Career Planning for Moms with Career Coach Kendall Berg

In this episode Kendall Berg, career coach, strategist, and author of Secrets of the Career Game, talks about how moms can plan their careers before kids, navigate work during the early years, and return with confidence after a career pause.

Kendall shares her own journey of climbing the corporate ladder, becoming a mother of two, and building a successful career coaching business alongside a corporate leadership role. Together, they break down the practical, often unspoken strategies that help women grow professionally without sacrificing family priorities.

In this episode, we cover:

• The most common reason women hire a career coach
• How to plan your career before having kids so you have more options later
• What to do during a career pause to protect your long-term growth
• How to return to work after kids without starting over
• Why promotions often depend more on soft skills than hard work
• The importance of building a “village” when returning to work
• How to advocate for yourself without burning bridges

Whether you’re early in your career, preparing for motherhood, returning after time at home, or feeling stuck despite working hard, this conversation offers practical guidance and clarity for navigating each season.

Connect with Kendall:

• Website: https://thatcareercoach.net
  
  
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thatcareercoach
  
  
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kendallberg
  
  

Kendall’s book:
Secrets of the Career Game
 
If this episode resonates, share it with another mom navigating career decisions, and make sure to subscribe so you don’t miss future conversations on building work that fits your family life.

If this episode resonated with you, please share it with another mom who needs encouragement. Subscribe so you never miss an episode, and connect with me on LinkedIn or Instagram. 

For other episodes and resources, visit our website at https://littlehandsbigplans.co/pages/podcast

To learn more about my law firm, Sisu Legal, check out my website. 

Transcript

Meet Kendall Berg And Her Story

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Today's conversation is with Kendall Berg. She is a career coach, a strategist, and the author of Secrets of the Career Game. Before becoming a mom, she was all about climbing the corporate ladder. And after motherhood, she figured out how to continue to grow her corporate career and also launched her career coaching business where she helps people navigate career choices. In this episode, we're diving into her personal journey. We discuss the most common reason people hire a career coach, what women can do to plan their careers around having children, and the number one thing that you can do if you choose to step away from the workforce but plan to return one day. Welcome to Little Hands Bake Plans, the podcast for moms who want to reimagine work after kids and build a life where family comes first, without giving up your dreams. I'm Amelia and I know firsthand how much motherhood shifts our careers, our priorities, and our pace. But instead of seeing it as a setback, what if we saw it as an invitation? An opportunity to design a life with a little more freedom, a little more presence, and a little more fulfillment. Each week, we'll have honest conversations with moms who've shaped their work and business around what truly matters. Whether you're considering a career pivot, dreaming of a slower pace, or just wondering what's possible, you're in the right place. So grab a little something warm, settle in, and let's explore the possibilities together.

SPEAKER_01 1:51

So we are in a very fun coming out of like the toddler terror age into the fun has their own personality era, which has been really, really wonderful. Oh, that's great. And do you have two girls, a boy and a girl? I have a boy and a girl. So younger boy, older girl. And uh I definitely love it that way. I have a daughter who looks out for her younger brother, but a brother who would pummel somebody on the playground for his sister. So we'll take it. It works out well.

Corporate Ambition Meets Motherhood

SPEAKER_00 2:19

Oh, so fun. What was your career like before you had them? Were you in the corporate world? Did you already have your own business? Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 2:27

So I was in the corporate world prior to having kids. And for me, my career really was my children. Like I was so focused on being successful, building progression, making as much money as possible, really climbing that career ladder was a huge priority of mine. And at that time, because my career was such a focus, I didn't really want children. Like I wasn't focused on having kids. It wasn't a priority for me. And I always joke when I met my husband, I told him I was like, I don't think I could have kids alone, but we could. Like together we can if we're gonna actively co-parent, if you're gonna be involved, if we're gonna be doing this together. And he comes from a really, really big family, wanted a lot of kids. And so we went from me being super career focused, that's gonna be my focus via, I think they call them DINKs now, double income, no kids, right? I was like, I was gonna go that path and then met my husband and was like, no, we should have kids and we should have a family and kind of started on that journey and that shift. Oh, that's so fun. I had never heard of that acronym.

SPEAKER_00 3:39

So, how did you plan, for example, what your career might be like after kids, or was it a shift that happened once your kids arrived? What kind of work did you do in the corporate world?

