The Work Series: my biggest mistakes and regrets - Zoe’s story

0:08Hello, hello, I am so happy you are here. Welcome to this very exciting eight part special work series of the Motherkind podcast. We are sponsored by World Nutrition Women's Supplements and I am your host Zoe Blaski. My intention with this special series is to bring together some of the leading voices on motherhood and work to support you wherever you're at with motherhood and paid work. We're going to cover pausing paid work to embrace the work of raising a family, the structural challenges we face as mothers in the workplace, we're going to be talking about the motherhood penalty, how to return to work, confidence with the UK's leading confidence expert.

0:49And then for the final episode of the eight part series, you are going to hear from five mothers all in completely different places in their work and careers about their challenges, their trade-offs, what's working for them, what they wish was different. And I'm so excited about that because it can feel like everyone else has it sorted. So this series is really going to show you that you're not alone. Everyone is facing challenges you can't see. And it's going to be like glimpsing behind the curtain of five working mothers' lives. Here's what I know. Work and motherhood and your relationship to both those things is deeply personal and circumstantial.

1:31Every single one of you listening to this will have a different relationship with work. Maybe you're in work and hating it. Maybe you're in work, but really you want to do something else. Maybe you're not in paid work and you want to be. Maybe you're in paid work and you really don't want to be. And when I asked on stories, 76 % of you said you wanted to change your work situation in the next three years. So this series, I hope, is going to be exactly what you need. And I thought long and hard about how to kick this series off. And then I realised there is only really one way and that is me sharing my story, my journey with paid work and motherhood for the last nine years which I have never really shared in detail before.

2:18So in this episode I am going to tell you my challenges, my tensions, what I've got right, what I've completely messed up and what I'm thinking for the future. I've started right at the start even before motherhood to give you some context and I'll tell you what has happened right up until this point and I'm not going to sugarcoat it.

2:43So here it goes. Let's start with chapter one of my work life, which I've called corporate life. So I did a degree in economics, which looking back was probably a mistake. Numbers are definitely not my natural domain, but I did do a couple of modules on sociology and I studied the economics of gender discrimination and I remember learning about the motherhood penalty 22 years ago isn't that wild I remember it so vividly the lecturer put up this chart and he said very bluntly very kind of coldly so when a woman takes time out for her family her salary never recovers and then the gap to men widens and that's the motherhood penalty and I remember kind of writing the chart in my book I guess I would have mid-20 and just thinking, huh, that's really shit.

3:34And then I didn't think anything more about it. And something that I love about life and career are the dots connecting backwards. And I'm pretty sure that you would have had some of this experience too in your own life when something that seemingly seems like you went off track or wasn't the right thing actually starts to make complete sense. And that is how I feel now about that economics degree, because what that degree really taught me if I think about it in the big picture sense is that the micro our individual experience is always linked to what's going on in the macro which is always going on at societal and policy levels and cultural levels and to really link those two together and that is what I've always bought into mother kind and I think it's probably set me apart from lots of other voices on motherhood who tend to do one or the other so that is my first big dot connecting backwards, even though I would have told you for a long time it was a mistake choosing that degree, I can see now it absolutely was not.

4:36And I wonder if there's something in your career path that you would have called a mistake, but actually now you can see what it has brought you. Anyway, I did the economics degree and I ended up on the graduate scheme at BMW head office. I know I started in marketing and then I did strategy and then I did press and PR. And it's actually wild to me how different I am now to that person. The culture was kind of as you would expect. It was very formal. It was very male. It was very process driven. And I, in many ways, hated it. And in many ways, I loved it because I learned so much. And again, no experience is ever wasted.

5:21I really want you to take that from this episode today. No experience that you've ever had is ever wasted. You can use every single job, every single, you know, crappy job that you had in your teens, every single one of those experiences that you've had will be adding up into skills that you've got today. And so again, while I would have told you, oh, I probably shouldn't have started in the automotive industry. It wasn't very me. Now I can see, honestly, I use those skills that I learned in that organization every single day to grow Motherkind. And I think there is a real benefit actually. And I always advise young people around starting in a big business because you really get to see what great looks like.

6:05BMW was incredible in how they activated things and I learned loads. But the most important thing about my time at BMW was I met my best friend, Anna, and we have been incredibly close for 20 years now, which is crazy. And again, no experience is ever wasted. I really believe that. And I think if we have that mindset, as we journey through our lives and motherhood, we get to not make ourselves wrong for perceived failures or mistakes. And you know, no experience is ever wasted. So I'm at BMW, I met my best friend, but I'm feeling a bit disillusioned with corporate. So I did a pendulum swing, as we call it in coaching, which is where you have a realisation and awareness, and then you pendulum right to the opposite side.

