Good morning all. Welcome to the session, Balancing Act, navigating motherhood and leadership. Super excited to be joining you all to discuss about this topic that is near and dear to me. I'll start a little bit about myself.I'm a mother of two very beautiful boys who leave no stones unturned to constantly keep me on my toes vibe to a wonderful husband who is my best advocate and the best partner I can ask for yet craves for those uninterrupted moments of love and care that we used to have with four kids, daughter to two aging parents who are the best support system that I could ever have yet in need of a lot of emotional support during this phase of their life.

Last but not the least. I'm a leader at box leading a team of world class consultants who need me there to be their visionary driving the team forward into the next phase of evolution and growth. Is it easy to balance it all? Oh, do I think I feel I'm doing the best job at balancing it all? No. Do I experience moments where I feel guilty for not spending enough time with my Children or for not being able to attend their events due to work demands? Yeah. Do I feel there is hardly any time left in the day to do it all? Perhaps? What have I experienced? Feeling stereotyped and biased being an executive mom where people assume that I'm perhaps less committed to my job or unable to balance my work and family responsibilities effectively.

Yeah. Have I often felt the lack of enough support to help me do it all? Yeah. Have I experienced burnout trying to juggle the demands of work and parenting? Yeah. Do I want to become better balancing it all? Yes, of course. I'm sure all of you who are attending this session were moms and people who have seen up, you know, people like us in your work environment or um you know, outside of work environment, being in the same ship that I am or a different board, but similar, the reality is that this is now more than ever very important in terms of balancing motherhood with work because it is a prevalent thing with a steady increase in women, joining the workforce and especially entering leadership positions.

And that's probably why I decided to talk and introspect about this topic with all you wonderful uh women and men attending the session in the tech leadership Global conference that women in tech has provided us motherhood. Perhaps parenthood is the most beautiful gift to humankind from nature.

Nothing less than a miracle. The first time you hold those tiny hands, there is magic that you experience like never before and your life transforms forever. Because with every child born on this earth is also born, a parent. Speaking of transformation, a mother's life changed it forever.

Starting the day she conceived the child both physically and emotionally and for a working mom. That transformation and change now has to find a way to mold into her work life. Until then there were fewer dimensions to her life. And now suddenly those dimensions and priorities start to transform to an amplifying a lot of cases to even get into the workforce. Every woman faces several un several U challenges that she overcomes climbing into the leadership ladder has its own unique set of challenges that she faces and wins over with motherhood opens up a completely new dimension which has its own physical and emotional challenges.

The biggest of all is how does she blend this with the current place at work? But what that she has worked so hard and overcome so many challenges to reach the most acute challenge she faces in this transition and journey is of guilt as working moms. We are chasing the balance of working a job that we want and being the mom that we envisioned. How many times have we found ourselves feeling bad about letting our kids team or boss down and also feeling guilty about not practicing self care, remorse for not helping aging parents enough or embarrassment about admitting our stress. Well, the next 15 minutes, we're gonna discuss about some strategies to start helping free ourselves of this guilt and finding a, a balance if not trying to find a balance in navigating motherhood and leadership at work starting today even better, starting this moment. So let's get started.

The first strategy is self empathy. We need to start with releasing ourselves from guilt that requires making a promise to stop criticizing ourselves for our decisions and situation because that guilt can soon spiral out of control and transform into shame, which can be emotionally distressing and make it feel like a bad mother, a bad employee or a friend.

Instead, let's remind us the reasons that led us to making those choices. Whenever we catch our thinking, I feel guilty about, let's replace it with. I made that decision because and move ahead with a positive mindset. Friends learning to practice self care is equally a part of self empathy. So important to take care of ourselves, physically, mentally and emotionally, which means getting enough sleep, exercising, regularly eating healthily and taking time to recharge. Bottom line. We must be prioritizing and taking care of ourselves first.