Mentorship That Changed The Timeline

SPEAKER_01 3:55

Yeah, so I I had this vision before kids that I was gonna be this super executive in New York City working for a bank. Like this was the vision. And at the time that I had kids, I was getting up the management chain relatively quickly. So I was getting progression, getting more opportunities. I worked as a I started as a data scientist and an analyst in the tech space. And then I was shifting into financial services and running tech teams. And there was this path ahead of me of like, I could be, you know, a senior director before I'm 30, I could be an executive mid-30s. And that was kind of the dream was I was just gonna move up the ladder really, really rapidly, grow my team, grow my skills. And before I had kids, it's funny, I actually had a little bit of a crash out where I was like, but if I have kids, my whole career will stop and I'll never get promoted again and I'll never get a job again. And I just had this vision that it was an either or for me. And I met with a mentor that I had at the time. She was fabulous. She probably looks back and is like, Kendall was having a complete mental breakdown. But we went to lunch and she had just had her first kid, and she was very similar to me. We were both very career oriented. We were both very leadership driven. We wanted to progress up in financial services. And I went to lunch with her and I was like, you know, you just got back from having a baby. Is your life over? And she just started laughing and she was like, Kendall, you will care so much less about everything that happens in this building once you have your kid. She's like, You just you can still be successful. You can still have this wonderful career. You just need to decide what that looks like. And it gave me a lot of peace with our decision to have a family and with what we were gonna do, what how I was gonna progress my career, because she was such an idol of mine. Like I just thought she was so fabulous. And she was like, you need to take a breath. It's all gonna be okay, and your career can look however you want it to. So to answer your original question, I was a middle leader at that time, working in financial services, running tech teams, and kind of sat down with my husband, was like, okay, we need to think through what my career looks like after this to make sure that I can be there for my kids and I can be present with my family and I still get the job satisfaction and you know, that I need that I'm contributing to my career. And we just aligned that we were gonna have a little bit of a slower growth. Now that's not actually so much what happened. And we can kind of jump into the post-kids, but there was a lot that happened really, really rapidly after my second kid was born that kind of changed what I thought had been my plan as life so often does.

SPEAKER_00 6:45

Yeah, it was really similar. And I think the mentors in the workplace can play such a huge role because I had the same experience of people telling me that I was worrying about the wrong things before, but you don't know and you don't know how much you're gonna connect with your kid before they're here. So, how long did you stay in the corporate world before you became an entrepreneur?

Promotions Delayed And A Dream Offer Declined

SPEAKER_01 7:10

Yeah, so I'm I am actually still in the corporate world. So a little bit about this whole wildness that has happened since. But to answer your question, I I had my my daughter and my son within 12 months. Um, and the company that I worked for at the time had a wonderful maternity leave. So I got six months per kid. So I worked basically six months in a two-year period while I was having my kiddos. And I had known that was gonna slow me down in my career progression. Now, I think quick side note, I don't think it should, right? I don't think that being a mom and having kids should slow your progression down because you're still the same hardworking person. You still have the same skill set and factor building more skill sets to be able to multitask and manage stress more effectively and all kinds of other things that I think are really pertinent in the workplace. However, I do think it's unrealistic to say that having kids and being out on maternity leave doesn't slow you down in any way. And it definitely did me in that short term, right after I had kiddos. And I wasn't upset about it, right? Similar to what you were saying, Amelia, you you don't realize how much you care about the wrong things until you have the right things to care about. And then you're like, it's fine that I don't get promoted. Who cares? But after a few years following my kids, I was kind of at this point where I was like, all right, I'm ready to really start to grow again. My kids are getting slightly more self-sufficient. I really want these opportunities. And the leader that I had at the time, uh, he told me, he goes, I can't believe you didn't get promoted. He goes, to be super honest, I think we forgot. Like we just assumed we had already promoted you and we hadn't. And in some ways, that was really justifying to hear that, like, okay, I'm not crazy. I am doing all this extra work. But from a professional perspective, you're like, what do you mean you forgot? Okay. Where's my, where's my title? Where's my money? So that kind of led me on a very rapid journey. So what happened was I started getting all these interviews with external companies. I hadn't been looking externally because I loved the place that I worked so much. And one of the interviews came through an executive recruiter who reached out to me. And they were part of a startup that was growing really rapidly that was going for IPO in the next six months, and they needed somebody to lead their tech organization. They brought me in and I did, gosh, probably 15 rounds of interviews, and they offered me my dream job. So I would have been chief financial officer for this large privately owned tech company that was IPOing in six months. I would have answered directly to the board and worked with the founder CEO really closely. It was like the job of a lifetime. And I remember I came back from my final interview and my husband had a bottle of champagne waiting, and he was like, You got the job. And I was like, Yeah. I told them no. Then my husband was like, wow, but I want to be there for my kids. And I knew this role was gonna be super demanding. They were joking about sleeping under their desks for big releases. They were talking about being on call with the board, and I was like, there's no way at this stage in my family life that's gonna be the right move for me.