6:56So I thought, I'm a bit disillusioned with corporate, I'm going to go to the charity sector. And if any of you have worked in charity, maybe you've had this experience too. But let's just say the charity sector was not what I thought it would be. And then I pendulumed back again. And I went back to corporate to a city insurance business, which was kind of, in many ways felt safe to me because it felt so familiar to BMW. Very corporate, very formal, very male. And I was just 30 at this time. I was just married. And the MD of the business, she was a mum and she had two young kids. And honestly, I don't think that she ever could have seen them.

7:35She was always traveling. She was the first in the office. She was the last to leave. And there is no judgment from me on that. I had no idea what her setup was behind the scenes. But I knew as a 30 year old thinking about starting a family that that isn't what I would want my life to look like. And I think if you're in an organization and you're ambitious like I was and you don't like the ladder that you're climbing and you don't like the destination, then you need to get that ladder on a different wall. You really do, because at that organization, I could see how my next promotion would be to marketing director and then possibly, you know, another senior role and then managing director, possibly even into the C-suite.

8:19But I could see that I didn't want that. I was climbing a ladder that was against the wrong wall. And in many ways, that feels scary when you have that realization. It's also incredibly freeing. so I realized I gotta get this ladder that I'm climbing and I've always been ambitious I've always wanted to thrive in my career I just thought to myself this isn't the right wall for me and this is where I call it chapter two of my of my story I took the leap so here's what I did I decided I wanted to try working for myself so I decided to quit and be a marketing consultant and I remember at the time saying that now it seems like such a small step like okay I'm already doing marketing I'll just do it for myself but at the time I was petrified and I think if any of you are sat in corporate listening to this you will relate to how easy it is to get kind of really stuck in that corporate thinking that there's no opportunities outside those kind of salaried roles that you have to keep going and climbing the ladder and I remember the fear oh my gosh the fear was absolutely huge but I managed to convince myself if it didn't work out I could always go back and get another job and there is some important context here is that at the time I was just married we were thinking about starting a family I was really getting into coaching healing thinking about a bigger vision for my life one with freedom really at its heart one where I called the shots in my own career, one where I got to be creative and more purposeful.

10:01And I remember this so clearly every day I would walk into the office, into this stunning office. It was filled with beautiful artwork. It was kind of shiny. And I remember walking into that every single day and I would be listening nonstop to books, to podcasts about entrepreneurs, about people who were living life on their own terms about people who'd started their own businesses, I flooded myself with positive role models, with ideas, with alternative realities. And then I would go in and I would step back into the kind of current reality, which was in corporate and everyone was doing the same thing.

10:39And then I would leave and I would do the same thing. I would flood myself with this new information. And I think that is so important. If you want to create any change, You have to immerse yourself in that future that you want to create. And there was a massive book that had an impact on me called Choose Yourself. I can't even remember the author now, but it was all about how no one is going to come and design your perfect career for you. No one is going to come and rescue you. You have to choose yourself. You have to decide I'm worth designing a life that is going to work for me. I am worth that.

11:17And I remember reading that book and thinking, yes, This is what I'm going to do. This is what I'm going to do. I am going to design a life and a work that works for me, that is on the right wall, and I can climb that ladder on. I had no real idea what was going to happen. I knew that starting in marketing consultancy would be the smartest thing because I already had those skills. That was what my experience was in. But after that, I never really had a clue what was going to happen. So I really immersed myself in this new world of entrepreneurship and freedom and mindset. And it gave me the courage to think I'm going to quit and do it for myself.

11:56I also knew, and I'm quite proud of myself for this. I had a little bit of foresight that if I could get my own thing going before I had children, that it would serve me really well when I had children. I did actually quit that corporate job and get pregnant about, I think it was about eight or nine months later, which wasn't that smart because obviously there's no maternity pay. So maybe not the smartest move financially, but I really backed myself and I really trusted myself and I am very, very proud of that. So picture the scene. I am there. I have made this decision that I'm going to quit corporate.

12:33I think I'd been about 12 years in corporate and I was going to become a consultant and I walk in tell my boss, who was actually really lovely, this was my plan. And you could not make up what happened. He hired me back as a consultant on the spot. He said, well, we need you and we think you're great. And, you know, we've got this big campaign going live. So do you want to come back as a consultant three days a week? And because at the time I was really full of confidence, I named like a really high day rate. He went with it and I had my first client. And I do believe in universal nudges and flow when you've made the right decision.

