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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?

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

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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.

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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.

But think of these less as episodes and More Thought Bubbles that have been floating around my head and now have found their way into your ear, just me talking into a voice note and hitting upload.

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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)

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 👋🏽

“Everyone wants a village but nobody wants to be a villager”

A village cannot exist unless people:

- Show up for others
- Check on people when they “disappear” for a while
- Offer help and ask for help (this is important, as most adults love feeling like they can add value)
- Be real and don’t always keep a mask on (when someone asks how you’re doing, tell them don’t just say the default “I’m good”)

People forget that a “community” is not something magical that just appears one day. You have to put in effort.

If we all want the benefits of a village, we have to be willing to do the work of being villagers!

☕ Now, on to today’s coffee chat…

Meet Rose Arendarczyk

Rose is the founder of GiftEase and a single mom to three teenage daughters. With over 25 years of experience leading large-scale transformation, technology, and change initiatives across hundreds of projects, Rose has built a distinguished corporate career while navigating the very real demands of working motherhood!

Her journey - shaped by career transitions and life challenges has led her to reconnect deeply with purpose and intention. GiftEase was born from that lived experience: a desire to help working moms show up thoughtfully for the people they love, without carrying yet another invisible load.

Rose and I met through a formal networking platform, and from our very first interaction, she has been incredibly supportive of me!. I continue to be in awe of her - her energy, her generosity, and the grounded clarity with which she moves through the world.

Below is my conversation with Rose…

Please tell us a little bit about yourself

I’m Rose, founder of GiftEase. I’m a single mom of three, now teenage girls. I’ve had a career of over 25 years driving strategic change, transformation, technology initiatives, and portfolio planning and delivery, with hundreds of projects under my belt. Most recently, I was the SVP of Transformation for the largest distributor in the promotional products space which involves a lot of corporate gifting.

All the while, as I started my journey as a working mom, I faced challenges balancing the load. That’s really when I began thinking, what’s my purpose in life? That struggle especially as a working mom became very real for me. Specifically, I struggled with keeping up with gift-giving and recognizing and appreciating the people I value most in my life. It’s something that often falls to the wayside.

That’s my purpose: helping others appreciate the people in their lives. That’s what I’m passionate about. And that’s why GiftEase.

Before we get into GiftEase, and let me know if this gets into territory that’s too personal…I did catch that you said you’re a single mom to three kids, and you’ve had a pretty busy corporate career. You’ve obviously led major transformations, which can be intense, all-in, and all-consuming. And now you’re an entrepreneur.

A lot of times when I talk to people, even women who have partners, they feel like it’s a lot to be a parent to kids while also thriving in work worlds that weren’t really built for women, but more for unencumbered individuals. What was that experience like for you, especially raising three kids as your career itself was growing?

It was tough. My divorce started right before COVID. And this is a bit personal, but it’s impactful for me, during COVID, I was also diagnosed with breast cancer.

So I was in a huge state of transition personally, and I worked all the while. I’m thankful for my company and the opportunity I had at that time. You know, there’s good and bad - there’s light and dark. During the dark times of COVID, literally the shortest, darkest days of winter, while navigating divorce and navigating cancer, I was able to continue supporting myself through my career.

I was able to do it from home, which was huge. I didn’t have to worry about showing up to work in a physical building at a time when I was physically and mentally exhausted, yet still keeping myself occupied and immersed. That helped me maintain some sense of sanity, by distracting myself and compartmentalizing the other things I was dealing with.

My journey, this personal transformation, really hinges on those two major experiences in my life. And more than ever, what’s happened is, you know, they say struggle makes you stronger. Nobody wishes those things on anyone. But navigating through them has really pushed me to focus on being more intentional and purposeful. That includes my career and my broader purpose in life.

Thank you for sharing that. That’s a lot. You were obviously navigating all of this for yourself, but I imagine your daughters were also trying to wrap their heads around these changes - the fear and uncertainty that comes with a parent dealing with all this!

They’re older, so they may have understood why you and your partner decided to split. But the fact that your mom has cancer ….that’s a very scary word…at any age!

That must have been intense for you, not just caring for yourself, but also looking out for them

During that time, my oldest was 12, my middle was 11, and my youngest was 8. So they were young, and, yes, it was a scary time. I worked to keep things transparent and factual with them, and to maintain as much normalcy as possible. I didn’t tell my girls when I was first diagnosed. When it came time, I kept it simple and non-emotional. I was pretty open about when I had treatments and when I wasn’t feeling well. In the end, we all came through the other side and so far, so good.

It’s interesting when you think about our journeys. So many terms and circumstances are ubiquitous in life - we hear about divorce, we all know someone affected by cancer. It’s not even five degrees? It’s very close to us. People are impacted. The same goes for becoming a mom - it’s ubiquitous.

However, when we individually experience these things, when we hear those words, when we’re navigating through them, it feels as if no one else ever has. It really does. And your journey is your journey.

One of my doctors said this to me: Your journey is your journey. The way you’re affected, the way your body handles things, the way you cope emotionally, your support system - everything is unique to you. And the combination of the life event and who you are creates a situation of one.

So many people in supportive communities share common experiences, but at the same time, you have to make decisions that are right for you. You can take input from others, but ultimately, it’s a situation of one. That really resonated with me as I moved through my journey. There’s no magic bullet. We all still have to figure it out.

I love that outlook…. in so many situations, people are looking for magic hacks & formulas. And like you said, whether professionally, as you do enterprise-level transformations, or personally, you can derive lessons and patterns, but eventually you have to walk it yourself. Everything is unique, and it will throw its own curveballs.

Exactly. And when you bring up transformation - corporate transformation - it’s the same thing. There are all kinds of frameworks. There are frameworks everywhere.

They can be guidebooks. They can give you perspective. But when you overlay them with the uniqueness of a company…the challenges it’s facing, its industry, its culture…you have to personalize and customize. At the end of the day, it’s still a situation of one.

Precisely. I love it. I feel like there’s so much overlap between our personal lives and work - so many lessons that carry across the board when you really think about it.

Which brings me to how you introduced yourself - as an entrepreneur, a founder. You mentioned that some of these experiences transformed you and led you to think, I want to live my purpose. And that manifested in you creating this company.

So what is GiftEase? What’s the origin story? What are your aspirations with it?

GiftEase is deeply personal for me as a working mom. I remember going back to work after having my first child and thinking, How does anyone do this? It felt like there was an invisible community of working parents I had just entered; and suddenly, the number of things to manage multiplied overnight.

Over time, one of the things I struggled with most was gift-giving. My family doesn’t live nearby, occasions kept adding up, and I wanted to show up thoughtfully for the people I love. But I was juggling everything.

What I came to realize is that working moms carry the vast majority of the mental load. Appointments, schedules, school, activities, birthdays – it all adds up. And gifting isn’t about the thing itself; it’s about recognition and connection. When I couldn’t follow through, it didn’t feel good.

I had this idea for years: I wish I had a personal gift-giving assistant. Someone who could take this one thing off my plate.

GiftEase is exactly that. A personal gifting assistant that helps busy parents stay thoughtful without carrying the mental load. It’s built to help you manage and plan for gifting so you’re not starting from scratch every time. It captures important moments, preferences, and those little things people mention in passing, and turns them into meaningful gift ideas when the time comes.

Right now, GiftEase is in an early beta, focused on organization and personalized recommendations. The aspiration is much bigger. Long term, I want GiftEase to support the entire gifting experience: from recognizing the moment, to choosing the gift, to getting it into someone’s hands in a way that feels thoughtful and very you.

So instead of feeling behind or guilty, you feel like you showed up for the people who matter most, without the stress and overwhelm. That’s the goal.

This is one of those things that a lot of people don’t realize until they become parents, especially mothers. People ask, Why are you exhausted?

