So hence the title of my presentation today, you don't have to choose, redefining balance, ambition, and care. Thanks for that great intro, Anna.To just further build on that, my name is Vanessa Manns. I'm a career coach at Carnegie Mellon University's Tepper School of Business, where I coach master's business students on product I'm building, careers in product and technology. And just to lead off, something that I care very deeply about and the reason why I'm talking to you about this today is, one of my core values is doing the right things for the right reasons. And this value isn't one that I woke up yesterday and decided on. It really took about twenty five plus years as a caregiver, and then, you know, my career, which has spanned over twenty five years in marketing product and innovation.

And so it's the reason that I feel confident telling you today that you don't have to choose. You can do both. So it's a little bit early where I am. I'm on the East Coast. I think some of you are it might even be earlier in the day for you. So we're gonna get our brain juices flowing with a quick activity. So I want you to just think about and write down if you have some paper nearby. What do these words mean for you? You can do both. Write down whatever that phrase brings up to you. Don't edit yourself. Just write it down. Is it hope? Maybe you feel a little bit of pressure, or maybe you're feeling a little spicy. It feels like a contradiction. And I'm here to tell you for a long time, those words felt like a cruel joke to me.

Like, a marketing guy, wrote this tagline, having never packed a lunch, taken a work call with a sick kid at home, or scheduled meetings between doctor's appointments for, kids and and elderly parents. But for me, over time, they became somewhat of a quiet resistance and eventually a personal revolution or personal challenge. So, hopefully, you've taken a few moments to write down what this phrase is bringing up for you. Just look at what you've written down. Is it positive, or is it negative? Is it feel re like, this is your reality, or does it feel like something you're aspiring to? There truly is no right or wrong answer here, and you won't have to share it with anybody except yourself. So today, I wanna tell you my story, about how I went from not believing in balance to living it as part of my life every day.

And we're gonna talk about some ways that you can do it too. So we're going to talk today about redefining balance. And for far, far too long, balance is something that women have been expected to figure out for themselves or if they're part of an enlightened couple, that have read and fully embraced fair play together as a couple, but alone together. But what I've learned and what I believe is that this is something that we owe each other, which means all of us, employers, managers, husbands, wives, elder friends and family members, everyone in a community is responsible for redefining balance. And before I get started, I wanna be really clear with everyone that my talk today isn't about how to have it all. It's about how to define it all for yourself. By doing this, this is gonna enable you to reimagine what balance, identity, and partnership can look like when you stop choosing either or and start choosing both.

And this topic is incredibly important to me because you'll see the two identities here that I have on on the screen. On the left, I'm a product and marketing leader turned career coach. And on the right, I live in a house, maybe not with kids that age anymore, but a pretty messy house with lots five people living in it, who all have needs. So I've lived both the internal tug of the identities that you're seeing up here, on the screen, balancing my in internal identity and my external expectations. I've made some really hard choices. Maybe not. Maybe you'll judge the choices. I certainly judge them. But now I wanna share what I've learned from making those choices, and you can do both.

But before we you figure out for yourself how do you do that, you need to really define what both even means for you. And, hopefully, you'll be inspired by my story. It's short. It's in three acts, to maybe, tell your own story and start thinking about your story differently. So my act is called the step back, and it really starts, when I stepped away from a job that I dearly loved, because I wanted to. Not because I wanted to. I'm sorry. More because I didn't see women doing both happily in my life. So I didn't know that it was allowed. When I graduated from undergrad, many years ago, I was very fortunate to be hired into a leadership development program at Procter and Gamble. I loved it. Every day, I got to learn something new and was challenged and was working with some of the best minds in in consumer products.

I started in business development, then quickly, evolved into my love for brand marketing, and then later developed, my passion for innovation working in, shopper innovation. And for those who, you know, haven't been shopping in retail stores for more than twenty five years, you won't know that the way stores are designed today really didn't evolve until about twenty five years ago when Procter and Gamble started using data to, inform retailers on how to build their stores, to maximize the amount of products that, shoppers would buy or, trade up to more premium products.

And I got to work at the leading edge of that early in my career. So it was a great career, but I left. After my oldest was born and I returned to work for the time, I really struggled every day with how to juggle meeting both my child's constant need for care and my own professional fulfillment. At that time, I transitioned into a role that was really exciting, establishing that insights practice and working on shopper based design innovation product projects, that I just described before. This enabled me to work from home because I was constantly traveling, and I didn't have to be located in an office. But I still found myself constantly pulled between worlds, my daughter's world and my world. Soon after, I had a child. And upon, starting to work on my return to work plan, I was offered an incredible promotion.

The catch was I needed to be willing to move halfway across the country from our families and our community. It was everything everything that I had worked for over the past five years. It was a team leadership role at one of the largest U US retailer accounts. But I gave up this opportunity because I really couldn't see a clear vision of how I could juggle both things, my career ambitions and giving care to my daughters without a support network. What I didn't see and what no one showed me were examples of someone doing both of these things happily and successfully. So that takes me to my act, my pivot. So it was only a few months before I started looking for work. I felt like I lost my identity, and I missed the daily opportunities that you get to learn at a job and interactions with adults, quite frankly.

So, my husband, in the meantime, had, launched a company that he had been building for a decade successfully. And so I became his marketing and finance manager, and I learned how to, do all the legal paperwork to establish the company. And then I learned and created all the accounting, payroll, and tax processes. When that was done, because that was kind of boring, I started analyzing his sales data and making suggestions based on my experience in marketing, how to make, drive more traffic to a site using Google, and how to use pricing and shipping incentives to increase purchases. So you get the idea. I had a cup that was empty, and I just started filling it anywhere I could, applying my skills or, needed to learn a new skill to do it.

