Works For Everyone

I first had the idea for a Part Time Power List in 2018. I had seen similar ideas in other markets and knew that it was what NZ needed. I even wrote a proposal and shopped it round. But nothing happened.

And the idea still sat with me. It sat with me for 6 years. Something was blocking me from taking action. So the idea stayed sitting on my shoulders through a global pandemic, as I took the most courageous decision I’ve made in my life and as I built my business from nothing into something.

In her book “Big Magic”, Elizabeth Gilbert, says that ideas are like physical matter. They are all around us and sometimes they settle on us. If the idea is meant for us, the idea will stay. But if it is not meant for us, it will go to someone else to make happen. My idea stayed with me. So I knew I had to do something with it.

Turns out, this was the year. Turns out, yesterday was the day. 6 years later. Remember that Instagram makes things look easy and you don’t see the journey to get there. So I wanted to share my story and share this photo of me taken today. I’m proud of myself for taking action. Finally! 😂

It’s here! Today we launched the inaugural NZ Part Time Power List, a list that celebrates employers and individuals that are changing the system by proving that you can build your career through meaningful part time roles.

The stories that all 25 Part Time Power Players have so generously shared are the gold in the list. In their own words they have talked about the difference part time work has made and also gifted their tips on how to make it work.

You can’t be what you can’t see and now we can see it! Check out the full list on our website, click on the link in our bio.

The more decisions we make during the week, the less energy we have. When we are feeling overwhelmed it can be because of the hundreds of micro decisions we need to make as our family’s chief operating officer. If we can reduce decision fatigue, we will have more energy and feel less overwhelm.

I have always done a menu plan on a Sunday night but the actual thinking/decision of the meal would drive me 🍌. Looking through cook books, keeping scraps of newspaper recipes, magazines sitting on my table, and screenshots on my phone. Trying to find meals that we would all eat. I wasn’t asking for much 😂.

But a couple of years ago, I transformed my Sunday afternoons. I decided to reduce decision fatigue. To stop putting myself under pressure to come up with new, delicious, nutritious and cost effective meals. I wrote down a list of the 10 meals that I know we all eat and now I just rotate that list. That is all we eat. I know it might sound boring but it has taken a massive weight off my mind. And love seeing how many times makes the list.

Think about what decisions you could remove or automate this week? It can make a massive difference to your mental load.

I have also reduced decision fatigue for my clothes by hiring to do a wardrobe audit, help me put together outfits and then photograph me. They are all printed out in my wardrobe so I always know what to wear. It is kind of like getting your toddler’s clothes ready for daycare but BETTER!! Recommend!

If you know me, you’ll know I’m a Swiftie. So I was beyond delighted to get this FABULOUS email from Jordyn who had recently finished our “Returning with Confidence” programme. Time is precious when you are a working parent so the fact that she used her time to create this masterpiece is incredibly special. Thankyou Jordyn, we’re just like Leo, in Saint-Tropez.

And if you ever have children and return to work, I’m the coach you need.

Happy Mother’s Day to everyone who mothers. I hope that you all know that your mothering love illuminates and warms the whole world. Mums are the hubs of our families, communities and society. We rock!

Back to work tomorrow after the best summer break I can remember for a long time. Plenty of swimming, seafood platters, sunshine, special people, special places, smashing tennis and sunrise walks. Onwards and upwards!



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And just like that, I’m signing off for a couple of weeks. Another year that I have been lucky enough to do work that I love with clients that I love. There have been tears, laughter, aha moments, podcasts! and courageous conversations. Thankyou to everyone has shared one of those experiences with me.

Meri Kirihimete, kia haumaru te moho, e hoa mā.

Merry Christmas and stay safe my friends.

If you’re making a list and checking it twice, make sure you get some presents as well. These are the books I have loved this year.