At first, they think it’s the physicality of the early years. But eventually, like you said, it’s the mental load. A house needs an operating system - it’s like an enterprise. And once you add more people, the variables increase.

You have three girls….that’s three times the birthday parties, teachers, schedules, everything. And that exhaustion is what often drowns women. Even at work, if you’re surrounded by peers without kids, or male colleagues whose wives are managing the household logistics, the number of variables they’re dealing with is just lower.

People scratch their heads and wonder why working moms are struggling or why some are dropping out of the labor force. There are structural reasons, of course, but I think easing mental load is a huge part of it.

Sometimes I think, why can’t corporations offer concierge services as a benefit? Gifting is one piece of it, but this could get bigger - logistics, scheduling.

Exactly! Gifting is just the tip of the iceberg. There’s so much opportunity to ease the mental load with thoughtful concierge-style support for everyday life and logistics. The mental load truly compounds across all aspects of life.

I had a conversation recently with a former colleague who asked me to tell him about GiftEase. As I explained it, he said that just this past summer alone, they had nine graduation parties, two weddings, and a baby born in their family.

He said, I show up at the graduation party, grab a beer, sit down, and relax. My wife takes care of it all. I don’t know how she does it - it just magically gets done.

And I thought, Thank you for saying that, because it’s true. Even when someone asks, What can I do to help? The mental load is still there. You still have to think about how to delegate, give direction, and follow up. So it doesn’t eliminate the load - it exacerbates it.

That’s why, when I think about GiftEase as one piece of that laundry list, my vision is very much set it and maybe not forget it, but almost.

As the date approaches, GiftEase is proactive. Not just reminders….I already have Outlook reminders out the wazoo. GiftEase might say, You have three ideas for your mom. Or a colleague. We have two weeks. Pick one and let’s go.

That’s the experience I’m envisioning.

I joke about this - I say, I am thoughtful. I think about gifts a lot. But converting that thoughtfulness into action, in the midst of everything else, is the hard part. I know the dates are coming, and then I beat myself up when I don’t follow through.

I want GiftEase to say, I got you.

You just talked to your mom and she mentioned she needs new kitchen shears. You tell GiftEase. It captures that note, incorporates it into future ideas, and then you let it go. You go about your day.

I love that, because it eases mental load and enhances human connection…which we could all use more of. Technology has taken over so much of our lives that human connection often gets diluted.

I love that this helps people personalize at scale while leveraging technology. Both ends of the spectrum are really compelling.

And just to clarify - this is currently available only in the U.S., correct?

Anyone can use GiftEase. Simply go to our website and sign up for a beta account. It is English-only at the moment, just in terms of language, but otherwise, anyone can sign up and use the app.

I am so excited for you. Thank you for sharing your story with me!!

I love what you’re doing. I really love the idea of sharing stories and hearing about other people’s experiences. I think we all have a lot to learn from one another.

Any final words of advice?

At the same time, I’d say that while we can take in a lot of input, ultimately we each need to choose the path and make the decisions that work best for us. As you move into parenthood, having a baby, everyone is going to have perspectives and advice. It’s all well-intentioned.

But at the end of the day, you take in the input, say thank you, and then you navigate it in a way that works for you.

That goes for being a working mom, too. Take your time. Plan on taking all your time off. You can always go back earlier, but it’s very hard to change expectations once you’ve told people you’re coming back sooner.

My final question - as a girl mom, what is your one wish for your girls? And maybe it’s not something like I want the world to completely change, but if you were to throw something out into the universe….what do you hope the world looks like for them by the time they’re mid-career, thinking about life the way I am now?

And do you have any advice for me as I start raising two little girls and help them see the world in a certain way?

With girls, I think it really comes down to believing in yourself. Believe in yourself - and believe that you can do things for you.

We all have an inner light. And for me, I know that over time, that light can get layered over with expectations…family expectations, societal expectations, professional expectations, all the things we’re navigating personally and professionally. We end up layering over this little light that is uniquely ours.

Staying connected to yourself, staying connected to that inner light, is so important. I’m in the back half of my career and life, so to speak, and I only now feel that I’m more empowered than ever. I feel ready to continue shining and to help other people shine.

That’s what I hope for my girls and for girls in society more broadly. That they really embrace and believe in supporting each other and shining bright. Don’t dim someone else’s light….help them shine brighter.

That’s such an important message in general.

I also hope that just by watching you - watching you navigate life, chase your dreams, and now become an entrepreneur - they see that they have agency over their lives. That yes, we all get thrown curveballs, but it’s how you respond to them that matters.

I keep saying this, but the world needs little girls to see their moms being inspiring….whatever that means. Not everyone has to change the world. But seeing women take control of their lives is incredibly powerful for a little girl. It shows her, this is how I can be in the world. I can make things happen.

Yes. Yes, yes, yes.

And it’s not about telling them what they can’t do. It’s about saying, Yes, you can. If they have a vision or a dream - go for it. Go for it.

Quick-fire Questions:

What’s the best thing you have read recently?
Atmosphere by Taylor Jenkins Reid. So interesting the perspective on women in the male-dominated NASA astronaut program back in the 80’s.

What’s the best thing you have heard recently?
Feedback from a user: I love GiftEase!

What’s the best thing you have watched recently?
I’m re-watching the TV series, Mad Men. Traditional gender roles, societal norms, expectations of what is acceptable for men vs. women in the ‘60’s. As I reflect on this and my book choice, funny enough, both shine light on just how much progress we’ve made – as women, and in the workplace!

🤓 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 the midlife crisis was replaced by a decadelong rise in ‘young worker despair’ in the U.S.—and what it means for Gen Z
Young people are now experiencing much higher levels of “despair” than those in midlife and older age, reversing the longstanding generational pattern of a “hump-shaped” relationship between mental despair and age. To sum: Way back when, you were supposed to be full of despair in middle age, not in adolescence or early adulthood

⭐China wants more babies, many women are saying no

The Chinese government is concerned about the country’s birth rate. The population in China is now approximately 1.4 billion and could drop to roughly half a billion by 2100. Beijing is demanding that women have more children, but many Chinese women are saying no

⭐Their parents never got them vaccinated. As young adults, they faced a choice.
Some who received little to no vaccination in childhood sought out the shots themselves in adulthood — and risked family relationships.

📖 My private thoughts from my very public diary…

(Sometimes on X (Twitter), sometimes on Threads and sometimes on BlueSky)

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Hi there 👋🏽

Here is my reminder to you (and myself), as we start a new year - the small, repeated choices you make will shape your year, and over time, your life.

Life doesn’t happen by default. It happens by choice. Where you start is chance, where you end up is choice.

Circumstances shape us, but ultimately, we decide how we respond to them.

The question isn’t whether life has inherent meaning, but whether we are willing to do the work of making it meaningful.

Here’s to making 2026 something we actively create, not passively experience!

☕ Now, on to today’s coffee chat…

Milestones are nothing but moments that make us pause and reflect on how far we’ve come.

Decks and Diapers started on a whim - created, quite honestly, for an audience of one. I didn’t have a grand strategy or a long-term plan. I was simply writing my way through a season of life. But as conversations unfolded, I began to realize how many remarkable stories lived quietly all around me. So I kept going. And along the way, I kept hearing something unexpected….that this newsletter made people feel seen, made them feel less broken, reminded them they weren’t alone, and helped them feel part of a virtual village!

As I approached the 100th issue of the Coffee Chat series, I knew I wanted to do something different. I wanted to profile someone who has had a profound impact on who I am and how I move through the world.

People often ask me where my grit comes from. Where this instinct to keep showing up, especially when things get mundane or hard, was formed.

I trace it back to when I was six or seven years old, when my mother explained the idea of compounding to me. She taught me that doing something daily, and doing it consistently over a long period of time, leads to outsized impact. In a world where most people give up too soon, she told me, the ones who win aren’t always the smartest or the brightest but the ones who show up every day, work hard, and get things done.

