Steven Bartlett’s CEO: How I Make Career Decisions Around My Family

0:00At the heart of it all is gut, right from when I was young, just like, does it feel right? What you completely fail to realise before you have kids is that actually you've completely forgotten that you're optimising for love.

0:13Zoe:Welcome back to Motherkind. It is me, your host Zoe, and we are proudly supported by Wild Nutrition's Women's Supplements. Hello and hello. I hope you are all doing really well this week. I've had the most incredible feedback on last week's episode with Vanessa Kingory. So if you haven't listened to that one yet, make sure that you do. And this week, I am going to introduce you to someone that you probably haven't heard of, but you'll definitely know her boss. Her boss is Stephen Bartlett of Diary of a CEO. And Amy Golding, my guest this week, is Stephen's CEO of his private office. I read a piece that Amy had written on LinkedIn about being a mum of three and taking on this massive role for Stephen at six months pregnant.

1:03Zoe:And I knew I had to get her on because there are so many of us, me included, who grapple with these big opportunities coming, whether that's a big career opportunity or a relocation opportunity or anyone else of those big life decisions. how do you know whether it's the time to go for it whether it's time to let the opportunity pass by and grab it in a different season that is really what I wanted to understand from Amy and I think that her decision making process and her answer will surprise you we also talk about so much more her matrescence how she manages holding three children kind of big job the way that she thinks about Gil and her lens on the working world for women and mothers.

1:55Zoe:Here it is, I hope that you love it. Before we get to the episode, remember to subscribe wherever you are listening or watching this. It is subscribing that helps me reach so many more women and mothers that need this content, so please subscribe and share with a friend. Here it is. What I find so fascinating being and why I really wanted to chat to you is because you took this huge job I mean you've always had big jobs right you've had an amazing career trajectory and you took a really big job with Stephen Barlett at six months pregnant and that is known to be a culture to be you know work very hard also play very hard and I really want to understand your career decision and how you did that because so many of my listeners have those opportunities right the dream job comes or the moment comes but it's like there's a tension and there's sometimes that conflict with family often there's a conflict with family and I would really love you to unpack this is how I decided step by step that this was going to work for my family and go for it I would love to be able to give you a formula some sort of please give us a formula and actually you know in my jobs and in my roles you know there has to be process and there has to be scorecards and investment decisions and all that stuff but at the heart of it all is is gut and I've always been a kind of I guess a vibes player like right from when I was young just like does it feel right also optimistic my husband says to the point of negligence so I just like I'll make it work sometimes that means you take the opportunity and sometimes that means you don't take the opportunity I think what I've really gained from having kids is almost like a two a two-way conversation with my body like I think you it becomes this instrument that has made life and keep keeps people alive and I think you spend a lot of I spent a lot of my 20s ignoring my body you just run through it drink through it party you through it go again sleep less do more um and I think your body becomes so important and listening to it and all the little things like the kicks and the the you know the the breast everything breastfeeding you know I think as I as I get older I feel it I feel if something's right um so yeah I don't know if that how do you tune into that I think it's hard to tune out I think yeah that that balance between making the lists and you know giving the score and understanding the pros and cons and then in my case just probably fucking doing it anyway because it just feels right yeah I think Stephen's reaction helped when I because when we first started talking I wasn't pregnant um or I didn't know yet you already had two kids right I'd already had two kids I was on gardening leave wondering what what to do next if to do anything next got a got a message from Stephen out of the blue pretty much went to meet him and just kind of like just really liked him which doesn't sound important but it's so important to me I think you know when you're making any career decision can are you excited about it can you add value and do you like the people that you're going to be working with or the environment you're going to be in and then number four is does it fit with your life can it fit with your life yeah I just really liked him and we were talking for quite a long time then I found out I was pregnant were you nervous to say yeah I was nervous because I was basically going to sort of take myself out of the conversation why were you going to do that by number three you know what's going to happen you haven't got that naivety anymore no you know exactly how hard it's gonna be it was you know I'd thought about three but my youngest was had just turned one so yeah it was it was a lot and he it got to the point where he wanted me to meet a whole load of the other execs um in his in his team so I went I was like look before I do this I don't think it's fair I've just found I'm pregnant so perhaps we put this conversation on the back there and he was like why um it was he was just so unfazed by it and i thought oh you have no idea i was gonna say is that because he brought he might not have any idea but um but no and he's always he's always been really great really supportive and actually really interested because he knows it's a phase he's gonna go through yeah and yeah so it it felt possible which is as much you can hope for with you know as a working mum

