly common.

3. When Inherited Patterns Become Parenting Patterns

And this is where family culture becomes especially important for parents.

Children learn not only from what adults say, but from what adults model: how conflict is handled, what emotions are welcomed, who gets to have boundaries, whether mistakes are treated as failures or opportunities for repair, whether love feels steady or conditional, whether achievement is celebrated or simply expected, and whether asking for help is seen as strength or weakness.

Sometimes that looks like anxiety.

Sometimes people-pleasing.

Sometimes emotional shutdown.

Sometimes rebellion.

Sometimes guilt over choosing differently.

And sometimes, it looks like a parent realizing they are repeating something they never consciously chose.

That realization is not failure. It is awareness. And awareness creates choice.

4. Choosing What Continues

For many parents, that kind of awareness can feel overwhelming, especially in the middle of busy lives shaped by work, caregiving, school logistics, emotional labor, and the countless invisible responsibilities of raising children.

But this does not require a complete family reinvention overnight.

Often, it begins with noticing.

The moments that trigger a strong reaction often point toward inherited beliefs.

Do you feel disrespected when your child questions you?

Guilty when you set a boundary?

Uncomfortable when emotions run high?

Frustrated when your child wants something different than what you imagined?

Sometimes those reactions are not only about the moment in front of you.

Sometimes they are connected to messages absorbed long before becoming a parent.

It can also help to get curious about the beliefs sitting beneath everyday family decisions.

Questions like:

What am I trying to teach here?
And where did I learn that lesson myself? can be powerful starting points.

For many families, especially those shaped by sacrifice, migration, or survival, another important shift is learning to separate gratitude from obligation.

A family’s work ethic may deserve deep respect without becoming the measure of a child’s worth.

Loyalty can matter without guilt becoming the price of belonging.

5. A few small shifts can create meaningful change.

Children learn emotional culture through what adults model, not just what adults say.

If openness is valued, it has to be visible.

If respectful disagreement is encouraged, it has to be practiced.

If emotional honesty, healthy boundaries, or repair after conflict are important, those patterns need to exist inside the home.

And perhaps most importantly, none of this has to happen all at once.

One repaired reaction.

One boundary held differently.

One inherited belief examined with honesty.

One moment where a parent chooses curiosity instead of automatic repetition.

Some things deserve to be preserved.

Some deserve to be reimagined.

And some deserve to end with us.

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Hi there 👋🏽

Back when I was playing competitive tennis, my coach told me we needed to rebuild my entire service action - the one I’d spent six years perfecting.

It was muscle memory. It was mine.

I was confused. And then I was furious.

He said: “What got you here won’t get you there. Your serve is good. We need it to be great. And right now, you’re one match away from tearing your shoulder.”

For months I felt like a beginner. Awkward. Slower. Worse by almost every visible measure. And then one day.... I wasn’t.

Suddenly I had angles I couldn’t have dreamed of before. Less strain on my shoulder. A serve I could actually build a game around, not just survive on.

That experience taught a very important thing I know about learning: sometimes, forward looks like backward first. You have to make yourself worse before you can become better.

I’ve thought about that moment often, especially in the parts of my career that required me to genuinely start over. From the outside my career has not looked linear and logical. It was a series of deliberate moves that compounded slowly, then suddenly.

What I have also realized is that, when you are an adult, the hardest thing about unlearning isn’t the skill gap. It’s the ego gap.

Most of us are willing to learn new things. Very few of us are willing to be bad at something ... in front of people who are watching.

Unlearning is a skill. Arguably the one that matters most right now - when everything around us is changing faster than our muscle memory can keep up.

☕ Now, on to today’s coffee chat…

Meet Jamaal Glenn

Jamaal is an entrepreneur, venture capital investor, educator, writer, speaker, and consultant working at the intersection of business, media, and public impact. He is the Founder and CEO of JG Holdings, an investment and advisory firm focused on building and supporting long-term value creation.

He is also an adjunct professor at New York University (NYU) and the City University of New York (CUNY), where he teaches graduate and executive courses in finance, marketing, and entrepreneurship. In addition, he founded Glenn Media Group, a boutique consulting firm whose clients have included Google, Harvard University, and the City of New York.

Beyond his business and academic work, Jamaal serves as Chair of The Pivot Fund, a venture philanthropy fund supporting community-led news organizations, and as a Board Director and Treasurer at LION Publishers, the largest membership organization for independent news publishers in the U.S.

Jamaal holds an MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business, an MPA from Harvard Kennedy School, and undergraduate degrees in finance and journalism from the University of Missouri.

Below is my conversation with Jamaal…

Please tell us a little bit about yourself

I’m Jamal Glenn. I’m just new to parenthood. I’m the father of boy-girl twins that we welcomed in the winter of 2024, and I live just outside of Washington, DC, with my wife and two children.

I’m originally from Colorado, born and raised, and I’ve lived in a bunch of different places, all in the United States. I went to undergrad in the Midwest, then moved to New York City and spent some time working in finance. I lived in New York City for many years, left for a bit to go to grad school, came back, and then moved to DC about two years ago. My wife is from the DC area, Southern Maryland, and we had this long-standing plan to eventually move there.

I’ve spent most of my career working at the intersection of finance and technology, and New York is a natural place to do that sort of work. When we had this plan to move to DC, I always felt like DC is a bit of a one-company town… you either work for the government or adjacent to it, and if that’s not your focus, it’s kind of like, “Well, what are you going to do here?” I never wanted to force a move to Washington DC. But the pandemic changed how I thought about the relationship between geography and work. As the pandemic shifted universal norms around remote work, I never again wanted a job that imposed geographic constraints. So we’re super happy in DC, we’ve been here a couple of years, and we are as happy as possible, just overwhelmed with gratitude, and learning what it means to be a parent day by day.

Wonderful. The way I first came across your work was actually through a piece you wrote about fatherhood, identity, and the long road to becoming a parent. You wrote about it with a lot of honesty, which is why I wanted to ask you about it more directly.

You’ve shared that it took you and your partner about six years - through IVF cycles, miscarriages, conversations around surrogacy and adoption, and all the uncertainty that comes with that kind of longing for a child.

One thing I think we still don’t hear enough about is the male perspective in that journey. Understandably, much of the conversation centers on women because the physical burden of fertility treatment and pregnancy loss is carried so viscerally in the female body. But emotionally, it reshapes both people.

So I’d love to understand what that period was like for you not just as a partner trying to support your wife, but as a man navigating hope, grief, helplessness, identity, and expectation over such a long stretch of time. How did that experience shape your relationship, and how did it shape you personally?

As the man in this situation, I always recognize my experience is about one millionth of whatever my wife was going through at any point in time. The reason I talk about it so much is that it takes up so much mental capacity - it’s almost impossible not to talk about. You go to work every day, you do all these professional things, you interact with people in a professional capacity, but you’ve got this lingering thing in the back of your mind that is core to who you are as a person. If you want to be a parent, if you aspire to be a parent, it’s such an ingrained desire that having these fundamental challenges exist makes it very hard not to think about them constantly. And for me, it became very difficult not to talk about them.

Throughout a lot of our journey, I was to varying degrees open about it. That came from two things. One, as I mentioned, it took up so much mental capacity. And two, I so often felt relief and comfort when other people shared their own experiences. I remember simply reading - I believe it was Michelle Obama’s biography - where she shares that she and Barack Obama went through IVF. And I remember feeling like, “Oh.” Hearing that from other people just made it feel less isolating. I also had interactions with people who’d say, “Oh, we had a miscarriage,” and those kinds of anecdotes provided so much comfort. One: I wasn’t alone. Two: they were often accompanied by some piece of advice. The advice that served me most was reframing the disappointment as just a delay … this is just going to take longer. And people would share their own stories: “Hey, we went through a ten-year journey.” Those kinds of anecdotes really made me feel better.

So it was a combination of: this is such a dominant part of my life right now that it feels inauthentic not to talk about it, and I felt a lot of comfort when people shared with me. But I always recognize that my experience was so different and so much less arduous than my wife’s.

So my goal was really just to be there to support her, make sure we had the resources to pursue this journey, and we were very fortunate to have the financial resources to do so, because this all costs a lot of money, and to let her know: I’m here, we can do this for as long as you want, you’re in the driver’s seat. She should never have to add to her list of worries: does Jamal want to stop, or pursue alternatives? So it was really about providing support and resources and letting her know to keep going for as long as she wants.

I really appreciate how openly you talk about this, because I do think it helps normalize an experience that so many couples quietly carry. A lot of the emotional support understandably gets directed toward women, because they bear so much of the physical toll, but when men deeply want to become fathers, they experience grief, disappointment, and uncertainty too and often without the same language or support systems to process it.

I have male friends who’ve been on fertility journeys for years, and I can see how deeply it affects them, but many don’t really know where to put those emotions or who to talk to about them. So I think there’s something really powerful in you speaking about it publicly.

And it makes me curious about the desire itself. Where do you think your longing to become a father came from? Was it something that was always deeply present in you? Did it come from your own upbringing or role models you had growing up? Or did the intensity of the desire grow over time, especially through the difficulty of trying to get there?

I don’t know that I can pinpoint an exact place or time where it comes from. I’ve always just seen myself as someone who would eventually have children. I will say my relationship with fatherhood is a little complicated, because my father died of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma when I was ten years old. That was such a profound experience that I think shaped me in probably some good ways and some not-so-good ways - in terms of how I show up emotionally, how emotionally available I am. There are some complications there I can’t fully articulate. But I always just saw myself as someone who would have children.

Now that I do have them, it almost feels like … oh, this is what the whole point of this is. This is the whole reason we live. It’s almost as if, if you strip away all the complexities of modern society, we are just a species of living things trying to continue to grow and thrive. And having children feels so core to that project, to the overall goal of life, that I can’t imagine an alternative where I wouldn’t have had them.

Obviously I can imagine an alternative where we weren’t able to have our own biological children but it feels so core to being human that I almost can’t conceive of it. I feel this very differently now, having them. Before, I wanted children but it didn’t feel this ingrained, this core. Now it almost feels like I can’t imagine not pursuing this path.

Growing up, I used to think about legacy in this big, abstract way …what impact will I leave behind, what will matter after I’m gone. And even in spaces like grad school or ambitious career environments, you’re constantly pushed to think about purpose in these grand terms.

But then you have children, and suddenly legacy becomes much more intimate and tangible. You realize: this is actually what outlives me. The values I pass on, the way my children move through the world, the small parts of myself that continue through them that’s the closest thing most of us will ever have to immortality.

It’s funny because we live in a moment where some people, especially in Silicon Valley, are literally trying to engineer immortality. But I sometimes think this version is how humans have always done it: through values, stories, relationships, family. A little bit of you carries forward through your children and grandchildren, and eventually even that memory fades and maybe that’s okay. Maybe that is the natural shape of legacy.

You also said something before we hit record: that fatherhood didn’t just change how you saw yourself, it changed how the world saw you. I think a lot of people understand the first part becoming a parent is deeply transformative internally. But I’m especially curious about the second part.

What changed in how people responded to you after you became a dad?

As a tall, physically imposing Black man in American society, I got used to this pervasive feeling of invisibility or sort of being avoided. The joke I’ve made for years is that one of the few “Black male privileges” in America is that the seat next to you on an Amtrak train is probably going to be open. I say that as a joke, but when I first started making it, it was my own anecdotal observation and then I heard other Black men independently make the exact same observation. I actually stumbled across an internet video the other day where someone was literally filming people getting on the train saying, “Yeah, I’m a Black man, I’m gonna have a seat next to me.” So that’s a pervasive feeling that took me a long time to fully realize and articulate.

But once I had the children, I realized that perception had shifted so dramatically. It went from: walking on a crowded street and being either sort of ignored, or sensing people crossing to the other side, or noticing these subtle things - again, I can’t read people’s minds, but there’s enough of a sample size that these patterns become clear to now having a double stroller with two children. And I realize there’s a universality to this: children just burst open people’s humanity. You see a baby, people smile. You see a stroller, people want to engage. But for me, the contrast was so startling… from that pervasive feeling of invisibility to suddenly being in a world where people are stopping me, engaging, elderly women are having full-blown unprompted conversations. That was such a stark contrast, and it was an immediate thing I noticed especially when I started taking the kids out in public.

And I think, in my discussions with others, people do feel that sense of engagement when they have children - people want to talk to you. But I think the big difference for me was how stark the contrast was, because I had felt such pervasive invisibility in public spaces for so long. It was almost as if my children softened how I was perceived externally and allowed people to engage with me, get to know me, recognize me in a way I simply wasn’t used to, at scale.

That’s wild to me, because I would always assume that any big, tall guy who commands presence would just never feel invisible. Honestly, had you not told me, I never would have assumed that was your experience in public spaces. I would always have assumed you were just used to people making way for you, commanding that space. I never would have thought you’d describe yourself as someone who feels invisible.

But I do understand some of where it comes from. And it’s just interesting .. the layers of biases and assumptions people make about us just based on what they can visibly see.

And I will say … I don’t know that the realization came to me fully on my own. One of the key moments that helped me understand it was in grad school. I went to business school at Stanford. Stanford Business School has this very famous class colloquially known as “touchy feely,” though it’s actually called Interpersonal Dynamics. You spend hours every week having very human conversations with your classmates, unpacking the feelings and perceptions behind them.

I remember having a conversation with one of my classmates outside of class … technically you’re not supposed to, but it happened naturally while we were grabbing drinks. He said something to the effect of: “You’re a tall, physically imposing guy. My perception, and I think the perception of a lot of classmates, is that if you’re not the one to go out of your way to build the relationship, people are going to kind of stand back.” That conversation, combined with others and my own perceptions, really crystallized it for me. But yeah, that contrast - from the world I’d been living in, to the parent world where people come up to you and start conversations and really engage …is so stark.

You went to Stanford and have built a really interesting career, and I imagine you’ve spent time in environments where success is defined quite narrowly: titles, funding rounds, prestige, constant upward mobility.

So I’m curious how your relationship with ambition has evolved over time especially after becoming a dad. Did fatherhood shift that lens for you at all?

I will say and I think this predates graduate school for a long chunk of my career, I’ve viewed professional success and ambition by taking into account: what does this provide for the world?

I’ve done a bunch of pretty cool things since graduating, and I’ve spent a significant part of my career as an early-stage venture capital investor. I was an impact investor, so the things I invested in needed to be inherently good for the world. You can define that in a lot of different ways, and it’s a challenging thing to claim, because every entrepreneur feels like what they’re building is good for the world. But my definition goes beyond just economic success for the entity itself. I always say: I would be a lot wealthier if I had a tolerance for investing in enterprise software, for example. And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with enterprise software … companies have done great things. But for me, it doesn’t check the box. The world isn’t inherently better because some large corporation can do a particular process 10% faster, even if that creates enormous economic value.

So I always needed to do things that had some inherent good for the world it was just how I was wired. So much of my success in any particular job or field depends on: am I interested in this? And the pool of things that genuinely interest me is largely defined by whether they’re good for the world.

That has actually made it harder to pursue certain career paths, because there are things that were great in many ways financially, in terms of the opportunities they led to but I just couldn’t get excited about them.

So I don’t think parenthood has fundamentally changed that. If anything, I feel more deeply about it the further along I am in my career. I also find that I increasingly live in a world where more and more people think this way - a lot of the organizations I advise, family offices and philanthropy, are at this same nexus: we want to put money to work in the world, but we want to do it in ways that make the world better.

I will say that one thing that predated having children, but that I think about much more strongly post-children, is that I increasingly define personal success by my ability to control my time.

That really crystallized for me during the pandemic. One of the interesting things about remote work is that it fundamentally changes the arrangement you have with an employer from “you come and work for us for eight hours a day and we give you money” to “you produce XYZ.” It disentangles money from time and rearranges it to money for output, which I think is a more rational economic arrangement and genuinely better for workers.

But beyond the macro argument … it’s just personally fulfilling. Literally just yesterday, or the day before: I was working from home, we have a nanny, and I could hear my daughter wailing in the other room. I just peeked in and grabbed her .. she needed a bottle before her nap. I put her in her sleep sack, brought the milk into my office, turned my camera off during the meeting, listened while holding her as she drank. It was maybe five minutes. The nanny finished up with my son and came and got her. But those five minutes were so important. I’m never that far from my children, and there are these constant touchpoints throughout the day. I would genuinely trade a lot of the money I make each year for that ability.

So that thinking - that success means controlling my time and my location - predated my children, but that feeling has only gotten stronger since having them. My wife and I were literally having a conversation the other day about how much money it would take for us to relocate to some arbitrary location, regardless of what opportunities were involved. That ability to control my time and location is very valuable and an increasingly central part of what I consider success.

And I think one of the most frustrating things right now is watching organizations roll back flexibility through blanket return-to-office 5 days a week mandates.

To me, those decisions are going to disproportionately impact women and working parents. We can’t keep talking about declining fertility and female workforce participation while simultaneously removing one of the few structural changes that actually helped many families make work and caregiving more sustainable.

You mentioned earlier that flexibility is a privilege often reserved for people with enough leverage or in-demand skills to negotiate it.

I think the pandemic opened a door that’s impossible to fully close now. It showed people and companies that remote and flexible work can actually work.

And because of that, we’re in the early stages of a much bigger rethinking of work, geography, and how people want to structure their lives. The people with the most leverage and optionality increasingly want flexibility, and over time, employers are going to have to adapt to that reality.

Especially in industries where people are the core asset - professional services, technology, knowledge work - companies can only push so hard before it starts affecting their ability to attract and retain top talent. In the long run, if you’re competing in a real talent market, flexibility becomes less of a perk and more of a necessity.

And that flexibility helps with energy that you can give to all aspects of your life.

I’m curious whether going through such a long and difficult fertility journey changed the way you experience parenthood now.

A lot of parents talk about the stress and exhaustion that comes with raising kids - but when you’ve spent years wondering whether it would even happen for you, does that shift your perspective on the harder moments? Does the gratitude change the way you experience day-to-day parenting?

Yes - our long fertility journey dramatically changed the ratio of gratitude to frustration I experience as a parent.

Of course parenting is exhausting and stressful at times… that’s true for everyone. But because my wife and I spent years not knowing whether this would ever happen for us, there’s this underlying sense of gratitude that never really leaves.

It almost acts like a frustration circuit breaker. Whenever things start to feel overwhelming, there’s a moment where one of us remembers: we once thought we might never get to experience this at all.

My wife and I even joke about it sometimes. There’s that meme from Transformers where Shia LaBeouf is yelling, “You wanted this!” Whenever parenting gets hard, we’ll say that to each other as a reminder: you wanted this. We chose this, hoped for this, fought for this.

There was a point where we were seriously considering adoption because we didn’t know if having biological children was going to happen. So I think living through that uncertainty permanently shifted our perspective.

The joy-to-frustration ratio just feels incredibly high for us, because we can so clearly imagine the alternative scenario the one where we never got here at all.

I’m glad you brought that up, because that’s the other thing I tell people - Parenting is tough but then anything worth doing in life is tough. I wish more people talked about the joy and the fun and the pleasure of parenthood.

Over the years, I do think the narrative around being miserable and it being soul-sucking and just grunt work has become so overblown that it unfortunately scares a lot of people off. A lot of people rationalize it by saying, “Why would I want that in my life?”

I couldn’t agree more. There is so much joy and meaning and it’s just kind of cool to watch little human beings develop. My wife is a scientist, she has a PhD in microbiology and immunology, so I think I’m probably a little biased, but if you’re at all scientifically curious about human beings, having children is fascinating.

You get to watch them go from newborns to actual people. And I oftentimes find myself projecting into the future, thinking big picture about society: what kind of people will they be? How will they contribute? And whether I like it or not, the things I’m doing right now are dramatically influencing that

And you’ve got a natural A/B test built right in, since you have twins! You get to see nature versus nurture - the personalities of two kids at the exact same age being different. And then there’s also the difference in gender, which I think is so cool, because it couldn’t be more scientific in terms of watching how humans develop.

I’m really excited for you and your wife to experience watching these two grow up.

🤓 Open tabs…

(I have modeled this section after those “open tabs” that we all have with a few (okay 30-40) interesting links that we promise we will eventually get to one day. These are the links that I had open for sometime that I finally got to …)

⭐Are you an actual book nerd, or are you just ‘performative reading’?
“Especially on TikTok and in Instagram Reels, we can see that the algorithm basically rewards what looks good, like the eye-catching cover and the staged coffee shots in a downtown cafe,” said Muong, 17. “They’re focusing on what looks good and not whether the book is being read or not. And I think, because of this, platforms turn books into basically aesthetic props to curate in their Instagram dumps.”

⭐The Taylor Swift Songwriting Process Interview
The New York Times Magazine polled more than 250 music insiders and gathered six Times critics to choose the 30 Greatest Living American Songwriters. One artist who made the list was Taylor Swift.

⭐Why I Finally Called It Quits With LinkedIn
LinkedIn has become a feed where we perform “professionalism.”

It’s a middle-school cafeteria for people in suits, parody accounts built by trolls, and the highest level AI slop disguised as insight. I’ve heard that other platforms are like this too. That social media as we know it is done for…You aren’t “checking” LinkedIn; you’re monitoring your status. You’re waiting for the next hit of validation or the next spark of conflict. And while you’re monitoring that screen, you’re missing the real life happening three feet away from you.

📖 My private thoughts from my very public diary…

(Sometimes on X (Twitter)…. sometimes on Threads)

📋 A quick reader request

Shine, an early-stage health technology company, is building a wearable that continuously monitors hormones through sweat - beginning with cortisol and designed specifically for women navigating perimenopause and post-menopause.

As the team prepares for Alpha testing, they are hoping to hear directly from women aged 40+ about their experiences with menopause and hormonal health. If this applies to you (or someone you know), they would deeply appreciate you taking a few minutes to complete this confidential survey. It takes approximately 5–7 minutes.

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In 2020, I had my first daughter in the middle of a pandemic.

The world felt small and scary. Parenting felt isolating and confusing. The changes in me and what parenting meant for me and my career felt overwhelming. I craved a community and space that didn’t ask me to choose which version of myself was the real one.

It was isolating in ways I hadn’t anticipated.

And in that isolation, I kept running into a question I couldn’t find good answers to anywhere: How do you build a serious career and raise children with intention … without treating one as the compromise for the other?

I looked for the content and the community. It didn’t exist in the form I needed.

So I decided to create it for myself.

[I talked about the origin story and why I continue to do this alongside a demanding career and motherhood on The Mambition Podcast]

At the time, I didn’t feel qualified to write from certainty. I was still in the middle of becoming. I had no idea how to do the parenting thing.

So I started reaching out to other parents - ambitious, thoughtful, honest humans who could help me figure out this parenting thing. Help me figure out all that I was feeling and experiencing. Help me make sense of it all.

And I called it The Coffee Chats series.

I think a part of me believed that if I interviewed enough people, eventually someone would hand me the map.

I had spent most of my life operating in systems where effort created progress, where there was a right sequence of moves, where you could optimize your way toward an outcome.

Somewhere along the way, the conversations stopped feeling like interviews and started feeling like mirrors. They expanded my understanding of ambition. Of partnership. Of identity. Of success. Of what a meaningful life could actually look like.

They also made me feel far less alone.

Via the chats I’ve met founders and physicians, executives and educators, parents who scaled companies and parents who quietly restructured their entire lives. I’ve heard stories about burnout, negotiation, guilt, partnership, invisible labor, reinvention, and ambition that refuses to die just because children arrive.

Each conversation changed me. And along the way, this newsletter found its people. It still shocks me that week after week, over 2,000 of you choose to read this. I’m deeply proud of what we’ve built together.

But lately, I’ve felt myself wanting to go further.

The patterns are becoming clearer. The tensions more familiar. The question has shifted from “What are we all experiencing?” to “What do we do with what we now know?”

The Coffee Chat format has naturally run its course. And so, at 115 conversations, I’m retiring it.

I’ve thought carefully about the final four. Together, they capture something of the remarkable range of parents I’ve had the privilege of profiling.