🌟 Did You Know That Your Employer Can Book Me To Speak To Your Team? 🌟

I know from first hand experience and from coaching hundreds of parents that working and having a family is hard. My talks and workshops are grounded in the tradeoffs, sometimes brutal ones, that we make every day. And they are pumped with practical ideas on how parents and leaders can best navigate this system so that work can work for everyone.

As an expert in supporting working parents, I can speak on areas such as:

🚀 Practical Strategies for Thriving as a Working Parent
🚀 Getting In the Driver's Seat of Your Career
🚀 Sharing the Mental and Physical Load at Home
🚀 How People Leaders Can Transform the Working Parent Experience
🚀 How to Smash the Motherhood Penalty

My sessions are great additions to the days when your full team come together in the office, help to build community and are in investment in everyone's personal development.

Book me as your next speaker if you want to equip your team with actionable insights and inspiration. Message me to book in a time. 🚀

The most beautiful description of the mental load from

“Silence on the outside. Sirens on the inside.” So powerful.

Thankyou for your words they help us to feel seen.

One of my favourite poems is called "Pessimism is for Lightweights" by the fabulous Salena Godden. It can feel so hard sometimes to be optimistic but for me there is no other choice. It is easy to be pessimistic. It is much harder to be optimistic. And I choose to walk the hard path. That is where the good stuff is. That is where there is a better life for all.

I know we can smash the motherhood penalty and when we do, I've taken a few notes about what the new system will look like. Let me know what feature you like the best?

I finished WIFEDOM this weekend, an extraordinary book by Anna Funder. Superbly written and uniquely constructed, it is based around letters that Eileen O’Shaughnessy, George Orwell’s forgotten first wife, wrote to her friend shining a light on her life, what it meant to be a writer and what it meant to be a wife.

This quote stood out for me as I see this almost every day when I am coaching working mothers. This complexity of it all. The secrecy of it. The lived insanity of it. The stories we tell ourselves.

My clients will often open up by saying "we split things 50/50, I'm pretty lucky". But then as they talk more, it becomes clear to me that it is not split this way. They are the ones sitting at the orthodontist/booking the dog into the kennels/folding laundry/planning meals/organising the counsellor/researching why the 4 year old has started waking up at night/chopping carrots as a healthy after school snack/putting their name down for cooking a meal for a friend with cancer.

"Wifedom speaks to the unsung work of women everywhere today, while offering a breathtakingly intimate view of one of the most important literary marriages of the 20th century. It is a book that speaks to our present moment as much as it illuminates the past."

Would recommend reading this book. A few great podcasts and interviews with Anna on the internet - search for them.

I've had an idea for a podcast for a long time. Elizabeth Gilbert says that ideas are all around us, sometimes they land on us and wait for us to use them. If we don't pick them up, then we were not the right person for that idea so they float away again. But this idea stuck with me. It wanted me to make it. So I did.

And now, I am beyond delighted to introduce you to the first season of "How To Smash the Motherhood Penalty".

In this series my aim was to get curious about the system that creates the motherhood penalty and curious about the solutions that are going to smash it. I will talk to some of the experts in NZ who are actively smashing it, find out their story and figure out what we can learn from them. It will be a punchy, practical, and peppered with laughter podcast that equips listeners with ideas they can take back to their homes and workplaces to help smash the motherhood penalty.

In the first episode I set the scene for what the motherhood penalty is, share my story and provide some observations on what I think creates a system where when we become parents, only mothers pay a penalty with their career, income and retirement savings.

You can listen to the full episode on Spotify and Apple Podcasts - links below:

https://lnkd.in/gx-uPSfZ

https://lnkd.in/gE3GKv9s

Please let me know what you think and if you enjoy it, please share with others who may also want to become agitators for change in the system.

Stand by for more episodes - we are talking to some AMAZING people - get excited people!

This is your reminder that monitoring whether the milk is about to run out is a job in itself. As is texting someone to ask them to buy milk.

This is your reminder that at home we need owners not helpers.