That lesson stayed with me. From an early age, my mother quietly instilled the habit of showing up - again and again.

So when I thought about who to feature for this milestone issue, there was no one more fitting than her. Not because she’s my mother but because she is, quite simply, extraordinary in her own right.

She retired as a one-star general (Brigadier General) in the Indian Army, built a remarkable career as a super-specialist cancer pathologist, and raised two children in a dual-career household….all while breaking barriers most people never even see!

I am inspired by her every single day. I continue to learn from her still. And if I can be even half the woman she is, I would consider my life a success.

Meet Brig (Dr) Sunita Kakkar, VSM or as I call her My Maa…

Please tell us a little bit about yourself

I am a Brigadier, an Oncopathologist, a mother of two, grandmother of three, a daughter of two parents who survived Partition, and the eldest of three sisters. I am also a person who enjoys reading. I enjoy cooking, and of late I’ve gone back to my hobbies.

I used to do bits of needlework and embroidery and knitting and things like that. I’ve now gone back to knitting. Maybe the reason is that while I would love to do embroidery, it takes more of a toll on my eyes at this stage. So knitting is great - it’s creative. And now, as a grandmother of three, I have reason to knit for the little kids in the house.

I enjoy trying to keep myself fit and I emphasize trying, because it’s been a bit of a yo-yo journey with my own fitness. But broadly, I do enjoy fitness. I enjoy walking and proper walking. Not a stroll in the park after dinner, but proper fitness walking.

There was a time when I could walk six kilometers per hour. Now my speed is down to a maximum of five kilometers per hour, but not bad, I think. And I enjoy yoga.

You’ve obviously had a lot of shifts in your identity. You’re a mother and now you’re a grandmother.

I’m curious because you might be the first person I’m interviewing who’s a grandmother.

So you obviously have all these multiple layers to your identity. And this is going back 3 decades plus to when you became a mom for the first time and then later, a grandmother. What were the differences between the two, if you remember?

Being a mother has its own challenges, because as a mother you are fully, wholly, completely responsible for the nourishment, survival, and upbringing of a little baby. You are fully responsible. You may have as much help as you want, but it is your responsibility.

Being a grandmother has a different set of factors.
A - you are older.
B - your energy and strength to sit up and do nights after nights is less.
And C - which is the most fun part - you get all the fun time with the baby. If the baby is fussing too much or crying too much, you can tell your son, daughter, daughter-in-law, son-in-law whoever it is, here, take your baby back. You can always do that as a grandmother.

And I think as a grandmother, you’ve brought up your own kids, so you have that comfort of knowing that things happen to babies. If you don’t follow a strict schedule for eating, sleeping, or bathing, it’s okay. They survive. They are very hardy little beings and they know how to survive.

A little up and down in their schedule won’t kill them. If the diaper isn’t changed that instant, it won’t give them some terrible rash or sickness. That’s a big, big thing.

The other thing is - I’ve been working all my life. So as a working mother, in your head, you are always, always multitasking. You’re thinking about your child, your home, your work, your schedules and your children’s schedules.

I’ve been an oncopathologist, so in the mornings, for instance, there are always things going around in your head - reports, reading you need to do, clinical inputs you need to provide the final reports. You’re also thinking about what you have to tell your baby’s caregivers - what to do for the child while you’re away. This is pending, please do this, please do that.

As a grandmother, you have the luxury of time. You’re not on that tight schedule, so you’re more relaxed with the child.

I am glad you are having more fun now!

Another question, when you become a parent, you take pride in your child doing things, but you’re also anxious on their behalf. You watch them make mistakes.

It can be anything - your child walking for the first time, reading for the first time. There’s pride, there’s frustration. In a way, you know they have to learn their own lessons.

What is it like watching your own kids…. who you remember as infants, who you remember holding for the first time…now going through parenthood themselves? Both your children are parents now!

So when you see them holding their babies… what does that feeling feel like?

And how do you restrain yourself from two things:
A - not telling them how to do things, and
B - being open to the fact that in the last three decades, things have changed. Science evolves, thinking evolves, lifestyles change.

How do you balance that?

First of all, when you see your own 30-plus-year-old kids holding their own babies—let me reframe that - your own babies, now 30-plus, holding their babies who are three days old - the first thing that hits you is, my God, time has flown. That’s the first thing that hits you.

It’s a whole cycle of life, and a whole new generation is standing in front of you. To be very honest and very truthful, many of the things - how to do things with the baby, what exactly you did with your own children - you’ve also forgotten. But a few things come back.

For instance, my daughter lives in Canada, where it’s very cold. Here in India, where most homes are not centrally air-conditioned, in the winters you tend to keep a baby in multiple layers of clothing. You put on a muslin vest, then a shirt, a sweater, cap, woollen booties, and you wrap them in a blanket.

In Canada, I would tend to forget the fact that the house is centrally air-conditioned at one constant temperature…until I was reminded, no, no, no. The house is at a constant temperature, don’t bundle up the baby. And yet, you still get scared that the child is going to be cold.

But after two hours, when you pick up the baby - for a bottle, a diaper change, whatever - you realize this little one’s body is nice and warm and cozy, just with the muslin sheets. So you learn.

The other thing I have firmly believed is that I have done my part. I brought up my kids. It’s your turn now, buddy - you do what you want with your kids. Just as I told caregivers for my children, this is how I want things done, it’s now their turn to tell caregivers, this is how we want things done with our baby.

That said, there are a few places where, as a grandmother, I would still intervene.

And now that one of my grandchildren - my oldest grandchild - is a school-going kindergarten kid, I do believe in little bits of work. Even if it’s 15–20 minutes a day, sitting with a paper and pencil and doing some work. Because I feel that builds a habit of consistency. It builds continuity. It builds the habit of doing something even when it’s uncomfortable.

Ultimately, in life, it is consistency, grit, and perseverance that get you where you want to go. It’s that same old rule of 10,000 hours. Sure, if you do 10,000 hours of imperfect things, you become a specialist in those imperfections. But if you’re fortunate to get corrections and do those things 10,000 times, it becomes something you can do at a spinal level.

So yes, these are some areas where I may differ with my own children. I don’t believe in a completely laissez-faire attitude of letting kids do whatever they want. Children don’t dictate. And I firmly believe that children do very well with proper schedules and with knowing where their boundaries are.

We’ve discussed this idea of how many millennial parents lean into gentle parenting.

I know you have perspectives on this. What are your thoughts on gentle parenting versus setting boundaries?

Like with most things there are certain aspects of gentle parenting which are very good and some not so good. My parents were survivors of India’s Partition. They were young during that time. That generation is often called the greatest generation - the ones who survived the Second World War and India’s Partition.

They were disciplinarians. And now, when I’m a grandmother and I look back, I realize their youth was spent in a time of grave shortages. Things were simply not available. Even the thought of having something like sweets every day was a luxury - it was a time of scarcity.

My granddaughter actually doesn’t believe me when I tell her that when I was in school…especially for the boys …getting a spanking from the principal or class teacher was par for the course. It happened.

Those are things I don’t believe in at all. These aspects of gentle parenting, I’m actually in sync with my millennial children.

What I believe, however, is that there must be clear boundaries of what is acceptable and what is not. You can have negotiables in your head, but you must draw a line of non-negotiables.

For example, when my kids were in their teenage years in high school…school parties became common. Birthday parties, social gatherings, all of that. I’d told my kids they could go for these parties, but the curfew was preferably11 pm, maximum midnight - the date should not change.

For my son I told him - he needed to find his own way home. I told him, you’re a young boy becoming a young man - you will find your way home. Make your arrangements and let me know.

My daughter had a very simple solution. If she was going to a friend’s house 30 kilometers away, she’d say, Mom, can I do a sleepover? My answer to that used to be if your friend’s parents are okay with it, I’m okay with it. And I would speak to the parents.I used to tell her once you reach your friend’s house call me from the landline on my mobile. And this was way back in 2005–2006 when cell phones in India were not common.