You’ll meet:

• A performer who has danced with Beyoncé and appeared in the Super Bowl halftime show

• A venture capitalist who became a father to twins and, for the first time, felt truly seen by the world

• A climate activist whose wife co-wrote the movie adaptation of Wicked

• The CEO of a highly respected Canadian company, who opens up about raising a child with a disability

But this is not a goodbye

What’s coming next is something I’ve been building toward for a while … less about collecting stories, more about making sense of them.

I want Decks and Diapers to become the place professional parents come to think, not just to feel seen. A space for both stories and for sense-making.

More intentional conversations. More expert voices. More of the personal essays many of you have told me resonate most. All of it connected to a larger body of thinking about work, ambition, caregiving, and what it actually means to build a meaningful life alongside children.

For now, I’m closing the Coffee Chat chapter with deep gratitude. The Coffee Chats did exactly what they were meant to do. And like all good seasons, they’re making space for the next one.

If you enjoy Decks and Diapers, it would mean the world to me if you invited friends to subscribe and read with us. If that feels like too much then, did you know that liking this post or leaving a comment helps it find more readers?

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This Mother’s Day, I don’t want being a mother to be a big deal.

I’ll take the handmade cards. I’ll take the chocolate. No complaints there.

What I don’t want is to keep managing the weight the identity carries in the professional world... in ways fathers simply don’t have to.

In 2026, motherhood still quietly rearranges how a woman is perceived at work. Not explicitly. Not in writing. But in assumptions. Between what gets said and what gets decided.

Her ambition gets audited. Her availability gets questioned. Her trajectory gets, just slightly...recalculated.

We do not do this to fathers.

A man becomes a father and none of that happens. His trajectory continues. His dedication is assumed intact. Nobody factors his kids into whether he’s ready for the next level. His life just keeps moving, forward.

And layered on top of it - a second tax: the cognitive overload of constantly calibrating how much of yourself is too much. ... always wondering whether she can talk about this part of her life openly. Without it meaning anything about her commitment, competence, ambition, or drive. Constantly managing the optics of it.

The way fathers don’t have to manage the optics of theirs.

Assume that raising the next generation changes nothing about what someone brings to work. Extend the same benefit of the doubt. Recalculate nothing.

That’s the bar. And in 2026, we’re still not there.

If you’re a working mother, you’ve lived this. If you know one, send this to her today.
And yes, Happy Mother’s Day. 💛

The Coffee Chats and Open Tabs will be back in the next edition.

If you find yourself with a little extra time, maybe you use it to go through the archives and rediscover an old conversation I had shared.

If you enjoy Decks and Diapers, it would mean the world to me if you invited friends to subscribe and read with us. If that feels like too much then, did you know that liking this post or leaving a comment helps it find more readers?

Leave a comment

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Disclaimer: All views expressed are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of my employer

If you’re reading this but haven’t subscribed, you may want to consider doing that. This will ensure future posts land straight in your inbox.

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🎧 Did you know you can also listen to Decks and Diapers on your favorite podcast app?

A French Canadian colleague told me she was taking a month off this summer … not to go anywhere specific, just to dériver.

I didn’t know the word. She explained it: intentional drifting. Moving with some direction, but without a fixed destination. Letting the current take you somewhere interesting rather than forcing yourself toward a predetermined point.

Every year I choose a word to live by .. something to imbibe. Dériver is mine for 2026. (It also makes me sound very sophisticated, which I’m not mad about.)

I’m currently on maternity leave. Baby number two arrived late last year. I know exactly how fast it goes. There’s a part of me that genuinely wants to be here … fully, unhurriedly here. With my infant, soaking it all in unrushed.

And then there’s the other part.

My work-self. The part watching AI reshape entire industries in real time. The part quietly auditing herself every few days … should I be learning to code, should I be building tools, should I be spending naptime keeping up?

Earlier this week I found a note in my phone … written with a few business school classmates, mapping where we each needed to be by 2028. A decade after graduating. I remember how certain it felt.

Reading it now, I laughed.

Not unkindly. But the person who wrote that note had made a specific kind of error …not a professional one, but a personal one. She had not anticipated, could not have anticipated, what becoming a mother once and then twice would actually demand from a person.

It was an unknown unknown.

A complete blind spot. She thought the self who made the plan would be the same self who executed it. She thought sheer force … hard work, determination, the willingness to bulldoze through … would be enough. She hadn’t yet learned that sometimes the ground moves. That sometimes you move. And that neither is a problem to be solved.

Her professional vision stayed frozen: titles, scope, trajectory. Locked in place as though the person pursuing them would remain unchanged.

And now I’m on maternity leave with my second, watching AI move at a speed that makes stillness feel like a strategic error.

I see the LinkedIn posts … the new certifications, the apps people are building on weekends, the courses people are taking, the quiet reshuffling happening inside corporations. The rational part of me knows that six to ten months don’t change a career.

But the AI-rational part knows that six to ten months right now might be a decade of change compressed into a single season. And I’m watching it from the sidelines.

That’s the specific texture of this anxiety. It’s not that I’ve lost my ambition … I haven’t. I am still driven. I still want to do interesting things in the world.

I don’t have a clean answer. I’m still the person who checks LinkedIn during nap time, still carrying a low hum of urgency that doesn’t fully switch off. But I’m slowly learning that the anxiety isn’t wrong exactly … it’s just pointed at the wrong thing.

Being married to a plan written for a past version of yourself isn’t ambition. It’s just anxiety with a spreadsheet.

Dériver isn’t about giving up the drive. It means loosening your grip on a map drawn by someone you no longer are.

I’m not there yet. But I’m trying. And right now, in this season, that may be enough.

The world isn’t going to slow down and wait. But maybe the move isn’t to run faster … it’s to get better at navigating moving water.

🎙️ This week’s Running Note is a short one … but it might stay with you.

Running Notes #2: What Toronto Taught Me About Being Many Things at Once — I’ve been thinking about how this city holds four completely different versions of itself across the seasons. And how maybe we’re allowed to do the same.

Under 5 minutes. One reflection question at the end. Perfect for a walk or your commute.

The Coffee Chats and Open Tabs will be back in the next edition.

If you find yourself with a little extra time, maybe you use it to go through the archives and rediscover an old conversation I had shared.

If you enjoy Decks and Diapers, it would mean the world to me if you invited friends to subscribe and read with us. If that feels like too much then, did you know that liking this post or leaving a comment helps it find more readers?

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Disclaimer: All views expressed are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of my employer

In episode #2 of Running Notes I explore 3 key ideas:

Toronto’s magic is in its multiplicity - it’s not one city, it’s many versions of a city layered into one. The seasons make that visible in a way few places can.

We are many selves within one self - Hazel Rose Markus and Alana Conner write in Clash! that our sense of self shifts across places, times, and situations. Easy to understand intellectually. Much harder to actually live.

You can’t be everything all at once ... and that’s okay -like seasons, different versions of us take centerstage at different times. The goal isn’t balance in every moment. It’s making sure each version of you gets its season.

If you’re new here, Decks and Diapers is a newsletter about work, parenting, and all the messy, beautiful intersections in between. Running Notes is where I think out loud about all of it.

Subscribe now

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Hi there 👋🏽

I have been thinking about how so many women in their 30s and 40s have this great awakening.

They start becoming a different person: less apologetic, more themselves, and not afraid to take up space.

That is because, irrespective of where you grow up as a little girl, once you hit puberty (& for some cease to remain a child), the world starts teaching you how to shrink yourself, how to tame yourself, and how to become a smaller version of you.

Lots of women spend their teenage years and 20s being this way - people-pleasing, smaller than who they are, apologetic, doing things because they’ve been told to.

Then at some point some of them reclaim themselves. People feel they changed but the reality is they did not change - they just learnt how to become their true self again!

☕ Now, on to today’s coffee chat…

Meet Jennifer Gagnon

Jen is career coach, and mom of two, dedicated to helping high-achieving mothers navigate the intersection of ambition and motherhood. She hosts The Sustainable Mom Podcast, where she explores burnout, redefining success, and building more sustainable paths through work and life.

Below is my conversation with Jen…

Please tell us a little bit about yourself

I’m Jen Gagnon. I’m married and have two kids - they’re about to be six and four. I work full-time in corporate America, where I currently have a team of about nine direct reports.

Within the last year, I also became a certified leadership coach. Through my coaching, I work directly with women in the workforce. It’s similar to what you mentioned about your experience on maternity leave - when you start thinking about going back to work and trying to balance your ambition with this new identity as a mother.

That’s very much what led me to this work. When you become a mom, your experience in the workplace really changes. For me, it felt very personal navigating that shift, and it made me want to support other women going through something similar.

And just out of curiosity - you mentioned you have a full-time corporate career, what made you want to take on coaching in addition to that? I don’t want to call it a passion project or a side hustle, but it is something you’re doing alongside your main job. What drew you to it?

I’ve always been in the self-help or personal development space in some way. I worked in a psychiatric hospital for 10 years, and I was also a yoga teacher for several years.

When I transitioned into my corporate job, I realized I’m good at it, but I knew I wanted to do more.

Ideally, I would love to do coaching full-time at some point.

That’s really interesting. I often say this to people - I think there’s a kind of false mental model when you’re younger, where you feel like your passion, your income, and your sense of meaning all need to come from the same place.

What’s interesting about your approach is that you’ve separated those things. Your job pays the bills and gives you stability, but coaching is what brings you fulfillment.

And I think that’s especially relevant when I talk to women post-motherhood. A lot of them feel burnt out because they dislike their jobs, and at the same time, they don’t have anything in their lives that gives them energy.

Yeah, and I think that’s a big part of it. If someone doesn’t feel passion in their work and also can’t create that separation, they start to question everything like, is this even worth it? Why am I doing this every day if I don’t enjoy it?

That can be really challenging.

And for me, I actually don’t like the term “quiet quitting.” It gets framed as doing the bare minimum at work, and it carries a negative connotation. But in certain seasons of life, that is survival.

It can mean going to work, doing what you need to do, and not going above and beyond - so you can preserve your energy for your kids and other things in your life when you get home.

That’s really interesting. I remember you writing about this idea that you don’t have to quit your job to avoid burnout.

A lot of people think it’s an all-or-nothing situation - they feel like the only solution is to walk away entirely. I’m curious where that perspective came from for you, and how you arrived at that insight. Could you unpack that a bit?

Yeah. And it’s hard to cover every scenario in a post or even in a single answer, but often we assume, it must be the job…that’s what’s burning me out.

I’ve also seen moms feel like the only solution is to leave the workforce entirely and become a stay-at-home mom. But I don’t necessarily think that solves burnout.

Sometimes, the pressure comes from within us - the need to constantly produce, to always be doing something, to live up to expectations. And those expectations don’t go away if you leave your job.

If anything, they can just shift. You might feel pressure to have the cleanest house, to cook organic, farm-to-table meals, to homeschool your kids, whatever it looks like.

So whether you’re working or not, there are still ways to burn yourself out. It’s not always about the job itself.

Of course, there are situations where the environment is the issue like having a toxic boss. In those cases, boundaries can help, but if the environment is truly unhealthy, it’s going to affect you regardless.

But if the job itself isn’t terrible, there are things you can do. You can set boundaries around your time like not always being the first one online or the last one to log off, not working late just because you feel like you should.

And I always come back to values. Understanding your personal values, and asking: does this job align with them? If it doesn’t, that misalignment alone can cause burnout even if the workload isn’t that high.

That’s really interesting. One thing you said that stood out to me was this idea of perfection and unrealistic expectations whether they’re externally driven or self-imposed.

Culture clearly plays a role, both inside and outside the home. And to your point, burnout isn’t limited to women in high-pressure careers. Even stay-at-home moms can experience it…they can essentially turn their lives into 60-hour workweeks.

Yes and I always like to add that even if it feels like we’re doing this to ourselves, it’s not really our fault.

We’ve been so deeply socialized to live up to these expectations that we’re often not even aware of it. So it can feel personal, but it’s actually systemic and societal.

Sometimes just stepping back and reflecting on how we’ve been conditioned - to be the “perfect mom” or the “perfect employee” - can help relieve some of that pressure.

That makes a lot of sense.

You mentioned that your coaching focuses on helping ambitious moms avoid burnout. So I’m curious - how do you define ambition? And how do you help women redefine it for themselves?

Because traditionally, ambition has been tied to hustle culture…this idea of always being on, always achieving. How do you help shift that relationship so it’s not toxic?

That’s a great question.

I think the perception of ambition is definitely changing. It’s often talked about now with a negative connotation - like the “girl boss” mindset, always pushing for more and more.

But to me, ambition doesn’t have to be exhausting or draining. It can simply mean having goals and wanting to achieve them. And those goals don’t even have to be career-related.

It’s really about knowing what you want your life to look like, and then taking steps to get there.

If I had to boil ambition down to one word, I’d say intention. It’s about being intentional with your life and your choices.

And without sharing anything confidential, you mentioned you’ve worked with around 50–60 women. I’m curious - who are these women typically? At what point do they seek out a coach?

And more broadly, are there recurring themes or patterns you see across their experiences?

Most of the women I work with are going through some kind of career transition.

Often, they’re either thinking about leaving corporate or they’re already in roles that don’t feel right anymore. That’s usually when they reach out.

A big theme that comes up is doubt questions like: Am I making the wrong choice? Am I being selfish for wanting to leave a job that looks perfect on paper?

There’s also a lot of uncertainty. Many of these women have been socialized into that traditional definition of ambition - keep achieving, keep climbing.

But then they reach a certain point and realize it doesn’t feel the way they expected. And when they want to move in a different direction, they’re no longer getting that external validation that tells them they’re on the “right” path.

That loss of validation can be really difficult to navigate.

To be honest, I was very much brought up in that culture. I grew up in India, my parents are both physicians, and it was always: get the top grades, go to the best school, get the best job. Then it became: be the fastest to the next promotion…just keep climbing for the sake of climbing.

And I know a lot of people like me who are externally look very successful but internally were miserable. And they cannot understand why. They just keep thinking happiness was just one level away….like, I’m almost there.

So what you’re saying really resonates. I think a lot of it comes from external validation. And then when you become a mom, the expectations are so high. It almost feels like if a dad does the bare minimum, he gets praised but a mom can give everything and it’s just expected.

And there’s also comparison. I remember you writing about meeting two male colleagues or friends who didn’t have kids, and feeling like they were more accomplished.

So I guess my question, buried in all of that, is: for women like me, who grew up with very clear external markers of success, and for the women you coach, how do you help with that internal shift?

How do you get to a place where it’s okay that people have made different life choices and that comparison isn’t helpful?

I can definitely speak to this from personal experience.

To your point about that post - I had met up with two guy friends I hadn’t seen in almost a decade. And both of them had made huge progress in their careers. I was honestly shocked at the levels they had reached.

And my immediate thought was: I’m in almost the exact same place I was the last time I saw them. And I did feel bad about that.

What I ended up doing and what I help other women do is really ask: What is it that I actually want?

There’s so much noise around us about what we should want - keep climbing, keep achieving, keep reaching for more. So it takes intentional effort to pause and ask: Do I actually want a higher-level job? And if I do, why?

Because I can get caught up in it too - the titles, the salary, the recognition. But when I really think about what that job would require day-to-day, I realize: No, I don’t actually want that.

So I always come back to values. What do you value in your life? And what actually aligns with that?

For example, if you know you don’t want to travel, then even if you see someone on Instagram living this jet-setting, luxurious lifestyle, you might compare yourself for a moment but when you come back to your truth, you remember: that’s not what I want.

It might be great for her, but it doesn’t align with my life.

So a lot of it is about distinguishing between your own beliefs and the ones you’ve absorbed along the way. Asking: Is this something I truly want, or something I’ve just been conditioned to believe I should want?

Now you’re not just a coach - you’re also creating content, sharing your perspective, and taking on something additional on top of everything else you already have going on.

What pushed you to do that?

Part of it, of course, is that it can support your coaching practice but was there a specific moment where you thought, I should start talking about this more openly?

Like, what led you to put your voice out there in a more vulnerable and public way?

Me starting my podcast and newsletter really came from a desire to step away from social media.

I wanted to get away from the algorithms, the pressure to push out content every single day, and the amount of time you spend creating something that, in the end, not many people even see.

What I’ve really loved about the podcast, especially since I’ve already done a few guest interviews, is exactly what you’re doing here. It’s the opportunity to talk to other mothers and learn from them.

How are you navigating your career after having kids? What did ambition look like before kids, and what does it look like now?

I think it’s really important for us to share our stories. For me, especially as a first-time mom, I felt really alone. I kept wondering: Am I the only one thinking this? Am I the only one going through this?

And even if our circumstances aren’t exactly the same, I think there’s a lot of unity we can find in shared experiences. And I think that’s really powerful for everyone.

Quick-fire Questions:

What’s the best thing you have read recently?
I’m love reading multiple books at once and my “to be read” pile of books is out of control. This is a hard one to narrow down so I’ll pick one fiction and one non. I am reading The Great Alone by Kristen Hannah, I love her and all her books and Making Motherhood Work by Caitlyn Collins, which is a summary of how women across
nations juggle motherhood and career. Highly recommend both!

What’s the best thing you have watched recently?
I don’t watch a ton of tv but when I do it’s usually Call the Midwife. I find the show so comforting and wholesome.

What’s the best thing you have heard recently?
Kelly Casperson's podcast on hair loss. As someone who mentioned feeling like my hair was thinning to several doctors and no one took me seriously, her podcast made me feel seen and validated.

🤓 Open tabs…

(I have modeled this section after those “open tabs” that we all have with a few (okay 30-40) interesting links that we promise we will eventually get to one day. These are the links that I had open for sometime that I finally got to …)

⭐How 911 Dispatchers Actually work

Ricardo Martinez II spent more than a decade as a 911 dispatcher. Martinez explains to Business Insider how dispatchers decide who gets help first for police, ambulance, and fire services, why they sometimes have to drop one call to save another, and the "caller hacks" that can literally save your life. He also reveals how burnout, low pay, and constant emotional strain are pushing America’s "first first responders" to the brink.

⭐Drop the Ball: A Strategic Guide to Letting Go
The one that starts with how I “do it all” – growing in my career while parenting and managing household responsibilities and also getting an adequate amount of sleep.

The simple answer is I don’t.

Today’s post is about dropping balls — at home and at work– and why it might be the most important skill you never learned.

⭐What Time Should You Wake Up? Probably Not 5 a.m.
“It’s true, some of the world’s top CEOs and elite athletes swear by early rising. But sleep experts say it can set you up for failure. The trend of waking up at 5 a.m. is the second stupidest thing I’ve heard in a long time,” says Michael Breus, a sleep doctor in Hermosa Beach, Calif. (The first? Taping your mouth shut at night.) “If you’re a night owl who wants to get stuff done and you try waking up at 5 a.m., you’ll last a week, and you’ll become self-defeated and depressed.”

📖 My private thoughts from my very public diary…

(Sometimes on X (Twitter)…. sometimes on Threads)

If you enjoy Decks and Diapers, it would mean the world to me if you invited friends to subscribe and read with us. If that feels like too much then, did you know that liking this post or leaving a comment helps it find more readers?

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Hi there 👋🏽

My mother rose to the rank of Brigadier in the Indian Army. She’s also a super-specialist onco-pathologist. She raised two kids through the 90s and 2000s ....both, I’m told, turned out reasonably well ;)

She did all of this without a roadmap. And then she quietly built one ....which means I’ve spent my whole life walking on the shoulders of someone who figured it out before I was old enough to understand what “it” even was.

I’ve grown up with her voice and her framework for living. So yes, I am biased, when I say she is one of the wisest humans I know and I am thrilled the world gets to hear a little bit of her wisdom too.

She was recently on the Been There Done That Podcast, where she talks about the choices she made, the trade-offs she accepted, and the philosophy behind what she calls her “two F’s, two P’s, and an S” - her theory for health and happiness.

Available wherever you listen to Podcasts!

P.s: If reading is still more your think, I had profiled her for the 100th Coffee Chat which you can read here

☕ Now, on to today’s coffee chat…

Meet Sophia Guennoun

Sophie is the Global Head of Healthcare Innovation & Transformation at Bupa, where she works at the intersection of health, technology, and human experience. Her focus is on shaping the future of care - building more personalized, preventative, and digitally enabled health solutions, from genomics-driven diagnostics to customer-centric care models.

Her path into healthcare wasn’t linear. She began her career in management consulting, spending nearly eight years advising private equity clients on commercial due diligence, growth strategy, brand building, and IPOs across consumer and luxury hospitality sectors. Over time, she found herself increasingly drawn to a more human question: how do we help people not just live longer, but feel better?

That curiosity ultimately led her into healthcare innovation, where she now brings together strategy, technology, and a deep focus on the individual to reimagine what modern healthcare can look like.

Below is my conversation with Sophia…

Please tell us a little bit about yourself

I started my career at McKinsey, where I spent several years working across different industries and building a strong foundation in problem-solving and strategy. Over time, I found myself increasingly drawn to questions around well-being - how we help people feel better, not just physically but mentally and emotionally as well.

That curiosity became more personal and more urgent at a certain point in my life, and it led me to reflect on what I wanted to do next. I began exploring different paths, including entrepreneurship, with a broad goal in mind: to work on something that meaningfully improves how people feel and live.

As I explored, I found myself gravitating toward healthcare. The more I learned, the more fascinated I became by the innovation happening in the space especially how technology is transforming healthcare from a reactive system into something much more preventative, personalized, and integrated into everyday life.

That journey led me to my current role. I’m now the Global Head of healthcare innovation & transformation within the Strategy & Transformation office at Bupa, a leading health insurer and healthcare provider based in the UK, with operations across markets like Australia, Spain, and Hong Kong.

I know we connected sometime back and you were excited to share your experience, I am curious when you heard about this newsletter, what got you excited?

I got excited to talk about this topic because, in my own experience, motherhood represented a huge shift for me. It took me some time to really understand what it meant and how it could fit with the other aspects of my life.

It also triggered a lot of thinking around questions like: What do I want my new life to look like? What do I want my new operating model to look like? What are my non-negotiables?

All of these questions took, I would say, a couple of years to answer. They weren’t easy questions.

But ultimately, motherhood triggered a lot of reflection and growth. That’s why I was excited by your mission and wanted to have this conversation with you.

You mentioned earlier that motherhood was a turning point for you. At some stage, it seems like it led you to question, not just your career path, but your broader definitions of success, ambition, and what those actually mean.

I’d love to explore that a bit more.

Yeah, absolutely.

There was definitely a shift in what success, ambition, and vision mean to me.

There was also a deeper questioning of things I used to believe in or the definitions I used to assign to certain concepts, like feminism.

Tell me more about that. This idea that it led you to rethink, not necessarily question, but reconsider, the modern notion of what it means to be an empowered, professional, successful woman.

I think the more traditional or mainstream definition often suggests that women need to be completely equal to men in the workplace.

But I really believe we should be striving for equity, not equality.

We go through different experiences. We have different constraints. And we also have different strengths and weaknesses - some of which are simply physiological. For example, women get pregnant and give birth; men don’t.

So the first point for me is that we need to stop framing this purely in terms of equality. When women return from maternity leave, they shouldn’t be expected to operate at the exact same pace as someone who hasn’t gone through that experience.

The second point is: what does an empowered woman in the workplace actually look like today? And what should the ideal state be?

For me, it’s about being in a workplace that gives you the flexibility to be who you need to be - not just at work, but also outside of work.

It’s about being in an environment that provides learning opportunities, fulfillment, and the tools you need to grow professionally and progress in your career but also gives you the time you need for yourself, your health, your partner, your friends, and your kids.

The key word here is really flexibility.

You should feel comfortable coming into work and giving your best—but also feel equally comfortable stepping out when needed. For example, if your nursery calls because your child is sick, it should be completely okay to step away, take care of that, and then come back to work when you can.

I used to think about work-life balance as something very structured - like fixed working hours, say from nine to six or even nine to eight depending on the industry - and then a clear cutoff point after which you disconnect completely.

But now, I see it differently.

I think work and life can coexist much more fluidly throughout the same day. It’s less about rigid boundaries and more about having the flexibility to move between work and life as needed.