Why The CFO Role Wasn’t Worth It

SPEAKER_00 10:25

That's also it's also a wild amount of interviews. Yes. So many. What kept you in it? At what point during that interview process did you realize it was not going to be the right fit for you?

SPEAKER_01 10:38

Yeah. So I my interview process was to meet with a lot of their executive team, to meet with a lot of the people that would report to me, and then to meet with the board. And that was kind of how we we flowed through. And my, I think it was my second to last or my third to last interview in the room. Somebody said, Yes, well, you're really young. And it was such an odd comment to me in the context of what we were discussing, right? We were talking about bringing me in as an executive. I was going to be answering to the board. This was like a very high profile position at the time. And for them to comment on my age in that second to last round is what like initially raised the red flag. And I was like, well, I don't know that my age has anything to do with my ability to execute. If you felt like I couldn't execute, I don't know why you would take 12 hours of interview time with me to make sure that we were good to go. And so after that, I started asking a lot more questions. And I wanted to know, you know, how does the workplace work? How often are you being called by the board outside of work hours? When's the last time you guys worked weekends? When's the last time you worked nights? And the answers I started to get at that point were basically everyone was living at the office. And I understand from where the business was that that was the right move for them to get their IPO complete. But from where I was at at that stage in my life, it just didn't make sense. And the risk of putting all that time, losing time with my kids, and then dealing with comments like, well, you're really young, or things like that. It just wasn't worth it at that stage in my career. And I made the pivot instead to take a VP role that was arguably a smaller scope at a bigger company, instead to have more work-life balance and be able to be there with my kiddos.

Two Very Different Maternity Returns

SPEAKER_00 12:26

What was the maternity leave return like for you? Because you were already in a point in your career where you were already in leadership. So sometimes those roles are harder to transition back slowly. Did you find that you were off on maternity leave for six months and then had to come back fully? And if you were, how did you find that transition?

Finding Purpose And Starting A Business

SPEAKER_01 12:55

Yeah. So when my daughter was born, my oldest, I always joke my two kids were born on the same day because the product I'd been building for my company that we would been working on for over a year launched the day I went into labor. So literally from the hospital bed, I was like calling my development team asking how things were going. And I was texting my boss asking how things were performing. Right. And I think that maternity leave, my transition back to work was a little more seamless because during my maternity leave, I was so focused on like had the product gone well and had these things launched well. And I was checking in with leadership. Now, about three weeks into my maternity, my boss called me and he was like, do not call me again until your maternity leave is over. He's like, I need you to focus. And so I think that maternity leave was a little easier for me to come back from because I had one kid at home. So you have a little less demands on your time. I think mom of multiple kids understand that like your first kid is a wild challenge because you're going from zero to one. But once you start adding one to two, two to three, it gets like progressively harder until you hit about four and then you level off. But I think my first kid, you know, she slept through the night really well. She was really healthy. She had like no issues whatsoever. And so it was a really easy maternity leave and a really easy recovery. And then when I went back to work, because she was such an easy baby, there wasn't much fear that something was going to happen. It was a little bit easier for me. But my second was a totally different story. So my second was a difficult birth. He never slept. He had all kinds of health issues. We were in and out of the doctor's office. And my product had been live for over a year at that point. So I wasn't thinking about work at all on my maternity leave. And I remember right before I went back to work, that so I had both kids home with me for six months. I was about to go back to work. And I remember telling my husband, I was like, what if we built a yurt? Which, if you're not familiar, is like a giant tent. I was like, what if we just built a yurt in the middle of nowhere and I didn't go back to work? And my husband was like, okay, crazy pants. Like, you need to, you, you need something to focus on. And that transition back, I think, was a little bit harder. I was much more, my brain was much more with my kids. And I was much more focused on like, what if something goes wrong while they're at daycare? And what if somebody calls me? What if somebody needs me? And what if somebody gets sick and I'm not there? And I just was really, that was a much harder transition. And my boss at the time had been my boss through both maternity leaves. And he told me, he goes, I've noticed such a difference with you coming back. It doesn't feel like you're showing up the same. And I was like, I gotta be honest, I'm totally okay with that. But I don't need to show up the same way where I'm taking calls for maternity leave two years ago. I need to be there for my family, and that's got to be my priority. So it was definitely a harder transition the second time to get back in the swing of meetings and sitting on these calls and not being with my kids all the time. I think that was a lot tougher for me than the first time for sure.

SPEAKER_00 16:01

And then at what point did you decide that you had you also wanted to throw in starting a business into the mic?