When they called from the landline, the caller ID would show a code, and I’d know they were actually calling from a landline. Since I had the parents’ landline numbers, in my head it meant my kids were safe.

This was my way of a bit of control and it was non-negotiable.

Another non-negotiable was alcohol. How do you tell a 15- or 16-year-old that all their friends are having beer and cocktails, but you must not touch alcohol? The minute you forbid it, they’ll do it…because forbidden fruit is always the tastiest. My husband and I were both in the Army, so there was never a lack of alcohol in the house - it was not a taboo thing.

When my kids became of legal drinking age I told them: If you must drink, ensure it is poured in front of you, and you hold on to that glass. Don’t leave it unattended for even five minutes. Like every parent, I was terrified of drinks being spiked.

I also told them Don’t mix drinks. If you’re having vodka, stick to vodka. If you’re having beer, stick to beer.

Yeah I remember all this and because alcohol was never a forbidden thing… Honestly it was never something I cared about or was excited to get my hands on.

That leads to another question. Both my brother and I are very intrinsically motivated people. There are two kinds of motivation - extrinsic and intrinsic. Extrinsic is driven by rewards, marks, validation, or what others think. Intrinsic motivation is waking up, putting your head down, and doing the work even when no one is watching.

Both of us are very self-motivated, self-starting, and even now, there’s drive and ambition in us - we care about our work, and we take pride in what we do.

How did you inculcate that in us as kids? Some of it is nature, some nurture—but nurture plays a big role. Did you do anything consciously? Because resilience, grit, perseverance….all of that flows from intrinsic motivation.

I am the product of parents who survived Partition. My father was a person who, as you say, had a very high level of intrinsic motivation - largely driven and developed by circumstances.

He was left at home with his mother and his brothers and sisters, literally looking out for them, because my grandfather was away. Going back a bit he was a salesman of sports goods. They lived in Lahore pre-Partition. My grandfather would take consignments of sports goods and travel extensively. He had already been to Burma—what is today Myanmar—and to Singapore. And then he sailed to New York. He literally took a ship and sailed to America because sports goods from Punjab at that time were of very high quality, and the company wanted to expand their network overseas.

So while my grandfather was traveling, my father just 12 or 13 years old he became “the man of the house.”

My grandfather would send money home - it would come by post. My father would go to the post office, collect the money, bring it home, and give it to his mother, my grandmother. She would keep the money, but he was the one handling the household expenses.

My grandmother, like most women of that time, was housebound. She would give him the money and say, the monthly rations need to come, this needs to come. Through this, my father at a very early age got exposure to the adult world around him and realized that if he did not educate himself, he could not pull himself or the family out of a substandard existence in British India.

This was British India, a time when Indians were not allowed to rise to officer levels or move up the hierarchy. Very few professions were open to Indians. He figured out that he had to study medicine to get out of this morass - to escape these circumstances.

So from my father, I inherited that self-discipline and grit, which was, in a way, forced upon him, and eventually became his nature.

My mother, on the other hand, is very spiritually grounded, even today. She meditates regularly. She also has a very strong belief that God helps those who help themselves.

When we were children, my parents believed very strongly that girls needed to be educated and financially independent. My mother also had this deeply inbuilt notion that children needed hobbies.

Before I went to medical college, I would see other kids in high school around me going to the defence / country clubs and going to parties.There was nothing wrong with that. In fact, at one point, three of us sisters used to say- They have so much fun. XYZ, our neighbors, their children go to the club every evening.

My father would say, Beta, you have finite energy and finite time. You can spend it in the club, or you can spend it making something of yourself for your future.

That really got ingrained in me.

I developed this belief that if children are kept busy, they stay out of trouble. And that responsibility needs to be taught at a slightly early age.

So what is responsibility for a child?
Pack your own bag for school. You make sure your clothes are ready for the next day etc.

In India, there has always been the concept of small amounts of homework for children. So I used to tell my kids, Your homework is your responsibility.

Literally, until both my daughter and my son…meaning you and your brother…were in Class 3, I would sit with you and supervise your homework.

But the minute you went into Class 4, I explicitly told you: Class 4 children are now big kids. You’ve finished Class 3. From now on, your homework, your bag, and setting out your uniform for the next day - that is your responsibility. If you get stuck anywhere or with anything Mummy and Papa are here, we’ll help.

So I think that’s where it comes from.

I have always, always firmly believed that a child needs roots - to be grounded - and wings - to be set free. But before wings, they need grounding. And grounding comes from responsibility.

I like that. And that idea that people rise to become the best version of themselves when expectations are placed on them really resonates. When you say, I expect this of you, children rise to meet that expectation.

I love this idea of age-appropriate expectations, and how much that shapes who a child becomes.

Now talking about expectations while you were raising two kids and managing your career as a part of a dual career household you also were taking care of 4 elderly parents! How did you manage all that, i am assuming a few years down the road a lot of us will be in that situation!

During those years I used to joke that I had six children - two below the age of 20 and four above the age of 70…..and yes, I was very much sandwiched. As you said, I had four elderly parents and in-laws to take care of, two children to raise, myself to take care of, and a very busy career of my own. I was growing professionally, leading teams, and we were a dual-career household.

At that time, life was in the fast lane. Everything was moving simultaneously—like parallel railway tracks.

The first time I really felt the pressure was when the kids were in their board classes. These board exams are school-leaving exams, and they determine, to a large extent, which colleges you get into and those admissions, in turn, shape your future.

They were at that critical stage. And I was also at a stage where it was make-or-break professionally. That’s the nature of the work world. Wherever you are in a workplace, I personally feel there are no real friends there because when you’re climbing the ladder, very often it’s your own cohort, your own peer group, that behaves like crabs in a basket, pulling each other down.

And then there’s that famous line from Alice in Wonderland - the Red Queen tells Alice, you have to run very fast just to stay in the same place. You only realize later how profound that statement really is.

At the same time, your parents are aging. They’re falling ill. So one of my personal rules was: take one day at a time. Another dictum I lived by was: this too shall pass. However awful the day looks, however busy it feels…this too shall pass.

You realize that you can’t do everything. Something has to give.

Where I may have lost out was pulling out time purely for myself. When I see younger people today, they’re much better at carving out personal time. For me, health was non-negotiable. If nothing else, I made sure I got in about six kilometers of brisk walking every single day.

But something’s gotta give, right? So things like swimming, sports, movies, baking, knitting - things I enjoyed - I couldn’t do then.

Professionally, I consciously sacrificed certain opportunities. Speaking assignments, panel discussions, guest talks - those often meant at least three days away: one day to travel, one day there, one day back. I started saying no to those.

But as I always say, you make a choice at a moment in time, given the circumstances you’re in. You can’t change those circumstances - you just choose within them. It’s like playing rummy. You play the game with the cards you’ve been dealt - you can’t change that hand and in each round you have to drop one card.

That’s what I was doing.

Do you have any regrets, though?

That’s a good question.

Professionally, I rose to the rank of Brigadier. I believe I built a solid, dependable reputation. I’ve had clinical colleagues tell me, Ma’am, we really rely on your reports. I’ve had people say, We’ve rarely worked with someone like you.

That’s very heartening.

I’ve had MD students who are still in touch with me. In India, 5th September is Teachers’ Day, and without fail, a group of them reach out every year. They say, We remember you not just for the pathology you taught us, but for the life lessons as well.

I’ve also had laboratory technicians who are still in touch with me, very respectfully. They send updates about their families. That means a lot. Because when you leave an organization, that’s when you really find out whether you had any value - whether people still think you’re worth their time and energy.

So do I have regrets? Not really.

I’ve had a very good life overall. If I look at myself honestly, I think I’m in the positive - net, net.