So rather than strict “work-life balance,” I think it’s about being able to integrate the two - while having the autonomy to dip in and out of each depending on what the moment requires.

I love that. I think there’s a lot of really rich insight in what you’ve shared.

I have also come around to accepting that we can’t have everything at the same time.

We still only have 24 hours in a day, but our mental load has increased significantly - almost tenfold. And we’re now splitting that time across work, family, friends, ourselves, our partner, our kids, and so on.

So realistically, it means we have to make trade-offs. We have to reduce focus in some areas in order to give more to others.

We can’t expect to operate at the same speed as before when we now have so many additional responsibilities on our plate despite having the same number of hours in the day.

But that doesn’t mean we’re doing less work or performing at a lower level. It just means we learn to work differently we become more productive, we time-box more effectively, and we get better at focusing on what truly matters.

We become more… 80/20 in how we approach things.

There’s also a real anxiety in stepping away from something you’ve built your career around for seven or eight years.

We tell ourselves these stories - this is it, this is who I am. And then the moment you consider leaving, the question becomes: what happens to that identity? How will the world see me?

In consulting especially, so much of your identity, professionally and socially, is tied to the firm. So walking away isn’t just a career decision; it’s an identity shift.

Even something as simple as how you introduce yourself starts to feel uncertain.

And I think that’s a big reason people stay. A lot of their sense of value is tied to being at a prestigious organization.

Yeah, exactly. And that’s such an interesting topic, because it took me a while to figure out how to introduce myself without mentioning where I work.

Do I say I work in healthcare? But that’s so broad…

And there’s definitely a bias we’ve internalized - that being a McKinsey consultant is somehow the gold standard, and anything outside of that is perceived as less. It’s actually very hard to let go of that mindset.

It sounds like your definition of ambition has evolved quite a bit. How would you define ambition for yourself now, compared to before?

Before, ambition was very externally driven - it was about progression, titles, recognition, and hitting certain milestones.

Now, it’s much more internal. It’s about building a life that feels aligned with who I am and what I value. It’s still about growth and impact, but not at any cost.

I think ambition for me now includes things that I didn’t value as much before…like having time for my family and protecting my energy

So it hasn’t gone away…it’s just become more holistic.

For someone who might be in that earlier version of ambition - the one you described - what would you want them to pause and reflect on?

I think I would invite them to pause and ask themselves: whose definition of ambition am I actually chasing?

Because for a long time, I don’t think I questioned that. I just absorbed what success was supposed to look like - progression, titles, recognition - and I followed that path quite naturally.

And it’s not that there’s anything wrong with that path. But I think the question is whether it’s truly yours.

So I’d encourage people to reflect on what genuinely matters to them. What kind of life do you actually want to build? And I think the earlier you start asking those questions, the more intentional your choices become.

Because if you don’t pause and define it for yourself, it’s very easy to wake up one day and realize you’ve been optimizing for something that doesn’t fully align with who you are anymore.

🤓 Open tabs…

(I have modeled this section after those “open tabs” that we all have with a few (okay 30-40) interesting links that we promise we will eventually get to one day. These are the links that I had open for sometime that I finally got to …)

⭐ How exploring new places can make you feel happier

Exploring novel places and having diverse experiences is important to our well-being and can make us feel happier. This week, Ike Sriskandarajah, a producer for This American Life, takes us with him as he explores new parts of New York City.

⭐Why Fascism Can’t Survive Without the Women It Hates

Women are so often portrayed as superheroes — tireless, endlessly capable and self-sacrificing — as if glorifying their endurance somehow compensates for their exploitation under patriarchy, whether standing alone or intertwined with authoritarianism.

📖 My private thoughts from my very public diary…

(Sometimes on X (Twitter)…. sometimes on Threads)

If you enjoy Decks and Diapers, it would mean the world to me if you invited friends to subscribe and read with us. If that feels like too much then, did you know that liking this post or leaving a comment helps it find more readers?

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Hi there 👋🏽

I read more books this quarter than I did in the last few years combined!

This eccentric reading list is something I owe entirely to the librarian at my local library, who I’ve become friends with. She treated me as someone with multitudes. Algorithms would have kept pushing me down the same hole, her suggestions kept me very engaged week after week!

While I don’t think reading needs to be a performative number counting exercise the real reason why i wanted to get back to it was - I’d found myself drowning in short-form content and wanted to rebuild the stamina, the discipline, and the specific joy that only comes from staying with an author for 300+ pages.

P.s: For those curious to know the how: I finally accepted that audiobooks count and as someone who is very busy I need to accept tandem reading that is physical copy + audio, switching between them depending on what my day allowed. I also now carry a tote bag with a book in it everywhere I go

☕ Now, on to today’s coffee chat…

Meet Adam Webster

Prof Adam Webster was introduced to me by Kanza Azeemi an alum of the University of Oxford whose perspective I’ve previously had the privilege of featuring here.

Prof. Adam is an Associate Professor of Law and Public Policy at Oxford, with a background in constitutional and public law shaped by work across the UK, Australia, and earlier as a Fulbright Scholar in the United States. He is also a father to 2.

What makes his story particularly compelling isn’t just his professional trajectory, it’s the choice he made to step away from it, at least in the way it’s traditionally defined.

In 2021, Prof. Adam stepped back from a permanent academic post to become the primary parent to his two daughters, while continuing to teach and pursue scholarship part-time.

That decision has now became a lens, through which he began to see more clearly the gap between what policy promises and what families actually experience. Today, his work sits at the intersection of lived experience and institutional design. He’s exploring how systems - parental leave, school structures, workplace expectations - shape family life, often in ways we fail to question.

It has been an absolute honour for me to get to know Prof Adam and I am thrilled to share his insights with y’all.

Below is my conversation with Prof Adam…

Please tell us a little bit about yourself

I’m Adam Webster. I’m a dad with two daughters, both below 10. I’m a full-time parent. I’m married and my wife is a barrister working in London, in commercial litigation and insolvency.

I work part-time at the Blavatnik School of Government at the University of Oxford. Previously, I was working there full-time, but in October 2021, I stepped back from that to become a full-time parent

What compelled you to step away from a full-time academic role and become the primary parent?

And how was that transition? I’m not asking purely from a gender lens, though that’s part of it, but more generally: how did you arrive at that decision? And how did you communicate it to colleagues?

A number of factors played into the decision.

First, I took some shared parental leave and in hindsight, I didn’t do it very well. I tried to stay too connected to work, doing too much during my “keeping in touch” days. That stayed in the back of my mind.

Then the pandemic hit. I had a one-year-old and a three-year-old at home, and we went through multiple lockdowns in the UK. During that time, it really confirmed how much joy I got from having my children around and how much more time I wanted with them.

For many people, the pandemic was difficult, and it was for us too, juggling work, Zoom calls, and children at home. But it also made something very clear to me: I wanted more of that time.

At the same time, I told myself you don’t make big decisions during a crisis. So I waited. I thought, “This will all be over in six weeks”….which, of course, it wasn’t.

About 18 months later, in October 2021, I made the decision to step back from full-time work and resign. I was very fortunate that my institution allowed me to continue part-time. So I still get to do what I think is the best job in the world but with more time to be a parent.

On your second question - how people reacted…it was mixed.

Some people asked, “Are you okay?”- with the implication that I’d had some kind of breakdown or made a terrible decision.

Others, particularly older women, would quietly say to me, when no one else was listening: “You’ve made a great decision. You’re going to have a wonderful time.”

I also spoke to mentors beforehand, including very ambitious colleagues. I expected them to say, “Don’t do this - you’re giving up a tenured role.” But many said the opposite: “This sounds like you’ve thought it through and I am thrilled you get to make this decision for yourself and your family.”

Those conversations really confirmed for me that I was making the right decision.

As someone who thinks deeply about policy, I’m curious: what are the questions we’re not asking enough about the realities of modern fatherhood or even parenthood more broadly? Where do you think policymakers, or even well-intentioned employers, are missing the mark?

I think there’s a fundamental disconnect between education policy and workplace policy in most countries. They’ve essentially been designed in silos.

No one from the Department of Education has really sat down with those shaping workplace policy and said, “Let’s look at this holistically.” We have a school day that runs from roughly nine to three, with long school holidays built in. At the same time, we expect parents to work nine to five, with a fixed number of annual leave days.

There’s an obvious gap there and parents are left to bridge it.

From a design perspective, it’s quite strange. If you were designing a system from the ground up with families in mind, you wouldn’t start there. You might begin by asking: what does an optimal day look like for children? Then, separately, what does an optimal work environment look like? And then you’d consciously decide on the trade-offs.

But that’s not how we’ve arrived here. These systems have evolved independently, without much thought to how they interact. And the result is that parents end up absorbing what is essentially a structural failure.

You were a tenured professor at Oxford - it comes with enormous prestige. You get to spend your days immersed in topics you care deeply about. That’s the dream job for so many people.

And yet, the pull to be a parent was strong enough for you to walk away from something that has global recognition. That’s incredibly powerful.

I also think what you said about parental leave is important. In countries like the UK or Canada, you can split leave between parents and having that exposure to caregiving might be what enabled this realization.

So I’m curious - what would you say to men who have access to parental leave but don’t take it because they fear career consequences?

My advice would simply be: just do it. I don’t think you’ll regret it.

But I also recognize that systems are structured in ways that make this difficult. In the UK, for example, men are entitled to two weeks of paternity leave. Shared parental leave is only accessible if the birth mother gives up part of her maternity leave.

So effectively, you’re taking from your partner’s leave, not drawing from your own. That structure alone discourages uptake.

In my view, a better system would be two equal, independent leave entitlements. That would also help address issues like the gender pay gap, because both men and women would be equally likely to take leave.

Of course, cultural norms still play a role. But for me personally, I wasn’t too concerned about what others thought beyond a small group of people.

I also reflected on my role as a father of two daughters, and as the husband of someone with a demanding legal career. If I believe in equality, I need to act on it and not just say it.

We had done the financial math - we could afford it. So at that point, the question became: why not?

Exactly. The workplace still assumes an “unencumbered worker.” Even the idea of nine-to-five, while it’s often presented as a boundary, isn’t real in many professions. Your wife works in law, for instance, where nine-to-five is often a fiction. The same is true in academia and other demanding fields - there’s an expectation that you’re always “on.”

At the same time, society is still structured around outdated assumptions…almost like we’re operating in a 1950s or 1960s model where a single-income household is the norm. That, to me, is one of the biggest disconnects.

In many cases, people are pushed into making difficult choices within that system. You arrived at your decision intentionally, but in many situations and unfortunately, still in most it’s the woman who defaults into the primary caregiving role and is pushed into stepping back.

So given those constraints, and recognizing that not everyone can make the same choices you did, what advice would you give to fathers or men more broadly who want to play a more active caregiving role while still operating within these structures?

First, I want to acknowledge that my choices are shaped by privilege - particularly the fact that we can live off my wife’s salary.

That said, there are still things people can do.

For those in leadership positions: you can set norms. Be visible about leaving early for childcare. Make caregiving part of workplace culture, not just policy.

For others: try to carve out small opportunities. Maybe negotiate flexible hours - like starting later so you can do school drop offs or wrapping up early on a certain day every week so you can take your child to an activity.

Even small changes matter. But I recognize it’s not easy, especially if you don’t feel you have the power to ask.

I love that - the idea of role modeling. That’s really what allyship looks like. If more men openly say, “I do pick-up” or “I do drop-off,” it normalizes it.

Right now, you often see women rushing out of offices, catching trains, trying to get home at a certain time and it feels awkward. But if more people were transparent about it, it would shift the norm.

Exactly. It’s more than putting it on your LinkedIn profile.Being an ally is more than just stating it - it’s about living it.For example, if childcare fell through, I would bring my child to work and say: “Something’s gone wrong, and I’m responsible for both this lecture and this child.”

I was surprised how many students, male and female, came up to thank me. Some female colleagues said it made them feel like they could do the same.

There’s still a double standard. When men do it, they’re seen as “super dads.” When women do it, they’re questioned.

We need to break that and that starts with everyday actions, not just statements.

Absolutely.

How has being a primary caregiver changed how you show up professionally? Beyond the usual “better prioritization,” has it shifted what you care about?

Yes, definitely.

A colleague and I now run a professional development session for our Master of Public Policy students called Managing Dual-Career Households. We start by sharing our own experiences, and then open up the conversation.

The response has been incredible it’s probably the session I get the most feedback on.

On a smaller scale, I supervise around eight to ten students each year, and many of them have families - either with them or back home. Those conversations often extend beyond academics into navigating work and family life.

I’ve learned as much from those discussions as the students have.

More broadly, being a parent is now a core part of my identity, and I’m comfortable bringing that into the classroom, whether I’m teaching law or running these sessions. Many women don’t feel they can do that, so if my openness helps create space for that, it matters.

Ultimately, we need to stop seeing these as “motherhood” or “fatherhood” issues. They’re parenting challenges or even more broadly, caregiving challenges. Many people are also supporting elderly parents or dealing with other forms of care.

These are human realities, not gendered ones.

I completely agree. Though in 2026 there are still all these biases around being a mom and have a professional identity

Yes for women, it’s harder.

In my wife’s profession, acknowledging motherhood often leads to assumptions that she’s less committed or available.

So she has to add a kind of “postscript” - explaining that she has a partner who takes on most of the home responsibilities.

Only then do people adjust their expectations.

Which is unfortunate but very real.

That’s why it’s important for men to call these things out. Otherwise, they continue.

As we wrap anything else top of mind for you these days?

I think we’ve covered most of it.

In the UK right now, there’s a review of parental leave policy. There’s a real opportunity for reform in the next 6–18 months.

If I can play even a small role in influencing that, I’d love to.

But at a personal level, I’m just passionate about being a good parent and a good partner.

If that’s all I achieve, that’s enough. But if I can also encourage other dads to experience the joy of caregiving, even a little, that’s even better.

During the pandemic, men increased their share of caregiving and housework but that dropped off afterward.

It feels like a missed opportunity. We experimented with new ways of working but then reverted back without reflection.

There was a chance to rethink both parenting and workplace structures and we didn’t fully take it.

That’s stayed with me.

🤓 Open tabs…

(I have modeled this section after those “open tabs” that we all have with a few (okay 30-40) interesting links that we promise we will eventually get to one day. These are the links that I had open for sometime that I finally got to …)

⭐I would rather regret not having children than regret having them
First, I need a big love. Second, I needed the timing to be right. And third, I needed a relationship that was ready to fight the patriarch together. Of the parents around me, couples that had these three components seemed happy, and the couples who seem less happy appeared to be missing at least one.

⭐Our Ancestral Eves: How the female body shaped human evolution

What does the female body itself contribute to the story of human survival and development, and how does it differ from other animals and specifically, other mammals? These contributions include but are not limited unique attributes for gestation, childbirth, and lactation.

Cat Bohannon is a researcher, scholar, and the author of the book Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution. Greg and Cat discuss the significant role of the female body in human evolution.

⭐Mass Hysteria. Thousands of Jobs Lost. Just How Bad Is It Going to Get?
Thomas Greifenberger graduated from the University of Delaware last spring. Although he double-majored in finance and marketing and minored in economics, it took him just three years to earn his bachelor’s degree. He had hoped that his solid grades and demonstrated drive would help him land a position in the financial services industry. But when Mr. Greifenberger began his job search, it quickly became apparent to him that he was sending résumés into a void. He got a few nibbles — several companies invited him to do asynchronous video interviews.

Nothing more came of those opportunities, however, and after a point, he concluded that he was on a futile quest. “It was super discouraging,” he said.

He has returned home to Long Island, where he is now employed by his family’s tree service business. Mr. Greifenberger enjoys the work — he is often the guy up in the bucket, pruning branches — and the tangible results it yields. But he admits that it’s not the future he had envisioned for himself. “I still go on LinkedIn from time to time, but I think that ship has sailed for me,” he said.

📖 My private thoughts from my very public diary…

(Sometimes on X (Twitter)…. sometimes on Threads)

If you enjoy Decks and Diapers, it would mean the world to me if you invited friends to subscribe and read with us. If that feels like too much then, did you know that liking this post or leaving a comment helps it find more readers?

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Hi there 👋🏽

I recently boarded a flight with an infant and a preschooler.
My co-passenger saw me enter with the two kids and a few bags.

She noticed I was struggling to stow stuff in the overhead bin and seat the kids.

She looked at me and noticed all the chaos and then slowly said with a big warm smile, "Hey, I know it's hard. I love kids and I'm comfortable holding them. If you're okay, I can hold your baby while you get settled, and since it's a long flight, if you need a break, I'm happy to hold your baby."

I genuinely believe most people are good and this is the decent thing to do when seeing a woman with kids and stuff.

Sharing it because unbearable horror stories of passengers losing their minds at people with kids get shared, not the 99.99% of humanity which is actually accommodating, caring, and considerate.

☕ Now, on to today’s coffee chat…

Meet Balu Belz

Balu is a community builder at heart, driven by a simple idea: creating spaces people never want to leave. She began her career in advertising, working on some of the world’s leading consumer brands, before moving into private membership communities for senior executives and founders. Today, as a Membership Community Strategist she brings together influential women leaders from around the world.

Alongside her role, Balu advises and invests in companies at the intersection of community and consumer, with a focus on improving the health and happiness of women, mothers, and families. She also hosts the Founding Mothers Podcast, a podcast about the intersection of motherhood and the founder experience.

Below is my conversation with Balu…

Please tell us a little bit about yourself

I’m Balu. I’d describe myself as a creative soul and a global soul. At my core, I’m defined by my curiosity and my passion for connecting with people. I’m endlessly fascinated by human beings…how we think, how we live, how we relate to one anotherand I feel like there’s always more to learn.

I’m also a mother. That’s something I’ve always known I wanted to be. Not just to have children, but to raise humans - good humans. That’s always felt like the most meaningful contribution I could make to the world.

I’ve never had strong, traditional professional ambitions like becoming a doctor or an engineer. But I’ve always believed that raising thoughtful, kind people is one of the most impactful things anyone can do.

The world needs more good people and that’s where I feel my contribution lies.

You mentioned that desire to be a mother was always there. Do you know where that came from?

That’s a great question.

Traditionally, a lot of African cultures are matriarchal.

Now, South Africa was colonized, so we’ve also absorbed many Western norms. But even in my own upbringing, when I observed my family and the families around me, they were very much driven and defined by women.

I always admired that. I thought it was incredibly powerful.

I grew up with a working mother and a working father. Many of my aunts and maternal figures were smart, capable, working women and also mothers.

It was a lot to carry, but there was this undeniable influence they had - not just in nurturing children, but in driving the household and even holding the broader community together.

They were the ones organizing everything - from weddings to funerals to weekend gatherings. They kept the social fabric intact.

It was incredibly powerful to grow around such strong women who were not devalued for being mothers.

I love that.

Because when caregiving and motherhood are devalued, young girls stop aspiring to it. And I really appreciate what you said - that this is actually one of the most impactful contributions someone can make.

It’s not an either/or, you’ve clearly done interesting things professionally, but I like that you’re not underplaying this part of your identity.

I’ve heard people say things like, “My mom was just a stay-at-home mom,” or use terms like “housewife” in a way that diminishes what those women actually do.

Exactly. And in my upbringing, even women who stayed home were often entrepreneurs. They ran small businesses from home - selling baked goods, drinks, or local specialties like vetkoek. They were contributing economically and socially at the same time.

So there was never a sense of “just staying at home.” They were building something, sustaining communities while nurturing and raising families.

You’ve also moved countries and shifted across different fields - from international relations to advertising to startups and now entrepreneurship.

You mentioned before that you’ve been guided by curiosity rather than a fixed path. How has that shaped the way you’re raising your kids?

That’s such a good question and I’m glad you used the word curiosity, because that’s really what drives me.

I know it’s unusual. Even my husband had a very clear path - study economics, go into finance, follow a structured career.

I studied international relations because I’ve always been globally oriented. I’ve always been curious about systems of power, global dynamics, and how countries and people are interconnected.

I grew up in South Africa during a time shaped by apartheid, and I was fascinated by the international solidarity movements around it. That idea - that no country exists in isolation - really stayed with me.

Then I moved into advertising, because I truly believe the best ads are made in South Africa.

Growing up, we had one TV, and the whole family would gather around it. And honestly, the most powerful part wasn’t even the shows…it was the ads.

They were storytelling. They were sociological. They reflected culture, politics, humor - everything. It wasn’t just selling; it was expression.

That’s what drew me in.

My W2 role, which was at a startup - a private network for executive women. That’s really where the “community” bug bit me. I became fascinated by how you can create experiences and bring people together.

My affinity for wanting to change the world really showed up in gravitating toward mission-driven companies - companies that stand for something.

And then I became a mom and I just felt like it was time. I felt like I had explored enough industries and roles to understand what I didn’t want to do. And I reached a point where I felt ready to take the leap - to become an entrepreneur and build something driven by my own focus and needs.

I was raised by entrepreneurs, and I used to think - how do you even study entrepreneurship? There’s no real degree for that. So I just thought, okay, I’ll follow my curiosity and see where my path leads.

I always knew I wanted to do something undefined…something like entrepreneurship but I didn’t even have the word for it at the time. I didn’t know, “Oh, this is what drives me.”

And now, in entrepreneurship, I’m curious about how business shapes culture and society. I’ve found a space where I support women, especially mothers, in building businesses.

For me, it’s always been about: what can I learn from this experience that I can carry forward?

I don’t try to map out my entire life. I have no problem admitting that I don’t know what I’m doing. Curiosity really is the thread connecting everything I’ve done.

I’m very comfortable saying I don’t know exactly where I’m going and that’s okay.

I think it’s incredibly healthy.

I’m probably closer to your husband’s archetype - more structured, more plan-driven. And for me, motherhood was a shock because you can’t plan it the same way.

It forced me to rethink productivity, what a “good day” looks like, and how I use my time.

I imagine for you, even though motherhood is intense, your mindset may have made the transition a bit more adaptable. For many women, including myself, motherhood can feel like a loss of control.

Oh, it’s still been hard.

Motherhood is the most transformative, identity-shifting, expectation-shattering experience.

But yes, I’ve tried to keep an open mind.

And honestly, my journey to motherhood played a big role in shaping that mindset. We went through infertility, which was not part of the plan.

That experience alone taught me that things don’t always go the way you expect. And it’s been more manageable for me to just let go of expectations.

If you’re comfortable sharing - what was that experience like for you?

It was shocking.

We grow up being told, “Don’t get pregnant.” And then suddenly you’re trying and nothing happens. That disconnect was hard.

I felt very alone. I remember sitting at a friend’s baby shower while quietly going through IVF, feeling completely isolated. I didn’t know anyone else going through it, and I didn’t feel like I could talk about it.

That’s why I try to speak openly about it now. For anyone going through it…you’re not alone. It is so common and I wish more women would openly share their journey because it is an emotional rollercoaster.

That silent grief is so real. It’s something many women experience but don’t talk about - IVF journey but also miscarriages and losses.

It can feel incredibly isolating especially because so much of the experience is internal and invisible.

Exactly. And IVF itself was a difficult decision for me. I’ve always been very mindful about what I put into my body, and this felt like a huge departure from that.

But my desire to be a mother was so strong - it felt like the only choice.

Even navigating that process in the U.S. healthcare system as an immigrant added another layer of complexity. I often wished I had someone guiding me…not telling me what to do, but helping me understand my options.

There’s just not enough awareness or support.

I hear you.

And you were navigating all of this as an immigrant in the U.S., right? Which adds another layer - new healthcare system, new environment…

Yes. I was still learning the U.S. healthcare system while going through this.

It made me realize how much more support is needed. I wish there were fertility coaches - people who could guide you, not tell you what to do, but help you think through decisions.

Even with a great therapist, there were things I only learned much later and I wish I had known them earlier.

That lack of information makes such a difference.

And speaking of identity, you’re navigating multiple layers too: South African, immigrant, mother, woman of color, entrepreneur…

What has that experience been like for you?

It’s been complex.

For example, in the U.S., I’m categorized as a “Black woman” or “woman of color” -terms that weren’t part of my identity growing up in South Africa.

I’ve had to actively learn about African American history and identity. Sharing the same skin color doesn’t mean sharing the same lived experience.