13:11And this was just massive for me. I thought I've made the right decision and I've just had a huge kind of positive universal nudge, I would call it. Yes. Like the doors flung open. I got my first client. I then went back to my old company that night, spoke to my old boss at the charity, said, Hey, I'm going to be consulting. He hired me back that day. And so on my first day, I could not believe it. I had two clients and then I spoke to another friend who'd started a popcorn company. It's absolutely massive now. And he also hired me. So within a couple of days, I was a consultant. And I guess it looked like to the outside world, many of my friends were saying, how have you done this?

13:52But what people don't see and didn't see, and I think this is true for you, if there's any big change, it's that it's the mindset preparation before it. It's the year that I spent before that, you know, reading, immersing myself, believing in myself, getting rid of limiting beliefs so that when you make the change and when you take the action, something, you know, it flows really quickly. And so I would really encourage you to think about that. Look for those nudges. You know, don't forget if you are in that time. And I love this analogy of the seed, you know, under the soil and it's dark and you can't figure it out and you feel really lost, but you keep doing the work.

14:29you keep watering you keep getting that sunshine and then eventually the kind of seed emerges and for a year I did feel like I was that seed kind of in the soil but I just kept doing the right thing I kept educating myself informing myself I kept shifting all my limiting beliefs who am I to do this I can't do it I who am I to be an entrepreneur who am I to have my own business I kept getting rid of all of those and replacing them with phrases like if not me then who why not me I really started to grow that belief and so I do believe that's why when I then did it it was kind of super successful so I was a consultant and I absolutely loved it I think consultancy if you have a defined skill set which most of you listening to could pull together a skill set that you could sell to organizations or other people I think consultancy is amazing I loved getting to work on ring fence projects I love to be on a day rate I loved not having to engage with kind of the politics and just coming in, doing what I was doing and leaving.

15:29But at the same time, I knew that marketing wasn't my passion anymore. And I knew that because I stopped wanting to go to the conferences. I wasn't reading marketing books anymore. I was reading kind of coaching and transformational books. I used to be really turned on by like a big campaign. And, you know, I'd talk endlessly about how brands are built and, you know, how they're using TV and different media And I just stopped being excited about that. And that was kind of scary to me because that's all I'd known. That's what I was consulting in. But again, I think it's about trusting yourself because this is another dots connecting backwards moment.

16:10because at the time I was getting really into individuals and companies that were changing things. There was a business called Tom's Shoes. I don't know if you remember it. And I would endlessly read about the guy, Blake McCoskey, that started Tom's Shoes and how did he start it? And I started to think, I want to do something with purpose. Initially, I thought that I would help marketing, you know, in a marketing perspective. But then again, I realized, no, I'm kind of selling myself short. I don't really want to do that. And I, because I was wanting to consume all this information about businesses that supported people and made changes and did something in the world.

16:47I was listening to a lot of podcasts, which were very, very, very new at the time. It was 2012. It was nothing like it is now, but I was in that quite early, I guess. I didn't realise that, but I was in that quite early listening to podcasts, listening to podcasts where people would be interviewed that were inspiring, that were doing their own thing, that were making a difference, that we're helping people. And I knew that I had found my thing. I knew that I absolutely was going to do something in that space. I was going to start a business with purpose. I was going to help people. I was going to do something in the world that mattered.

17:26I also did my first coach training at this time. So I was kind of marketing, consulting a lot, and then doing coach training on the side. I did some meditation training. I was going to lots of talks and workshops. I was just immersing myself in kind of personal development and entrepreneurship with purpose world. I even started at one point career coaching some friends because I thought, oh, maybe that's what I'll do. I can, you know, help people in their careers. And I was just playing around with this idea of what I really wanted to do in the world. Then I got pregnant. and I think this is about really when life pushes you into alignment so all these kind of seeds were being sown and I was full of ideas and I was kind of really starting to believe that I could be someone that did something in the world that I was proud of that I wanted to build that mattered and I actually remember saying to Guy at one point I'm so nervous about getting pregnant because I don't know what my purpose is yet.

18:28And looking back on that just makes me laugh so much because I was so clueless that in fact it would be getting pregnant that would give me my purpose, that would give me my business, Motherkind, would give me my platform.