Great family, an impressive career. There’s never really “enough,” right? You could always say you missed the next level, or the one after that…

I have a personal theory. I believe life is made up of ten points - you’re a composite. There’s your physical and mental health, professional and psychological health, family, social life, finances.

When I look at myself across all those spheres, I think I’ve done very well, by God’s grace. I have two children who are sorted, decent human beings - sensitive and caring with their own families and their own professional standing… I believe I’ve made them good members of society.

I love that. I read somewhere that the biggest responsibility of a parent is to create good ancestors… How do you make sure your kids become good ancestors for generations you’ll never meet?

I’ve always said this - children never do what you tell them to do. They only copy what you do.

If you live with integrity, honesty, and truthfulness, they will see it and imbibe it. But if you tell them be honest and then do something small but dishonest they notice.

They don’t listen to lectures. They copy behavior.

If you wake up in the morning and say, You sit and have breakfast, I’m doing a quick workout, they learn that physical exercise matters. If breakfast is boiled eggs and toast, they don’t ask for cake and Coke. They absorb that.

That said, you don’t kill joy.

When my kids were growing up, Sunday breakfast was fun. Sometimes we’d make muffins together - corn, zucchini, carrots, cheese, onions, spices - all mixed together. My logic was simple: instead of corn bread plus eggs plus vegetables, just combine it all. Same nutrition, different shape.

You must also set expectations. I clearly remember telling each of you about the - You’re a big kid now, you do your homework yourself , it’s your responsibility - bit.

The kids stumbled. There’s no doubt about it. In Class 3, 4, even 5, their grades dipped. But then they realized they could do it.

That realization, the joy of capability, is huge for a child.

And I did this because my mother said the exact same thing to me when I was in Class 3. She told me, You have two younger sisters. I have to help them. You sit here and do your own homework.

I know we spoke about expectations. And I know you mentioned you’re happy with how life has shaped up.

But there’s this idea women are constantly told - the whole notion of having it all. There’s so much debate about it now. Can women really have it all? Or is that even the right question?

When you say something’s gotta give - and you’ve got three grandkids now, two of them girls, plus a daughter and a daughter-in-law - do you think we should still be telling our daughters that they can have it all?

You know, life is a marathon. And the end point, you cannot see it when you’re starting out.

Actually, maybe it’s not even a marathon. It’s more like a long cross-country run. Every turn in the road brings something new. You see different vistas. You see different parts of nature.

Wanting to have it all - that’s like treating life as a buffet where you only have one plate!

You take your plate and load it up with everything at once. You can’t even carry the plate properly. You’re going to stumble.

Instead, think of it as a meal in a great restaurant - enjoy all the courses! Enjoy a bit of salad. Then maybe some soup, then some grilled fish, some chicken curry. Then you come back, take a breather. Later, you have dessert. You pause again. Maybe an after-dinner drink.

That way, you enjoy the entire meal. You’re not sick. And you’re not walking around with a plate so overloaded that you’re about to fall.

I really like that analogy.

People often talk about seasons of life, but this feels different. This is more like a Michelin-star meal - you’re saying there might be five, six, seven courses. Eventually, you’ll have everything. But not all at once.

Because professionally, and you know this, people like me, people like my brother… we were very driven, very motivated. After a point, winning became a habit.

We cleared competitive exams. We got into the very best universities. We got dream professional roles. In those roles we rose through the ranks. And then to me as a woman it felt like - you have children, and suddenly a big brake is applied.

You start seeing other people - women who chose not to have kids, or men you once thought were average or even below average - and now you look up and realize they’ve reached the same place you’re at. Some have even gone further.

And sometimes you can’t help but ask: Is it my gender that’s holding me back? Is it because I have a uterus? Because I had children?

You were told you could have it all and for a long time, it felt like you did. Until family entered the picture. And you’re grateful for that family but you’re also confused.

Because you’re always taught: work hard, strive, and you’ll get there. And then suddenly you realize there comes a point where you can work hard and still not get there. Because there are real constraints now. And biases.

So this women in the workplace or women outside the house - for millennia, this issue has existed. And it will exist till time immemorial!

The workplace is geared for men. And I say this having worked in the army, which is truly the epitome of a boys’ club.

I have always maintained this: as a woman, if you want to succeed professionally, there are certain things you have to do doubly hard.

First - you have to work doubly hard to prove that you know as much. Actually, maybe a little more.

In my profession, medicine, I know my work. I know more than you. I can help you when you’re stuck. I can give a second opinion.

Second - you have to run doubly hard to prove that you deserve the next opportunity. That you are fit for the next promotion.

Having said that yes, children do slow you down.

But remember the cross-country run. When you’re going uphill, you slow down. Sometimes you even stop…..to catch your breath.

That doesn’t mean the race is over.

You start again. And life is not all uphill. There are summits, and there are valleys. There are ups and downs. That’s how it goes.

At the end of the day, it’s about your internal clock.

What do you want from life?

I have colleagues and friends who were very fixated on titles. One of them used to say, one day I will be the head of department.

She never became head of department. And she carries that hurt with her even now.

That’s the danger.

The only permanent thing in life is impermanence.

Your career is one aspect. But when you look at life as a whole - the satisfaction comes from the bigger picture.

For me, it gives me immense satisfaction to see that my children are doing well in life.

And when I say doing well, I mean in all aspects - their homes, their families, their children, their finances. The way they stand in their own circles, and in society.

Sometimes I get stuck in comparisons of only one aspect of life. But I know it’s also important that your entire identity is not determined by just one aspect of your life.

Because the people who do that are often very miserable - the ones who tie their entire self-worth and identity to a title. Especially today: you can have a layoff, a medical crisis. Like you said, that colleague of yours who desperately wanted to be head of department and when it didn’t happen, she carried that hurt with her.

So it’s about understanding that you contain multitudes. That there is joy in many different things. Doing things for the love of the game, versus being enamored by a title.

Because the reality is, you tell me this now, a lot of your colleagues and friends are retired, some retired as junior army officers, some retired as generals, when you’re all hanging out together now, does it really matter?

Life -it’s like a game of chess.

At the end of the game, a pawn can checkmate the king. But when the game is over, the king, the queen, the knight, the rook, and the pawns….all of them go back into the same box.

Ah so your professional life is like a chess game!

Exactly. And at the end of it, all the pieces are together in the box.

And I think that’s exactly it. What they often say is that work life is a kind of pretend play. We’ve created scripts, roles, hierarchies. Real life is what’s happening outside of that.

Work is a facet of life but over the years, we’ve made it all-consuming.

That’s why when I ask people to introduce themselves and I specifically tell them not to start with their professional or corporate title, people stumble. Because for some, that’s the only identity they’ve built. They don’t know how else to describe themselves.

Because life is what happens to you while you keep planning your professional life.

All your life, you’re planning but what’s happening alongside that? That is life.

I think both having multitudes is important and then also knowing that agency is real. For a child and for us as adults I fundamentally believe that life doesn’t just keep happening to us. We do have the power to make things happen in our lives. Yes, we’re dealt certain cards, but we can still change situations and circumstances. So that whole idea of agency is very real, and very important.

And if there is something I can teach my kids, your grandkids that is it! Any tips on how to do it?

One thing I consciously did with my children, you and your brother, was to put them into organized sports.

Because sports teach discipline. They teach responsibility.

Whether it’s a team sport or an individual sport ….you make choices. You decide whether to pass the ball while playing soccer. When a tennis ball comes at you, you decide: do I smash, do I do a drop shot, do I go cross-court?

And you live with the consequences.

As children, once you learn that you have choices you can make and you have to live with the consequences and you understand something important - one game doesn’t make you win or lose the match or a championship.

You may be behind at one point but if you want, you can push yourself. Over time, you can still win overall.

Quick-fire Questions:

What’s the best thing you have read recently?
Rob Henderson’s book Troubled.