When something like Black Lives Matter happens ….it’s like, yes, Black lives matter. But I’m not African American. I understand the injustice, completely. But it doesn’t hit me in the same personal way.

For example, when I was working at this one firm, there was a Black affinity group and I’d be the only Black person in the room. Everyone would look to me to speak for the “Black experience.”

But that’s not an experience I really tapped into until I became an immigrant five years ago.

That’s something I think is really important…understanding nuance.

For me, it was similar - being seen as a South Asian, brown woman in a certain way. It’s interesting how people frame you.

I think it would also be really interesting to talk about how you navigate this with your kids. Because in your case, your kids are American, right?

My daughters are Canadian but they’ll grow up as Indian-Canadian. They’ll inherit these layers and biases that I didn’t experience in the same way growing up.

I grew up in a community where everyone looked like me. I had privilege …I acknowledge that. I never thought of myself as someone who was “othered” in that way.

Of course, I was aware of gender issues - India is very patriarchal, and I think South Africa has similar challenges - but this added layer of identity is something my daughters may have to navigate in a very different environment.And how do you think about identity for your kids?

Yes. I think about that every day.

I think about how much “baggage” I carry - around identity, labels, all of that. And I’m very conscious about what I pass on to my kids versus what I let go of.

My kids are mixed race and growing up in the U.S., so their identity will naturally be complex.

I want to give them access to their heritage - through family, through visits to South Africa but I don’t want to define it for them. That’s something they’ll need to discover for themselves.

I really like that - giving access, not imposing identity.

Switching gears a bit you mentioned your husband was in consulting. How do you both navigate roles at home, especially given demanding careers?

We keep things very fluid.

Our lives and careers have changed a lot, so rigid roles wouldn’t work. I’m more of the at-home parent right now, but that’s situational.

We don’t assign tasks based on traditional roles. For example, my husband hired our nanny. He handled things like pediatrician records at one point. I take out the trash when needed.

We just adjust based on what makes sense at the time.

Communication is key - we use shared calendars, notes, and constant check-ins.

And on your bookshelf behind you I see a copy of Fair Play. Did you find frameworks like Fair Play helpful?

I understand why that structure works for some couples - it creates fairness.

For us, it felt too rigid. I was very direct early on, especially postpartum, about what I needed. That helped us avoid issues later.

Before we wrap - any parting thoughts?

I am energinzed by the work i get to do…I’m especially excited about my podcast, Founding Mothers.

I had a podcast years ago focused on business and tech in South Africa, and I’ve always loved storytelling. This new podcast focuses on women founders who are also mothers.

These are unique stories about building businesses while raising families. I think they’re valuable not just for founders, but for investors and consumers as well.

We already have a few episodes live and many more lined up.

Also, your LinkedIn is honestly some of the most insightful, well-thought-out content I’ve come across. Every time you post, I don’t roll my eyes, I actually stop and read. I just wanted to share that.

I am excited to check out your podcast and thank you for reading what I write on LinkedIn! Given I am not a professional content creator, so I don’t need to play algorithm games. I don’t even want to.

People talk about these “hacks” - post every day, comment at 7 a.m., engage constantly because the algorithm rewards you. And I just think… I don’t need to do that.

Writing on the internet is a hobby for me. And I’d rather put something out there that I’m proud of…something I won’t feel embarrassed about later.

Also, LinkedIn is so public - if I’m writing something, I always ask myself - is it worth someone’s time? If not I just put it in my diary.

So I’m really glad that’s how it comes across to you.

🤓 Open tabs…

(I have modeled this section after those “open tabs” that we all have with a few (okay 30-40) interesting links that we promise we will eventually get to one day. These are the links that I had open for sometime that I finally got to …)

⭐See which jobs are most threatened by AI and who may be able to adapt
“Women make up about 86 percent of those most vulnerable workers, the researchers said, suggesting the negative effects of automation won’t be borne equally across society.

Mark Muro, a senior fellow at Brookings who assessed the policy relevance of the research, said the most vulnerable workers “may be out of sight and out of mind” to policymakers and the American public.

⭐ How to use your career to help the world
If you vanished from your job tomorrow, what would change? When is a high paying job more impact than direct service? How do you estimate your counterfactual contribution without fooling yourself? What signals tell you a problem is neglected rather than merely unpopular? Are you optimizing for visible outcomes instead of real outcomes? Which incentives in charities and NGOs quietly distort priorities? Could a simple weighted factor model outperform your gut on big choices? What would make you switch paths even if you feel committed? How do you balance personal fit with moral urgency

⭐Childhood shyness can be advantageous – don’t pathologise it
Although heightened threat detection and cautiousness might seem like negative characteristics, they can serve important adaptive functions for children because humans are an extraordinarily social species. In addition to facing potential physical threats in the environment (such as starvation or violence) humans also face potential social threats (such as ostracisation). Because shy children tend to ‘look before they leap’, they are more likely to detect possible threats, which could prompt them to act more carefully in social situations.

📖 My private thoughts from my very public diary…

(Sometimes on X (Twitter)…. sometimes on Threads)

If you enjoy Decks and Diapers, it would mean the world to me if you invited friends to subscribe and read with us. If that feels like too much then, did you know that liking this post or leaving a comment helps it find more readers?

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Hi there 👋🏽

Here’s a belief I hold strongly: every few years, you should fire your mentors.

In early 2017, in business school, I joined the Leadership Development Lab (LDL) at the University of Toronto - Rotman School of Management

Prior to starting business school, I had worked for a few years and I arrived at b-school wrestling with foundational questions, which I took with me to the LDL:

What does a good life look like?

How do you find work that feels true?

How do you become a good human in a complex world?

The guidance I received was deceptively simple: look around. Identify the people whose lives you admire and ask what values they are actually living by.

That reframed mentorship for me.

Because every few years, the answers to those questions shift. And when they do, the people we seek guidance from should shift too.

The mentors who were right for one chapter may no longer reflect the values or life you’re growing toward in the next.

This isn’t about burning bridges. Relationships compound. But growth requires discernment.

Different seasons call for different teachers.

And if you never fire your mentors, you may never pause to ask whether the advice you’re following still belongs to the life you’re building.

☕ Now, on to today’s coffee chat…

Meet Tiffany Scott (Sanya)

Tiffany is the Head of Security-Cleared Electrical & Mechanical Engineering for CyberStrike Group, a specialist recruitment firm connecting security-cleared professionals to mission-critical roles across the United States. She focuses on placing experts in cybersecurity, systems engineering, data science, and highly specialized technical position with federal agencies, the Department of Defense and the intelligence community.

Alongside her work in national security recruitment, Tiffany is also the co-host of Mambition, a podcast devoted to fueling the ambitions of mothers navigating the beautifully complex journey of identity, growth, and purpose. In the last post, we met the her co-host Alex Morgan, this week we focus on Tiffany.

Below is my conversation with Tiffany…

Please tell us a little bit about yourself

I’d love to start by saying I’m a multi-hyphenate. For quite some time, I’ve identified as someone who sits across different aspects of personality and interest.

For example, my number one thing is creating content. I just love content. I’ve always loved reading. I love writing. I love processing my thoughts on paper. That’s always been very natural to me.

I also love fitness. It’s one of the foundational principles of my life - getting outside the house, going for a walk, being at the gym. It’s very important to me to keep moving. It’s always supported my mental health.

Another angle of who I am is that I live intentionally. A key part of that was shaped by losing my mom when I was nine. That experience has always shaped how I look at the world. For me personally, things have to make sense. I have to understand why I’m doing something. Of course, there are always constraints, socially, culturally, from community or background, but I’m always asking myself: Do I want to do this? Why am I doing this? Does this make sense to me?

That idea that life is what you make it, that time is important - those things really matter to me. I try to balance ambition with rest. But that intentional aspect is central to who I am.

I’m also a mum. I’m a mum of two young children both under 5. That’s a huge part of my identity right now. I’m in this process of trying to live fully in the chaos of it all, trying to understand what’s important to me. How do I balance being a devoted, loving mum while also acknowledging that I’m not done yet? I’m still a work in progress. There are things I want to achieve alongside raising my children.

Those are the main aspects of what make me, me.

When you say you’re trying to “live fully in the chaos of it all” - can you unpack that? What does that really mean to you, and how do you navigate it?

I think becoming a mother changes everything. Everything.

First of all, time just shifts completely. I look back now and think, what did I do with all that time before becoming a mum? I used to say I was busy…. I had no idea.

Your priorities shift. For me, I genuinely love being a mum. I want my kids to grow up knowing they were important to me. Not just that I thought they were important - I want them to feel and know that they were deeply important to their mum.

But it’s easy to get lost in the day-to-day. It’s easy to get lost trying to achieve other goals. So holding onto that intention feels very important.

The “chaos” part is about rejecting the idea that motherhood can be neatly compartmentalized. I can’t put it in a tidy box - like, okay, 9 to 5 is work, bedtime is motherhood, and everything fits perfectly. It doesn’t work like that. Kids fall between the cracks of everything. Life overlaps.

I don’t believe all the advice out there about waking up at 5 a.m. while the kids are sleeping and building your “real life” then. I don’t believe I can just be patient until my “real life” begins … when they grow up, go to school, or when I’m an empty nester and can “find myself again.”

For me, it’s about asking: How can I actually live right now? How can I create something meaningful right now?

It might be messy. Like recording a podcast episode with my daughter in one arm while tapping out an email with the other hand. It might feel chaotic. But I don’t want to postpone my life.

It’s not going to look perfect. Something will always give. Something will shift. But can I do it in a way that makes sense to me and actually enjoy this process of being a mum at the same time?

That’s what “living fully in the chaos” means to me.

I love the idea of integration - not pushing life off to some future date. That’s a trap a lot of people fall into, even outside of motherhood. They’re successful but miserable because they keep telling themselves happiness is a destination.

I love that you’re saying: this is your life right now.

You mentioned the podcast but you didn’t include it in your introduction. You’re also a co-host of a podcast. Tell me more about that. You’ve said you love creating content but how did the idea of the podcast come about? And why did you start it?

The podcast actually started because of Alex.

Alex and I met through my husband. She was a childhood friend of his. We were both pregnant at the same time, during the pandemic, and our babies were born just ten days apart.

We kind of walked that whole journey together. “Oh, you’re pregnant? Me too.” We joined the same baby group. We went to baby classes together … masked up, navigating early motherhood in a pandemic. That shared experience really bonded us.

And honestly, I think the best way to describe how the podcast started is through ambition.

There’s this idea Elizabeth Gilbert talks about, in Eat, Pray, Love, where she says ideas are like butterflies. They float around waiting for someone to catch them. That’s how this felt.

We just couldn’t stop talking about it. Every time we met up - babies crying, food everywhere, total chaos - we kept coming back to the same thing: We’re having children… but what about our careers? What about our ambition?

We created a Google Drive. We were sending voice notes and messages back and forth on WhatsApp. For almost two years, it was just this ongoing conversation: What should we do? Is there something here?

During the pandemic, we both started listening to more podcasts. And we both love talking. So at one point, Alex said, “Should we start a podcast?”

And I said, “Yes.”

Funny enough, in our city and friend group, there’s no one else I know who would have wanted to start a podcast, except Alex. We were both willing to put ourselves out there. We weren’t perfect. We weren’t experts. But we weren’t overly worried about looking embarrassing either.

We knew we weren’t experts but we could feel something shifting culturally around motherhood and ambition. And we wanted to talk about it.

That’s how it started.

I love that. And I love this whole idea that creativity is like butterflies because for me, it was the same thing.

Decks and Diapers - at some point, I just became obsessed with the idea that this should exist. That there shouldn’t be this tension. That it’s an “and,” not an “either/or.”

I remember I was changing my daughter’s diaper at like 1 a.m., and I randomly got into bed and told my husband, “I’m going to start a newsletter tomorrow. It’s going to be called Decks and Diapers.”

And he was like… “Okay.” He just went back to sleep …

But I woke up the next morning with so much energy. I went on Substack and thought, I’m doing this. And I did.

So I completely relate to that feeling of something just taking root in your head and then that’s all you can think about.

And I love that you’re putting yourself out there.

I’m also curious — You’re a recruiter. You work with the government. And then you write a lot about motherhood on LinkedIn.

How did that happen? And did anyone ever tell you not to do it?

And I’ll tell you why I’m asking. I was told, by well-intentioned people, not to make it so public that I’m a mother. Especially working in corporations. They said there might be recruiters or people with unconscious biases who won’t even approach you with opportunities because they’ll make assumptions about who you are and what you want from life.

So I’m curious - did you ever experience that? Or did you ever think about it?

I’m probably one of those people who just… doesn’t care as much what people think.

And again, I’ll go back to losing my mum. That experience really shook the foundations of who I am at a young age. Because of that, I start from a very grounded place with my decisions.

I also had proof, even before becoming a mum, that I’m someone who will do what I genuinely want to do in my life. I’ve been stacking that proof over the years. So when it came to “outing” myself as a mum publicly, it felt easier and honestly, natural.

I think we lay the foundations for the things we want to do. And eventually, you reach a point where you can bypass what people think.

I grew up in a very strict Nigerian environment - very much “go to uni, follow the traditional path.” But about ten years ago, I quit my job and went backpacking. I did unconventional things. I started my own business. I worked out of my spare bedroom and built it up to the point where I was working with Big Four consultancies from my house.

So over the past decade, I’ve already been living unconventionally in many ways.

That said, on LinkedIn, I always had a very professional presentation. The motherhood piece actually started because of the podcast. When Alex and I decided to build something and create a community, we realized it’s hard to build something authentic if you’re hiding a core part of yourself.

Four or five years ago, I probably wouldn’t have leaned into the “mum” identity publicly. But starting the podcast made us realize that if we wanted to talk about motherhood and ambition, we had to embody it.

Now, I work for a company that is fairly supportive of me building a personal brand. Of course, sometimes they’ll say, “Post more about recruitment.” And I do.

But I genuinely believe people connect with people.

The strongest connections I’ve made with candidates often happened because I mentioned something about my kids. I remember speaking to one man, and I mentioned my children. He talked about his grown-up son, and we were on the phone for over an hour. If we had just talked about the job, that conversation would have been short and transactional.

People need something human to hang connection on.

Anyone can post about AI trends or 2025 recruitment forecasts, you can ask ChatGPT for that now. But me talking about what’s authentic to me, my children, my ambition, my lived experience, that’s what differentiates me.

And actually, I think my company is starting to see that being open about how I manage motherhood and ambition is a multiplier for them.

Also. and this might sound bold, but I’m entrepreneurial at heart. If a company didn’t want to work with me because I talk about motherhood and ambition, I would be okay. I would build something else. I would make my own opportunities.

So that gives me freedom.

I hear you. My thinking was similar - being a mother is a feature, not a bug.

If an organization has a bias, I was never going to succeed there anyway. I can’t suddenly pretend I don’t have a child. So if it filters out the wrong opportunities.

And like you, I feel privileged in terms of the proof I’ve built in my career. That gave me the confidence to put myself out there.

And I’ve had many women reach out saying, “I’m glad you’re doing this.” I also think women talking about motherhood, ambition and everything co-existing also positively impacts the organizations they work for - it signals that mothers can thrive here.

But I do think this is cultural. Maybe 20 years ago, many senior women had to hide parts of themselves to survive professionally. So I’m glad there are more women openly talking about this now because that is how the change happens.

Which brings me to ambition - it’s literally in the name of your podcast.

How has your definition of ambition or success changed over the years? Motherhood is obviously transformative. Was that the trigger? How do you think about ambition today?

That’s a big question.

Interestingly, I think I’m more ambitious now than I was before becoming a mum.

But my definition of ambition now includes my children.

One major part of my ambition is who my children become as a result of me being their mother. That’s huge for me.

I’m a Christian, and there’s a Bible verse that says, “What good is it for a man to gain the whole world and yet lose his soul?” For me, that translates into this: What’s the point of becoming wealthy or popular if my children don’t feel seen, if I’m not present, if they don’t know me?

So ambition now includes the question: How am I influencing my children?

Am I teaching them that life can be messy, and you can still create something meaningful? Am I showing them that you don’t need perfect conditions to build something wonderful?

I look at my dad’s generation - they had to go to work in a very rigid way. Success was linear and restrictive. But now we live in a much more fluid age.

That’s something I want to teach my children.

One way I do that is by traveling with them. I want to shape them as human beings who are open, adaptable, and confident.

I also reflect on how my life experiences - the unconventional choices, the pivots, the resilience - actually help me be a better mum. I even did a podcast episode about how the things I’ve done in my life prepare me to guide them.

Because one day, they’re going to need that guidance.

They’ll need support when a relationship ends.
They’ll need help navigating heartbreak.
They’ll need to know how to pivot if they lose a job or change careers.

All of those life experiences that once felt like they were just about me, now I see them as tools I’ll use to help them.

That’s ambition for me now. How do you navigate the randomness of life? How do you build resilience, grit? When something goes wrong in life, I know how to rebuild. I’ve got loads of that, kids. And they’re going to need that.

So that’s one aspect of ambition for me.

The second is clarity.

I’m what I’d call a “multi-hyphenate,” and I think a lot of people like us fall into this trap of thinking, I can do anything. I can start a podcast. I can start a newsletter. I can launch a business over here.

But motherhood forced me to close what I call my “47 tabs” and just keep two open.

For me, that’s recruitment, my work, and Mambition, my passion project That’s it.

If someone invites me to something now, I say no. If there’s another idea, I say no. I just don’t have the time.

Ambition, for me, has become about clarity. It’s not “I can be anything.” It’s “I can’t be everything.”

It’s asking: On my deathbed, what will I be glad I poured myself into? And then being disciplined, even harsh, about protecting that.

Sometimes that means burning bridges. And actually, that’s been good for me. Because otherwise, we just try to be everything. We try to impress everyone. We chase noise.

Once you get clarity, you start asking deeper questions. Do I really want to be a millionaire? Or do I just like the idea because I saw someone drive past in a Range Rover?

For a long time, I really wanted a Range Rover. But I don’t even know why. I think I associated it with success.

Now I look at it and think, do I even want that? Or was that just a symbol I adopted without thinking?

And for personalities like ours i suppose - the I want to do a bazillion things - constraint is powerful.

Motherhood did that for me too. But also, just recognizing that life is finite. There’s mortality at the end of it. That realization is strangely freeing.

Because in 10,000 years, no one will remember any of us walking this earth. And that used to terrify me. I used to feel this pressure to “be somebody” and have this huge external impact.

But when I became a mom, I realized one of the greatest impacts I’ll ever have is on my kids.

You can be wildly successful externally, but if your home is broken what’s the point?

That resonates deeply with me.

Yes. And it’s funny - I never thought I’d say this - but even my sister once said to me, “You used to be so selfish.”

Now I feed my kids before I feed myself. That shift is wild.

And someone said something the other day: “You don’t know who’s in your house.”

That stuck with me.

At one point, and I’m not proud of this, I thought my kids needed to become something extraordinary: an athlete, a model, something “big.”

But greatness can be small or large. You don’t know who your children might become. And I take the time to study them. To observe them. To help them intentionally.

Because I didn’t have that.

I lost my mum young, and I didn’t have someone closely studying me - noticing patterns, giving feedback, reflecting things back to me. It took me a long time to discover myself and tap into my own strengths because no one was close enough to say, “You’re good at this.”

My son is four. I’ve noticed he loves running. So we run together. I’ve even signed up for a run next year because of him.

My daughter loves performing. She’s two, and when I sing, she sings the endings of songs she barely knows. She needs a stage … I can already see it.

Imagine having someone in your life early on who sees that and reflects it back to you. That kind of early feedback can change a trajectory.

And I think that’s something mothers can uniquely do when we’re present.

That’s beautiful, helping them identify their gifts.

And with every gift comes a shadow, right? My daughter is incredibly gritty but that also means she’ll argue like a seasoned lawyer. It’s exhausting.

I don’t want to kill that fire, though. I just have to help her manage it.And that requires presence.

So let me ask this - if you could change one thing about how society views ambitious mothers, what would it be? If you could sprinkle magic dust and shift one perception, what would you change?

I think it’s the idea that motherhood, or marriage, is the summit of a woman’s life.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s beautiful. But I reached a stage where I was married with children and thought, Is this it? Have I arrived.

And yet, I still felt there was more… more in terms of exploring who I am independently of those roles.

And I know that sounds taboo. Because it can be interpreted as, “Are you saying being a mother isn’t enough?” That’s not what I mean.

What has kept me afloat is my ambition. My work. My projects. If I hadn’t had something that was mine - something I had been building - I genuinely don’t know where I’d be mentally.

Having something that exists independently of your marriage or your children doesn’t threaten those relationships. It strengthens you.

My podcast is my space to reflect and process.

That individual identity, maintaining it, is powerful.

I really love that framing. And I’m so sorry you’re going through a divorce.

The idea of not putting your entire identity into one role, whether that’s motherhood or marriage, feels deeply important.

Any final thoughts on this topic of motherhood and ambitions?

The one thing I’ve been thinking about a lot is this: motherhood isn’t just about raising children. Our children are raising us.

Even though I’m exhausted, there’s something transformative happening.

I’ve developed a very bulletproof optimism over the years. That’s come from surviving challenges. And because of that, I lean into the beauty of motherhood, even when it’s hard.

Reading children’s books every night has changed me. The simplicity. The wisdom in those stories.

There’s one book - one of our favorites - about a small fish in a big ocean. And the themes are so simple: courage, perspective, belonging. But they hit differently when you’re reading them as an adult.

Motherhood has forced me to slow down. To notice. To reflect.

We think we’re shaping them but they’re shaping us too.

And I think if more women leaned into that idea, not just what we’re sacrificing, but how we’re being transformed, it might shift how we experience this whole season of life.

🤓 Open tabs…

(I have modeled this section after those “open tabs” that we all have with a few (okay 30-40) interesting links that we promise we will eventually get to one day. These are the links that I had open for sometime that I finally got to …)

⭐Why Nudge Policies Failed
A new book buries the Obama-era idea that small shifts in personal behavior can greatly improve the world.

⭐Stop Meeting Students Where They Are
At some point over the past 15 years, kids stopped reading. Or at least their teachers stopped asking them to read the way they once did. We live in the age of the reel, the story, the sample, the clip. The age of the excerpt. And even in old-fashioned literature classes, assignments have been abbreviated so dramatically that high-school English teachers are, according to one recent survey, assigning fewer than three books a year….“Many students no longer arrive at college - even at highly selective, elite colleges - prepared to read books.” One-third of the high-school seniors tested in 2024 were found not to have basic reading skills.

⭐Jeffrey Epstein & the Ordinary Misogyny of Extraordinary men

📖 My private thoughts from my very public diary…

(Sometimes on X (Twitter)…. sometimes on Threads)

If you enjoy Decks and Diapers, it would mean the world to me if you invited friends to subscribe and read with us. If that feels like too much then, did you know that liking this post or leaving a comment helps it find more readers?

Leave a comment

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Subscribe now

🎧 Did you know you can also listen to Decks and Diapers on your favorite podcast app?

Hi there 👋🏽

A local librarian recently told me that for every 100 women who read for pleasure, only a few dozen men do the same. Over the years it seems like, reading for pleasure is something boys, and as a result, most men, have quietly stopped doing.

Somewhere along the way, reading became coded as “feminine.”

A decade or so ago, we rightly championed initiatives like Girls Who Code to bring more women into STEM. Maybe now we need a Boys Who Read movement?!

Reading is associated with a wide range of long-term benefits - stronger empathy, and reasoning skills; better employment opportunities; lower stress; and even longer life

What if we start treating reading the way we treated coding, as a skill that shapes futures.

A culture, and a group of people, who stop reading, don’t just lose stories. They loses their ability to understand themselves and those around them.

P.s:
Instagram was launched in 2010. It took me only 16 years to finally create my public Instagram account…

... in case y'all are interested to follow along and connect on Instagram: decksanddiapers

☕ Now, on to today’s coffee chat…

Meet Alex Morgan

Alex is the co-host of Mambition Podcast and a fierce advocate for ambitious women navigating the beautiful chaos of motherhood. After a bruising return to work following maternity leave, marked by exhaustion, anxiety, and a stark lack of support, she realised that too many capable women are set up to struggle in silence. Rather than accept that trade-off between career and family, Alex chose to challenge it. She’s on a mission to show mothers that ambition and presence can coexist - just not always all at once. Which is exactly the point of this newsletter.