Just like when we are instructed to put that oxygen mask during an emergency on an airplane, just like that, put the oxygen mask on yourself first before you're able to take care of your family. Because that's the only way you can take care of your family, both at work as well as at your home. Because to me, you, you're actually working with two different families. Right. Next one, it that I want to talk about is aligning our priorities with our core values. It's time for us to revisit our values and start making them our top priorities. For instance, if family time is at the top of our list and we don't, you know, get enough of it. Let's get rid of ourselves of the guilt by consciously finding ways to spend more time with our family. Let's all learn to practice saying no, it's hard, believe me, I'm not good at it either, but I'm trying to get good at it practicing to say no to unnecessary commitments that you do not see aligning with your priorities is super important. In some cases, it may not mean that you're not able to make it to every single happy hour with your coworkers or maybe sitting on your neighborhood at two a board, you know, just try to align your values with your priorities.

And therefore, you know, let's try to find that time. Let's involve our Children in tasks. We already do like competing chores making meals, taking the dog for a walk. Let's use our weekends intentionally. Let's dedicate blocks of time for our family rather than the errands.

I know it's tough but a change needs to happen and how we look at things right. Let's talk about the next strategy. Ask for help. Asking for help can be a very difficult task for many women, including myself. It took me a really, really long time to start asking for help. Because instead of seeking assistance, we working moms, we add to our stress by just trying to do everything on our own, eventually realizing that it's not feasible. So asking for help is a skill that requires practice. But believe me, once you take the first step, others around you will begin to do the same. Let's reach out to our neighbors, our friends, our parents of our kids, our in-laws our own parents aftercare programs. Friends believe me over time asking for help will become a reciprocal relationship which basically benefits everyone involved. So yes, let's please ask for help. Remember, we cannot do it all and now that we know that we gotta be asking for help, I want to be speaking about this little topic which again, it's not um Rita made, but it's research that tells us this decades ago, the concept of a good enough parent was introduced by attachment researchers like John Bulby.

According to their research, parents must be emotionally present, provide comfort to their child. Understand their child's emotions, show delight in their child's presence and support their child to establish a healthy insecure attachment. This means that parents are caring and connected with their child without compromising their personal needs and well-being. So instead of striving to be the perfect mom who can do everything she should be doing and is praised for her selflessness. Let's remember the basics and focus on being good enough parents who can take care of themselves while still maintaining a connection with their Children. Bottom line, putting additional pressure on ourselves may not be necessary. After all, we're better off striving to be good enough parents rather than the perfect one. So yes, time to take the pressure off the next strategy. Stay away from any form of social media that brings you down. How many times have you felt a sudden arousal of guilt or negative emotions about you as a mom or a leader by a social media post? I have been the number of times and it's time to prioritize a mental health as a mother. It's so important to stay away from any form of social media that brings you down or makes you feel inadequate. That could mean to unfollow accounts, groups or pages that trigger negative feelings or make you compare yourself to others?

What if we tried limiting our overall time on social media, our own emotional well being so we can focus on being the best mom, we can be for our Children while being completely present to them. Time to retrospect our personal social media strategy. My friends, well, now that we spoke about social media, let's talk about workplace, choosing the right workplace or changing the place you work into the right one is so important. And believe me, the change starts with us. So choosing the right place to my opinion is one of the most important decisions for us in our parenting journey. After all, we spend in most cases, more than 40 hours a week at work. And what happens at work has a direct or an indirect impact on us being an even good enough mom to our Children. If you're seeing people at your workplace, making assumptions about your commitment because you have Children or are seeing limited opportunities such as high profile assignments or promotions because you are perceived as being less available or less committed to your job or lack.

Or you see a lack of flexibility to manage your competing demands such as flexible work arrangements of family friendly policies. If you're seeing or experiencing any or related issues, it's time for you to reconsider the team or organization that you're working for and start advocating for yourself and others by speaking out against the discrimination and bias and pushing for more family friendly policies.