It’s a memoir. And it really struck me, because it reinforced something I’ve always believed: children need boundaries.

I used to tell my kids, I am your friend but I am Mom my word is the last word.
If I said you have to be home by midnight, you had to be home by midnight. No negotiation. There were negotiables and non-negotiables. And I always felt that children actually do very well with that.

That book is very troubling, because you realize how many children, especially in North America, are wandering through life lost. Children who were never wanted. Who never received love, affection, or guidance to help them become grounded, responsible citizens.

What’s the best thing you have heard recently?
There’s an old Hindi song - it’s very meaningful.

It says, “Main zindagi ka saath nibhata chala gaya.”
It means: I walk alongside life. I accept what I receive, and what I don’t get, I let go.

It’s a very Indian, very spiritual, philosophical idea that acceptance is what ultimately leads to inner happiness.

What’s the best thing you have watched recently?
I would say Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour Documentary

It shows you the degree of professionalism, discipline, and hard work involved. Standing on a stage and singing is not just fun and games.

I actually told my niece, she’s fourteen, to watch it. I said, you’ll realize that she does a workout of at least three hours a day to build the physical stamina required.

Taylor Swift also has a great relationship with her mom, dad and brother. Very good adult relationship. Very good grounding for a teen to see.

🤓 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 A.I. Didn’t Transform Our Lives in 2025
This was supposed to be the year when autonomous agents took over everyday tasks. The tech industry overpromised and underdelivered.

⭐Flounder Mode
Kevin Kelly on a different way to do great work. Kevin Kelly isn’t known for one “big thing,” and doesn’t aspire to be. He’s as intelligent, hard-working, ambitious, and prescient as history’s most iconic entrepreneurs—only without any interest in building a unicorn himself. Instead, in his words, he works “Hollywood style”—in a series of creative projects. What follows is a sampling of his life’s work.

⭐The Only Right Way to Ask for an Intro (Everything Else Is Wrong)
How do you engineer a killer intro without looking desperate or annoying?

📖 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 👋🏽

As 2025 comes to a close, I’ve been thinking about the arc of this year - how it felt different in a way I didn’t fully expect. After a few chaotic, blurry years, this one felt… good. In both the professional sense and the personal sense**.

At the start of the year, I chose “unrushed” as my word. I didn’t know what that would look like in practice, but I knew I needed to stop sprinting through my life as if the finish line were moving further away each time I got close.

And ironically, leaning into being unrushed created more momentum than all my rushing ever had. When I slowed down, more doors opened. When I took pressure off, more interesting things happened.

Including me finally learning how to breathe!!!

After more than three decades on this planet, it was only in 2025 that I learned how to properly engage my diaphragm - to breathe deeply instead of hovering in a constant state of shallow breath. It took me a visit to a pelvic floor therapist to realize I’d been breathing on autopilot - short, shallow breaths that mirrored how rushed everything else felt.

As we head into 2026, my hope is to protect this sense of expansion …..to move forward without gripping so tightly, to breathe before reacting, to trust that not everything needs to be forced.

I’m less interested in resolutions and more interested in rhythm….in how I want my days to feel, not just what they produce.

Thank you for being here with me, for being part of this little corner of the internet, and for making Decks and Diapers feel like a living, breathing community.

Wishing you a meaningful start to 2026. Until we meet again on the other side.
Rashi

A few habits anchored me this year - simple, almost obvious things that ended up becoming surprisingly high-leverage.

I’m carrying them into 2026, and if you’re looking for small shifts with outsized impact, maybe keep these in your back pocket too:

1) Sweat before you watch others sweat.
Before spending hours watching sports (or really any content), move your own body first. There’s something grounding about earning your rest

2) Don’t become a permanent “consumer of knowledge.”
Endless learning can be a form of procrastination…and procrastination is often fear in disguise. At some point, you have to stop studying the thing and start doing the thing.

3) Let go of overplanning and perfectionism.
Creators and consumers differ by one variable: action. You don’t need the perfect plan; you need forward motion. The world rewards people who build, ship, and create.

4) Smile more. Greet people.
It sounds small, but leading with openness changes the texture of your days. Say “Hi, I’m <name>,” extend your hand, and watch how differently people respond.

5) Read - anything.
What you read matters less than the act of reading itself. It’s one of the simplest ways to spend meaningful time with yourself and learn to enjoy your own company

**In 2025, I also did this other thing…

We decided to expand our household headcount in Q4 2025 🧿👨‍👩‍👧‍👧🐶

Baby T has now graduated to being a big sister to Baby A.

We’re all doing well, adjusting to life with a little less sleep but a lot more love.

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 you refer friends, you will receive a little something from me as a thank you!

Refer a friend

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Leave a comment

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Hi there 👋🏽

I’ve been shopping online again, something I’d completely stopped doing after the COVID lockdowns.
It reminded me how consumption is closely tied to limits.

Not long ago, limits were physical.
You could only carry what fit in your hands, your bag, your mode of transportation. You made choices carefully... what to buy, what to leave behind, what mattered.

Even the shopping cart was once a technological innovation meant to expand those limits.

In the late 1930s, Sylvan Goldman, an Oklahoma supermarket owner, noticed shoppers stopped buying once their baskets got too heavy. So he put a basket on wheels and instantly expanded how much people could consume!

Fast forward to today, the cart has no wheels, no handles, no end.
It’s a bottomless feed in an app. A never ending wishlist.

We consume endlessly because the limits that once forced discernment are gone.

☕ Now, on to today’s coffee chat…

Meet Simmer Singh

Simmer is an accomplished global HR leader whose two decades of international experience span Fortune 500 organizations including VMware, Pinterest, and Vodafone. Throughout her career, she has bridged cultural divides across continents, leading large-scale transformation efforts and supporting thousands of employees across Asia, Africa, Europe, Australia, North America, and South America.
Her work centers on leveraging cultural intelligence to solve complex organizational challenges, helping multinational teams unlock the strengths of diverse perspectives and fostering collaboration between Eastern and Western business paradigms.

After a successful corporate tenure, Simmer founded Glintt Consulting, where she designs experiential, cross-cultural solutions that spark lasting behavioral change and healthier workplace cultures. Her approach integrates insights from both Eastern philosophies of community and harmony with Western models of innovation and individual empowerment.

Her personal journey, immigrating from India to the US and building a career while raising her daughter, has been instrumental in developing her deep cultural fluency. This lived experience of East-West integration fuels her commitment to supporting diverse global talent, which she extends through pro-bono executive and leadership coaching with the Humanitarian Coaching Network.

Below is my conversation with Simmer…

Please tell us a little bit about yourself

I grew up in India, in a small town outside of Delhi. I always say I’ve had a very linear career in HR. Somehow I just fell into HR. I started with L&D, training, and coaching, and then I kept trying new things.

I grew up in an environment where there were really only two options - You could be a doctor or you could be an engineer. I didn’t want to do either. Ideally I wanted to study the arts but back then it was considered something with no future. So I did commerce, and then I realized I’m not a numbers person but I loved psychology and the human side of things - how I fell into HR.

It’s been 20 years now being in this space. I’ve always worked with large organizations.

The shift from India to the US was really, really interesting - coming from a very collective culture to hyper-individualistic corporate America. I found mentors, learned a lot of cultural nuances, and then realized: I want to do this. I want to work on culture, and I also want to continue doing good work. Now I work directly with organizations as a consultant.

I have two daughters. They’re amazing. They keep me on my toes. They’re six and two. I love spending time with them, though, of course, there’s always this guilt of not being present enough. And I’m a very active person- I love being outdoors, working out, hiking etc.

I’m assuming your two-year-old was born in the US. Was your six-year-old also born there? Or did you immigrate with her?