If you are not the lead caregiver in your house because of the nature of paid work you engage in, there are still ways you can provide support to the parent who is often sole charge and on deck 24x7. One small way is to "own" monitoring when milk will run out and "own" buying more. It is the small things that add up to create a equitable load load at home. What other small things does your partner own that help to share the load?

The Motherhood Penalty often starts before you even have a child. It starts when you make assumptions about how it will be possible to have a family and career within your current employer. It starts when you look around at how other parents are managing it. It starts when you self select yourself out of leadership or career growth because it will be too demanding. It starts when you hear side conversations about a colleague who never makes team drinks on a Friday afternoon.

It becomes part of the mental load you carry. I say, share that mental load!

If you have a partner, then start a conversation on how your family will work if you have a baby. Or in this client's case - a third baby. These thoughts can't just sit in a mother's mind . The conversation might go something like:

1) How will our family work if we have a baby?
2) What impact will it have to our careers and how will we manage this together?
3) What can we both own in terms of the work at home required to keep a family of five operational?
4) What systems can we put in place to keep us honest to what we have agreed? For example: Sunday night weekly check-ins, a weekly family routine.

Love this from James Clear. We often think we need more information, or another qualification, or just one more online certificate. But what if all we needed was courage?

Working and having a family is hard.

As a Mum of three, I have had first hand experience of how hard it is. When my children were young, it felt like I was constantly in the fog of war. I couldn't chart a course for how I was going to stay the distance. So I get why working mothers off ramp themselves into more junior roles, to ones with no people leadership or out of the workforce altogether.

I get it. And at the same time it deeply fatigues me. We can't continue to be surprised at the glacial progress of women in senior leadership if we are not providing support at the very time they need it. The time when they are navigating a system that does not value caregiving. The time when relationships come under pressure like never before. And the time when they often begin to doubt themselves.

It is one of the reasons I pivoted my career in my late forties to launch a business that provides a raft of services that put a care wrap around women at the hardest time of their careers. Coaching, Returning with Confidence Programmes, Workshops and Speaking. This is hard and we can do hard things. If you want to put a care wrap around your working parents so that they continue to stay in your leadership pipeline please reach out to me.

If you are looking for your next watch and you are in NZ - then it must be "Maternal" on On Demand. It is the story of three doctors in a London hospital as they return to work after having a baby. Three different lives but so many things in common. Many returning mums will identify with their experiences - doubting yourself, doing it all, being sidelined at work as you return, trying to make sense of being ambitious for your career at the same time as looking after a sick child, the mental load and the incredibly nourishment that female friends provide. I watched it in two nights - cried, laughed, got angry and felt seen. Let me know what you think.

It can be easy to think that we need to justify what we ask for, what we need or what is going to work for us. But sometimes these justifications distract and dilute our power.

Sometimes the reasons we use for why we can't make the meeting at 5pm, make us feel somehow in the wrong. Sometimes the justifications that we offer up are long, wordy and risk mis-interpretation of what we are actually asked for in the first place.

Next time you are asking for what you need, try asking for what you need.
Full stop. Silence.

Live in that silence. Wallow in it. Breathe it in. Smile through it.

"I can't make the team meeting at 2pm but will catch up with Amy on my actions."
"I need your help to clarify the outcomes you are expecting from this role."
"Please can you own organising the school holiday programmes for the kids this July?"
"I need to leave at 5pm today."
"Thanks for asking and it is a no from me."

If those statements feel too tame for you, remember that no is a complete sentence.

Kia ora tātou. Thank you for following my page and for all the messages which I love getting and using lots of 💖😂😍 to reply to! I also love it when people come up to me when they see me in the wild. So permission to say hello if you see me grocery shopping at Pak n Save Royal Oak or in the queue at Kmart St Lukes!

Wanted to introduce myself for any new followers. I'm a Mum of three teenagers (they are mostly nocturnal) and one miniature black Schnauzer called Yoda. For the first 25 years of my career I was in the corporate world doing strategy stuff but about 4 years ago, I started my second career which was born out of the insight that working and having a family is hard. Sometimes impossible.