Lessons From Launching Fast And Pricing Right

SPEAKER_01 16:10

I know it's always funny. Like, how many things do you want to do at the same time? So in 2020, I read a book called Every Good Endeavor by Timothy Keller. And that book is about basically finding God's purpose in your life. So it's about what has he called you to? What is your purpose? Why do you, you know, exist? What are you doing for the kingdom? And I remember I read that book and I was talking to my husband, and I said, Do you think when God made me, he just went, she's gonna be really good at making slides for old dudes in banking? That's the purpose. That's the special sauce that he gave me. And my husband and I were having this conversation, and I was really driven by this concept of finding my purpose. And he said, You love mentoring, you love coaching. And at the time I had uh, I think 17 mentees of the company that I was at at that point, because I had had a difficult journey where I was a really poor communicator, but I had really good technical skills, right? I had the right answers, but I didn't know how to say them in a way that wasn't, frankly, argumentative or offensive. And I spent a lot of time before I had my kids investing and building my soft skills, building my communication skills. And what happened after I had my kids is people would send me their problem employees. So they would say, Hey, you know, Amelia is really good at her job, but she needs to work on her communication. Would you mentor her? Or John is doing a great job day to day, but he needs to work on his collaboration skills. Would you mentor him? So I had accumulated the 17 mentees across my firm that I was helping essentially communicate better at work. And during this conversation with my husband, he goes, I don't understand why you don't just coach people all the time. And I was like, But that's not a job, right? Like that's not, is that a thing that I could do all day is just help people get better at their careers. And all of 2020, he pushed me. He's like, I why don't you post something on social media about it? Why don't you try to make content? Why don't you try to get a coaching client? Like, why don't you try to build this business? And I was very resistant to the idea because I I love corporate for so many reasons. I love the consistency, I love the paycheck, I love the the knowledge that 90% of the time you're gonna show up and your job's gonna be there and you're gonna be have that stability. And I'd worked really hard to get to the director level. And I was like, no, I don't, I don't think I want to do that. And in 2021, I finally caved and I was like, cool, I'll post a video talking about what it's really like in the workplace and we'll see what happens. And that first video got 4.1 million views. Wow. Yes. So we went from no business working in corporate to young kids to like a thousand people on a wait list in 48 hours. So we built the business really rapidly. I made a million mistakes that we could talk about. But the goal was that I could build this business to a point where it would give me more freedom to be with my family, right? It would give us financial freedom so that we could retire earlier, so that we could pay off our house, so that I could be more present with the kids. And that long term, it would replace my corporate income consistently enough that I could go full-time in my business and, you know, go to my kids' nativity show at two o'clock in the afternoon that the school is hosting, or go to parent-teacher conferences on a random Wednesday and it not be an issue with my work schedule. So that was really the purpose behind building the business. Now it's been almost five years, which is crazy when I think back on it. And that career coach is definitely in a position where it does all those things, gives us a lot more financial freedom, gives me a lot more flexibility. Um, and I have kept My corporate job, mostly because I have a fabulous boss who's really flexible with me and who gives me a lot of freedom to run the business on the side. But the decision to introduce the business was more of a God thing and less of a me thing. And then it has provided us a lot of opportunities that allow me to be the kind of mom that I want to be on the back end, which is really what we were hoping for.

SPEAKER_00 20:24

I really love that it was your husband that recognized that you had that gift and continued to encourage you until you until you were willing to make that leap, because sometimes it seems like the people that love us close to us recognize it a little bit sooner than sometimes we recognize ourselves. So that's really great. If you could share maybe one or two things that you wish you had known before for someone that is thinking about launching a business but wants to continue also staying in their career as well.