No, both of them were born here. I actually moved because I married my husband, who was born and raised in the US. His parents were immigrants who came here as NYU students in the ’60s or ’70s, I believe. So yes - I moved, got married, and then had two girls here. It’s been a lot of fun raising kids.

You came here, adapted to a new life and new culture, and then had kids here. Your husband grew up here, but he’s of Indian descent, so there must be some cultural overlap - yet also differences in outlooks toward life, parenting, raising kids. I’m curious: what were some of the things you both agreed or disagreed on? How have you navigated that?

Your kids are getting such a unique upbringing - one parent who grew up fully in India, and one who grew up fully in the US. And I’m sure you also have cousins and friends in India raising kids. So I’m very curious if you notice big differences between that style of raising kids versus how we tend to do it in the West.

First of all, I have to tell you how grueling it was for me to raise kids here. They say “it takes a village,” and I always felt like - where is my village?

The way we raise kids in India is very different, just like you pointed out. One of the biggest differences I noticed between the West and the East is how protective we are of our kids. Also, a lot of our upbringing was done by parents who were in survival mode. That protection often became controlling - discipline-heavy - and that didn’t necessarily let kids blossom or become independent or be who they really are.

For us, it was like, “I told you so, just do it.” Academics were non-negotiable. If you got 90, you needed to get 95. If you got 95, you needed to get 100. And we didn’t explore the world outside academics - there was no space for interests or hobbies. I don’t think I got to explore any of that because there was so much focus on marks. My mom was a teacher, my dad ran a business guy - the focus for me was always academics.

Another big difference I see here is how we meet the kid where they are. In my house, we cannot raise our voices. We will spend hours negotiating with our kids. We try to understand each child’s temperament. My older one is very sensitive, so we explain things to her with high EQ. The younger one is more assertive, more risk-taking - her own personality.

I don’t think our parents had the time to understand individual personalities. It was just: “We told you, so keep your head down and do it.” So that’s a big difference I see, and I’m trying not to be controlling - trying to let them be their own people.

Hmm some of it could be cultural and some could just be generational!

The other thing I notice is a kind of cultural fluidity for people who’ve grown up or worked across different cultures. It’s a superpower, in a way - we have more in our toolkit than someone who’s only experienced one way of doing things.

But there’s also the flip side. When you move countries and corporate environments, there might be stereotypes or biases you get pulled into. How was that transition for you professionally? In India, you worked with some really big, leading organizations. And here in the US, you also worked with well-known companies.

I’d say there was a lot of learning. First, when I was applying for jobs - there were crickets. Nobody was responding. And I thought, “Okay, I’ve done 10+ years in corporate Asia, and I’ve done pretty well.” But there was a lot of, “Oh, you don’t have global experience,” even though I was managing clients and teams in the US.

The education or “living and working in the US” piece was a big barrier.

I also realized that in the US, you need a lot of networking and relationship-building. In India, we’re collective culturally, but in the job scene, it was mostly about experience and intellect. You just applied. There wasn’t this expectation of going around building connections.

So I made mentors and friends who kept saying, “Why don’t you talk to this person? Or that person?” That was a huge learning. Even now, in my own work, the biggest lesson has been how to network and build relationships. You help people; they help you. You get to know each other. You and I met through common connections and here we are doing this interview. Tomorrow, maybe we’ll do something else together.

The second big shift I struggled with was humility and hierarchy. Not challenging your boss. Keeping your head down. Not asking for much. Hoping someone would recognize you and pull you up from under the table and say, “Hey Simmer, you deserve that next step.”

One time, a colleague was upset in a meeting. I asked why. She said, “I created these two slides and my boss presented them without acknowledging me.”

This whole concept of self-advocacy - sharing your ideas, opinions, challenging people - was new. We come from a culture of harmony: “Don’t say anything that might hurt someone.” My team would say, “Simmer, you’re so good at giving credit to your team, always passing it along.” And I’d think, “Isn’t that what leaders are supposed to do?”

I always got complimented for that, but I had to consciously shift toward thinking about myself more….more individualism. I realized it when I finally told my boss that I was thinking about a promotion. She said, “Oh, I didn’t know you wanted one.” And I thought - aren’t you supposed to be thinking about me?

That makes so much sense. For me one of the biggest aha moments to do well in the west was this idea of advocating for yourself. That you’re an adult. And you shouldn’t assume someone is looking out for you. People are nice, but unless you ask for something, you’re not going to get it.

For me, one of my biggest learnings…luckily it happened during an internship…really shocked me. I thought I was doing very well because I was following instructions, doing a really good job. But towards the end, the big feedback was, “Hey, look, we hired you for this internship from what we think is the top school in the country, but we barely heard from you. And that to us was confusing - why are we hiring an MBA and paying that premium if they’re not going to question anything?”

To me, that was surprising because, similar to you, I had a great career in India. And a large part of that is: you agree with your boss, you’re told to do something, you do it really well, you give it to them, they present the slides, you get a pat on the back. And every few years your boss says, “I think you’re ready for the next promotion.” HR has processes, and you move through committees and get promoted.

So that was surprising - to realize there’s a different approach here. Which I think is nice, because there are people who stay in the same role for decades if that’s what works for their life. And it helped me realize that in India we’re very linear about growth. But here, some people genuinely say, “I like this. I don’t want more responsibility.” And that was shocking to me….people saying no to promotions.

But the other question I had - and I know you did a lot of culture change work, which ties to advocating for yourself is this: a lot of parents, especially women returning from maternity leave or with young kids, really struggle in organizations. As someone who has been on both sides…you’re a mother, and you’ve also worked in large organizations - what are some things you think women can do to advocate for themselves?

I feel like one thing women are taught is to be superhuman, right? The other day I was coaching someone whose boss had just come back from maternity leave. She wanted to be supportive, but she said her boss acts like nothing happened….like she had a kid but nothing changed. She doesn’t talk about the baby. And this woman said that actually makes her nervous about how to offer support.

I feel like you don’t have to go into every detail, but your life changes in so many ways when you have a child. Pretending that you’re going to work the same hours, at the same speed, and deliver at the same pace - it just puts a lot of pressure on yourself. And at least in Asian cultures, and many others, we don’t raise our hands to ask for help because we don’t want to appear weak. But it is a vulnerable time.

If during those 6–8 months you can get flexibility, I don’t think that compromises anything. We’re amazing at multitasking…we’re project planners for our homes. We run the show. We do everything. So all we really need is some understanding from the organization: I may not be responding to emails 24/7. I may not deliver things at supersonic speed. If something is urgent, can we align on expectations? Otherwise, I can work when the baby is sleeping, etc.

So I think having that understanding upfront and feeling comfortable asking for it is important. And bosses should also create that space and say, “Hey, you just came back. You have a newborn. Three months is not enough, we both know that. What’s going on? What do you need?”

And that looks different for everyone. Someone’s partner might be a stay-at-home dad. Someone else’s partner might travel constantly. So what do you need? How do we make this work?

I think people sometimes assume that if they give a woman some flexibility, they’re compromising the quality of work. But that’s not what it is. You still owe the work, and you still need a plan. You can absolutely say, “Hey, I can do these eight things, but I can’t do these two.” And that’s a conversation you owe your team.

And the same for the woman returning she needs to have that conversation. Not pretend that everything will go back to how it was. You had three months off, you have a tiny human now things are going to be different.

I really like that. Someone recently told me this too - the idea of “bouncing back” from maternity leave is false. You don’t bounce back to your old self; some things change, and you move forward.

And the flip side of what you’re saying, which I really like, is that as individuals, where things go wrong is when you forget that you still have to be outcome and impact-driven. Trust is earned. So you can say, “Here are 10 things. I can do six or seven really well. For the other four or five, let’s talk about timelines or flexibility.”

Even flexible hours like, “Can I log off at four and log back on at eight or nine?” For knowledge workers, asynchronous work is possible.