Warm, honest, and refreshingly real, Alex reminds women that they don’t have to sacrifice their identity to succeed, nor figure it all out alone.

Below is my conversation with Alex….

Please tell us a little bit about yourself

I’m Alex Morgan. I’m the co-host of a podcast called Mambition Podcast, which I co-host with my friend Tiffany Scott. We actually knew each other in real life before starting the podcast. I’ve known her husband for about 20 years.

I live in the Northeast of England. The title of our podcast is partially based on where I’m from. We have an accent called Geordie - so we put “mum” and “ambition” together to create Mambition.

I’m a mom of one child - he’s about to turn 5 and started school last year. I live with him and my husband. I worked in international higher education for the best part of 15 years however last year I took voluntary severance. I’m now focusing more on the podcast.

The podcast was born out of negative experiences I had returning to work after maternity leave, and out of realizing just how hard it is to juggle being an ambitious person with the pull of motherhood. Not wanting to fully outsource motherhood - that was a big thing for me.

A kind of aside to all of this is that my son was sick when he was born. From my 20-week scan onward, we knew he was going to be unwell. That really changed what I felt willing to compromise on in terms of motherhood. He needed to have most of his left lung removed when he was a year old. So we had a rocky start to parenthood.

But that experience also clarified a lot of red lines for me - things I wasn’t prepared to miss, and things I couldn’t miss, like hospital appointments. It had a big impact on starting the podcast, because I feel passionate about women’s experiences after having children. I feel strongly that having a child shouldn’t be the death of ambition. Women should be able to achieve as much as they want post-child. And that’s where the podcast came from.

You said you were always very ambitious and professionally driven. And I know some of this may come from life circumstances - wanting to be there for your son, given his birth story and health journey.

But how did you not swing into resentment territory? I see a lot of women, and it’s obviously not great for the child or for the mother, but I see women regrouping and thinking, “Oh shit, I did this and I wasn’t prepared for it. The cost of motherhood is too much. I’m miserable.”

I am not sure if it is full blown regret but I’ve definitely heard women express something close to that - that the cost feels overwhelming. How do you address that?

I can totally understand that reaction. I had a lot of ideas about parenthood before becoming a parent. People say they’re tired, parents talk about being tired, and you kind of go, “Oh yeah, sure.” And then you have a child and you think, “Oh my God. I had no idea what this meant.” I had no idea how tired I was going to feel, or how difficult it would be just to get through a normal day.

I wouldn’t say I ever felt resentful, because I was just so grateful to have a baby. That was not certain for a big chunk of my pregnancy. But I was shocked by how much it rearranges your life. I used to see people organizing their lives around naps and think, “Just bring the baby with you.” And then you realize it’s actually not that easy.

When I returned to work - I was off work for 18 months, from my 20-week scan all the way through until he was 14 months old when I went back - he was immediately sick again. So even though I was back and ready to go, ready to prove myself, we had a really disrupted start.

We got two weeks of free settling-in time at nursery before I started work. The first day I put him into paid childcare, he was sick and couldn’t go. And you’ll appreciate this … it was COVID. I hadn’t been able to socialize. I had a baby with a lung problem, so I couldn’t expose him to risk. He had no immune system built up from social interaction.

I know all kids get sick in childcare, but he really got sick. He got sick a lot. So you have this incredibly disrupted return to work, and you think, “Hang on, everyone else is making this look easy.” But I don’t think they actually find it easy. I think they just don’t talk about the hard stuff.

And some of your disappointment was how your workplace welcomed you back. Or maybe the lack of a proper “welcome back ..ramp back.” It sounds like they didn’t fully understand the realities of your life.

Was there a specific moment? I know sometimes it’s death by a thousand cuts, not one dramatic incident, but was there a point where you thought, “Okay, this is it. I need to eject myself from this situation”?

It actually took me a long time to leave. I didn’t leave until I’d been back almost three years. But from about three or four months in, I knew things were really difficult.

I was still breastfeeding my son - I breastfed him until he was nearly two and a half. I went back to work in May, and in September - so I’d been back about four months - I was asked, with three days’ notice, to do a week-long trip.

In my previous role, I was Head of International Partnerships at the university, which involved a lot of travel. Before having a child, I loved the travel. It was the most fun part of my job … going to China, Russia, amazing places. I’d done some incredible trips.

But this time, I was asked to go to Pittsburgh with three days’ notice, and I had a small child. I said, “I can’t go. I’m still breastfeeding.” In the UK, that’s a protected status.

My manager said, “Well, I think you should go.”

And I said, “Well, I won’t go.”

From that point on, I felt there was a kind of undermining of my leadership and authority. That was a red line. It wasn’t that I would never travel again. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to travel. But I was still breastfeeding. I couldn’t go on a week-long trip to the States unless I was willing to just stop that immediately.

And he would have been about 18 months at that point - still quite little.

I just couldn’t believe that I said, “No, I can’t … I’m breastfeeding,” and that was the response. Being put in a position where you have to push back against something like that is hard. And what surprised me even more was that this manager was a mother of two herself. Her children weren’t that much older than mine, just a couple of years.

I was shocked that someone in that position wouldn’t understand.

I would have assumed this was someone who either didn’t have kids or was an older man who had never experienced that part of life. Wow.

We all have our own biases, but the lack of empathy is shocking. And I think this happens a lot. Even now, I meet women in executive positions who seem to think, “Well, we suffered through this. We didn’t have flexibility during those early child years - why should you all get it?”

To me, that’s shocking. I have this mindset that if I experience something that wasn’t great, then if I have the power, I want the next generation to have it better - not to go through the same cycle of trauma or bullying. So it’s absolutely shocking to me that this person had kids, fairly recently herself, and she’s forcing you to choose between your child and a work trip, with no flexibility in that moment. That’s just… wild.

I was really shocked by it.

And essentially, the re-onboarding when I came back from maternity leave just wasn’t there. Despite having been out of the office for 18 months, it was basically, “Oh, you’re back now - just jump in.”

There was a tiny bit of ramp-up, very slight, but no real re-onboarding. It was assumed I would just get on with it and everything would be fine.

And I think any length of maternity leave makes that difficult, because you are a different person to some extent. But after 18 months? I came back to a whole new team to manage. The University Executive had changed. The Director of the International Office had changed. The strategic direction had shifted. And there had been a pandemic.

During the time I was off, no one had been traveling. Travel was only just coming back onto the radar. So while I was away, they hadn’t had to manage travel at all. I came back and had to set up travel plans, start visiting partner universities again - it was intense.

And I don’t think it was appreciated just how intense that would be. It’s certainly not how I would organize someone’s return from maternity leave.

It’s something I tell people all the time. I went to business school, so I have a very traditional management lens. I think in terms of operating models. Your life operating model has changed.

So you need to give women, and men, time to readjust. Things you could do pre-maternity leave, you might eventually do again. But you need time to set up that new operating model with your partner and your household.

It shocks me that organizations don’t have proper ramp-up, ramp-off, and onboarding programs for women. And then, similar to what you realized, there are institutional and structural issues that women face, but it gets framed as a personal problem.

So you feel terrible about yourself. In this situation, your organization should feel terrible. But instead, at some point, Alex feels terrible for having to make this choice.

I felt awful about making that choice. Because whatever choice I made, I knew I was either making a choice that was bad for my son, or a choice that would be detrimental to my career.

And after that incident, I was treated differently. I stayed as long as I could, but it really undermined my confidence.

I think people often come back from maternity leave after spending a long period of time focused on very small, very immediate things … like someone’s bowel movements. You’re literally managing a tiny person’s schedule.

Then you come back to work, and you’re thinking about projects you worked on just before you left. But to everyone else, that’s old news. It’s moved on. That can really undermine your confidence unless you have proper onboarding.

And then, on top of that, you’re put in a position where you have to advocate for yourself. But advocating for yourself means making other people unhappy.

That’s a difficult situation to be in.

I’m sorry you had to go through that.

But what stood out to me, and honestly why I reached out to you, is that you can either sit and complain about the world, or you can say, “Okay, I’m going to create a platform. I’m going to give voice to this.”

And you chose the latter. You’ve been very vocal about sharing your story, which I know can’t be easy. And you created this platform.

So what’s the origin story? At what point did you think, “A podcast with my friend Tiffany is a good idea”?

Tiffany and I had babies ten days apart - my son is the older of the two.

You’ll be speaking to her as well, so she’ll share her side. But I remember messaging my husband saying, “Look, I’m pregnant.” It didn’t feel exciting at the time. And he messaged back, “Oh - so is Tiffany. When are you due?” We realized we were due three days apart.

Her baby was late and mine was a little early, so they ended up ten days apart.

Baby groups were hard during COVID. Our babies were both born in February 2021. We did go to some baby groups, but everyone was wearing masks, numbers were limited it wasn’t the same experience.

So we’d go to baby group, then have coffee afterward. And we weren’t just talking about the babies - we were talking about our careers. Tiffany was self-employed at that point, so she had a very non-typical maternity leave. We talked about all of that.

We realized how similar we are in terms of our outlook and our interest in self-improvement. We were having these really interesting conversations and thinking, “We want to do something.” We just didn’t know what.

We talked about it for a while. I listen to a lot of podcasts. I have ADHD … I talk a lot. And as I was listening to podcasts, I thought, “I could do this. I like talking. I like getting to know people. I like asking nosy questions.”

And I thought Tiffany would be really good at it too. So I asked her, “Would you like to do it?” And she didn’t hesitate. She said yes.

I came up with the name - which people often compliment. We procrastinated a bit at first because you don’t know the tech, you don’t know how to get started. But eventually we decided we just had to do it.

Tiffany has two children, I have one, they’re all under five, so it’s been tricky. But we decided progress was better than perfection.

Eventually, we put the videos on YouTube as well. We hadn’t planned to at first. We are so not camera-ready always… it’s hilarious. In one episode, Tiffany was half with her hair scraped back and half with her curls out. She was wearing a big fluffy dressing gown. We thought we were keeping the behind-the-scenes to ourselves.

But people wanted the videos, so we released them.

I’ve been a guest on a bunch of podcasts, and in the last year everyone says, “Be camera-ready, we’re putting this on YouTube.” People actually watch podcasts now which I find crazy… i started listening to podcasts in 2013 and to be it is always been an audio thing.

And passion projects are hard when we have so much else happening in life, so kudos to you both for making this happen.

I record in the room where we do our laundry. So normally there are piles of washing behind me.

We’ve put them out on YouTube, and recently we’ve spoken to a couple of people who said, “Yeah, I’ve been watching.”

That’s a bit scary because in my head, no one watches it. I like telling myself that, keeps the stakes low

Now that you’ve done quite a few episodes and spoken to women from very different backgrounds are there similar themes you’re hearing across conversations?

Are there macro-level challenges that keep coming up? And are there common things women are doing to overcome them?

A really big realization for us was that we thought we were going to crack the code - figure out how to make this easier for people.

And it turns out… there isn’t a code.

It’s hard because it’s hard.

We haven’t spoken to anyone, no matter how successful, who has said, “Oh, it’s easy. I’ve figured it out.” Every single person has said it’s really hard.

We’ve spoken to women in Canada, the US, India, and lots in the UK. It’s universal. In some ways, it seems even harder in the States because of the lack of systemic support. But what we’ve discovered is that the systemic issues are global - they just show up differently depending on the context.

Another big theme is that “having it all” is a bit of a myth.

You can do what you want to do but you can’t do everything. You have to be very clear on your own priorities. We spoke to someone who said she puts either motherhood or career at her core, and works everything else around that. I quite liked that framing.

It’s really about being intentional: What are your values? What are you willing to sacrifice? Because there will be sacrifices. Once you’re clear on that, you can build a life around those choices.

A huge theme we’ve seen is women being pushed out of the workplace and then starting their own businesses. We’ve spoken to so many women who had no desire to start a business before motherhood but they did it out of necessity. They couldn’t get the flexibility they needed. They didn’t want to outsource all of parenting. So they built businesses that fit around their lives.

That’s really surprised me, how many women are becoming entrepreneurs not because they always dreamed of it, but because they had to. They’re ambitious, and they don’t want to just take a part-time role that isn’t commensurate with their experience.

We also spoke to some people who set up something called the “Five Hour Club.” They create proper jobs - professional, meaningful roles - structured around a five-hour school day. Not entry-level jobs. Not roles beneath someone’s experience. Proper jobs.

That was really interesting.

Very, very cool. That’s exactly the kind of innovation we need.

The traditional workday structure was built around factory systems - people needed to log in at a certain time, log off at a certain time. But we’re not all factory workers anymore. So the idea that everyone needs to operate on that same rigid schedule feels outdated.

I love these trailblazer women, and some men who are realizing this and creating change. Hopefully 20 or 30 years from now, these innovative workplaces will be the norm.

And I actually wonder … there’s so much concern right now about AI and jobs being swallowed up … but I wonder if AI could also create opportunity.

I’d love to speak to an AI expert about whether this could be a catalyst. If the workplace is going to change dramatically anyway, maybe we can rebuild it with more flexibility built in.

Maybe AI can also take away some of the mental load around parenting and running a household

That’s such a major conversation. Some of the biggest discussions we’ve had are about how women have conversations with their partners - how do you shift responsibility? And recognizing that change doesn’t happen overnight.

We spoke to someone really interesting - Dr. Anne Welsh. She said she was complaining about carrying the mental load, and her husband is actually very involved. He does all the laundry and things like that. But she still carried the hospital appointments, the scheduling - the invisible coordination.

She said it’s difficult for men too. They are doing 50% to 75% more than they ever saw modeled growing up. But they’re not necessarily doing 50% of what actually exists.

So there’s a gap between what they’re experiencing and what women are experiencing.

Women are saying, “Can you just pick up the slack? We need 50%.”

And they’re thinking, “Hang on … my dad never did anything.”

That reframing really helped me. They’re also pushing back against the patriarchy. They’re on their own journey of change. Unfortunately, those two journeys - women’s and men’s … aren’t quite synchronized yet.

I had featured Dr. Anne last year and she recommended the book Fair Play, which I don’t know if you’ve read. It’s one of those books that gets mentioned a lot. Would recommend for sure - gave me the language to talk to my husband about the mental load.

Switching topics, how do you define ambition now? Because ambition has a very traditional definition - usually limited to professional achievement and external validation. A certain title, network, organization, team size.

When people think “ambitious woman,” they often think only in those terms.

How have you reframed ambition? I assume you still recognize yourself as ambitious but it’s changed.

It’s definitely changed.

I used to have that very traditional definition. For me, ambition was the next promotion. The next opportunity. Mentoring people. Taking on postgraduate qualifications. Always asking, “What’s the next thing I can do?”

Now, I’d define ambition more broadly.

It’s about fulfilling your potential - in whatever way that looks like for you. It’s about achieving the goals you have in life, not just at work.

And I think you have to be more intentional about defining what those goals are.

It’s not just about climbing the ladder. The pandemic gave people a different perspective on work-life balance. For me, ambition now includes the workplace but it’s bigger than that.

It’s about not being completely subsumed into motherhood. It’s easy to lose yourself. For me, ambition is carving out time and space to be the person you want to be. To achieve things for yourself, things you could have done without children, but now you have to find a different way to do them.

It’s broader. And it probably requires a cultural reframing - moving away from that myopic lens of ambition being about just one narrow aspect of life.

What are your hopes for the future of your podcast? What projects are you excited about?

We’re big proponents of: don’t wait for everything to be perfect. Just start.

If you want to do something, take small, incremental steps toward it. That’s how we started the podcast.

Our audience is growing all the time, which is amazing. We have lots of people wanting to be guests, and we’ve got a long list of people we want to interview. We’d love to host events as well.

The more we speak to women, the more we see there’s a real need for this space. What started as a side hustle is starting to look like it could be a sustainable career - bringing women together, building community.

We’re really enjoying it. The conversations are incredible. It almost feels like free therapy - we get to speak to such amazing, inspirational people. We’ve learned practical techniques for managing the motherhood–ambition juggle.

One of the biggest lessons is that everything is a season. You might not achieve a particular ambition right now but that doesn’t mean never. Sometimes you just have to ride out a season.

In terms of projects, we’ve got guest spots coming up on other podcasts. We’re continuing to build.

Ultimately, we want to create a community of women supporting women. That’s what’s really important to us.

🤓 Open tabs…

(I have modeled this section after those “open tabs” that we all have with a few (okay 30-40) interesting links that we promise we will eventually get to one day. These are the links that I had open for sometime that I finally got to …)

⭐The False Divide Between “Working” and “Stay-at-Home” Parents
Many stay-at-home parents deeply desire to be home with their children, but others are home mainly because of challenging questions about the cost and availability of quality child care.

Families with stay-at-home parents—like all families—are facing a serious affordability crisis.

⭐The myth that women are more naturally empathetic than men
When women achieve great things, it was erroneously supposed that “they were not Women who did those Great Actions, but that they were Men in Petticoats!”, the philosopher Mary Astell wrote in 1705. Even Queen Elizabeth I once famously said that she’d rule the country like a king, despite having the body of a “feeble woman” – as if ruling had to be a masculine path.

Notably, we still typically describe traits like empathy as naturally feminine and traits like dominance and assertiveness as masculine. Even when displaying the same behaviour, men are seen as assertive and women as aggressive.

One particularly notable trait that is often gendered in this way is empathy. Women supposedly are natural empaths while men who show more empathy are typically seen as weak. Gender stereotypes like these have clear consequences on how we raise our children, workplace culture and leadership. But what’s less visible is how early these biases start, and the fact that stereotypes reinforce our expectations – imposing significant constraints on how we expect others to behave.

⭐The Incel to ICE pipeline
ICE is many things - chief among them, an outgrowth of a seemingly neverending masculinity crisis. The U.S. government has devised a billion dollar strategy to recruit aggrieved young men into ICE with the promise of giving them a purpose: to “restore the homeland.” And their masculinity.

📖 My private thoughts from my very public diary…

(Sometimes on X (Twitter).. sometimes on Threads)

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Hi there 👋🏽

This Valentine’s Day, I celebrated with the man I built this life with AND the tiny human who still thinks we’re magic. ❤️

Handmade card with slightly chaotic hearts and our whole family drawn standing very close together.

Right now, I am one of her favorite people.
And so is her dad.
We are the heroes. The safe place. The center of the story.

I know this phase has an expiration date. One day her world will get bigger. But till then I plan to soak in all this magic.

If you’re parenting little humans right now, try to soak it in. I know I struggle with that .... with the feeling that other parts of my life have slowed down. But it’s all seasons. And this one won’t stay forever.

☕ Now, on to today’s coffee chat…

Meet Sid Saraiya

Sid helps founders of B2B service companies make clearer, higher-impact decisions - about where to focus, how to position their offer, and how to respond (rather than react) when markets shift. Since 2020, he’s worked alongside founders navigating everything from inflation and geopolitical uncertainty to growth plateaus, helping them identify the biggest levers in their business and pull them with confidence.

Before launching Sid Saraiya Consulting, Sid spent over a decade in advertising, delivering hundreds of multinational campaigns for global brands.

Today, his work is shaped not only by that experience, but also by life outside of it - as a partner and a father, navigating the realities of dual careers, time scarcity, and modern family life.

Below is my conversation with Sid**…

**Note: this conversation was recorded almost a year ago, so some things may have changed since then*

Please tell us a little bit about yourself

We are a family unit of 4, with 2 wonderful kids. After about five years of what I’d call PTSD from the first experience, we were very much in the “one and done” camp. And then all of a sudden, we decided we couldn’t let this be the normal run. Growing up as an only child …it didn’t feel fair to anyone to be an only child, actually.

My professional background is really in advertising and marketing. I started in that space around 2006 as a junior designer. I worked through a couple of companies and eventually into a creative services manager role. At the peak of that wave, I was doing multinational ad campaigns for global brands.

I got to a point in my life where I thought, I don’t have time for a puppy, let alone a child. And all I knew was that doing more of this job wasn’t going to allow me more time. Maybe it would get me more money although I wasn’t really seeing that either.

I became pretty disheartened because there was a shift happening in corporate culture. It went from, “You’ve done a great job …here’s a new title and more pay,” to, “You’ve done a great job … here’s more work.” That whole thing just didn’t sit right with me.

I think I’d grown from 25 to 35, where my principles started to outweigh how the company actually behaved. Nothing about the company changed - I changed. So I had to step away.

Luckily, I had the support of my wife. I said to her, “I don’t know what I’m going to do. I thought I’d just keep doing more of this, but more of this isn’t going to be fulfilling for either of us.” And she basically said, “You know what? Do it.” She’s been the primary breadwinner since 2016.

For some context on our relationship. My wife is Canadian. I met her in London. After our relationship started, she moved to the UK, which meant she sacrificed her career and her career progression to start over. At that point, I was the breadwinner, and I was happy doing what I was doing.

Eventually, we reached a point where she was building traction in her career, and I was the one trying to figure things out. That’s when the transition happened. I shifted my time into supporting the household - making sure the fridge was stocked, getting groceries, managing the home. When you’re starting out in business, you can’t really work eight to twelve uninterrupted hours, but you can still do the job.

I was grateful to be able to support the home that way. Then the baby came. It was really nice not to be in a situation where it was like, “Hey, I’m on two weeks of paternity leave and then I have to go back to work.” No one told me to go back to work. I was able to work and manage life in a way that felt sustainable.

So, we had our daughter in late 2018. Then 2019 comes around, and we decide to move to Canada. We arrived in November 2019. I was pretty confident that I could run my production company in the UK from Canada or even expand into Canada. I had a portfolio. It was shaping up to be a really good year. The inbound requests were unbelievable. I’d never seen anything like it.

And then the pandemic hit. And everything disappeared.

So I moved countries, changed careers, and pivoted my business — all during a pandemic. I was back to asking myself, What is it that I actually do? What it turned into was trying to find people I could help as a consultant or advisor.

I come from a creative production background, so I started talking to creative agency owners saying, “How do we not just survive the pandemic, but actually thrive through it?” I was doing a lot of that work for free because I was trying to figure it out myself.

As things slowed down, I went back to what I knew, creative production, thinking, “Maybe I can run marketing campaigns for you.” I’d get into discovery conversations, and what I realized is that I’m someone who never wants to knowingly sell something a client doesn’t need. That would destroy my reputation when the campaign goes bad.

So I’d do discovery, clients would say they needed marketing, and through the process I’d realize, Actually, this is a hole in your business that marketing can’t fix. And I’d say, “I don’t want the project. Go fix the hole first.”

So I was basically working myself out of jobs. And then I realized, why don’t I just get paid for finding the holes?

That’s when I started repositioning myself that way and building that network in Canada. That’s pretty much where I still am now.

What made you both want to move to Canada from the UK? Was it about her wanting to come back home?

Education was a big factor especially childcare. Childcare is a lot cheaper in Canada. Mobility was another piece. Where we are, it’s a smaller town, it’s easier to get around, and a lot of our friends have kids. So our daughter would have people to play with.

And honestly, having a kid made her want to be closer to home. We’d always said that she moved to the UK for us, but Canada was never off the table. It just felt like the timing was right.

It also meant she didn’t have to go back to her job immediately after maternity leave. Canada was a really good jumping-off point. She could take the time to find something new here.

How was it for her to come back post-maternity leave and rebuild her career?

When we got back, she ended up at Conestoga College in a learning and development role, working primarily with international students. There was also a training component helping people improve their English as part of that role.

We went into it thinking, “Hey, it’s a one-year contract. Let’s treat it as a cup of tea and meet some people.” If the contract got extended, great. If not, that was fine too, we’d figure something else out.

Then the pandemic hit, there was a hiring freeze, and the contract didn’t get extended.

So she looked at pivoting into tech, partly to step out of the education system. She landed in a learning and development role at a tech company supporting startups, and she really thrived there. She did incredibly well.

