Jill Koziol: Bridging a Better Future

Working moms drive exceptional productivity and economic prosperity for our country, but we need structural changes to make motherhood and career compatible. As a massive voting block, mothers have the power to push for change at the governmental level through their collective voices. Jill Koziol, CEO and Co-founder of Motherly, joins Cherissa Kell in a discussion that sheds light and data on the importance of mothers’ contributions to the workforce, along with some Motherly inspiration from her story from consultant to entrepreneur and the evolution of support she has needed as a working mom over time.

Introducing Jill Koziol, CEO and Co-Founder of Motherly

Jill Koziol is the co-founder and CEO of Motherly, a wellbeing destination empowering mothers to thrive. An Inc. 5000 Fastest Growing Private Company and aParity.org Best Company for Women to Advance, Motherly is built for mothers, by mothers. Engaging an audience of 40million+ readers and viewers a month, Motherly offers on-demand parent education classes, Webby-award winning videos, TheMotherly Podcast, essays and articles, and a highly-engaged social media community.

My perspective with my children has always been that I just can’t wait to see who they become. And I think that that perspective has given me an ability to not hold so tight onto a certain vision of something.

And that has created like real space to prioritize our relationship because I’m just trying to always be relevant and meet them where they are.

Jill Koziol, CEO & Co-founder of Motherly

Co-author of “The Motherly Guide to Becoming Mama: Redefining the Pregnancy, Birth, and
Postpartum Journey” and “This Is Motherhood: A Motherly Collection of Reflections and Practices”, Jill is passionate about serving and empowering women and mothers because when mamas are successful, everyone wins. She is an advocate for families, female founders, and how to thrive with multiple sclerosis. Jill lives in Park City, Utah with her husband and two daughters.

Production Credits

This episode of Pearls onBoards was produced by Mix Theory Studios, a music and multimedia studio located in downtown Jacksonville, Florida. This show features original music written, mixed and mastered by Punchboi and DJ PM, the music production team of Mix Theory Studios.

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Read the Full Transcripts

I think we’re actually hitting a point where, We need to have women in the workforce or we need to have massive immigration. One of the two has to happen. And the productivity that mothers and women can drive is exceptional. We’re the most educated cohort in the economy right now.

We need to find structural ways to make this work. And so I do think that we’re, we’re hitting a point of where the drivers of change are getting strong enough to really actually turn this corner.

Hello, thank you for joining me this week for this episode of Pearls on Boards. I am so excited to sit down with Jill Kozeal this week. She is the co founder and CEO of Motherly, and she is a mom of two little girls. Hey, Jill, thank you for sitting down with me. a business that you exited before motherly, Yes, and you had young children doing that.

I think it’s really important to note that I’m a first generation college student.

And so I came from a family of small business entrepreneurs, local small business entrepreneurs, and so I had always had that example ahead of me, but from a family that was not as well educated in a traditional sense.

And so being a first generation college student, I really had to overcome and get to, you know, through a master’s degree and all these other things, and I think was very entrepreneurial in a way about my own education. Even from the start. I did strategy consulting for quite a while in the defense intelligence community and consulting, I believe, is a really strong foundation for entrepreneurship and for business as a whole. You are able to look across a wide variety of businesses or organizations to solve a particular problem, and you start to realize that there’s commonalities across a lot of these things and you start to develop a playbook of sorts.

And so when I launched my first company, it was when my husband was in business school and I had a, we had a six month old daughter. And I went to the playground with her and I was still doing strategy consulting remotely at the time and from California, and we went to the playground and it was a elementary school playground, and so there were no baby swings there. And so I went home like any good mom and I went on Amazon to try to find some sort of converter because this was a, a playground that I knew we were gonna be frequenting often. And so there wasn’t one. I then went onto Google Patent and discovered that there was no patent for this product I expected to exist. And so I reached out to a colleague of mine, Katie Stewart who was an, actually an engineer and had worked with me in consulting, and we started iterating on this. She had a child around the same age and. We started talking about is this a pain point that’s bigger than just the two of us?