So I like this idea: ask for what you need, but with something solid behind it. Not just asking and asking. Because you’re right…that’s where bias creeps in. People start thinking, “Women with kids always do less.” And then they don’t want them on their teams. And that becomes a very damaging cycle.

At a certain level, we’re all responsible human beings. We know we’re running a business, and we owe our work to the organization but not at the cost of mentally or emotionally crashing. That’s the part that worries me.

Post-pandemic, there were definitely some good things. We all had this big wake-up call: What are we running toward? But I do feel like we’re forgetting those lessons now and slipping right back into the grind … not asking for help, not drawing boundaries, not prioritizing work–life balance or a healthy culture.

For sure. And I think that connects to something you said that you’ve taken the plunge and gone independent. That takes courage. Entrepreneurship is inspiring, but there’s also so much you have to do. You never really get a break. You’re constantly thinking about your business, and now you’re navigating that while raising two little girls.

So how do you manage your energy? How do you fuel your professional ambition while also doing right by your kids - whatever your definition of that looks like? Different women have different thresholds for what being a “good mom” means, so I don’t want to label it. But how are you navigating all of that while also essentially birthing a third baby ….your consulting firm?

You said it perfectly - the 24/7 part. You basically got inside my head! My husband says this too: there have to be windows where you switch off. But when you’re on your own, your brain is constantly running. There’s no end to what you could be doing.

My younger one just started daycare and I’m already like before I know it, she’ll be flying. She won’t need me like this forever. So I’m trying to be more present. Doing fun things. Yesterday we went biking. My older one is doing swimming and gymnastics. I used to drop her off and then hit the gym, but yesterday she asked, “Can you watch me?” So I said okay …I’ll watch half the class and then do a quick 20-minute workout.

Those small choices matter. Being where you are. As moms, our brain is always jumping ahead. I’m not perfect at this, but I’m trying.

I love that and it’s a good reminder for me too. I’m often in a moment but already thinking about the next thing, which means you never actually feel the moment. So yes - be fully present at work, fully present with your kid. Don’t mentally run ahead.

You have two girls…. have you thought about what you want them to take away from watching you navigate life? When they’re, say, 18 or 21, and becoming adult women, what do you hope they internalize about what it means to be a woman? A mom? An adult in the world? Because so much of our own ideas come from our mothers and how they showed up.

I really hope they don’t grow up thinking they’re supposed to do all the chores or shoulder the heavy lift. My husband and I try to model balance … if I cook, he cleans, he loads the dishwasher

Growing up, I saw many women put themselves last. I want something different for my girls. I want them to pursue careers they love, not just what’s expected, but what excites them. I want them to put themselves first sometimes and prioritize self-care.

And yes, there’s a generational shift, which is great, as long as it doesn’t swing to the extreme where they’re just chilling and not doing anything! But genuinely: I want them to be passionate about something, driven, trying to make a difference. That’s a big part of the work I do, and I hope they pick up pieces of it.

Confidence is another one. I read an article that said girls’ confidence drops dramatically after age eight … looks, societal pressure, all of it. And I’m raising brown girls in a country where many people don’t look like them. I want them to be confident in who they are, their values, their roots. I want them to come talk to us without fear. Not the way we grew up - “If I tell my mom, she’s going to explode.”

I always try to create a safe space: no matter what mistake you made, you can come talk to me.

Yes. My husband and I talk about this too. We weren’t difficult teenagers, but we did stupid things like every teenager. And our daughter will too. I just want her to know …. if she’s ever in trouble, we are the first people she calls. Yes, we’ll be disappointed, yes we’ll talk about consequences. But I don’t want fear or secrecy.

Even now, when she does small “forbidden” things - like sneaking candy before dinner - we tell her not to hide things from us. The previous generation in India was very fear-driven, especially with fathers. I want something different.

Switching gears… you also offer pro bono coaching through the Humanitarian Coaching Network. How did that come about? And has a conversation there ever changed you in some way? Because you’re clearly changing others but did someone shift your worldview in return?

I don’t know if “changed” is the right word, but I’ve had conversations that reinforced why I do this work.

Humanitarian Coaching Network does a lot for people of color and those who can’t afford coaching.

What I’ve seen is that many people grow up never being encouraged to ask for help. When I coach someone, they often don’t even know this kind of support exists. They think they’re supposed to figure out their entire lives alone.

Sometimes during reflections at the end of a coaching journey, someone will say, “I applied for that promotion only because you told me I’ve got this.” Something so simple — you’ve got this — can shift a person’s entire path.

There are so many people who tell you why you can’t do something. Very few tell you why you can. Coaching creates that space. Life is busy, even with great friends sometimes you don’t get that depth of support.

Any final parting thoughts?

First, we’re living in a global, hybrid world where leaders are often moving across continents, and organizations are more diverse than ever. I’m committed to supporting organizations, leadership who manage global teams as well as immigrants in navigating different perspectives with cultural agility. This is an ongoing journey, and I’m excited to be part of it - blending insights from both Eastern and Western experiences.

Second, for all my fellow women leaders and moms: Don’t be afraid to ask for what you need. Whether it’s a promotion, support from your partner, setting boundaries with family, or help from a friend, we often feel we have to figure it out ourselves and put ourselves last. But asking isn’t selfish - it’s necessary, and it allows us to show up fully in every part of our lives.

I love that. And I also know that my mom… again, moms are amazing….If nobody else reads the newsletter, I know she does. It’s the mission of my life now - to tell her to be a little bit more selfish. Like you said, she has given so much and always puts her own needs and desires last.

I’m like, “Mom, both your kids are well-settled. We’re fine. Just do something for yourself. It’s not selfish.” I keep telling her, “Just do things for yourself.” So hopefully this inspires a bunch of people to be a little more… I won’t say selfish, but to live for themselves. Women especially - we’re so selfless.

But if nobody gets inspired except my mother, that’s still a win. If she reads this and does something fun this weekend for herself…something entirely for herself and nobody else…that would make me so happy.

Quick-fire Questions:

What’s the best thing you have read recently?

The 12 Week Year. As an entrepreneur and as a mom, I need to brutally prioritize my life. The book talks about considering 12 weeks as your whole year. People make high sales in December not because it’s festive season, but because they put pressure on themselves and say, “This is it.”

What’s the best thing you have heard recently?

The Talent Development Hot Seat podcast! I think it is great and as a bonus for your readers both you and I have been featured in it

What’s the best thing you have watched recently?

Euphoria! There is definitely something in there for us to think about.

How we’re raising our kids in this digital world. I know the show exaggerates things, and there are a lot of pros and cons, but I do think for all parents we have to be mindful of what we want our kids to see, how we want them to be raised, what values we’re instilling, and how we’re engaging with them.

It’s very easy to give them an iPad and get more work done, but it’s also really scary if you leave them unregulated in the online world.

🤓 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 …)

⭐Coordinated online attack sought to suggest Taylor Swift promoted Nazi ideas, research finds
This demonstrates how a strategically seeded falsehood can convert into widespread authentic discourse, reshaping public perception even when most users do not believe the originating claim

⭐How does being born c-section affect a child’s long term health?
When babies are born vaginally, they pick up helpful bacteria from their mum as they pass through the birth canal. This helps seed their gut microbiome – the community of microbes that play a vital role in immunity and health.

C-sections skip this step, and a major Lancet review found C-section babies had a higher chance of having allergies, asthma, and a less diverse gut microbiome in early life. But most of the research was observational, showing links rather than clear cause and effect, and it’s uncertain whether these differences actually persist into later childhood.

⭐Pedophiles Using AI To Target Kids And No One Can Make It Stop
But we need to get our collective heads out of the sand. Because every time I talk about AI being an unregulated industry people get real angry. Not at AI companies. At me.

📖 My private thoughts from my very public diary…

(Sometimes on X (Twitter), sometimes on Threads and sometimes on BlueSky)

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