6:51Zoe:I found you through your writing which is like phenomenal the way that you write I'll put your LinkedIn link in the show notes because the way that you write is is is so beautiful and I found this post this viral post that you'd written I was like I have to speak to this woman because you talk about let's stop saying have it all you know there's a lot of conversation about that but let's also stop kind of maybe pretending to ourselves that we're doing these big careers for our kids yeah and can you talk about that because that is something that I think a lot of women say to themselves right and of course some people are in that situation where you know financially they they do genuinely have to do it but not always and that's not my reality and I don't think that's your reality so tell me about how you came to that realization and what you want other people to kind of know about that I think what's interesting is like my when I write it's very much for me like I always when I was a kid I used to write as an outlet and I don't think I've ever written anything to try and tell anyone anything you know I don't need anyone to know this or that I'm not I don't have an objective I don't have like it's got nothing to do with my you're not trying to sell a coaching course and sometimes it just comes like I just I just write to get it out of me like what are these things that I'm grappling with you make sense I make sense of things through writing yeah definitely and I think the the particular post you're talking about it was like when i was coming back from maternity leave just over a year ago and i just i was really struggling with like all the things i was thinking and feeling so i'm just gonna write you know get the shower thoughts like get the like old like funny line or the so i'm like i'm having a conversation myself so i sort of sort of wrote it down there's not a lot of you talk about in this piece i want to be the primary attachment figure and the ceo yeah and you know we talk a lot about how hard it is to be a working mum and how the mental load isn't shared and how it is a very different reality being the working dad and the working mum you know me and my husband both have huge careers and definitely um and he's an unbelievable dad but he doesn't notice the things I notice and he doesn't do the things I do and and sometimes I think if I didn't do them they wouldn't happen but is that okay like does it matter if they don't make every birthday party and they don't have a present and they and they don't have new clothes ready for spring and they doesn't matter and also do I want him to do it because it it's so strange because before I had kids I was so embarrassing um as a as a boss um like I thought I was being understanding you know I wasn't making life hard for the mums that worked with me I was like you leave when you want whatever but I did not understand yeah didn't understand and I always assumed that when I have kids I was like oh it seems really hard you know it's really hard logistically she's got a you know her nanny leaves at this time and if she doesn't get this train and I like I kind of I understood the complexity of like it's really expensive and it's really logistically difficult and you're trying to do so many things so I was in my head I was like right you know I will be optimizing for cost and time um and so you like you think get nanny and then the nanny can work here and then you can do this and and what you what you completely fail to realize before you have kids is that actually you've completely forgotten that you're optimizing for love and this love that you feel that you couldn't understand like the only way that someone I think that doesn't have kids the only way you can even begin to compare it is like a romantic partner so if I have no time to see my romantic my my my husband or my boyfriend or whoever I'm in love with like and they're lonely so I can hire someone to spend time with them to have dinner with them I can you know I can outsource that and they'll be that's fine then but it's like and I think that's what you don't realize how desperately you want to be that person and how jealous you are of the person that gets to do it instead and so I have made my life 10 times more difficult not having a full-time nanny because the irrational jealousy I would feel if my kid spent more time and that person knew who's basically you know was doing all the things and going to the school plays and ordering their clothes and stupid things the doctor's appointments like it has to be me and that is for me where the unbelievable like unsolvable equation comes from because it's not it's not a maths equation it's like a love equation and you can't and then you love your job too like you also want to be there you want to be doing that and you don't want someone else to do that for you either so like you're not two people so yeah how do you how do you solve it um how do you make peace with the insolvability is that a word it is now it is let's go with it how do you make peace with the riddle that can't be squared i don't know if you can i don't know if it I don't know if it sums or equals or cancels or whatever the GCSE algebra is it's funny because 100 my priority is my kids like there is no question like when push comes to shove that's the priority you'd cancel a huge investor meeting or not show up but no and that's the thing so they are the priority baseline so like I know if I if something bad happened at work it's horrific and it's sad and it's embarrassing and it's all the things but you get over it and the older you get you have got over those things so you know that you can if something terrible happened at home I would never get over it I wouldn't survive it you know if the worst thing what's the worst thing that can happen at work honestly unless you're a