But that hidden cost, and some people call it hidden labor, of always being needed was still there in the background and sometimes in the foreground. I was still the primary caregiver. I was doing all that invisible labor of keeping our kids cared for, in touch with our extended family and community, feeding our family, managing our health finances, and just our life in general. Through this experience, I could see myself juggling more than one identity, and I can imagine it was possible to do both, but I still had a sense that something else needed to change to make this sustainable. At this point, though, I didn't know what it was. So that brings me to the final act, act three, which is my return. I actually joke a lot that my act began when my oldest child needed braces. There's also some truth there as well.

There is nothing like, an estimate of $5,000 from the orthodontist to inspire you to find a corporate job with dental insurance. All joking aside, I was really nervous about returning to the workforce. Even if I wanted to do it more than anything in the world, our family had not yet had to absorb two parents working outside the home and caregiving at the same time. We finally had to do the work to figure out what changes we needed to make so this would be sustainable. And so we started by saying, okay. Well, what if we each did fifty fifty? But it became clear that with my career, growing, my it I would that would have to shift to the front burner for me, and I would need to take on a smaller percentage of caregiving, and my husband would have to shift his balance and move his career further back and, increase his proportion of caregiving tasks.

This enabled me to take on greater leadership roles and eventually graduate with a master's degree at Carnegie Mellon. My one of my most proud moments on the left on the screen. Later in where I am currently, I found this role, where caregiving and career aren't opposed, but they're integrated. You know, my kids are older now. They need different kind of caregiving, less intense caregiving, but my parents are aging and their needs are increasing. But I'm now able to, you know, use that those caregiving skills in the coaching that I do with the future product leaders that I work with. My caregiving didn't go away, and I was able to make it a strength of source and a source of strength in my work.

So what we're talking about here isn't just my role over these three acts. It was my whole story. But in order to make that change, I had to let go of the belief that I had at the beginning in act one that I had to be split in two in order to successfully do both and therefore I had to choose one or the other. And to do that, to see that I really had to stop chasing perfection and I had to start designing integration for my life. Integration of skills, integration of values, and also integration of people. So my story isn't unique. It's actually quite common, but the problem is it's often not visible. So a few quick statistics that I wanna share with you. So I think this one we all know. Women are still doing 50% more unpaid caregiving work than men. One that I didn't know until until I I started researching this, for my presentation is that 67% of working caregivers actually say that they've had to reduce hours or change jobs.

This is a problem for the for The US particularly because in countries with better leave policies, female participation in tech tech and leadership is significantly higher. And it really requires representation, not just of women, but more importantly of men, especially men in leadership roles doing both. This is a lever for change. We need more examples in the workplace of people doing both caregiving and achieving their professional goals so that others don't feel alone like I did without a map or a vision for how to do it. 53,000,000 Americans are unpaid caregivers, and this isn't just a parenting issue. Actually, 59% of those caregivers aren't caring for children. They're caring for aging parents, partners, and loved ones. And it's not a women's issue either. Men are doing 40% of the caregiving work, but they feel far less safe talking about it at work. And research shows that workplaces where men take leave and visibly care give, it reduces stigma and increases for women, and it increases the retention of women in the workplace.

There's a financial value to investing in caregiving at work Because caregiving isn't a women's issue. It's not even just a parenting issue. It is a human issue, and workplace culture won't change until more men and more leaders stand up and say that they're doing this too. So I've learned a few lessons, and I'm gonna distill it down for you here. The biggest one is you don't have to choose. But in order to not have to choose, you have to give up that desire for perfection and more focus on integrate integration of the different parts of yourself across the different sections or silos of your life. Your career doesn't have to pause, but you may have to pivot, and that can be a good thing. And that's gonna enable you to hold ambition and care in the same hand together. But what's critical and essential is partnership.

Partnership at home, partnership at work, and in the bigger picture, partnership at the policy level. And last but not least, and maybe most importantly, is that representation matters, especially for an issue or a topic like this where it's challenging a status quo. You can do both, but you can't do both alone. If you're here wondering how to juggle caregiving, career, ambition, identity, it is not you. You are not doing it wrong. You're just doing something hard that isn't visible enough yet. So what can you do? I'm not your coach today, so I can't end our time together by asking you what you've learned and what you plan to do next. But I'll leave you with a few choices that you can make starting today.

If you're a woman who's caregiving, I want you to ask yourself, where can I stop hiding the full story of who I am? Look for spaces and allies, small or big, ERGs, team, coffee group. Maybe it's just one person to start, but look for those plea places and people where you can be your whole self and you don't have to choose. If you're a man, especially a man in leadership, we need you to be visible. If you're a caregiver, say so. Take the leave, block your calendar, and make it visible to everybody while you're doing it. Support the women in your life by asking them how you can support them, not if. And please normalize caregiving at work, not just for women, for everyone.

And if you're a manager or a teammate of a caregiver, model flexibility. Build systems and processes for your team that doesn't assume that someone else is doing the caregiving at home because there probably isn't. Value output, employee output over the hours that they're logging. Empathy, not availability, is important because every time we make space for someone to do both, we make space for everyone to belong. The world does not need one more woman sacrificing her ambition for her family or her family for her ambition. It needs you, all of you, messy, whole, powerful, doing both things. You don't have to choose.

You don't have to choose between career and care, identity and ambition, impact and presence. You can do both. And the more of us who do both openly and perfectly, the easier we make it for the next one. So we are almost at time. We have twenty seconds left. So no time for q and a here, but I wanna invite you to connect with me at the CMU booth in the expo where I will be for the next little bit to answer questions, and you can learn more about Carnegie Mellon, Tepper, and the masters of science in product management. You can also follow me on LinkedIn. I regularly share career advice and other content, and I would love to, stay connected with you there. Thank you so much for your time today, and I look forward to to meeting some of you, shortly.