Telling Your Boss And Managing Pushback

SPEAKER_01 21:06

Yeah. So I would say a couple things. One, do some market research. So I always joke with friends of mine when I started my coaching business. I had no idea what coaches charged. So my initial pricing when I first launched was way too low. It was way too low compared to the market. And it's not necessarily about being greedy or wanting more money, but it's more about I have found clients take me much more seriously now that I'm priced correctly in the market than they did when I was first starting out. So my first piece of advice would be like, do some market research. If you want to start a landscaping company, hire one, see what they're charging, interview some people, see how they run their business, like do that insight. And you don't have to wait to launch necessarily to do that, but I would do it very quickly. And so one big piece of advice is do the market research. The second is something that I think came very easily to me, but I've talked about this with a lot of different business owners and friends of mine in the space who struggle immensely with it. It is always better to be fast than it is to be perfect when it comes to running a business. And the mistake I think so many entrepreneurs and so many business leaders make is we wait until we think it's perfect. Right. We wait until we have the whole business model made and we have the tax ID and we have the LLC and we have the website and we have the email address, we have the logo and we have X, Y, Z things in place. And then we go, Great, I'm gonna start posting and hopefully find a client, or I'm gonna run an ad and hopefully find a client. And because we've invested too much in making it perfect, one, if it doesn't go perfectly, we take it really personally and really hard and it becomes really challenging to continue with our business. But two, we've waited so long to do it that odds are somebody else has done it while we were planning. And the best business leaders, they launch fast, they make changes fast, and they learn from what happens fast. And I was talking to a good friend of mine who runs a similar business to me, and we were joking. She said, one of my clients the other day was watching my video and told me there's an error in it. Like it doesn't stop when I thought it stopped. So you can like hear me talking to somebody in the background and like eating chips and it's like on the recording. She goes, I had no idea. And I started laughing. I said, Somebody told me the other day that there's a typo in like my second video. I've run this coaching program five years and no one has mentioned that I had a typo in a video. But I think we get in our heads and we think, oh, until it's perfect, until I've double checked it, until the quality is 100%, I'm never going to make any sales. And the reality is by building something fast, by producing fast, by constantly putting out new videos, my clients have grown 10x because I learned fast and implemented fast. So those would be the two biggest pieces of advice I would give is like do some market research, understand what other people are doing and what you should be charging. And then make sure that you are doing the thing. Do the next best thing that you need to do, launch it. If it fails, figure out why, and then launch something else and just be really rapid with your iteration.

SPEAKER_00 24:20

Those are really great ones. And curious because of your specific situation, how much pushback did you get? Did you tell your boss in advance that you were going to be doing this at the same time? Is there a lot of pushback, you know, concerns about where time is going? How does that work?

The Core Client Problem: No Reward

Soft Skills That Accelerate Careers

SPEAKER_01 24:40

Yeah. So I did not tell my boss in the beginning. And to be super honest, that would probably be my advice. Is unless you have something contractually that says you can't start your own business or you can't have double employment or something that's in your contract. If you have something in your contract, follow the legality of your contract, 110%. But in my situation, the only rules I have in my contract for employment is that I can't, I have a non-compete, but I wasn't starting a bank and I work for a bank. So what I do is not in competition with my company. So there was no conflict of interest. I did not tell my boss in the beginning. I did tell my boss in about 2023 because I found out I was going to be published in Forbes. And I was like, my boss is going to see. Like there was like this panic, like, what if he sees? And I never told him that I was doing this. So I did tell my boss in 2023 that I was working my business and that I had these social media platforms. And at the time, my intention in 2023 had been to leave my corporate job and go full-time in my business. And my boss really did not want that to happen. So I think the benefit that I had in my specific situation is my boss really wanted me to stay. And so there wasn't any like, well, what if it takes too much of your time or what if your focus is split? There were none of those concerns because my boss was like, please just stay and keep the team running. We'll we'll give you what you want. Just we need you here. So I will say I was very blessed to have that unique situation where my company really wanted me to stay and they wanted me to do both. Now that has not been my experience with clients and with friends who have done this. Like a lot of their bosses were like, Yeah, you can't. You can't run both simultaneously. And what I would say is if you've run your business and you've gotten it to a point where it's relatively successful, and then you're telling your boss, the benefit is that when it's running successfully, if they tell you, hey, you can't do that, you can quit and work full-time in your business and have that option, right? Or leave and find a role that's part-time, right? That was one of the things me and my boss discussed back in 2023 is he's like, if you really need a bunch of time to run your business, what if we shift you to part-time? And then there's no concern about how you're spending your hours or what's going on. So I think there are ways to be flexible to say, hey, I could do part-time, or what if I started doing hourly? Or, you know, what if we leave and I find something else that works more effectively with running my business in parallel? I think there's a lot of options for that. But for me, I just had a really unique experience where my boss was like, yeah, no, you're you're not.

SPEAKER_00 27:14

That's amazing. And also because of the coaching that you do, it's so good that you're still connected to that world because it has its unique changes that you're there for. I do think, especially in legal, there is a lot of pushback. So that's that's really great. But it there shouldn't be if it's a completely different industry and you're not taking away from the time that you would be doing the work, it shouldn't matter.