surgeon but the worst thing that can happen at home is unsurvivable and so like knowing that like the priority is my children but then so why on a monday morning am i getting up leaving them with a nanny and going to an investor meeting and not seeing them all day when i know that they need me so yeah they're my priority daily and hourly and all you know you it's a really weird it's a weird thing to know that they're your priority and yet not prioritize them um and i don't know how you i don't know how you make peace with that i haven't um and yet you know just you're just working out aren't you and again that's where your gut comes in because at some point you know even if it's hard things are hard but good things are hard and you just have to check in with yourself and be like does this feel right does it feel good enough how are you different like I think you know at the core I'm still the same person I have the same personality I have the same interests and you know I'm you know I get excited by but like my I mean my friends my school friends have all said like oh my god you're so much softer I think matrescence definitely soft it softened me too yeah and I had this all of this energy of like but I didn't know where to put it I didn't know who I should be and like I was always measuring myself about who I should be and what I should have achieved by now and and I think I don't know if you know I became a mother in 2020 so it was also four weeks before covid and so it was like a double like i was so always busy high energy like always trying to achieve something um and then it was like baby lockdown and i was so i did not know who i was i was terrified because i had all you know and i was gonna go to these baby groups and then i was gonna do this i'll probably get i'll write a novel while i'm on maternity leave and and then everything just what did you have to face in yourself what came up stopped um like motherhood especially at the beginning can be very boring like there's hours of nothing happening and like you know I remember those days where it was like the three hour chunks yes you know so like you feed and then you play and then you they nap and like no one told me about breastfeeding no one tells you that you breastfeed like every two like two hours it's like every you breastfeed like 45 minutes and then you get a two hour gap yeah if you're lucky yeah and then you breastfeed again for 45 minutes i thought it was like oh breastfeeding a couple of times um bloody hell and so you're you start to see the your day in these like right i've got through one three i've got three more to go right i've got through the second one two more to go and by the tell me when the fourth one you're like nearly there and like just the the stillness and like because it was lockdown we'd go out we had this two-bedroom flat in a little tiny communal garden in the middle of london and um i'd get all the stuff ready and we'd go out we'd lie at the grass we'd like look up at this tree and like she was a you know obsessed with the tree moving and it was the first time I noticed nature I grew up in in a city London and I honestly couldn't have told you like when blossom comes out when daffodils come out how long they come out for just I was just so busy all the time and I remember that lockdown year being like wow and I feel like I was seeing things for the first time like she she was it was crazy um I know that I can be happy with that because I was so happy I'm like I know you know lockdown was oh my gosh what a lot of bad things happen but like the silver lining I took out of it was that I spent the year with myself and with my baby and by the end of it I knew I could be happy with that so for me everything else now is like a has to be better and it has to be a positive decision and because you don't actually need that much if you can be positive about it and that's I guess that's just what I always try and do is I just try and be positive and how's that experience it sounds like and I sometimes describe it and I talk about it in my book as going from kind of fifth gear to first I had the same big job rushing rushing rushing and then suddenly you're in like first gear or even like neutral for a few months and it's like what just happened but I think that is what starts that's what started to change me yeah and it sounds like that's what started to change you how's that changed if you think about leader Amy pre-motherhood yeah leader amy now yeah how how has that how has matrestres changed you as a as a leader i mean i think mums always say like i'm so much more empathetic yes because now my kids can be having a full-on scrap and i'm like guys just sort it out yeah same at work i'm like i'll say to the girls we'll sort it out yeah it's the same energy right it's like so good very few things are a crisis yes um and I always say my my eldest daughter is so different to me she is so sensitive and like so high empathy and so gentle um and I always say like she was sent to teach me a lesson um and yeah so I and don't get me wrong it like I also read a lot which is like I'm so much better at work now because I'm a mum and there are so many things like that but like that is just one side of the coin you are also exhausted and you have less time and you care a little bit less than you used to and so I don't think it is all better and more positive and easier um I think you know you have some days where you are literally sitting there looking at a spreadsheet and you have this sort of like out of body experience of like who the fuck cares what is this who cares if it's seven or eight pounds like you do you have that too which you don't beforehand because it's everything yeah it's all of your identity that was the episode i hoped you loved it if you did please make sure you subscribe and i will see you next time.