And if so, is it possible to create and to really productize something that could solve a problem or a pain point for other

families? And it turned out it was. so we. We’re just doing drawings. We were you know, sewing things together, trying to make the prototypes for this. And I was living in Silicon Valley at the time, which is very entrepreneurial of course. And so went in Rome as they say. And we, we ultimately created a tech package with a manufacturing company. We took it a baby goods. Conference and entered it into an innovation program. And we won with this because there’s actually not a lot of innovation that happens in the product world. And so what we created was called the swingy and it converts playground swings into baby swings.

And we ultimately through those conferences a couple years later. We were able to get a purchase order from Babies R Us to go into every single Babies R US store around the world. We very quickly though, realized that being a single SKU company, self-funded, had a lot of hurdles, really, really challenging. And so we ended up licensing that to an outdoor adventure company and taking a step back from it. But during that time, Not only did I have that six month old, but I ended up welcoming another baby into the family. They’re about 22 months apart, my daughters. And so I I launched this first business with two very, very young children. I mean, I had a, a small maternity leave with my first child

in consulting, but I really had none. When I was launching this other business, I took maybe like a week or two off of email, and I had a toddler and a newborn.

Yay. That’s a lot.

it was absolutely a lot. And what I’ve always felt is that passion and persistence are what delivers success when it comes to business.

And you really need both of them. You have to feel really, really passionate about what you’re building because there are a lot of hard times that require persistence and being a mom and having to balance All of, not just the the mental load, but especially when you have young children, the physicality of early motherhood with launching a business required a lot of perseverance. And it also required, benefit of having a partner that was really supportive and helpful as well. And so for us, it looked like not having childcare.

Stepping away from my consulting job that was funding our family, frankly, while my husband was in business school, dipping into that little bit of savings that we had. And so I couldn’t afford childcare working during nap time on weekends. He would take the girls for about four hours every Saturday morning so that I could just be super productive in those four hours. And that’s, that’s what it looked like in the very, very early days for that first business.

I feel like it’s a superpower that you kind of tap into once you have kids. It’s like your efficiency ability. You can get so much done in that 90 minute nap, . I don’t know what happens, but once you have kids, you realize I only have X amount of time and it I have to get eight hours of work done in this little narrow window of time or else it won’t happen.

Absolutely. I mean, we like to say at Motherly that uh, motherhood brings you new superpowers that you didn’t previously have. And these are superpowers, maybe, you know, patience and empathy on one side, but they’re also, they can, they can be new superpowers around productivity, efficiency, ambition even. Motherhood really unlocked a, different level of ambition for me. I really wanted to set. An example for my two daughters that they could do and be anything they wanted, and I felt like they needed to see that in their own home in order to feel it internally themselves.

Yeah. Just kinda going back to your husband helping and the early, my boys are 12 months apart, so I get it. Like when they’re little and it’s a kind of a chaotic time. , do you think that without his help, you could have done that?

I’ve, I’ve written articles on this in the past that I. It is still true today. I believe that the most important professional decision a woman makes is who she marries. If you wanna have a family and you want to have a career, who that that husband is and how they view your value in a professional world and how they value caregiving and how those two things come together is the most critical decision that you make for your career.

Oh, I agree.

And so yes absolutely critical. I could not have done it without his support. And still today with Motherly could not do it. Even with all the extra infrastructure and support we have both inside the company and, you know, supporting our family could not do it without him really seeing value in what I’m doing and making sure that we as a family prioritize my work too.

Well, and I think a lot of the women I’ve talked to before sitting down with you have, we’ve all kind of talked about how we’re uprooting this stigma of what women are expected to do and how all of the women I’ve talked to all have had supportive spouses, and it’s . Incredible. If you give a man a chance to, you know, be engaged and do domestic things and help a child, they want to do it.

They wanna be a part of their kids’ lives. They want to be part of all of the things that are happening. And just previously and in the past and for generations, we didn’t invite them into the process, so they just didn’t do it.