Stay Or Go: Alignment And Fit

SPEAKER_01 27:43

Yeah. It's funny that you bring up legal because I I have a, I would call him a friend, Henry Nelson. He's in the UK and he's a lawyer. And he started a social media account where he basically I don't want to say makes fun of, but he makes comedy about the workplace. Right. So he does skits like what I thought being a lawyer would be like, and he shows clips of suits, and then he walks out and is like, what being a lawyer is actually like, and he's in his pajamas and he's sitting at his table and he's yelling at a red line doc, right? And he came on my podcast a couple of years ago, and he and I've had a chat a couple of times since that his law firm was basically like, Hey, it's great. Like you're getting us a lot of PR that we don't have to pay for because people are interested in you and we don't care. And so I do think it's so dependent on the leadership, on how they react to having, especially a successful side hustle, right? If you tell them, hey, I'm gonna start an Instagram, they probably don't care. But if you get a million followers, then they do care, right? So I do think it's interesting. And I've worked with a lot of clients in the legal field, it has a lot of politics, right? And a lot of navigating strong personalities is how I'm gonna put that. So it's definitely an additional challenge. But right, if your podcast blows up and gets wildly successful, like kudos for you. That's awesome. Then go tell your boss, hey, I run this wildly successful podcast where I talk to moms who are doing awesome things. Like I think that that's exactly what it should be is let's build the thing. And then if it gets too big to keep quiet, then we share it and we see how people react.

SPEAKER_00 29:22

I really like too that the thing that triggered, oh, I should probably tell my boss is the fact that you are gonna be published and in Forbes. That's amazing. What is the main problem that someone is encountering, the number one reason why they contact you? What tends to be the trigger for that?

Inside Secrets Of The Career Game

SPEAKER_01 29:43

It's usually that they are working incredibly hard and they're good at their jobs, but they're not seeing the reward. So, you know, a lot of your listeners are in the legal field or their moms or their moms who are working or all of the above. And what I see so often is they come to me and they say, Kendall, I'm working 60 hour weeks. I'm doing everything I'm supposed to do. My work is excellent, and yet my boss doesn't like me, or I got passed over for a promotion, or my boss refused my raise, or I can't find a job and I've got to get out of my current workplace. Like most people, when they come to me, it's that they feel they're doing everything right, but they're not seeing the reward they thought they would. And what I find when I work with most clients is that lack of reward generally comes down to one of three things. Either one, we don't know how to talk about ourselves, especially women. We are the queens of the humble. Like for whatever reason, men will walk into work and be like, I did this killer project, and you guys should all thank me. And women are like, oh, I'm just doing my job. It's just, you know, it's no big deal, right? So we downplay our strengths a lot. We downplay the impact of our work a lot. We don't talk about ourselves. So the number one thing that I see holds people back is we don't know how to talk about ourselves and brag about ourselves. The second thing is we don't know how to communicate negativity in a good way. So very rarely does life work like the movies where you can get into a yelling match with your boss and get promoted for it. Very rarely. So what happens is when we do disagree at work, we argue like we're arguing with a friend. Well, no, that's a dumb idea. You can't do that. We need to do it differently. Why aren't you thinking about this? Why aren't you listening to me? And the workplace is not super conducive for that. We need to find ways to disagree more effectively and more collaboratively with the people around us to build good relationships. And then the third reason that they're not finding success is they're not building enough relationships. They're so focused on delivering a very heavy workload of keeping their heads down and doing what they're supposed to do, that they're not getting coffee with the accountant from the third floor who has a lot of influence, or they're not going to their boss and bragging about themselves over lunch, or they're not investing in that coworker who's notoriously difficult to work with, but they have to work with all the time. So usually people come to me, hey, I'm working hard, I'm not getting the results I want. And then when I dive into it, it's almost always one of those three categories that's holding them back. And it's such a bummer to see because usually it's high-performing women, right? They're killing it. They can multitask and make their kids a soccer game and handle that project and deal with that jerk who sits in accounting and and and, but they don't get that promotion because they don't know how to do these soft skill pieces.

SPEAKER_00 32:37

Do you find that in your coaching, typically the person wants to stay, or is it a fit where maybe it's just not a good fit with that boss, but they would thrive elsewhere? Like, do most people stay, or do most people end up jumping ship and finding a better fit?

Career Planning Before, During, After Kids

SPEAKER_01 32:57

I would say it's about 50-50. So there's definitely such a thing as a personality or a skill misalignment, right? So one of the things I talk with my clients, and I I mention this in my book, Secrets of the Career Game as well, is if you're really good at organization and you work for a company that's really organized, they don't need your skill. They already have it, they're already organized. They're not hiring somebody to bring a bunch of organization. They don't need it, right? The same can be true of a boss. If a boss needs somebody who's really good at playing corporate politics, they don't need somebody who's exceptional at Excel. That doesn't add the skill that they need. And so it comes to understanding you and your unique skill set. And then is that skill set needed by your company and your leadership? Sometimes clients will come to me and the answer is like, yes, there's good alignment. We just don't know how to execute the way we need to from a soft skills perspective to get recognized for it. And other times people will come to me and there's not that alignment, right? Their boss is super toxic or, you know, doesn't care about their skill set or their company doesn't need what they're good at and doesn't reward it. And then in those cases, you definitely have to leave. But the approach that I always take with all of my clients is you should first give your company the opportunity to do the right thing for you. Right. If you want to get promoted and you haven't told your boss you want to get promoted, tell your boss, like give them a chance to do the right thing. And then if they don't, you don't have to feel any guilt or remorse or regret to take your skills somewhere else. But usually people are afraid to ask for what they want at their current company, or they just jump ship really quickly because they're like, oh, I'm not getting promoted here, but they don't address the underlying issues holding them back and they face the same type of difficulty at the next company.