But as with most things, how a company is run isn’t always up to you. When push came to shove and decisions had to be made, she decided to move on.

She is currently at Deloitte.

The move to Deloitte was inspired by someone she worked with someone she really looked up to a strategic leader who had come from Deloitte. That kind of became the bar she aspired to.

Honestly, I’ve never seen anyone get jobs the way she does. Talent aside, it’s almost providence. The only time she didn’t get a role, she still made it through multiple rounds and they took her into interviews knowing she didn’t technically have the qualification. That’s how good she is.

She’s had ups and downs like everyone, but she’s really thriving at Deloitte now though being mom to 2 is certainly a different ballgame.

Lovely! I love a supportive partner and you look like one. That’s actually a great segue back to something you mentioned earlier - the PTSD from the first experience, and how you were pretty convinced that “one and done” was the plan.

There are wonderful parts of having one child, and wonderful parts of having siblings.

So what shifted for you? Was there a moment when you both consciously said, “You know what a second child would be good. We want to do this all over again”?

I think I was actually the one who kicked off the conversation and said, “We should have another baby.”

What led to that were a lot of conversations about what’s going on with my family. For example, the older generation is getting older. My grandmother passed away, and then we started seeing the dynamics between my mom and her siblings. That made me reflect on my own situation.

I’m an only child. And while I was living in the UK, it wasn’t that easy to just fly home. When we moved to Canada, we thought things would stay similar to how they were when we lived in the UK — that we’d be able to travel back once or twice a year. Flights were more affordable then, we didn’t have kids, so I think we were a bit naïve about how that would actually play out.

Through those reflections and my wife articulated it really clearly - she said, “I’m starting to feel the pressure of being an only child at this stage of life.” When your parents start to need support, and you’re the only one, that responsibility lands entirely on you.

There’s also the social aspect. Our daughter is the youngest, the first grandchild - everyone’s favorite. And that’s lovely. She gets spoiled. But it also creates pressure. Having someone to grow up with, that companionship, that matters.

My wife has a sister. They still go out together and talk about anything and everything, and it’s really nice to see. That kind of sibling relationship feels important.

Through all of this, it reminded me that before we got married, I always imagined having three or four kids. Then reality hits you and you’re like, “Whoa, this is so much work with just one.” And when you’re in the thick of it, you think, “Okay, maybe we’re done.”

But as we started coming out of that phase, it felt like, actually, maybe we should have a second. Having a family, a slightly bigger family, always mattered to us. Not huge, but that idea of a full house. That always felt right.

I completely get that. And thinking about timing - did you or she at any point consider the career implications of a second? You know, she’s finding her stride, she’s found what feels like a dream role, and it takes time to settle into that. Was that ever part of the conversation? Or was it more, “Let’s do this, I’ll go on maternity leave, and then come back maybe things slow down a bit, but I’ve already built the career I wanted”?

I quit my career after ten years with no idea what I was going to do next. I tend to jump off the cliff and figure out how to build the parachute on the way down.

She’s different. She likes to have more answers before we jump.

But because she’s with me, she’s less afraid to jump. So we kind of meet somewhere in the middle.

When I try to recall the conversations we had about careers and momentum - it was always a consideration. Being in a big organization like Deloitte, you have good benefits. Maternity leave is supported. The job is still there when you go back, there will be a role waiting for her.

At the same time, I’m 40. She’s a few years younger than me. And this might be the last really good window for us to have another baby. That ultimately outweighed the career timing question. Careers make sense. We can make more money later.

That’s such an important point. I say this to a lot of people: biology is real.

Certain professions, like professional servies: advertising firms, investment banks, law firms, management consulting - structurally reward momentum. You’re expected to keep running at this relentless pace toward some golden carrot at the end: partnership, director, whatever it is on your track.

And I think that does women a huge disservice, because it directly conflicts with the biological clock. For many women, their 30s are the window when they want to have children. Early 20s is increasingly rare now.

When organizations impose these artificial timelines - “These are your professional years, and if you step out, you’ll miss out” - it forces impossible choices. Some people make them. From the outside, they look incredibly successful: the title, the corner office. But they’re miserable.

I’ve seen this with women who later say, “I actually wanted a family.” And then at 40, they’re navigating IVF and other paths, which is valid, but it comes with the realization that biologically, it’s become harder than it needed to be.

Yeah. And it’s such a tough conversation.

I think part of the reason is that we put so much of our identity into our careers. It becomes a huge part of who we are. That was definitely true for me.

I really wanted that director position. I really wanted the title.

But when I stepped back and asked myself, Why am I waiting for someone I don’t respect , who doesn’t really understand what I do … to give me a title I feel I deserve? That question shifted everything.

That’s shaped my perspective on corporate work since then. There are more important things than the title or the career, at least for me. And family is a big part of that.

There’s something you said earlier that I actually want to explore, maybe through a masculinity lens.

For the first few years of your relationship, you were the “breadwinner,” as you put it. And now there’s been a shift - you’ve become more of the lead parent. You do pickups, you make sure dinner’s ready, you manage the day-to-day.

That’s an identity shift. And when you layer in gender norms and stereotypes - I imagine when you’re at school pickup, there are a lot more women than men.

Was there ever a narrative, either externally or in your own head, that made it feel like you weren’t being “responsible” - that you weren’t doing the expected provider role by staying in a job you hated but that paid the bills?

Honestly, that mostly came from my mum.

I’ve had conversations with other people, but the “sometimes you just have to suck it up” narrative really came from her. It’s hard to convince her to break from what she knows.

I had a very transparent conversation with her. I said, “I tried. I did everything that was expected. I worked hard. I earned a living. I bought a house. I started a family. And what we ended up with was hitting a brick wall.”

There was no growth … not in my career, not in personal fulfillment, not in anything. Something had to change. And we took responsibility for that change.

She does understand it but even six or seven years later, it still comes up. “How’s work going?” “Do you have enough clients?” “Should you be looking for a full-time job?” It still surfaces.

From everyone else, especially my friends, the response has mostly been, “That’s crazy, but you’re brave. I admire you. I wouldn’t do it myself.” And that’s fair, it’s not for everyone.

I don’t judge anyone for staying in a job and collecting a paycheck. There are days I miss it too. There are days where I do a ton of work and see no immediate return. Being self-employed means you work incredibly hard just to get work.

With a family, the practical stuff creeps in too - healthcare, insurance, dental. I do think about going back sometimes.

The reason I asked is because when people talk about the patriarchy, I think it often traps both women and men.

What you and your wife are doing feels like you’re intentionally building a model that works for your family, rather than defaulting to traditional norms. If your wife had made the same choices you did, I don’t think anyone would have questioned it. People would have said, “She’s going independent. She wants flexibility. Good for her.”

When a man does it, it’s met with more resistance because it challenges the old idea that the man must always be the provider.

And honestly, if a woman had done this - from the outside - society might even be more patronizing about it. People might say, “Well, she can do that because her husband earns a good paycheck.” I don’t agree with that at all, but it’s still how people think.

Those gender norms are leftovers from the 1950s. And they just don’t work anymore. Back then, one person worked, one person stayed home and the system supported that. Today, that structure doesn’t exist, but the expectations somehow remain.
If you fast-forward a bit into the 80s and 90s, we collectively said, “Great …equal rights. Men and women can both go out and work.”

What we didn’t say was: Who looks after the home?

And now, even further down the line, we’re realizing that two full-time salaries often still aren’t enough to maintain a household. In professional environments where eight to twelve-hour workdays are expected, who looks after the kids?

You’re paying the mortgage, the clubs, the activities. Maybe you go out to a restaurant once in a while but more often you’re doing takeout because there’s no time. And then you’re paying for that too. It feels like we’re constantly moving.

It’s almost inflationary: two people running a household at full speed, trying to buy time. And sometimes it feels like you’d actually need a third adult to make it work.

I don’t know how this plays out long-term but it’s a little scary right now.

And I think that’s why I know so many people in their 30s and early 40s who are, for lack of a better word, completely burnt out.

Like you said - they did everything right. They hit all the markers that, three decades ago, would have given you a good life. Not private jets or anything like that but a stable, comfortable life. You could go on vacation. You might even choose to live on one income if that’s what worked for your family.

You’ve hit the nail on the head: the nine-to-five no longer exists. Most jobs start at 8am and end at 10 or 11pm. And not necessarily every day but the expectation is that you’re completely unencumbered. That work is your life.

People logging back on after their kids are asleep because there’s no way to keep up with the volume of work otherwise.

So there’s no time for self. And unless organizations and the systems we operate in start addressing this structurally, I don’t see how individual families can solve it alone.

Why do we expect two people to work full-time, but schools still end at 3 or 3:30, with massive summer breaks? Of course we’re not saying kids should match adult work hours but then who’s with them?

I feel like I’m just repeating what you’re saying but I genuinely don’t know what the answer is. You can find individual solutions that kind of work, but at a structural level, it’s broken. And I think that’s why so many of us are exhausted, burnt out, and increasingly cynical.

Yeah, absolutely. You really do wonder how people do it.

My earns a good salary - it’s no joke. But in a town like this, it doesn’t stretch the way people think it does. This used to be a very blue-collar area, and it’s become more white-collar over time.

After the pandemic, things shifted. It became more white-collar, and prices moved accordingly. But even families earning what one of us earns are still struggling.

It’s crazy.

Essentially our families are now basically these lil units operating under a lot of pressure

Amd to operate as a unit under this kind of pressure, you need really strong communication. But the pressure actually erodes communication too.

So if you drop the ball on communication even a little, things unravel fast.

Honestly, the only reason this marriage works is my capacity to communicate.

And for some context — I asked my wife to marry me after about nine months of knowing each other. Not even dating … knowing each other. Part of that was because I saw that we could work through friction. We could see things from each other’s perspective.

I’d say, “Here’s how I see it,” and she’d say, “I understand - here’s my side.” We were still getting to know each other after we were married. We got married about 18 months after meeting and communication was always foundational.

And even now, it’s still incredibly hard to do well.

And that’s such an important point.

This isn’t marriage advice, but when you layer in long hours, immense pressure, and a tiny human who can drive you completely up the wall, it’s no surprise that people say the years with young kids are the hardest on a marriage.

You’re physically and mentally exhausted. You stop spending time together as a couple. You’re together but mostly in the context of this third person.

I honestly think empathy is the only way through it. Giving each other slack. Because both people often assume the other isn’t doing enough and if you can interrupt that assumption and say, “They’re doing the best they can,” it changes everything.

Otherwise, everything’s already dry tinder: overwork, stress, pressure. Poor communication just becomes the spark that sets it all off. You have already shared so much wisdom, any final parting thoughts?

One thing that comes to mind is how you carry the load between you.

I had a lot of friends who got married before me, and they used to say, “Marriage is a compromise.” I never agreed with that. I believe that with enough collaboration, it shouldn’t feel like a compromise because you’re moving toward the same thing.

One shift that helped me was this: when you think, “The other person isn’t doing enough,” ask yourself, Why might that be?

I’ll pick up the slack, because I know there are days I won’t have it and she’ll pick it up for me. That’s the rhythm.

Love that! Being in tandem. Not “me versus you,” but “us.”

Exactly. Operating as a unit.

Sometimes I’m at 20%, sometimes I’m at 80%. Sometimes she’s at 20%. It’s about knowing how to respond to that. And when it works, it’s a really good place to be.

It’s not flowers and rainbows, it’s still hard but you’re doing it for the unit, for each other, and for yourself.

🤓 Open tabs…

(I have modeled this section after those “open tabs” that we all have with a few (okay 30-40) interesting links that we promise we will eventually get to one day. These are the links that I had open for sometime that I finally got to …)

⭐Lovers in the Hands of a Patient God
The universe needs us; God needs us; we will God into existence. It would be an understatement to say that this is an oddball view within the history of theology. “Heresy” is another word that comes to mind. Luckily, though, mercifully, in the event that the weight of God’s demand is too much to bear, there are other happy recipients for our steadfast belief. Human beings.

⭐Is there a skinny apocalypse in Hollywood?

⭐The future belongs to those who prepare like Dwarkesh Patel
How the rising star of podcasting eschews the breadth v. depth dilemma and is quickly becoming known as ‘the new Lex Fridman.’

📖 My private thoughts from my very public diary…

(Sometimes on X (Twitter), sometimes on Threads and sometimes on BlueSky)

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There's no editing here. I know that's pretty contrarian in a world of highly produced, carefully polished podcasts.

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In this first episode, I go back to the very beginning.

Why does Decks and Diapers exist? Who was it created for? And what do I hope it becomes?

I talk about why I finally stopped waiting for the perfect moment to launch this podcast, the gap in content that made me start writing in the first place, and the deeply personal reason I keep showing up to do this work, in my non-existent free time!

If you're new here, Decks and Diapers is a newsletter about work, parenting, and all the messy, beautiful intersections in between. Running Notes is where I think out loud about all of it.

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Hi there 👋🏽

I know this newsletter hit your inbox on Feb 14th.

I love love but as I have grown older I have realized - Most people talk about how love is an important component needed to sustain a healthy marriage and relationship!

Not enough people talk about respect, pride and a sense of admiration :)

☕ Now, on to today’s coffee chat…

Meet Ashley Chang

Ashley is the founder of Sundays, an executive assistant service helping working parents reclaim time for what matters most.

After spending a decade in product management at high-growth tech companies, from being an early employee at a Y Combinator startup to roles at Carta and in healthtech, Ashley saw a pattern she couldn't ignore: brilliant women consistently dropping out of the workforce after having children.

Inspired by her own mother, a computer scientist in the '80s who felt forced to choose between her fast-track career and family, Ashley set out to change this reality.

In 2023, she interviewed over 300 parents and discovered they all needed the same thing: more time. So she built Sundays, a bootstrapped company now helping families reclaim hundreds of hours while growing from $1M to $2M in ARR.

As a new mother herself to an infant, Ashley is living the very challenges she's solving for, proving that meaningful careers and present parenting don't have to be mutually exclusive.

Ashley and I connected on social media, a reminder of the power of writing openly about what matters …it's how you find your tribe and spark the conversations that need to happen!

Below is my conversation with Ashley….

Please tell us a little bit about yourself

I’m the founder of Sundays. Before this, I worked in the tech industry for about 10 years, mostly in product management roles. And before that, I grew up in the Bay Area, just outside of San Francisco, which is where I still am. I’m the oldest of three daughters, and I think that played a big impact on who I am as a person.

I grew up with my mom staying home with us and my dad being an entrepreneur. My mom actually was a big inspiration for Sundays. She was a computer scientist in the ‘80s, and then when she started having kids, she felt like she had to choose between family and work. She actually had a really high, really fast trajectory in her early career. She was making more money than my dad at the time, but she just felt like, I think personally, she wanted to be home with us. And then also there was a lot of conflict between what she was able to do at work and supporting having kids. At the time, I think she was one of the few women working in the software engineering world too.

I have learned so much from both of my parents, and I think it’s been really interesting in my head thinking about what it was like having my mom at home and then also my dad starting a business. And I was really realizing recently that I’m trying to be both people, and I can only be one person. So what does that mean for me? This is a question I have been grappling with recently

And now you’re a mom too?

Yes I had my baby last year but I started Sundays before that.

Coming from the tech industry, I was in product management and kind of worked as one of the first employees at a company called ReadMe, and then went into more formal product roles in health tech and at Carta most recently.

I always really cared about supporting women in the workforce. I think in all of the technical roles, there aren’t as many women represented. But as I got older, I saw a lot of the smartest people I know dropping out, and I started to realize this was happening at the same time that they were having kids, because there still is so little support for them.

I was looking ahead… I always wanted to have a career and a family. So I was like, how am I going to balance this myself? And at the same time, I was feeling like I didn’t want to continue following the product path, for now, at least. I wanted to try doing my own thing. And so that led me to start Sundays.

And for people who may not be so familiar with Sundays, how would you describe it?

So I say it’s an executive assistant service for working parents. We help parents get time back to do what they do best, both at work and at home. So we have a team of executive assistants, they’re all caregivers, almost all of them, and we pair them with the clients that we work with.

50% of those are just our family clients, so we help them with all the family admin that it takes to keep a family running. The other half have started their own businesses, so we help them with the business side and the family side, and all of the everything that it takes to keep that running too, so that they can really focus on what they do best. And our overall goal is just to help as many parents as we can have meaningful careers and the family lives that they want, and just get time back to do that in a way that they can feel present.

When people ask me how dual-career parenting actually works, I often talk about the idea of an operating model - you have to intentionally design and revisit it, the same way organizations do.

You’ve been using the phrase “family ops,” which I love because it elevates the rigor of running a household, especially when two people are working. It frames running a household as something that requires real rigor and design. Was that language a deliberate choice for you? And how do you think naming it differently changes how people value that work?

I learned the term “ops” from a client and I was like, that is the right term for what we’re doing, because it is running operations. It’s not not easy. It takes real work to do these things. And I think the terminology you use should reflect that.

You also talk about Sundays as a way for people to reclaim time. Now that you’re a parent and experiencing that pressure firsthand, what does reclaiming time look like for you personally? Has that definition changed?

When I started Sundays, I did as much research as I could with parents. I wasn’t a parent yet, so I was like, “What is your day-to-day look like?” And almost all people were in families where they had two working parents, and they’d say, “I work nine to five, I’m with the kids in the early morning and then after that, and then I go back to work.” And so all the life stuff gets put on a long to-do list that they do on the weekend. That was our original “reclaim time” - we want you to get that time back with your family or for yourself to do whatever you want.

And then now that I’m a parent myself, there’s even another layer to it, where it’s like being able to actually be truly present in that moment. Because even if you’re not physically doing all those activities, when you have so many things on your mind, that to-do list is taking up mental space and taking away from your ability to be present with your family or to truly relax too. So I think there’s those two layers.

The mental load is real. Even when you’re getting help, if someone is only executing tasks but not taking full ownership, it still weighs on you. There’s always that running list in your head - what’s moving, what’s stuck, what’s next - and you never fully switch off.

You’ve spoken about this really insightfully. How do you think about the difference between getting help and actually offloading the mental load?

That’s exactly why we chose a human approach instead of building an AI tool or an app.

I come from a tech background, so my first instinct was, “We’ll just build an app to solve this.” But the people I spoke to weren’t disorganized or incapable. They were smart. Many had already built solid systems. The issue wasn’t knowledge - it was capacity. There were simply too many moving pieces and not enough time.

So we decided to give people a partner, someone who actually knows them, so things can truly be handed off.

For example, I work with an EA. During the measles outbreak in the U.S., I wanted to move up my son’s vaccine appointment. I just texted her, “Can you move up his next appointment?” She already knew who his pediatrician was. She knew when his last visit had been. She could handle it without me managing the details.

It didn’t stay on my list. I didn’t have to track it. I could just hand it off.

I love that. And what’s striking is that you didn’t just come from tech - you were shaped by it. Y Combinator. Growth-stage startups. The Valley’s definition of ambition. That ecosystem has a very specific narrative around success: scale fast, grow fast, go big.

So I’m curious, how has your definition of success evolved, especially after becoming a parent?

Not in a sentimental way. More in a philosophical one. Has motherhood shifted how you think about ambition, pace, or what “winning” even means? You still clearly care deeply about building Sundays. But has your proximity to that high-growth ecosystem and now your proximity to your son, changed the time horizon or the scoreboard you’re optimizing for?

There was actually a big shift for me even before becoming a mom, when I left tech to start Sundays.

I’d spent years in VC-backed companies where success meant growing as fast as possible. It wasn’t necessarily about building something sustainable. It was about scale.

When I went out on my own, I had to ask: What kind of business do I actually want to run?

And I decided very intentionally to build something more old-school. A traditional business. We make a certain amount of money and that’s the money we have to spend. That’s it. So Sundays is intentionally bootstrapped.

VC makes sense for a lot of companies. And for some founders, that outcome is exactly what they want. But in that world, success often means you either make a billion dollars… or you don’t. And for me, there’s a lot in between that would feel deeply meaningful. I care about impact. I care about building something valuable. And I care about supporting my family with the kind of lifestyle I actually want to live.

Interestingly, I made that decision before having a baby. I think if I’d waited, I might’ve been too risk-averse to take the leap.

Now that I’m a mom, I’m still processing what success looks like. But I notice I’m thinking in longer time horizons. I’m less rushed about hitting certain revenue milestones. I’m more aware of the trade-offs.

Is this business giving me time with my son? Can I be present while he grows up? Can I build something meaningful without sacrificing that?

That’s the version of success I’m calibrating toward now.

It is all so new for you! and unsolicited advice but you will probably have to keep revisiting your operating model every couple of months for the next couple of years.

Right now though - what does a successful day or week look like for you? Are you intentionally setting some boundaries? As an employee, you can still sometimes switch off. I think as a founder, you never truly switch off, right?

Yup - there is no completely switching off as founder and I think that’s what’s hard.

When you’re first coming back from mat leave, you kind of want to just execute on things. You’re like, “Okay, I just want to do the things I know how to do.” And so that was definitely difficult because all the problems that existed before I went on leave were still here waiting for me. And that is work that I love doing.

I think the transition time has been valuable where I have hard time limits of when the baby is here and when he’s with childcare, and then when he’s back here. So my physical time during the day to spend on work is a lot more limited, and so I need to be much more proactive about prioritizing and being like, “What things actually need my attention?” And then building systems to make myself more effective or hand things off to other people.

So both at work and at home, I’ve been doing a lot of just: what are the things that run on repeat, and how can I systematize them so that either I’m much more efficient at them or someone else can do them? And especially my favorite thing right now is things that other people can push to me. So, like, we have someone on our team who does meal planning for us. It’s not even a complicated process, but just having her every Tuesday send, “Here’s a meal plan for next week. Approve it,” and then she’ll set up a grocery order for us. I don’t have to think. I just have to say yes, versus being like, “Okay, I need to think about doing the meal plan on Tuesdays, and I need to think about putting in the grocery order.”

So trying to remove myself from owning as much of the mental burden as possible so that I do have this free space during the day to hopefully do proactive business development.

That makes a lot of sense. And I know this is obviously unique to your circumstances, but maybe there are a few other people who read my newsletter who care about this.

As a founder/CEO, what sort of maternity leave coverage did you create for yourself? What was your plan? Were you able to get a true maternity leave in the traditional sense? Or how did you sort of create that coverage, and how was that entire conversation within your company?

It was really important to me to take a true leave — for myself and my family. I also believe everyone deserves that time with their child, and as a founder, I wanted to model it.

So I took two months fully off, followed by one month part-time.

And I truly disconnected. I didn’t open my computer once. When I came back, I had forgotten my password. The team sent one update email during that time, and a few people texted to ask how the baby was — but I wasn’t involved in any day-to-day decisions.

That level of disconnection didn’t happen by accident.

I spent most of my pregnancy designing the leave. When I got pregnant, it was just me, my co-founder, and one ops person. I was doing everything else - recruiting, every single sales call, all of our marketing.

So I made exhaustive lists of what I actually did. Then I asked: what can be absorbed? What needs a system? What needs a clear owner?

We pulled in existing EAs where it made sense. And for the rest, I built simple systems around each function so they could keep running without me.

The leave wasn’t a pause. It was a test of whether we’d built something that could operate beyond me.

I love the intentionality behind how you designed your leave. And I think this applies beyond founders. Whether you’re a CEO or not, good coverage plans don’t just magically exist. You have to take some ownership - who’s covering you, what’s the ramp-down, what’s the ramp-back-up.

A lot of people assume the organization has it figured out. Sometimes they do. Sometimes they don’t. But if your career matters to you, there’s something powerful about designing that transition so your future self isn’t walking back into chaos. And frankly, it reassures people that you’re stepping away, not disappearing.

On a different but related note - you told me your mom has been such a big inspiration behind Sundays. And now you’re a mom, a founder, building the very thing that was shaped by her experience.

How much of this journey do you share with her? And what does she think - about you building your own company, and now navigating motherhood while running it?

I think she’s happy that I’m working in this space, trying to support more moms. She’s been super supportive of me, and I don’t think I could be in this position if I didn’t have her. Even especially with the baby - we live close enough that we can see them regularly, and she is super involved.