I think there’s a lot of layers to this actually. One is, yes. when you’re picking your spouse looking, if they have a strong professional mother, they are more likely to support you as being a strong, professional mother in that family. And so I think if they’ve had that experience and watched, you know, their own fathers perhaps, and their own mothers navigate this. But what we’re really asking of this generation of men is to largely change the dynamic. In a way to become something and to lead and be intentional in a very different way than how they were raised. You know, my mother always said, , my father you know, he probably changed very few diapers as an example.

Right. And so the vision that we all have for a family is based on what we were raised.

And so I do think that we have an entire generation of millennial and you know, a little Gen X as well, and now into Gen Z that are trying to create a family structure and equity in the family that’s very different than what they were raised in.

And that does in fact , necessitate us to say like, Thank you and congrats because that is a hard thing to do. And patting someone on the back for, for being intentional about this, I think is warranted. And it doesn’t diminish the fact that of course they should be doing it. I think it’s, you know, gratitude is, is, is important.

And I think what the pandemic did, unfortunately It set a lot of that back. Because when we are faced with a crisis and we are in survival mode, we go back to what is comfortable and what is comfortable in the US and in our families, our gender norms.

And so that’s why we saw the great resignation really impact mothers.

It’s why we’ve

seen through our state of motherhood data, the number of, of mothers, you know, returning to being stay-at-home mothers as an example. Those shifts. I think we’re starting to claw our way back from those now, from the pandemic. But it, it is a challenge because I think so often we we do a false equation around childcare and caregiving where we attach the. The price and cost of childcare against the woman’s salary only.

When we’re deciding whether or not it is worth, it’s important for that woman to work as an example. And so , these are cultural shifts that are happening at the family level, at the employer level, and hopefully at some point soon at the governmental level.

That think, will shift things for our own children, creating more structural support for mothers to be working and to be working at the C-suite level.

Yeah, I know there’s a lot that did I guess get set back from the pandemic, like you said, and then all that’s happening with childcare right now and loss of funding and it’s always been common for the woman to take

the gender norms, the gender stereotypes around the default parent being the mother and coming back. And, you know, I don’t see that changing in any given time in, in the very near future. I mean, women, we are the ones that have these babies. Um, I think there, for me personally, like there is a different Almost a primal desire to be closer with my children, I would say, than even my husband has. But it’s, so, it’s less about that. It’s more about his recognition that caregiving is a family requirement and, and value that we have to have, and that that has to be split because he values me in the workforce, not just the example that I’m studying for my children. But also the financial, you know, implications for our family and, you know, he values what goodness, motherly and I, you know, me through motherly are, are putting out into the world too.

Yeah, and I think it takes time. I mean, like you said, it’s not gonna happen anytime it takes. I think I read an article in N P R about education a few years back and it was like three generations to fully like get to where you wanna be. ’cause it’s the first one pioneering it. The middle generation who’s like known what it was and known what it should be.

And then just that last generation who always just knows the transition. And that’s, I mean, that’s a, a long time customarily in America. We don’t have patience for such a long process, I think.

I, I was speaking about this, you know, everyone, of course, this summer the Barbie movie was a big thing and there’s, you know, one, a part of it when America Ferrera says that mothers stand still, so that their daughters can see how far they’ve come and that. to me was really insightful because. I do look at that. I see the women from the seventies and eighties that were really entering the workforce had to sacrifice even having a family in many cases. Right. And they had to take on very stereotypically masculine tendencies in order to do that.

Then you’ve got this generation, our generation that’s out there and we are. Bearing the weight of the world on our shoulders, we, they have shown us that we can and shown the world that women can be incredibly successful professionally. And now we can, quote unquote, have it all by having a family. But we don’t have the structural support or the village of the, you know, the, the past eras to really support us in doing this.

And so we’re burning it at both ends, but I really believe. That this is our role in history, frankly, to have it all to endure, to push through this and to shine a light on the structural challenges that exist, but most importantly, to endure and make it into the C-suite and make it into the halls of Congress so that we can then be the change agents for our children’s generation, where they’ll be able to have it all without giving up Everything.

I was on a, a call with a bunch of C-Suite women the other day, a peer group call, and one of the women said, you can have it all. You just can’t have it all today. And you can have all the same, exactly.