18:48at five months pregnant I had a life-changing experience I somehow and it did feel like that ended up on this island in Sweden doing a kundalini conscious motherhood and birth training course and it was bonkers how I ended up there honestly it's a story for another day but let's just say I was completely guided to end up on that island five months pregnant with this teacher called Gumuk. She's incredible. She's kind of bonkers. She's like a wild woman. And I've never been on anything like that. Everyone there was doulas, midwives, coaches, and I knew in my soul that I was meant to be there. Again, I didn't know why yet, but I think this is what is so important is just trusting being guided to the little nudges that we get or that feeling of wouldn't it be incredible and I just knew that I was meant to be there but I didn't know why I thought okay maybe I'm going to be a pregnancy yoga teacher honestly at the time I thought that's what I might be have you ever had that experience where you just feel like kind of doors are flying open and it doesn't make much sense but you're going with it that was how this time felt for me and that 100 % that experience planted the seeds for motherkind I just didn't know it yet then as you know I had my matrescence experience which I've spoken about a lot especially in the book it was just way harder than I thought that first year of motherhood all my stuff came up around control, around fear, around not being good enough.

20:34So I looked for answers. And at the time, 2013, it was the rise of the Insta mum. It was all about looking cool, drinking gin. I think hurrah for gin was the kind of book of the era. And mother's meetings, there was this huge kind of meetup thing where all the cool blogger mums would go and meet up and just look cool with these cool babies on their hips and these kind of hipster outfits. And honestly, I didn't resonate with any of that. I didn't drink, which instantly kind of othered me with the whole gin, cool mum vibes. I didn't get out of my maternity leggings for about 18 months. And then my mum staged a bit of an intervention.

21:19She was like, Zoe, it's time to leave the black baggy leggings at home now. So I just didn't resonate with the fashion content. And you know, what I really wanted in that first year through my matrescence experience was to feel seen. And I felt like everyone around me glided into motherhood and it felt like, what's the opposite of glided? I kind of thumped into motherhood and I felt really different in myself and no one was talking about it. So in my previous life, like I was telling you when I was doing those sort of coaching trainings and those meditation trainings, and I was going to workshops and talks almost like every night of the week, I was in it.

22:00So it was so normal to me that when you wanted to learn about something or when you had a challenge, and also I've been in lots of 12 steps groups, it was completely normal to me that you would go and find a group or a course or a teacher and learn. So I just assumed that that stuff must exist for mothers. And it did not. Everything that I found was about parenting. Everything that I found was about what to buy, like what bottles are the best, what buggies the best, you know, how to get them to sleep, about feeding and, you know, all that stuff, of course, is useful. We need that. That's kind of the practical skills side of it but nothing was about me nothing was about the mother and I think when you're not seen you become to feel invisible you start to feel like something's wrong with you and I now know and I think I knew even then it didn't make any sense to me that the whole focus was on the baby on the parenting and the mother and our experience was being completely ignored unless we were talking about, you know, wearing cool jeans and drinking gin.

23:04Where was the depth of the conversation? To me, it was just completely missing. And it seemed insane, especially as in the kind of rest of our lives, there was just this massive industry called self-development and there was nothing for mothers. So I started to just do my own research and I've talked about this a few times. I started to read Brene Brown, Peter Levine, Dan Siegel, Gabor Marte, and I really felt like wow like this is cool this is actually new world and it's a million miles away from the kind of cool fashion gin content and I wanted to share it and also I started to think about oh that purpose driven thing that I want to do that difference that I want to make could it be this like could it be this and there was definitely that kind of chink of excitement and I started to I think it probably can be.

23:59So at that point, I'm about 15, maybe 18 months postpartum. And I had gone back to work. I was doing, I think one day or maybe one and a half days marketing consultancy. I'd kind of kept that going in the background. I had patchy childcare. If I had any, I think me and Guy just sort of juggled it between us. And she was also an amazing Napa, my eldest. So she would regularly do two and a half hours every lunchtime. So I would do work then. And at that point, I thought I really want to do something with this idea that I've got around helping mothers feel seen around helping mothers with, you know, fear and control and how do we meet our own needs and what the hell is all this about?

24:43So I actually at that point made a smart decision, which I would absolutely do again, which was that I hired a coach because I was sleep deprived and my inner critic was loud and I knew that I wanted to do this but I also knew that if it was just me sat on my own with a laptop I probably never ever ever would I knew that I needed someone in my corner and I have done that at every stage of my business I've when I've needed that kind of push or that up level I've hired someone who's done it before to help me. So I hired a coach and she helped me figure out, okay, what could this thing be? How are we going to do it?

25:24Where are we going to start? Really what she gave me was accountability because I was paying her quite a lot of money at the time. I think like all the money that I made from marketing consultancy, I gave to her. And I knew that if I was paying her, I wouldn't shirk out of it, even though I was petrified. So I wanted to do it and I didn't want to do it. And I wonder if you relate to that. If you've got a big decision around your work coming up where you want to do something, but you don't want to do it. And I was kind of doing that dance. So we landed on the idea of a podcast. Originally, MotherKind was going to be a blog.