SPEAKER_00 34:51

You mentioned your book, The Secrets of the Career Game. And can you tell me a little bit more about that? When is it coming out and who did you write it for?

SPEAKER_01 35:01

Yeah. So uh Secrets of the Career Game is out and live, and it is written really as a textbook. So I always joke, it's it's not a it's not a fun read. It's a helpful read, but it is written as an instruction on how to play the career game successfully. And I often will equate the career game to playing chess. If you sat down to play a game of chess and you'd never played before, and I only told you part of the rules, told you you have to be good at your job, it told you you have to be able to do X, Y, Z. I told you your job description. And then as you're playing, I'm like, oh no, you can't make that move. That goes against the rules. Or no, that piece can't move there because that goes against the rules. You'd be incredibly frustrated because you're like, well, why didn't you just tell me all the rules when I started the game? Because then I could have played a much better game. And so your career works very similar to that. We're told parts of what's required of us, but not everything. And so we get stuck. We don't build relationships, we don't advocate for ourselves, we don't communicate effectively, we don't understand how performance reviews work. And so Secrets of the Career game has 36 different strategies on how to get ahead at work. And each one comes with like a tactical outline of what to do. So we talk about networking. It's got a template for how to build your network and what to talk about. We talk about skill misalignment. Great. Here's how to understand what your skills are, and here's how to figure out what you need a company to need in order to be successful within it. We talk about micromanagers and how to deal with them or managers who steal credit. So it's very tactical on how to navigate all the things about corporate that just frankly nobody teaches you. And it's written for anybody who has walked out of a call frustrated that nobody understood them. Like, hey, I'm trying to do what's best for the company, nobody seems to see it. I'm trying to work hard and nobody seems to care. I'm trying to do the right thing and people are arguing with me. Those people, which is, I would argue all of us, can benefit from understanding that peak beneath the hood of like how does this actually work so that they can build the skills to get success in the future.

Build Your Village And Protect Energy

SPEAKER_00 37:17

When you were talking about some of them, I also think it would be applicable for even someone that's building their own business, because a lot of the the game you might, you know, if you want to put it that way, of building a business tends to be similar to how you would grow within the corporate world, right? The network, the connecting with others, who do you connect with? How do you spend your time most effectively? So even though I'm not in the corporate world anymore, I still think it'd be really helpful to read for those other tips. And I also like how it's laid out in 36 because then you can go exactly to where you are having trouble with and go from there. For moms specifically, some of my friends struggle before. I think when you are going to become a mom, a lot of the times the assumption is that your career is just not going to be the same, which before kids, I would have probably thought that was silly. But after kids, I kind of see it, you know, your priorities change a lot of the times. And then there's also the trouble of trying to manage during your return. A lot of my friends have struggled with coming back, how little they see their kids, the expectations that remain the same or increase. And then the last group is when you decide maybe I'm just gonna step out for a couple of years, but I want to come back. I don't want to build my own thing. I like being in the corporate world, the things that you should do in between. So I know it's a long question, but what do you think should be a tip or a focus that would be helpful for each of those stages before, during, and after when you're wanting to come back and maybe your kids are older, your kids are back in school, and now you can jump back in.