Right. And it’s like, and I think that’s part of the thing too.

You see people maybe having it all, but it is a juggle of today. I have, I’m an exceptional mom today. Like last week I was an exceptional mom and this week I’m like, I don’t know what’s going on. Everyone was sick. So now it’s just chaotic, you know? But ’cause work has to take precedent and I think that it’s figuring that out and like you said, like the next generation, they’re gonna have it less to sacrifice, to

That’s, that is the hope. That’s what we all need to be working toward. I, I really think this is an opportunity for mothers to understand. The weight of our voices and truly require and push for change. And I mean it truly at like the, the governmental level, like we are a massive voting block and we have not fully realized our power, but our motherly state of motherhood, Data shows that mothers are willing to cross party lines for candidates that support paid family leave, affordable childcare, and these things that are really, truly universally seen as, as requirements. And I think that also we’re getting to a place where birth rates, you know, declining a bit and and productivity declining in this country.

I think we’re actually hitting a point where, We need to have women in the workforce or we need to have massive immigration. One of the two has to happen. And the productivity that mothers and women can drive is exceptional. We’re the most educated cohort in the economy right now. We need to find structural ways to make this work.

And so I do think that we’re, we’re hitting a point of where the drivers of change are getting strong enough to really actually turn this corner.

So we lived in Japan for two years. My boys were six months and 18 months old. And it was interesting because they’re declining now, you know, they’re seeing severe decline and so they’re now starting to implement childcare support and all these support structures.

’cause I’ll be honest, it is very difficult to be a mom in Japan. It’s incredibly difficult. And so I understand why women don’t wanna do it. So they’re kind of like what we saw in the seventies, they’re seeing now, right? Where women are sacrificing having children to work and grow careers.

So now they’re trying to incentivize that by each township gives money for kids and they have like subsidized daycare so you can work and you know, like healthcare for children is free and all of these things, I mean, too little, too late in some ways, but at least they’re doing it.

But, It’s so interesting to see somebody like a a nation be like, okay, we have to change all these things and provide all of these infrastructures to support women. ’cause first off, we just need people in the workforce. ’cause we’re rapidly declining as a population, but also no one’s like procreating and they’re not doing that because we’re making it very difficult for them to be more than just a mom.

Well, our economy needs for mothers to be multi-dimensional and to contribute to the economy for economic competitiveness in the future in general. But here’s the thing. We have a model for this. During World War ii, we had nearly universal childcare because we valued and needed women in the workforce.

You could drop your children off at. Free childcare facilities that were run by the government, they would take your kid to the doctor if they , were sick. And when you came back from working in that war factory right during World War ii, you’d pick your kid up and they’d give you a casserole to go home with as well. So we know how to do this um, when we truly value and need women in the workforce.

And so that is the point where let’s not wait until it’s too late. Let’s not wait until

The US loses its economic edge in this. We need to invest in it now.

And the childcare cliff and the inaction by our Congress to address that is the repercussions are going. I mean, they’re just now starting to be felt as childcare. Facilities will start closing as the middle , um, class gets, you know, priced out even more of childcare. We’re gonna see a massive ripple effects on our economy, unfortunately. and the sad thing is they have the data to show that all of that is going to occur and it’s gonna be much more devastating like fiscally that it’s gonna cost the government so much more money to get back to where it was today, just because they couldn’t agree on keeping it. if we’re trying to slow the economy down a little bit, this is one way to do it on the backs of moms.

My husband and I talk a lot about this ’cause in Japan they had what they called a mom shift, and it was for moms that. They didn’t have a tribe to help with their kids. They couldn’t afford afterschool daycare so they could work. And so companies he worked for Amazon at the time and Amazon and Japan has run differently than here.

And so they had a mom shift at Amazon Japan. It was their best workforce. They were like so happy to not have to work at 10:00 PM at a restaurant that they were amazing. And I feel like, and my husband and I talk about this often, and we’re actually working with some lobbyists to do some . Tax breaks for military spouses.