Remember, as moms be working on building the next generation of humans while you're also contributing to your mission and goal at work and the world around you owes you in several ways for doing that. So the least minimum way that your workplace can help you is not forming prejudices against you as a working mom. And if they are, then you got to stand up and advocate for yourself and every mom around you. Well, now we're ready to raise a voice against any form of prejudice against women. I want to focus inward in a lot of cases, I've seen that we as leaders and, um, also being moms have self doubt of being able to be a successful leader. And I've seen, you know, executive mom falling into an imposter syndrome where they don't feel good enough to be a leader because just because they are a mom. When I experienced that in my day to day, this is what I reminded myself. Motherhood makes me become a better leader. Motherhood teaches valuable skills and provides me with unique learning opportunities. That actually makes me a freaking good leader. You know why multitasking speak about multitasking. That is so important for a leader. Mothers are experts at juggling multiple tasks at once. Empathy.

It's the basic need for every leader to work with their teams. Mothers develop a strong sense of empathy as they respond to their children's emotional needs. Communication, mothers need to communicate effectively with their Children to understand their needs and to be helping them navigate challenges.

And you know what communication is the most important skill that the leader needs to have. Flexibility. Motherhood requires a great deal of flexibility as children's needs can change quickly and unexpectedly and guess what? Leaders need to be flexible all the time. They need to be ready to adapt pivot and make sure that they enroll people into their decisions. Right? Patience is another trait. Motherhood often requires a great deal of patience. And if Children may require repeated instructions or are taking longer time to complete tasks and same for leaders, leaders require a lot of patience to be able to sit there and to be able to drive their teams motherhood. In my opinion, is a nature's MB A. And in my opinion, organizations can hugely benefit from leaders who have undergone or undergoing this journey mother who just makes you a freaking good leader. And that's, that's one takeaway. I want all leader moms and executive moms attending the session um to, you know, take away with them, seek out role models. I mean, I cannot say enough about seeking out role models, we gotta be seeking out successful women who have balanced work and family responsibilities to inspire and motivate, motivate us, right?

Inspiration and motivation are always going to be the key factors that can help executive moms pursue their career goals while also being able to fulfill responsibilities as parents. Another piece, I'd also like piece of advice I'd also like to give is we should be building supportive networks such as working parent groups or mentors to share experience and insights and learn from others. It's extremely important for us to have that, you know, opportunity to share and to learn from each other. So, you know, seek out for role models, there are a lot of role models out there. You just have to go and save for uh these role models and find time to network with them. All right. Last, but not the least. Let's focus on impact, let's focus on the positive impact that we are making through our work and by raising these wonderful human beings who will soon be changing this world in amazing ways. Do not forget that we are building the next generation of leaders both at home and work. Are you going to feel underappreciated or even unappreciated for it sometimes?

Yes, but let that not undermine you in any way of the contributions that you're making in making this world a better place. We're all rock star and let's be proud of what we are doing as a working mommy day in and day out and to everyone attending the session. If even if you're not a mom, if there's one thing I can ask all of you today, please show some extra gratitude and appreciation to all the moms around you at your workplace. When you go back after the session, mother's day around the corner is the perfect timing. All right. Speaking of time, we're almost at time. I just want to thank you all for joining me today in this retrospection and wishing all your moms a great motherhood journey as a working mom to everyone else in your efforts towards advocating and supporting for working moms power to you. Thank you everyone. Happy to take questions if any. Thank you, Artie. Thank you, Christine. Thank you Diane. Thank you for making the time to come attend this session guys. Thank you, Noah. Thank you Olivia. Oh, thank you, Sherry. Thank you, Roger. Well, once again, happy mother's day to all of you.

And yes, do not forget to take care of yourself self pampering number one step towards becoming a suc successful mom. So I hope you all take that time this mother's day and yeah, and you know, uh spread the love.