I know that I always have her as kind of a safety net, a person who’s there for me and for the baby. It makes such a huge difference in being able to build anything to have that kind of support. And I think she’s also just excited that I am trying to make a difference in this space for women to have more of an impact outside the home too.

I love that. Most parents are proud of their kids no matter what. But in your mom’s case, there’s something deeper here. She made tradeoffs for you.

I think that’s something many of us only understand later. As kids, we don’t fully see the structural constraints our parents were navigating - the policies, the norms, the economic realities. We see individual choices. We don’t always see the system around them.

And now, as parents ourselves, that lens shifts.

I have a daughter, and I think about this a lot. I hope that when she enters the workforce, she’s not still facing the same cliff so many women hit around motherhood. The same quiet drop-offs. The same trade-offs framed as personal shortcomings rather than structural design flaws.

So looking ahead, what changes do you most hope to spark? In workplace culture? In policy? In how we define ambition and “good work”?

Not in the sense that every woman has to work in one specific way, because every woman already works. But in this persistent tension between work and family… what would progress actually look like to you?

That’s a great question.

One of our biggest goals is getting more moms into leadership roles. Representation matters. Culture shifts when the people at the table reflect the realities of the workforce. And right now, there just aren’t enough moms in executive roles.

Culturally, I also think we need to rethink how we define “good work.”

Too often, it’s measured by visibility - who’s active on Slack at 10pm, who’s always available, who says yes to everything. But very few organizations have paused to ask: what outcomes actually matter?

If we were more honest about that, we’d probably see that constant responsiveness isn’t the same as meaningful contribution. Sometimes the most valuable work comes from someone who protects time for deep, thoughtful output.

Decoupling “grind” from “success” would make a huge difference in whether moms can stay and grow in the workforce.

And practically speaking, we’re big believers in remote work. Our entire team is remote. Especially in the U.S., as more companies push people back into offices, the ones that remain flexible are going to have access to incredible talent, including moms who might otherwise opt out.

🤓 Open tabs…

(I have modeled this section after those “open tabs” that we all have with a few (okay 30-40) interesting links that we promise we will eventually get to one day. These are the links that I had open for sometime that I finally got to …)

⭐We’re finally learning the true side-effects of weight-loss drugs
But like any world-changing technology, semaglutide drugs have their critics. In this case, it’s health influencers leading the charge. They would rather you fast, switch diets, take up exercise or, better still, spend a nominal amount to join their online programmes and courses.

That said, with the widespread public adoption of these drugs in recent years, reports of side effects have begun cropping up. In some cases, semaglutide has led to malnutrition, gastric issues, mental health issues and eye problems. On top of that, many people are beginning to question what happens after they’ve lost the weight – how can they stop taking semaglutides and keep the inches off their waistlines?

⭐Denmark’s generous child care and parental leave policies erase 80% of the ‘motherhood penalty’ for working moms
Despite having one of the world’s ‘s strongest safety nets, the women still experience what’s known as the “motherhood penalty” in Denmark. Researchers found that Danish women born in the 1960s received 80% of what they missed in earned income through an array of government benefits – and that the disparity between their earnings and the earnings of childless women eventually went away.

⭐Usha Vance, Rama Duwaji, & the Tragedy of Heterosexuality

📖 My private thoughts from my very public diary…

(Sometimes on X (Twitter), sometimes on Threads and sometimes on BlueSky)

If you enjoy Decks and Diapers, it would mean the world to me if you invited friends to subscribe and read with us. If you refer friends, you will receive a little something from me as a thank you!

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Hi there 👋🏽

Early in the morning, I was feeding my baby when my older one entered the room, jumped into our bed, and asked if she could sleep there with us for a little bit.

As the sun came up, I had my husband on one side of the bed, both our babies - the older and younger one - between us, and our dog at my feet.

In that moment, I felt nothing but blessed….this is exactly the life I wanted when I pictured myself all grown up.

I’ve taken a mental picture of this moment and know that decades later, I will revisit it and feel nothing but warmth.

Every once in awhile you have a moment you know will flash before your eyes on the way out of this world, it’s good to bask in the glory of it all.

☕ Now, on to today’s coffee chat…

Meet Iain Boomer

Iain is a global talent, leadership, and learning leader with nearly two decades of experience building systems that help organizations grow, adapt, and perform at scale. Across Canada, the US, and EMEA, he has led enterprise-wide talent and learning transformations impacting more than 12,000 employees, with a particular focus on closing the gap between well-intended people strategies and what actually gets executed day to day. His work brings together culture, leadership capability, performance, and modern learning ecosystems in service of real business outcomes.

A co-host of the Lead & Learn podcast and and shaped by an international family journey, Iain brings systems thinking, curiosity, and deep self-awareness to how he leads and how he helps others lead.

Below is my conversation with Iain…

Please tell us a little bit about yourself

Iain Boomer and professionally I’ve been in the learning and development field for almost 20 years now, with several different roles around the world. I’ve progressed through different levels of learning - from doing the work myself, to working on the vendor and partner side, all the way up to working in industry. Most recently, I led the global talent and leadership transformation at Bitfarms, a digital infrastructure company that is undergoing a massive transformation from Bitcoin mining to high-performance data centers for AI. Prior to that I, I held several learning leadership roles at AbbVie.

I am really passionate about what I do. I love it.

My wife, Taryn, used to work in the exact same field. That’s where we met. She understands exactly what I do, very well. She has a passion for it as well, so it’s great to be able to have conversations about it together.

Taryn is South African, and I’m Canadian, so we’re pretty much an international family. Everybody’s born somewhere else, with a couple of passports here and there. One of the interesting things about having opportunities to change roles around the world is being able to see different cultures, experience different things, and also see different ways our kids can interact with programs in different countries.

We had a nanny in Germany. We left just before Zack was two, and that was a great experience because we were both working at the time. We both had jobs with a lot of responsibility…we were both driving learning for a medical device company in Germany. We worked in a very hybrid, even virtual, environment, which gave us flexibility. We could go into the office or work from home without having to worry too much. That flexibility was huge.

So when we moved to the States, Taryn decided to leave her job and stay home to take care of Zack. Then Riley was born there.

How did your wife arrive at her decision to leave her job?

Because we have a passion for learning, we put our son into a Montessori school - a truly well-funded, well-supported Montessori program with really well-educated teachers who followed the Montessori approach properly. We were very fortunate, because there was a teacher in Zack’s homeroom who identified something called Sensory Processing Disorder, which is an autistic trait.

At that point, we didn’t really know a lot about autism or neurodiversity in relation to our son. When the teacher shared this with us, we were floored. We didn’t really believe it at first. Zack was very smart, he had been speaking from a very young age and had an advanced vocabulary. We just thought, “He’s a smart kid.”

But that one moment, when he was two years old, gave us a massive opportunity - a window to start learning about how Zack is different. We were very fortunate, because not a lot of parents get that kind of information so early in their child’s journey.

We were also fortunate to be in the U.S., where there is a lot of support. Because we had insurance through our company, we were able to start very early in getting Zack the support he needed. He’s very high-functioning, very smart, very intelligent.

One of the things that follows Zack is that he also has Nonverbal Learning Disorder. What that means is that he can speak very eloquently, so he looks and sounds much older than his age. As a result, he is often overestimated and underestimated at the same time.

That put us on a significant learning journey as a family. He did very well in that Montessori school because there was a strong teachers to student ratio, and it allowed him to self-discover and progress at his own pace.

Then I had the opportunity to come to Canada to head up learning here. Riley had already been born, and when we moved to Canada, Taryn said, “Let’s try Zack in a private school,” knowing that public school might not be the right environment for him.

We gave it a try. Within three months, Zack was spending most of his time in and out of the principal’s office, just sitting there. People didn’t really know what to do with his energy or how his brain worked. He also has ADHD.

That’s when we made the big decision to homeschool.

For Taryn, that was a massive decision saying, “I’m going to learn how to do this.” And it wasn’t just Zack; it was Zack and Riley. They’re very different individuals, and of course males and females present very differently across the neurodiversity spectrum.

So Taryn decided to take this on, and as a family, that meant we became a homeschooling family.

Kudos to her, that is a big commitment and more intense than most jobs

It’s a real commitment and while she does the lion’s share of the work I too support our kid’s education. I am very open and public about it. There is always a child at home. There will be interruptions. There’s always that moment when someone wants to share something exciting they’ve learned.

The reason I’m public about it at work, and why it comes up in meetings, is because these things are part of my life. Just like during the pandemic, people may appear on screen. This is simply our way of working and being…it happens every single day for us.

That’s fascinating. And when I think about it, you’re not just playing two roles, which is what many working parents do. You’re leading learning and development for an organization, you’re a dad but you’re also taking on aspects of being an educator.

I don’t even want to ask “How do you manage all of this?” but more: how do you think through it as a family? How do you stay on top of everything together? It just feels like a lot, and I’m not sure how I’d handle having a third role added in.

We do have a very strict and regimented schedule at home. The kids wake up at set times. They have structured activities. When someone is home all the time, there’s more food being consumed, more electricity, more water, more cleaning - so those responsibilities are part of the household schedule too.

The kids are involved in that. Part of their learning is understanding how responsibilities fit into daily life.

Taryn runs the majority of the homeschooling program. But for me, just like in the corporate space, what matters is application. How do the kids apply what they’re learning? How do they demonstrate it?

So we integrate reading, science, and math into real-life activities. We think outside the box. Taryn does a lot of research into curriculum requirements for wherever we’re living, and then we look for tangible, real-world experiences instead of just following a ministry-issued classroom model.

That flexibility allows us to adjust our schedules. If there’s an activity that isn’t coordinated with other homeschoolers, I might take an extra day off so we can do it. Homeschooling for us runs almost 12 months a year.

We get to choose when we take breaks. I don’t have to take vacation strictly during summer because the kids are off school. I can work all summer and then take time off in September, October, November or in January or February. That lets us design our lifestyle differently.

I might take extra days here and there for curricular activities, just like parents take time off to attend school plays or science fairs. The difference is that I may participate more directly.

Our entire day revolves around the homeschooling schedule from chores and responsibilities to extracurriculars, social learning, and social skill development. We make sure those elements are built in.

For my work schedule, it’s really about knowing that the kids are here and interruptions will happen. If Taryn needs help managing multiple students, I might block off a meeting to cover something so she can do one-on-one time with a child who needs extra support.

That give-and-take might mean working an extra hour later in the day or waking up earlier. It’s just part of the rhythm.

Taryn also works a lot with the kids on ownership and development, helping them understand what they need to accomplish in a day. They can do it in two hours or six hours - it’s up to them. They can play, go outside, do other activities, but the work needs to get done.

Some days they finish quickly. Some days, like with any child, it takes eight hours. Some days nothing gets done and it’s frustrating.

That’s just part of the reality.

I was just thinking about it - you’re probably the first person I’m speaking to who is homeschooling their kids. And what I really like about it is that your entire life is no longer constrained by external structures. You can design and structure life the way you want.

But also, it feels like there’s a real focus on skills that actually matter. School, especially public schooling, has its pros and cons, but it’s often preparing people for a workplace that doesn’t exist anymore. Everything is regimented. There’s very little creativity. There’s a lack of first-principles thinking. So the fact that you can integrate all of that feels really powerful.

Yeah and just on that point, we do take some key differences very intentionally. Taryn is responsible for creating the curriculum, and in that curriculum we step outside a lot of the norms that exist in public schools, largely because of the rules and regulations they have to follow.

For example, we have a distinct curriculum on finances, which doesn’t really happen in traditional schooling. We also have a distinct curriculum on racism and diversity. And when we go into history, it’s real history - history that public schools are often limited in how far they can go.

So we get to change things up a little bit. We homeschool not because we have to, but because we chose to - it’s what’s best for our children right now, while they’re learning more about themselves and developing the skills they need. At some point, they may move into a more traditional schooling environment, and that will be a decision we make together with them.

Being able to shift the curriculum allows us to give them those planning skills and life skills that, like you said, aren’t typically developed in public school not because schools don’t want to, but because there’s limited time, limited teachers, and limited capacity.

And the other thing I was thinking about, for both you and your partner, is energy. How do you manage your energy levels? How do you recover?

Because when you say you’re doing this for 12 months a year, it’s kind of like working for 12 months straight. You’re both working - there’s curriculum planning, delivery, constant adaptation. I imagine Taryn is also continuously upskilling herself. It’s a lot of labor. How have you thought about burnout and making sure that doesn’t happen?

That’s a great point. I mentioned earlier that we do have skills and hobbies on the side, but there are a few broader reasons why this has been particularly intense for us.

We’ve moved a lot ….countries, houses, rentals before buying. We’ve bounced around quite a bit. And since committing to homeschooling in 2018, that’s taken a lot of time and effort. Our families are also far away geographically, so we don’t have close family support nearby. That means we’ve fully committed to this lifestyle.

It’s also not a surprise that Zack and Riley are both neurodiverse and honestly, we are an entirely neurodiverse family. I was recently late-diagnosed with ADHD and autism, with the same sensory processing differences. Taryn has ADHD as well. So over the last couple of years, we’ve also been discovering ourselves.

That’s required a significant investment in self-discovery - really understanding who we are and how we function. That’s been incredibly important.

So when it comes to recovery, energy, and making sure we keep ourselves safe, sane, and functional, it comes down to communication. Very strong communication.

Brené Brown says it really well she talks about telling her partner, “I’m at 20% today. You’ll need to cover the other 80%.” Taryn and I don’t use that exact language, but we’re getting much better at communicating where we’re at.

We’re also very different people. I’m very internal, I process things in my head. Taryn is very external in how she communicates. So a big part of our journey has been learning how to meet each other where we are.

That handoff is critical. Whether it’s, “I’m done for today,” or “This is where I’m at,” and then the other person takes over - whether that’s dinner, cleaning, or managing the kids. Some days, things just don’t get done because it’s too chaotic. And with neurodiversity, there are moments when you can engage in conversation, and moments when you absolutely can’t.

So you have to be able to read each other.

For us, creating that safe space, where we can protect ourselves and show up appropriately, comes from that clear handoff. “Here you go, I’ve got it.” Or, “I need to step away. I’m going for a walk. I’m going to read. I’m taking a bath.”

We have to be very intentional about that.

There are also days when I’m just overwhelmed by work, by my own emotions, by what I’m trying to understand about myself. And I need to communicate that early. Say, “I’m not okay today.” And not just to Taryn - to the entire family.

That’s a key skill for us as a neurodiverse family: getting out of our comfort zones, finding strategies that work, and communicating clearly. For us right now, communication is everything. That’s what allows us to rest and recover.

And I imagine you extend this into the formal workplace as well. From what I can tell, you’ve created a psychologically safe environment by sharing enough about yourself.

There’s also a gender dynamic here. Unfortunately or fortunately men bringing their whole selves to work is often perceived very differently than women doing the same. When women say, “I’m a mom” or “I have caregiving responsibilities,” their commitment or competence can be questioned. When men do it, it’s often celebrated.

How do you think about this in your workplace? Are there things leaders can do to help people build lives where they can truly be themselves and create structures that let them thrive both personally and professionally?

Leading people means learning all the time. The moment you decide to step into leadership, you commit to learning - from others, from mistakes, from failures, from reading, from courses.

One of the benefits of the work we do is that we’re very open about information flow. We’ve been saying for years that we need to normalize differences—but the workplace is still very far from that reality.

It’s much easier for a white man to walk into the workplace, set boundaries, and have them respected. For others, particularly women, there’s often a history of trauma around boundary-setting, or environments that have punished them for it.

We don’t normalize conversations around the different life stages women go through. Instead, we expect them to show up every day as if everything is fine while often carrying the majority of household and caregiving responsibilities.

And even structurally, it’s reinforced. In Canada, for example—when you file taxes to receive child benefits, those benefits are typically tied to the woman. The system perpetuates these dynamics constantly

If somebody is not feeling well one day, generally a man’s lifestyle doesn’t really change. There’s very little adjustment. But women go through different phases at different times in their lives, and yet the expectation placed on them never changes.

And if the attitude and understanding aren’t there, that’s where we start running into boundary issues.

Not to go too far off on a tangent, but this is a big thing - we just don’t normalize these conversations.

So what we do in our family, from a very young age is we normalize conversations around periods. We normalize conversations around when Taryn isn’t feeling great, whether it’s because of her cycle or something else. Every woman experiences this differently, so we use language that allows her to say, “Right now is not the time for this,” or “I can’t engage in that at the moment.”

We normalize it.

It’s important for Riley to understand this, and it’s equally important for Zack to understand it as well. For us, this is just part of our day-to-day reality. And it makes us more conscious of what this looks like in the work environment.

To bring it back to boundaries depending on a person’s background, their trauma, or their lived experience, setting boundaries can be very difficult. We talk a lot about the importance of saying no. There are lots of courses and frameworks about it.

But for individuals who haven’t had good experiences with setting boundaries or whose boundaries haven’t been respected just saying, “Hey, say no,” doesn’t really work. Boundary-setting is a leadership skill, not a simple tactic.

I don’t want to go too far into theory, so I’ll simplify it with how I structure my day.

I design my day in a way that works for me, clarifies expectations, and makes things clear for others. For example, when I’m traveling to work, when I arrive, the first thing I do is my MIT - my Most Important Task. That time is already blocked in my calendar so I’m not immediately inundated with emails.

I also have specific blocks in my calendar for answering emails. That repeats three times a day. So I have dedicated time for my most important tasks, dedicated time for email, and dedicated time for travel whether that’s commuting, lunch, or heading home.

If people know where I am and what I’m doing, we can schedule meetings during travel time if needed. And I also have clear blocks of time when I’m available for meetings.

That structure allows me to actually get work done. Otherwise, it becomes, “I’ve been in meetings all day when am I supposed to do my real work?” And the answer can’t be, “When I get home.”

Yes, sometimes things happen you wake up a little earlier or work a bit later but that’s not the norm for me. And the reason it’s not the norm is because if I’m not present here, then I’m not supporting my family or myself.

About a year and a half ago, I made a big decision to separate my work phone from my personal phone.

Now, when I get home or on the weekends, my work phone is off. I only have my personal phone. Making that separation was a big change for me, but it also clearly communicated that at the end of the workday, I’m done. On the weekend, I’m done. I pick it back up on Monday.

When I get to work, I use my email blocks, and then I engage. Before, I was mixing everything all the time.

To finish up answering your question about - Are there things leaders can do to help people build lives where they can truly be themselves and create structures that let them thrive both personally and professionally?

Leaders have to take control and make it a priority to create this environment in their teams. As a new leader, coming into a new team, and this needs to be done yearly, it’s good practice to run Team Assimilation and Team Alignment meetings. Revisit your team vision/mission, what do the company values it look like and don’t for your team. What is are your communication norms, what are your boundaries and what happens when they are crossed – what is the expectations. What is team loyalty and how do we expect to show up for each other. What’s working well and what is not working well. When failures or mistakes happen, how do we come together to discuss and discover the next action to innovation or change. Being intentional about these actions, committing to them, and revisiting regularly (quarterly) is essential. As a leader, you made a mistake, say it, involve the team. Show vulnerability. Use we. Let’s solve this together, let’s find a new way. How do we celebrate? Celebrating the wins, celebrating how we discussed failures and moving one, celebrating how people succeed at work life balance, celebrating taking time off for family birthdays and other special events.

I love that. There are very tactical things here that we could all do.

I agree with you - you can be incredibly busy answering emails and sitting in back-to-back meetings, and still have no time or energy to think or do creative work. And I think that’s one of the reasons people feel overwhelmed.

In a pre-children world, you could stretch your day to 16 or 17 hours if you wanted to. But once you have kids and, once you want a life outside of work, putting constraints in place becomes critical. Saying no, not being interrupted by every email notification, protecting your energy - that feels really important.

Yeah, absolutely. I used to be someone where, if I saw an email come in, my face would change, my attitude would change, my energy would change immediately.

And I was also one of those people who said yes to a lot of things. People in learning and development often do - we want to help, we want to support, we want to say yes to the team.

I was doing a lot of travel like, a lot. I was away constantly. And during that time, yes, the kids were going to school for a bit when we weren’t homeschooling, but it meant that I wasn’t very present here.

And that has massive consequences when your partner, the person you want to support and help, is essentially doing everything alone. If you’re not present, whether physically or mentally, you’re not really there.

I was doing 14-, 15-, 16-hour days. Seventy- to eighty-hour weeks. And when you’re doing that, you’re just not present. And if you’re not present, then you’re not showing up for your partner.

What we’re doing right now would not work - at all - if I were still in that environment or allowing myself to be in that environment.

And let’s be clear: most of the time, as individuals, we create that environment for ourselves, unless we actively choose otherwise. Now, I know that depends on what people can and can’t do in their roles, and I fully acknowledge that.

But for me, I allowed myself to be there. And I wasn’t being the partner I wanted or needed to be.

That level of self-awareness is powerful.

The fact that you can look back and say, “My partner was carrying the entire burden, and I wasn’t showing up the way I wanted to,” is incredibly impressive.

Iain, thank you, truly, for that self-awareness and vulnerability.

Before we wrap, is there anything you wanted to share that I didn’t ask? Anything that’s been sitting with you and feels important to say?

Yeah. I think one really important thing, both in our careers and as parents, is taking the time to step back and ask:
Who am I as an individual?
Who am I in this corporate world, or running my business, or doing my job?
And who am I as a parent?

We often set goals for ourselves at work. We’re very intentional about that. But we rarely set a vision or goals for ourselves as a family.

And that’s a key step.

If you can do that - define your vision as an individual, your vision as a family - and then even invite your kids to do the same, it makes such a difference. There are great tools out there that allow families to do this together.

Because then you become self-aware of what’s actually important to you.

If you have a hobby that really matters to you, where does it fit into your day, your week, your month, your year? Because that hobby is part of who you are. If you’re not doing what you enjoy, something will always feel missing.

Whether it’s playing hockey, golfing, reading, flying a plane, whatever it is you need to understand how that fits into your life, your family life, and your work life.

If you get that right, everything starts humming. You’re firing on all cylinders.

So take the time to set a vision and goals - not just for work, but for yourself and for your family. We do this constantly in our careers. We push ourselves to achieve.

Why wouldn’t we do the same for our lives?

100%. And that also tells me that every aspect of your life needs to be in sync.

Some of the most miserable people I’ve met are those who over-index on one area of their life. And then they wonder, Why am I so unhappy? Why do I feel so broken?

It’s because they’ve poured all their attention, focus, and energy into one identity ignoring that life is everything happening around us, not just one small piece of who we are.

I love that you’re someone who owns your entire identity and still enjoys what many would call conventional success.

So again, thank you, Iain, for being a role model and for having this conversation with me.

🤓 Open tabs…

(I have modeled this section after those “open tabs” that we all have with a few (okay 30-40) interesting links that we promise we will eventually get to one day. These are the links that I had open for sometime that I finally got to …)

⭐Airbnb manager quit her job to take a gap year with her husband and 3 kids—she credits the reset for propelling her to CEO of Taskrabbit

She was seemingly at a career high, working as an senior leader at Airbnb, when she quit it all; she packed up her life and moved to Buenos Aires for a year in 2018 with her husband and three young children, to hit pause.

Despite the stigma that often surrounds résumé gaps, Smith scored a promotion on her return–and has since seen her career go from strength to strength. And the 50-year-old chief tells Fortune that it’s largely down to the big reset the year abroad gave her and importantly, her marriage.

⭐Applying Product Principles to Your L&D Strategy (Podcast Episode 93 )
I was recently invited as a guest on Training Industry’s The Business of Learning podcast. We spoke about how product management principles can help L&D teams move beyond programs and courses to operate as true strategic partners to the business.
Some of the topics we spoke about:

• How product management and modern L&D processes overlap

• What L&D can learn from product managers about taking a business-first approach

• How customer-centric thinking can improve learning design and impact

⭐How MAGA Won the ‘Sensitive Young Man’
“I was 10 when he first announced he was running for president, and he just captured my attention,” he says. “I’d always been fascinated by politics and history, obsessed with world leaders. . . . I think that there’s a certain element of greatness in Trump’s personality.” And then: “I’ve always seen myself in him. That’s the first thing that drew me to him when I was 10. I’d always been admonished in school by my teachers . . .”