But I feel like military spouses are an incredibly untapped, educated group of women who are like, if you give me some flexibility around what I’m doing, I am incredible. Because they, they want that extra money, but they’re PCSing every two years their husband or spouse or partner is deployed. And so they do have no other option but to do it all.

But if you can tap into that, like, I mean, You are an example of that. You’re a very educated person who was a spouse, and if had your husband stayed in, you would’ve been in this precarious position.

my co-founder Liz Kennedy of Motherly, both our husbands went to the Naval Academy and were officers in the Navy when we had young children. And so we actually back in 2015 when we founded Motherly We specifically were thinking about military spouses, and so we made motherly 100% remote with flexible work hours from 2015 on.

So we were very, very much ahead of the future of work. You know, when the pandemic hit, we didn’t skip a beat, Except for the fact that children were home while there while everyone was working. That was a bit of a challenge productivity wise, but I completely agree with you. It’s, it’s such an untapped resource and it’s largely women and mothers specifically that are impacted by it.

And what we found was that we were able to get incredible top talent by being fully remote back in 2015 and offering the flexible work hours. But we also had amazing loyalty. From our staff too, that really appreciated that. Just saving them the commute time and then allowing them if they had to move to maintain their career. They were just so incredibly grateful for that. And I’ll never forget one woman who, who switched jobs and came to work at Motherly, her daughter told her, she’s like, I love your new job. You’re home for dinner every night. and these kinds of things matter.

And so even for our, our staff that is not, that are not parents you know, it allows them the opportunity to, to focus a little bit more on their life. Like, go take that yoga class first thing in the morning instead, right? Like save that time. and and I think look at your, your staff as holistic and not just showing up for this one sliver of thing, which is work you can get real returns on that.

Yeah, I agree. I think if you look at people as a whole, , if you, you know, they’re not just a cog in your conglomerate wheel, then and you get more out of it if you don’t have constant churn and having to, I mean, it’s so expensive to hire talent, especially good talent. So meet them where they’re at.

So you guys did do remote work, when you were starting motherly, was your husband helping a lot with the kids at that time, or how was that Juggle Looking?

So when we launched Motherly, .He had just left business school and we were living in Manhattan. He was working in finance, so very, very long hours. And we lived in a one bedroom apartment with the four of us. It was 710 square feet. our daughters had the, the bedroom, and then we treated the rest of the apartment as a studio effectively with like our double bed. In the studio that my husband and I slept in for a year. And so, no he was not able to help a ton with the girls in the very, very early days. Being in, you know, just right outta business school and in finance and working for a bank. And think one of the challenges for moms particularly is that not only might you be leaving your job in order to launch something as an entrepreneur, but you’re also leaving your job and. Also still having to have childcare

in some way. And so it’s this double whammy that hits. And so I did have a little bit of childcare. My eldest at that time was two and in a preschool. And so she was in preschool. The other one was still doing nap. And just trying to, I. To fit it all together as much as we possibly could. And yes, again, on the weekends, those four hours for, for many years were those four hours on a Saturday morning were kind of the go-to for me. And I will say I was a little younger then. It was eight and a half years ago. I was definitely like they would go to bed at seven 30, I guess back then maybe.

And. And then we would have a quick dinner, and then I would work from like eight to 11 every night too. And so I think part of it also is just when you’re, again, super passionate and super persistent and where failure is not an option. You, you find the time to, to make it work.

Yeah. I feel like too, when you’re starting something and you’re like looking at your kids and you’re like, I gave up. Comfort and security in this career. Like, I have to figure it out. , I feel like as a mom, it’s that you just do it for your kids too. Part of you is like, well, this is for them and I’m gonna do it no matter what.

And I think that’s that motherly instinct that kind of kicks in and I don’t know. What is that like now that your girls are older, are they, do they look at what you’ve done? Do you feel like. Your younger years were lacking or you missed anything ’cause you were doing all of that.

I actually feel differently. I feel like, maybe it’s different now because there is, there are so many more. Knowledge worker, remote roles available, but I really felt like because I was launching a business, and there’s a lot of agency that you get when you launch your own business. Like the, the meeting doesn’t happen unless I’m on the call, right?