Works for Everyone was created to support working parents with coaching, workshops, advocacy and inspiration. I am lucky enough to work with some of NZ's largest and most progressive employers when it comes to putting a care wrap around their new parents including BNZ, Fonterra, Chorus, One NZ, Fletchers, ANZ and NZDF. I guess my clients would say that I am well known for my unique "Returning with Confidence" programme - a blend of coaching, workshops and accountability that welcomes parents back to the workplace at a transformational time in their lives.

What else would you like to know about me? My next career will be as a Dahlia Flower Farmer, I bake a delicious Louise Slice, pink is my colour, "Working Girl" was the movie that inspired me when I was a teenager (thank you Tess McGill) and I am a lifelong Swiftie (just give the scarf back Jake).

Photo Credit to the amazing team of Nykie and Helen at SheShoots
Make-Up by the talented Ruby Beauty NZ

This is not an uncommon thought for working mothers in cis-het relationships. Others include: "I'm a control freak as I have specific ways I like to do things so it is easier to do it myself" or "he is just not that good at doing it".

These stories that we tell ourselves make me deeply uncomfortable.

First of all, we tell ourselves that it is our problem that we have requirements for a job.

Secondly we are observing our partners weaponising their incompetence to get out of doing work at home. They are capable of doing a job at home to a certain standard. We know this because if they get a new task at work or a new area of responsibility, they will ask questions like "what does good look like?" or "what outcomes do I need to be delivering?". So why is this not the conversation at home? Work is work. And there is a lot to of it to do at home.

Thirdly, we can do anything but we can't do everything. So telling ourselves that we can may lead to exhaustion and resentment.

Please know that you are not a control freak. It is ok to have requirements for how a job is done. It is ok to have needs. Often these "ways of doing things" have been crafted over hours and hours of you being in sole charge of the children and the household. Hours and hours of experience, of failing, of learning and of doing your best.

Want more from your partner. Want a partner that wants what you want.

When I set up my business, I did it to put a care wrap around working parents, working mums in particular. My own lived experience was that working and having a family was hard. My business was born from that insight. If we don't put a care wrap around women in the middle of their career, at the hardest part, we can't be surprised if they are not there at the top.

So getting client feedback like this is incredibly gratifying for me. To know that I am supporting working mums and that this support is making a difference. That makes my job the best in the world.

If you want to me to work with your working parents in 2023, there are five ways I can help:

1) August 2023 Returners Programme - registrations now open.
2) In-House Returners Programme - run exclusively for your parents.
3) Workshops - punchy, practical and peppered with laughter.
4) Conference Speaking - what is working for working parents.
5) 1:1 Coaching - on a wait list for the reminder of 2023

In 1988, Marilyn Waring, a New Zealand economist and legend of a human being, published the groundbreaking "If Women Counted: A New Feminist Economics", a critical examination of the United Nations System of National Accounts.

She found that unpaid work was the largest single sector in the economy. That unpaid work was the unmeasured backbone of the NZ economy and mainly completed by women. That this unpaid work enabled paid work to be completed.

In 2023, this work is still unpaid, still unmeasured, still the backbone of our economy and is still performed largely by women.

Sooner or later there will be another headline about the small numbers of women CEOs we have. These stories, numbers, reckons and quotes don't feel like they are changing the system.

Thinking about it doesn't change it. Nothing changes if nothing changes.

What if we stopped the headlines on how many women CEOs we have and started reporting on how many men took 6 months of parental leave last year. Or creating stories on how a business has re-scoped all their GM roles into part time roles. Or highlighting those employers that offer on-site school holiday programmes.

Instead of measuring the outcome, what would happen if we measured and profiled the enablers for all parents to thrive? It is the enablers that need our attention.

BTW - last year, 2% of govt paid parental leave was taken by fathers.

I've noticed in a common thread amongst my returning parents and that is the anxiety they are feeling as they return back to the office after working from home. What are you noticing in your workplace?