📖 My private thoughts from my very public diary…

(Sometimes on X (Twitter), sometimes on Threads and sometimes on BlueSky)

If you enjoy Decks and Diapers, it would mean the world to me if you invited friends to subscribe and read with us. If you refer friends, you will receive a little something from me as a thank you!

Refer a friend

If that feels like too much then, did you know that liking this post or leaving a comment helps it find more readers?

Leave a comment

P.S. If this email landed in your Promotions tab, please take a second and drag it to your Primary tab. It makes a big difference to the inbox gods, plus you’ll never miss a post!

Disclaimer: All views expressed are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of my employer

If you’re reading this but haven’t subscribed, you may want to consider doing that. This will ensure future posts land straight in your inbox

Subscribe now

Hi there 👋🏽

This week, I’m thrilled to bring to you the 5th edition of The Balcony, a new series that steps back from our usual Coffee Chats and invites voices who’ve spent years studying the broader patterns shaping our lives.

To understand more about the name “The Balcony” - click here where I dive deeper into the so-what behind the name.

Today our guest writer is Sherri Phillips

Sherri is the Founder of Baby Helping Hands, Postpartum Doula, Registered Early Childhood Educator and mom of two children.

Sherri’s path to becoming a postpartum doula was shaped by both lived experience and a deep commitment to supporting families in their earliest, most tender seasons.

After welcoming her second child, she trained as an early childhood educator and began working in a childcare setting. When a family with limited support invited her into their home after the birth of their third child, Sherri did not hesitate to help, as she remembered the ups and downs of raising her own babies. In doing so, her curiosity and care for infants continued to grow.

Through caring for families in the weeks after birth, Sherri came to understand that supporting a baby also means supporting the whole family. This realization led her to deepen her knowledge of postpartum changes and practical strategies that help parents balance life with a newborn while still making space for themselves…grounding her work in empathy and trust.

Now, let us head to The Balcony…

Adjusting to Life After Birth

Postpartum comes with changes to your body, relationships, and lifestyle. Instead of rushing to ‘bounce back,’ embrace the transition into parenthood.

Life with baby is a learning curve filled with challenges and joys. You will experiment, problem-solve, and grow while getting to know your baby. It takes time. Prioritize self-care along the way. It is essential for you and your family.

Firstly, I want to highlight what is occurring to the birth parent’s body after birth.

• The uterus is shrinking and the uterine lining is reestablishing. This may cause afterpains.

• The wound is healing where the placenta detached.

• Organs shifted during pregnancy and need to go back into place.

• If vaginal tear or c-section incision those areas are healing.

• Either your breasts are producing milk, and you are converting food and water into breastmilk or lactation suppression occurs requiring comfort measures.

• Eliminating excess fluid retained in your body.

• Hormones are rebalancing.

  

Nourishing yourself helps to heal the body and aids in your baby’s feeding journey. Focus on warm, easy-to-digest meals like cooked vegetables and porridges. Include protein (meat or legumes) and healthy fats. Finding time and energy to cook is hard. Ask others to batch cook and freeze meals and request food delivery gift cards. Keep hydrated. Many of my clients admit they do not drink enough water. Include non-caffeinated teas, which you can often make with pantry staples.

Self care and personal time are essential for your health. Define your postpartum priorities for example sleep, shower, reading, a walk, talking to friends or a hobby. Communicate your needs to others. Ask for help with baby so you can enjoy the moment instead of feeling rushed.

Create a bedroom postpartum haven!
Having the right environment can make activities smoother, more enjoyable, and comfortable. Consider having:

• A comfortable chair and pillows of varying sizes for back, arms and baby support.

• Side table and containers to make the following things more accessible.

  • Feeding supplies

  • Handheld snacks and drinks

  • Books to enjoy while feeding

  • Hot or cold pads to ease your sore joints

• Adjustable lighting (dim or bright depending on time of day).

• Breathable, easy-to-feed-in clothing if breastfeeding.

• Back up of the following items just in case you need to change them.

  • baby sleep clothes and sacks

  • sleep tops for you

  • bed sheets (for you and baby)

  • change table cover

If you have a guest bed, keep it ready for yourself or anyone helping, there will be times when a nap is needed. Many parents are surprised by how noisy babies can be, even while they sleep! A guest bedroom also offers a quiet space to take off your parent hat and reconnect to yourself while someone else cares for the baby.

Here are a few examples for things you can include your baby in:

• Read your book to them

• Play your favourite music, sing, dance

• Exercise safely near them

• Do a hobby beside them

• Find a shaded place in your backyard to connect to nature or a stroller accessible trail.

• Find online or in-person non-baby related activities where babies are welcome with feeding friendly and stroller accessible environments.

Remember, you are not alone. Research and choose community and postnatal professional supports that resonates with you, provides evidence-based guidance and resources, and are only a phone call away when you need them.

Do you have older children? Each sibling adjusts differently to the arrival of a baby. Set aside time to focus only on them. If they are interested, include them in baby’s routines. Try to maintain their routines. This can be difficult. Don’t be hard on yourself when routines do not go as planned.

To maintain other everyday routines, start by making a list of tasks. Talk with your partner or family members to divide responsibilities or identify others who can help. For example: Who will walk the dog, grocery shop, clean the house, do laundry, pick up children from school, or take you and the baby to appointments? Remember once either of you return to work discuss again to see if individual responsibilities need to change.

As your body adjusts postpartum, a process that takes time, care, and patience, you will also begin to learn your baby’s temperament. Over time, you will discover which approaches, products, and supports work best for your family.

Preparing for life after birth is about more than just surviving; it is about creating a foundation for thriving.

Postpartum is not about perfection.

Give yourself grace, lean on support when needed, and celebrate the progress you make each day. You are doing an incredible job, one moment at a time!!

The Coffee Chats and Open Tabs will be back in the next edition.

If you find yourself with a little extra time, maybe you use it to go through the archives and rediscover an old conversation I had shared.

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Hi there 👋🏽

There’s a lot of chatter right now about the “right age” for women to get married or have children.

The truth is simple: there is no universal timeline. Every path has trade-offs.

I spent my late teens and 20s working intensely and did experience career acceleration. Then I got married in my late 20s and kids soon followed. By most measures, my career has been strong.

Did having kids introduce a pause in that acceleration? Yes - and it was a conscious choice, not a setback.

Would I make the same choices again? Absolutely.

Do I believe I can return to a high-growth trajectory in the coming years? Without hesitation. Ambition doesn’t disappear; it evolves.

Unfortunately, women do face real workplace biases, especially after becoming mothers.
The real problem isn’t women’s choice to become mothers.

It’s that society pits two timelines against one another - biological clock and career clock - and tells women to solve a conflict they didn’t create.

Here’s my advice to women navigating this:

• Talk to women 10–20 years ahead of you - the ones whose careers and lives you admire.
  Ask what worked, what didn’t, and what they wish they’d known.

• Choose the timeline that aligns with your values, your energy, and your long-term vision. There will always be trade-offs but they should be yours to make.

• Trajectory is rarely linear, for men or women. Leadership depth often grows during the years a lot of individuals felt they were “slowing down”

☕ Now, on to today’s coffee chat…

Meet Maurizio Cuna

or MC, as most people call him - is a Partner at Infosys Consulting, where he leads complex transformations in banking and insurance at the intersection of technology, strategy, and human behaviour. With over 20 years of experience spanning four continents, he has advised global firms on core banking transformations, platform modernization, large-scale digital programmes, and AI integration.

Beyond consulting, he is the bestselling author of Beyond Slides, a #1 Amazon bestseller across multiple countries, and a generous mentor to the next generation of consultants.

Now based in Sydney with his family, he is as passionate about thoughtful transformation as he is about cooking Italian food from scratch, playing football, and reading more dead authors than he probably should.

We got to know each other through social media, drawn together by our shared love of writing and thinking out loud. We have been exchanging and bouncing perspectives back and forth across time zones and a giant ocean.

Below is my conversation with Maurizio….

Please tell us a little bit about yourself

I was born in Italy, which is not where I live now. I live in Sydney, Australia, which is pretty much one of the furthest points you can get from Italy…especially from the south of Italy, where I was born.

I was born in the south and then moved up to Padova, which is near Venice. Most people are familiar with Venice. I studied there and then started working for Accenture in Milan. That lasted for a bit.

About 2 decades back, I decided to move to the UK. The idea back then was pretty simple: move to the UK, learn a bit of English, and then go back to Italy after a couple of years. Instead, I ended up living in the UK for almost a decade.

After that, I moved to Hong Kong for a couple of years, did a bit of time in the US, and now I’ve been in Australia for almost 10 years. So that part of the plan definitely changed, I never really moved back.

I got married to a girl from Australia. We met in London, in the UK. Then, after moving here for a project that was supposed to last a couple of years, at the end of the project we were meant to go back to the UK. But after experiencing the Australian lifestyle, we decided it was much better here. There’s definitely more sun.

So we decided to stay. We have a daughter - she’s eight now. She’s fluent in Italian and, of course, English. She’s able to speak with my mom in Italian, which is something that was really important to us. We wanted her to be bilingual. And of course, she lives here, so English is very natural for her.

You’re also an author, right? That’s something you didn’t mention just now, but you’re a published author as well.

Yes. I do a few things.

Professionally, I’m a management consultant. I currently work as a partner at INFOSYS CONSULTING, which is the consulting arm of Infosys, based here in Australia.

On top of that, I write a newsletter called Consulting Intel. I started it about a year or so ago, and now it’s read by several thousand consultants all over the world - in about 127 countries, last time I checked. So there’s definitely been a lot of interest.

June 2025, I also published my first book. It’s titled Beyond Slides. I frame the book as part memoir, part philosophical essay, and part survival manual for consultants who want to have a long career.

So I do a lot of things along with my busy job.

And that’s actually a good segue into a follow-up question.

You’re a dad, and you’ve been in consulting for about 20 years now. Regardless of which consulting firm you work with, when you’re serving clients, there’s always a certain level of intensity and pressure involved.

I don’t love the words “balance” or “boundaries,” but how do you navigate that intensity? Especially given that you’re not just a parent outside of work - you’re also an author, you write a newsletter, and you’re very active on social media platforms. What kind of life have you created that allows all of this to work?

Yeah, I also don’t like the word “balance.”

I really don’t believe that life is made up of two or three or four separate things. There is one thing, which is life. And within life, there are things that we do. Work is an important part of it, of course but so is family, hobbies, and finding creative outlets.

The way I structure things is that I like to think in weeks rather than days. That’s how I organize my life.

First of all, very naturally, I don’t like watching TV. I don’t like Netflix. That comes very naturally to me. When I talk to other people about this, they say it probably saves me 10 hours a week or even more. I just don’t enjoy it. I feel very bored. If I’m forced to watch TV for more than 20 minutes, I’m bored.

I also don’t enjoy shopping centers or that kind of stuff. They stress me out too much. So I buy everything online, or my wife goes - she likes it, so she does her thing.

My hobbies are writing and playing football. I still play football. I’m 41, and I’ve been playing since I was five. It’s something I really enjoy, and it keeps me in the moment. Obviously, it’s also a motivation to stay as fit as possible. I’m less fit than when I was 20, but I’m still reasonably fit.

I play in a competition every Saturday. It takes a couple of hours, but I enjoy the training as well it’s not a chore. It’s genuinely how I have fun.

I’m very strict about time and energy management. That’s really how I manage myself.

I wake up very early, naturally between 4:30 and 5:00 a.m. No alarm. I don’t set an alarm at all. The only time I would set one is if I had to catch a flight, which I don’t enjoy anyway. For the past 10 years, I haven’t set an alarm. I just naturally wake up around 4:35.

That means I go to bed relatively early around 10:00 p.m. I try to get between six and seven hours of sleep.

The early hours of the morning are when I do my most creative work. That could be personal work, but it could also be work-related. If I need to work on a presentation, a deck, or something like that, I’ll do it then. I go from zero to 100 very quickly within five minutes I’m fully alert. I don’t need a slow start. Most people do; I don’t. I’m lucky that way.

If I go into the office, I have a long train ride about an hour. That helps me focus my thoughts, take notes, write, and do emails.

If I’m working from home, I usually take my daughter to school in the morning. By 8:30, I’m back and ready to start work at around 9:00, depending on the first call.

So I try to integrate all of these activities into life. There’s no “balance” for me. I’m very happy to work on a Saturday or Sunday - I really don’t care. I’m happy to take a phone call at 8:00 p.m.; it honestly doesn’t bother me. But if I need to do something at 1:00 p.m. on a Tuesday, I have a lot of flexibility to do that too.

I really like that, because that’s very similar to how I think about things.

For me, it’s about energy. A lot of these rules feel artificially created. If I need to pick something up on the weekend, I’m fine with it as long as I enjoy it and still have space during the week to do other things when I need to.

That brings me to another question. Through your newsletter, your writing, and your own experience - what’s a big misconception about consulting as a profession that you wish to dispel? Especially for aspiring consultants who feel like, “I can’t have a life outside of work.” A lot of people fall into that trap and assume that being a career consultant means you’re just going from project to project, and that’s it …that you can’t possibly have a life outside of it.

I think there are seasons in everyone’s life. And I don’t want to lie - when I was in my 20s, my life and my focus on my professional career were very different from what they are now.

That was also a function of the type of consulting I was doing at the time. When I was younger, I worked for a boutique specialist consulting firm that specialized in core banking. Core banking transformations are massive programs. They’re very risky, they cost a lot of money, and they used to be described as doing heart surgery while the patient is still alive because you’re changing the core systems that run a bank.

So I worked in that domain. These kinds of projects don’t happen very often in one city, or even in one country. As a result, I had to travel a lot. That’s how I ended up working in, I don’t know, maybe 10 different countries by now. I would finish one project and then move to the next project in a different country or continent.

While I was based in London, it was absolutely not unusual for me to work Monday to Friday in a completely different place. For example, I was living in London, but I would do 15 days in the US, then go back to London, then one week in Poland, where my team was, then one week in London, then two weeks in the US again. That was my rhythm.

Obviously, I was much younger, and I didn’t have children. That’s a huge difference. At that stage, I was very focused on that part of my career.

If you want to live that lifestyle for 50 years, then to me it’s kind of obvious that you need to sacrifice something else. But if you use your early years in consulting as an accelerator for the second stage of your career, then I think that’s a wise move.

You can use the accelerated growth you experience in your first 10 or 15 years and then leverage that in the second part of your career when maybe you have a family and different priorities. And you can leverage that not necessarily to work less, because if I look at my working hours, they’re still quite substantial but I work differently.

As you gain new roles in a firm, the nature of your work changes. Each new role is different from the previous one, and you have to improve different types of skills, often shifting from hard skills to soft skills.

That’s a big debate. For example, in my book, and I’m not trying to plug it, I talk about the foundational skills consultants need to develop if they want to work in consulting for a long time.

I think young consultants focus disproportionately on domain skills or hard skills, and many of them completely ignore the softer side. Then they complain and say, “Why did that person get promoted and I didn’t?” Well, you have to think holistically about the challenge and reflect on what you could have done differently - what that person might have done that you didn’t.

I completely agree with you. And I think that’s why your book is titled Beyond Slides, right?

There’s a misconception that consulting is just about creating slides or building Excel model after Excel model. While that’s important, we don’t even need to get into the conversation about AI tools and how that’s becoming faster and easier.

I keep telling people consulting is a team sport and a human business. At the end of the day, you have to influence people, coach them, understand their insecurities, and navigate human complexity.

I really like the fact that through your book you’re encouraging people to think this way. And I’m not trying to force a “consulting meets parenting” conversation, but I am curious - are there skills you acquired as a consultant that helped you as a parent? Or vice versa? Did becoming a dad give you a whole new set of skills that actually made you a better consultant?

Yes, absolutely. I think that really happened.

First of all, having a child and especially seeing someone grow from zero to who they are today you learn from them. You learn from kids. As much as you want to teach your child, you also have to be able to learn from them.

The way my daughter looks at new things is incredible. Sometimes I wonder if I was the same when I was young, I probably was, but I forgot. She’s incredibly curious. She keeps that curiosity open for pretty much everything. She asks a lot of questions, and she doesn’t come in with pre-judgment.

Kids are very open-minded, whereas adults have decades of embedded societal norms - what they read, what they’re told, what they absorb over time.

Staying curious has definitely made me a better consultant. The way you ask questions, the way you frame questions, and how you move from one question to the next, it really matters.

We talk about the “five whys” in consulting. With my daughter, it’s more like the 15 whys. She doesn’t stop. And maybe there’s something there we can learn from.

Has your idea of success or even ambition or growth evolved as you’ve taken on these different roles? You’re not just a consultant anymore. You’re a consultant, a father, a writer, and whether you like the term or not an “influencer” - someone who is quite public with their thinking in the profession.

Has all of that changed what success means to you?

Probably, but I don’t really come at it from that angle.

I don’t do any of this because I’m chasing some definition of success. For me, it’s really about enjoyment. I like to write. I always had the idea that one day I would write a book, because I like to read. Reading has been a habit of mine since I was a kid.

And by the way, I’m very happy that my daughter loves to read as well. Even this morning, she was just sitting on the sofa with a book. I like to think that she looks at me and thinks, “Okay, this is a good habit,” and then she does it too.

I always wanted to write a book, and I finally did. I like to read deeply

I write the newsletter and I write my thoughts because, honestly, I didn’t realize there was interest. This was something I had never tested before or even experienced.

When I started writing online, I genuinely thought nobody would read it. And instead, very quickly, to be fair, there was a lot of interest. A community of consultants started to form around what I was writing.

So I thought, okay, maybe there is interest. Maybe I’m actually helping other people. And then, after I published the book, I kept receiving messages from people who really liked it and who said they were finding it helpful in their profession.

At that point, I realized: okay, there is interest. People are finding this useful. I like doing it. It doesn’t add stress to my life. So it’s kind of a no-brainer to continue writing.

I relate to that so much.

Like you, TV does nothing for me. There are books everywhere in my house, probably close to a thousand. I really enjoy reading and writing.

And very similar to you, I thought, “Who cares about my thoughts online?” But once you start putting yourself out there, a few things happen. Your thinking gets refined, and people sort of find you.

I think there’s also a personal process involved. For me, at least, that was the case.

I’m very effective one-on-one, that’s always been true for me, but I don’t think I’m naturally very effective in public speaking situations, especially when there are a lot of people in front of me. That was something I always wanted to fix.

So I went through this process of saying, okay, let me take this fear - this aspect of my personality where I feel weak, or at least not as strong as I could be and let me attack it directly.

I started writing in public to confront that fear and say, “Okay, let’s do this and see what happens.” And like with everything, once you start doing the thing, your brain moves from fear to solution. You start finding ways to improve and get better.

Of course, I have reasonably solid skills in writing and communication, and I know what I’m talking about because I’ve been doing this job for 20 years. I’m not a random person on the internet who’s never experienced consulting.

So naturally, it resonates a bit, which is good. But I’ll keep improving. I still see a lot of areas where I can get better.

I love that. And honestly, that’s how you and I are connected halfway across the world through the power of the internet.

One thing I remember reading, you might have written it on LinkedIn, was this idea that “one day” is a dangerous concept. There’s a certain urgency in how you approach life.

Can you tell me a bit about where that idea came from and how you live it day to day?

Yes. That idea actually goes back to when I was five years old.

I started primary school one year early. At the time in Italy, you could start school at five instead of six. Then I finished high school one year early as well.

There was a scheme back then, I’m not sure it still exists, where, if you were getting certain marks, you could compress the last two years of high school into one., you could compress the last two years of high school into one. That meant I started university two years ahead of my peer group.

This might sound absurd to people outside Italy, but the average length of a computer engineering degree at my university was nine years.

Wow - 9 years!!

Yes - 9 years was the average. It wasn’t unusual for me to be 17 years old and sitting next to a 30-year-old student.

I finished university in five years. So I always had this sense of wanting to get there to move forward. That urgency you mentioned has been there since very early on, and it’s still there today.

I don’t like wasting time. I’m extremely optimized in how I spend my energy and my attention. I like doing many things at once. I always have multiple things going on.

Consulting suits my personality very well because I can have 10 or 15 projects at the same time across different clients. That variety keeps me engaged. I’m always learning, always doing something different, so I never get bored.

I don’t know if that’s just how my brain works or a personality trait that comes naturally to me but it’s not something I had to learn. It’s just always been me.

As we start wrapping up, I wanted to ask something broader. You’re now a partner at a consulting firm. You’ve had a long 20-year career, and hopefully an even longer one ahead. You write a lot about the industry, and you have influence within your practice.

How do you think consulting as an industry can do a better job of retaining parents, especially mothers? I’ve seen incredibly talented women leave for various reasons.

Given your experience with parenthood and the demands of the job, what are your thoughts on how consulting can make this work better?

I can say that over the last several years, there has already been a huge improvement, and the attention on this issue has increased significantly.

When I started my career, nobody talked about this - literally nobody. Now, at least, it’s part of the conversation.

Some of the things we’ve done include creating programs to support new mothers returning to the workforce. We offer specific training and create opportunities for more flexible ways of working.

That flexibility has allowed us to attract many women with strong industry experience back into consulting.

This idea that once you have a child you’re suddenly no longer “useful” is completely crazy. If anything, you were good before and now you’re even better.

The key is flexibility and recognizing that being a parent comes with additional responsibilities. If firms are receptive to that, it helps everyone.

Sometimes clients can be quite strict about expectations, and I’m very comfortable having tough conversations with them. I’ll say, “We need to ensure flexibility for our consultants, because they have responsibilities at home that need to be respected.”

Most of the time, honestly, about 99% of the time, people are receptive. There’s always room for improvement, but I can safely say there’s been significant progress and a lot more attention paid to this topic.

Quick-fire Questions:

What’s the best thing you have read recently?

I could give you many titles. The problem is….how many do you want? One thing I always recommend is the work of Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

I’ll try to give you a few titles that are a bit less obvious, otherwise everyone ends up recommending the same books.

One book I recommend is The Sovereign Individual.

And then I’ll give you a more controversial one: How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World by Harry Browne. I’m not American, but I understand that Harry Browne was a politician with very specific political views around liberalism, which at the time were considered quite radical in the US when he wrote the book.

He’s no longer alive, and the book is several decades old. But if you ignore the political framing, the book itself is very provocative in a good way.

What’s the best thing you have heard recently?

The music I listen to mostly comes from my time as a punk rock drummer about 20 years ago so that kind of dates me.

I could tell you bands like Lagwagon or Jimmy Eat World - that’s kind of where I’m at musically.

I do listen to podcasts. I tend to listen to very popular ones rather than unknown ones, so the names I mention will be familiar.

I like The Tim Ferriss Show. I like Founders, the podcast where the host reads biographies; I find that fascinating. I also listen to Modern Wisdom.

And I like The Memo by Howard Marks. Howard is a major investor. He used to write a memo every month, and now those memos have been turned into a podcast. So if you don’t want to read the memo, you can listen to it while you’re doing other things.

🤓 Open tabs…

(I have modeled this section after those “open tabs” that we all have with a few (okay 30-40) interesting links that we promise we will eventually get to one day. These are the links that I had open for sometime that I finally got to …)

⭐When Your Kid’s Best Friend Is a Great Big Problem
A natural impulse is to forbid contact - but that’s likely to backfire. “I feel like I’ve lost my daughter,” she said. “Ever since she started hanging out with those girls, she’s become a different person.” She told me how her daughter had become obsessed with her appearance, was constantly on her phone, and had lied about doing her schoolwork. “I want to tell her she can’t see them,” the mother said, “but I’m afraid that will only make things worse.”

⭐Reading Is a Vice
Being a reader means cultivating a relationship with the world that, by most standards, can seem pointless and counterproductive.

⭐Why pleasure is the key to self-improvement
Forget puritanical self-discipline – the way to really make a new habit stick is to lace it with instant gratification

📖 My private thoughts from my very public diary…

(Sometimes on X (Twitter), sometimes on Threads and sometimes on BlueSky)

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