So it works around my schedule in a way. And the fact that it was fully remote, I think I was much more present actually in the earlier days for my children. I, because of my consulting days, I have an ability to context switch really well. And so my husband’s not as good at this. He will readily admit if something, if I’m on a work call and then that work call ends and then I’m in mom mode. I. I can really just close that door and not think about the work thing and just be in that. So I’m very good at the context switching of things. And that made a huge difference because there was a lot of context switching, needing to happen when you’re launching a new business and around your kids a lot.

And so I, I think we all look back and say, oh, I could’ve enjoyed those early years more or better. But I feel really blessed that motherly has afforded me the ability to be more present with my children. And now that they’re older. So my daughters are nine and a half and 11 and a half.

Um,. got a middle schooler for the first time. We moved to Park City um, Utah during the pandemic to get our children in school full-time in person. We moved from California where schools were shut down and I knew that our family and that motherly couldn’t work if my kids weren’t in school.

And so we, we made a very massive shift. We’d never even been to Utah in our lives. And so They’ve stayed in school and then we actually moved them to a school now down in Salt Lake where they’re, I drop them off at seven 20 in the morning at the bus, and then I pick them up at four 20. And so that’s a full day of work, right in that timeframe that I can get things done that allow me to be much more present in the evenings.

Last year we had an au pair . This is our first year, not, you know, having a no parent, having no childcare, but they’re at that stage now where we can do that. And so, the seasons evolve and change and, some things are harder, bigger kids, bigger problems in some ways, but the physicality of it is a lot easier now.

And so we no longer need help on like the childcare side of things. We need household support now instead.

Yeah. What were the supports that you had you finally had supports, what did that look like?

Yeah, so, it started out with like just, you know, no childcare at all, launching motherly to 10 hours a week of childcare. I mean, I was definitely paying more for childcare than we were paying ourselves with Motherly for a bit. And again, that came from the privilege of having a spouse that was able to work during that time and helps support us.

Not everyone has that. And then It was putting them in preschool and then, you know, still keeping the 10 hours a week. And then it was having an au pair. Which while that wasn’t like ideal when we were living in pretty small spaces in California it was a way to make it work that had like the flexibility that we needed and au pair. And it’s definitely much more

You know, there’s always trade offs and so we lost a little bit of that, like family time by ourselves together as a unit. But we got a ton of flexibility and a very affordable in that way. And some language skills for our children. We’ve leveraged au pairs like three different years. We’ve never had besides the au pair, like a full-time nanny or anything like that. Because as motherly was growing, it was kind of growing as my children grew and we started to be able to have school as a backstop for childcare for us, which is why the pandemic was so devastating and, and required such a massive move for our family. So that is the, how the childcare side of it has shifted over time. And now, you know, my 11 and a half year old is a mother’s helper for other people’s children. So it really is, is fun to watch how that shifts and changes over time. We’ve never lived near family and so we’ve never had that backstop, which There are days that I really wish that we did, we had grandparents, you know, around to do that. I think it’s, it’s hard when you move around for work and for school and your family stays where they are. That’s, that’s part of that village you just don’t have access to. And so I’ve always been a little envious of those that can call up grandma to, to come watch the kiddos a bit. I know that comes with its own trade-offs, of course. And, and then beyond that, it has started to be, as motherly has grown as our staff has grown. And as we’ve raised more capital, we’ve closed our series B in May of this year. are. Able to afford additional support for our families. My husband’s career has changed, so we have a cleaner that comes, you know, of course once a week and we have actually a house assistant that comes about nine hours a week and helps do all the laundry and empty dishwashers and just keeps things to, um, for us. And we do a lot of like meal services as well.

To help feed the family. I like to cook. This isn’t my season to cook that time will come. And so for me it’s been just leaning into the things, prioritizing what’s really important, and right now it’s like FaceTime with my children and

I’d rather sit there and be with them than making dinner, unless I’m making dinner with them. So it’s, it’s really just having those trade offs. And I think that’s huge, like being able to recognize what season you’re in and then just accept it and take the help that you need in that season so you can have that quality time with the kids. ’cause that you can’t get back, you know, And, I think it’s also, we put a lot of pressure on ourselves as mothers to, to be there all the time. And there’s data now to suggest it’s nine minutes.