25:57And then I realized that kind of whole mummy blog thing. And actually, you know, there's no shade there at all, but I just didn't sit with me. It just didn't feel like me. And podcasts have been such a huge part of my learning and I loved it. And I've always loved speaking, presenting. It's been like my thing my whole life. At one point I wanted to be an actor. So we landed on a podcast. We launched the first one. We launched the second one. We launched the third one and people started listening. And you know what? I knew quite early on I was onto something. And I would say about three months in, I started letting myself dream of what it could be.

26:30And the ideas just came flowing in. I remember thinking, what if I could write a book one day? That's always been my dream. What if I could do products what if I could work with brands that I love what if I could do coaching and I think the tension for me and I suspect a lot of people will resonate with this has always been between my ambition and my desire to be a really present mum because I've always been a super ambitious person especially with mother kind to me it matters so much and every single day and I wake up and I just want to reach more people but there's such a tension with also wanting to be super super super present with my kids so at that point I got two days of child care that's right and I was doing one day consulting and I was doing one day on motherkind and I did that for three years and I think it's really important to talk about this because Instagram and content can make it look like people quit their jobs or they come back from eternity or they come back from a career break and they start a business and it starts flying and they're making money and it's doing really well.

27:40And in my experience behind the scenes, having looked behind the scenes of hundreds of kind of career changes in businesses like this, it is rarely like that. What most people do is they parallel for a while. So they use their old skills and experience to fund the new era. And I think it's really important to normalise that because that's what I did. And I think it's extra challenging for us as mothers when we do these big career changes in motherhood, because we also have to factor in childcare and the cost of that. So that's what I did. I paralleled my old world with the world that I wanted to create.

28:14So I carried on consulting for three years, the first three years of Motherkind, and then I would do Motherkind kind of evenings, nap times, and then I think, yeah, one more day of childcare. care and you know we need to normalize slow sustainable growth and businesses that fit around our lifestyles as opposed to you know businesses that start to determine our lifestyles and I have always been very very very clear that mother kind even though it's super important even though I want to reach millions more mothers every month it has to fit around the type of life that I want to live, which is a really present one with my kids.

28:53I want to do most of the school pickups because I love it. And I don't think that is any overnight successes. It often looks like that, doesn't it? And, you know, maybe some people even look at me and think it looks like an overnight success. It absolutely isn't. I don't think in corporate. I don't think if it's your own business. I don't think if you're freelancing, I just don't believe there's overnight successes. there is so much that goes behind the scenes that no one else sees and that's the sort of next chapter for me 2018 to 2021 I call the brutiful years they were so beautiful that chapter but they were also absolutely brutal and the first thing that happened a bit of a trigger warning here on miscarriage was that in 2018 I had two miscarriages it was really really harrowing traumatic experience both times and I managed to keep the podcast going week in week out they really cracked me open I don't think I gave myself enough time to grieve properly and about a year later I actually went into some specialist therapy to help me grieve those miscarriages because I realized I just kept going and I do remember recording episodes kind of trying to fight back the tears and not really knowing how can I hold space for my community for others for my listeners when I'm crumbling behind the scenes but what happened was the podcast became my lifeline and my way to stay connected and to keep moving through and it was the messages from the community from you guys from our listeners that kept me going and you know what's wild is that I've never missed a week in eight years and sometimes I think that's incredible other times I think you really need to give yourself a bit of a break girl but I haven't missed a week in eight years and then in 2019 my youngest was born right at the end of 2019 so we had two miscarriages and then fell pregnant, stayed pregnant, had her in December 2019.

31:05And this is something that I got very wrong. So the podcast, when I was about four or five months pregnant, started to go viral. I'd done a Dr. Gabor episode. I had millions of new listeners and I thought, I can't stop this now. this is like the dream I am reaching so many people I'm starting to get known you know journalists are reaching out brands like this is everything that I have dreamed of I'm having exactly the impact that I want to have and I don't believe in regrets but I do wish that I had had a longer maternity leave I think I was back recording I want to say after maybe three weeks which is actually crazy.

31:52And I would do that so differently now. I can see looking back now how I was in quite a lack mindset. I remember thinking if I pause this for three months, four months, five months, six months, I'm going to lose all my listeners. I'm going to lose all the momentum and I'm never going to build it back up. And that is such lack. Now I'd think to myself, no, you live your message first. You take a proper break, knowing that you can just pick up where you left off. But I didn't do that. And it cost me to be honest, I was exhausted and I don't think I did a very good job on either. I didn't do a good job on keeping the podcast going and I didn't do an amazing job.