Leadership, your career and motherhood with Summer Edwards.

Women At Work

“If I give myself a vision of where I want to get to and then only identify the next step... I actually end up going to places that I hoped to get to but that seemed like a wild dream.”

Summer Edwards is a Life and Leadership Coach, and the founder of Lead Mama Lead, a social enterprise that empowers working mothers to drive change in the workplace. With a background in community development programs, working in Indigenous Affairs and internationally in developing countries, she has a strong interest in gender empowerment work, inclusive economies and social enterprise development. After becoming a mother, Summer transitioned from employment into a freelance career in community development and the social innovation sector, working with social enterprises and NGOs to capture and learn from the social impact of their work. Still, she found herself called to do something more with her experiences and challenges with work and motherhood. The Lead Mama Lead community (based around a website and a Facebook group) was born, because engaged motherhood and an engaged career should not be mutually exclusive.

What we cover:

• The challenges Summer faced negotiating challenging work in a part time role as a new Mum
• How a blog side-project helped her find challenging, career-worthy work in her field of expertise
• The mission of Lead Mama Lead and how it came to be
• The power of small steps, incremental changes, and treating your leadership path as an experiment
• How to discover what energises you by asking reflective questions:
  • What have I really loved doing?
  • What kinds of activities have I got lost in?
  • Where have I found that sense of flow?
  • What activities leave me feeling energised and on a high?
  • What tends to deplete me and how can I do less of that over time?
  • What do I always ask for more of at work?
  • What has really worked for me in my career?
  • What challenges have I overcome before?
  • What can I draw on from those previous experiences?
• The importance of clearing space and avoiding distractions in order to create change in our lives
• The leadership skills we learn from parenting
• Why we need to change our views of success and transform the workplace to recognise that home and family life matters too
• Balancing the internal battle with the external (bottom-up and top-down) conversations, and power of community in supporting women’s confidence to challenge the system
• The trap of internalising unrealistic expectations about parenting and working
• The two big problems impacting mums: Imposter Syndrome and Overwhelm
• The Overcoming Overwhelm program and other ways to work with Summer

Quotes

“I quickly found that a job that I’d loved and was so challenging, and gave me so much variety and opportunity, became very routine and pigeonholed as I returned to the office 3 days a week… I felt really dissatisfied and trapped.”

“The solution cannot be for everyone to haemorrhage from existing institutions, corporations, public service agencies. We need to keep mums in these roles, we need their perspectives on policies and product decisions, and every facet of our economy, so we can’t have everyone [become a freelancer].”

“Mums should be able to have a meaningful and engaged career, and have the time that they want for their family and to take care of themselves.”

“If I give myself a vision of where I want to get to and then only identify the next step... I actually end up going to places that I hoped to get to but that seemed like a wild dream.”

“We can’t transform our work overnight but can we can do little 1% changes that will move us closer to where we want to go.”

“We [need to] transform our workplaces so that they recognise that life outside of work is there and it matters and it doesn’t get in the way of being a good, productive employee.”

“We should never forget that great change often seems impossible before it happens and we just have to trust that every little thing we do to stand up for ourselves is going to contribute to the tipping point that will normalise a different view of mums and flexible workers in the workplace.”

“Women are expected to work like nothing’s changed in their life after they’ve become a mum, but they’re also expected to be a Mum as if they don’t have a job. And we internalise those expectations of ourselves and think that we are failing if we’re not performing. We need to let go of unrealistic expectations that we have about ourselves.”

Resources

We mention some resources in this episode, including ways to work with Summer:

The Lead Mama Lead Website

The Lead Mama Lead Facebook Group

Summer’s Overcoming Overwhelm course

We also mentioned authors Brené Brown and Annabel Crabb, who you can find on Twitter.