And so to alleviate all of the pressure for all of your listeners, nine minutes a day, if you can be fully present with your children, three minutes when they first wake up, dedicated time, no phone, really looking at them and being engaged with them. Three minutes when they come home from school or you come home from work, like really like present with them and then three minutes as they go to bed. That’s it. That’s, I mean, of course you wanna do more if you can, but if you can hit nine minutes a day of really feeling truly present and engaged with your children, that connection will be very, very strong and like you can still be winning.

And I feel like that’s what we all wonder, right? When we’re like, do I do it, do I make the leap and like pursue my passion and my career and also um, raise kids, but will they still love me?

The answer is yes, and they’ll be so proud of you. And as you get into these new seasons too my 11 and a half year old’s not there yet, but you know, through motherly I get to kind of peek around the corner and it’s soon, it’s gonna be time for her to really separate her identity from me. Um, will it’s not that the connection gets broken, but the, the elastic band between us is gonna stretch further and. She’s going to need to see me as someone as more than her mom and the ability to have a career and to have other things that, that she can, you know, see me as a multidimensional woman that doesn’t only exist for her, I think is really, really healthy.

Um, I think it’s going to allow our relationship to have more dimensions to it. It’s going to allow a level of respect.

To be there as she grows. And you know, when she, I think in many ways, like they of course sometimes say like, oh, we wish you could like, be at school volunteering like some of the other moms. And we talk about it, we talk about the trade-offs financially. We talk about the trade-offs for me and my own mental health, we talk about how, you know, mommy helps all the moms around the world through motherly and they’re really proud of that. My, I mean, it’s an amazing thing when your daughter. Is supposed to create like a baseball card, kind of like trading card thing of a person that they admired, and she wrote it about me,

Oh, I love that and I love hearing when you kind of get to see like all the sacrifice or all the things that you negotiated when they were little, you start to see them grow and be like, oh, wow, it, it. They turned out great, or I am doing the right thing for them.

I mean, I’m still white knuckling it. Like the first 10 years are like the physicality, like keeping them alive, like physically. The next 10 years are about emotional and and mental health and wellbeing in that way. And so, I’m, I’m buckling up for the, the, the teen ride.

My perspective with my, children has always been that I just can’t wait to see who they become. And I think that that perspective has given me an ability to not hold so tight onto a certain vision of something and that has created. Like real space to prioritize our relationship because I’m just trying to always be relevant and meet them where they are.

And you know, it might’ve been Sophia the first, when they were three, and now it’s, you know, ballet and golf and things like that. And so it’ll continue to evolve and my interests have to change with theirs so that I can remain relevant.

The piece of advice I would give any mom, especially with young children, is don’t underestimate yourself.

You have gained superpowers that have so many professional applications to them and. Again, know the strength and power of you and of all moms. Right now, women for the first time in history are more educated than men. It is not a nice to have to hire or to promote a woman. It is a business imperative.

Women owned businesses tend to be more successful as well, and so like . There are winds beneath you, right? Like ride that, like own that power. And don’t underestimate yourself. It’s not gonna be easy. But is anything worth doing ever easy? Is motherhood easy? No. Through motherhood. These, these superpowers are again, like persistence and, and an understanding of empowerment and that you can, you can do, you are a creator. Like go out there and create in another way. Let this be fuel for you. And so just don’t estimate yourself and, and, and speak up.

If you’re in a corporate situation and you’re trying to move and, and move your career forward, like use your voice.

it is not doing a favor to you to have. More flexibility or to have like a remote opportunity or to advance you in your career and provide professional development things.

These are things that this business and all businesses need to do in order to recruit and retain top talent and the top talent. Our mothers,

Yep. I love it. Thank you.

of course, thank

Thanks. Yeah, thanks for sitting down with me. I loved it and I love, you’re a few steps ahead of me with kids, so it’s good to hear that it all works out in the flesh.