How Kendall Coaches And Works With Clients

What Kendall Hopes Her Kids Learn

SPEAKER_01 39:23

Yeah. So I think before I would tell you to make an ideal schedule. So I'm a tactical person, I'm a tactical coach, I like tactical things to go do. Once you've had your kid and you're assessing, do I want to go back to work? What do I want to do next? I want to start my own business, what does that look like? I would create an ideal schedule. So create a week. You can do it in Excel or on a piece of paper and write, you know, 6 a.m. until 10 p.m. on the left hand side with blocks, Monday through Saturday through Sunday, and talk about how would you like your week to look, right? Are you hoping that you're dropping your kids off on the bus every single day and the bus picks up at seven? Or are you hoping to avoid childcare while your kids are really young and you're you want to be home all the time? So like remote work would be your only option, right? I would create a a calendar of this is what I want my week to look like. This should also include things that fill your cup because as moms, we are the queens of pouring into everybody else while we're running dry. And I don't think that's good for us long term. So do you need time to exercise? Do you need time to go for a walk? Do you need time to enjoy your cup of coffee or paint or journal or whatever it is? Create that ideal week. Once you have your ideal week, you can assess what fits that life. Because I think what we do a lot of the time is we do it the opposite. We say, well, if I had a corporate job, how would I squeeze in everything else? Or if I had a full-time job, how would I squeeze anything else? Or if I had a part-time job, how would I squeeze? I start the other way. What do you want your week to look like? What space is there for work? And then figure out what's going to fit that, whether that's a full-time corporate job or that's a part-time job, or that's work remote, or that's starting your own side hustle or whatever it is. Because when we know what we want our time to look like, we can determine what fits into that structure. So that's the before. I would say during, if you decide to take a break, if you decide, you know, hey, I want to stay home with my kids till they're in school. I think that's a really common decision to avoid childcare. Hey, I'm going to stay home and then I'll go back when they're older. What I would say is during that time, your self-investment needs to be high. And what I mean by that is you need to be reading, you need to be listening to podcasts, you need to be taking a certification, you need to be taking a course, you need to be getting a master's degree, you need to be doing something that is for you and for your future during that break. Because having a gap on your resume is hard. It just is, right? I'm not going to blow smoke and tell you, oh, you can take five years off. You'll come back in the exact same job you left. Usually it doesn't work that way. But if you can say, hey, I took off five years to be home with my kids while they were younger, but during that time, I took a course on AI and got trained in a genet AI development. And I built a bot that helped me manage my household tasks in order to stay on top of things with my kids and save me time. And I got a certification in people leadership where I now know how to communicate more effectively and lead people towards a strategy. Like show investment in yourself in the gap. It makes it much easier for you to tell your story when you get back to interviews and it shows companies that your time off was intentional and not accidental. That's an amazing tip. Yeah, because it's it's easier. Because otherwise you're gonna sit in an interview and they're gonna go, why'd you take off I have yours? And you're gonna go for my kids, and they're gonna go, okay, why are you coming back now? It's just awkward versus saying, Hey, this was a time of self-development. I really did things I thought were important for my career while being present for my family.

SPEAKER_00 43:08

And I think it it it makes you less likely to be to be discounted in terms of oh, she's just spent five years with her kids. Is she really gonna be full on now into our company? Versus if you still invested in some type of learning self-development in that time, you already have additional skills that you're contributing to the workplace. Yeah. What about after? Let's say someone doesn't take time but is just struggling on their return.

Host Takeaways And Closing

SPEAKER_01 43:43

I think after I saw something on Instagram the other day, I'm gonna quote it because I think it's appropriate. It says people want to be part of a village, but they don't want to be villagers. And the reason that I bring that up is because going back and being a working mom is incredibly challenging, right? Laundry does not go away, dishes does not go away, grocery shopping does not go away, cooking does not go away, planning your kids' school and their extracurriculars does not go away, making sure that you have clothing and all of the toiletries that everybody needs. Like these types of mental loads stay for moms. Now, they do for some dads too, so I'm not discounting them, but generally moms hold a higher level of administrative tasks when it comes to the family in their brain and in their areas of responsibility than their male counterparts. And as a result, it's really freaking hard to be out of your house 40 hours a week and then be expected to come home and do dishes and laundry and clean and plan the kids' stuff for the next day and do their homework with them and make sure they're at their extracurricular is on time. Like it is hard. And anyone who says it's not hard is either incredibly wealthy and has a huge team helping them or has a village. And so what I bring this up is you cannot be superwoman alone. You must have a village in place. You must. And that village could be daycare, right? This daycare is great. They take care of my kids, they give me peace of mind so that I can go work out after work or work before work, do something to fill my cup twice a week and not feel stressed about it. Your village could be family that lives nearby, your village could be other moms in your community or that work with you who are all single moms, where you can talk about these things. This could be your spouse, this could be your friends, but you must have a village and you must decide what's going to give. There's a very famous interview by the former CEO of PepsiCo, who's a woman, and she talks about how this idea that women can do it all is completely unrealistic. She says there were plenty of years where I didn't do anything except be a CEO. She's like, there were years where I didn't show up to my kids' soccer games, I didn't go to things I wanted to be at, and I didn't cook cookies for the bake sale, and I didn't do all these things because I chose that my career was gonna be more important for that phase. And I think we put a lot of pressure on ourselves as mom that, like, yeah, I'm gonna do it all. I'm gonna wake up at 4 a.m., I'm gonna cook, I'm gonna clean, I'm gonna work out, then I'm gonna get my kids up and get them off to school, then I'm gonna work 10 hours, then I'm gonna come back. Like, it's not feasible to operate that way long term. So, what I would say is if you are in the after of having kids and you are struggling to readjust, you need to build your village, whatever that looks like for you. That could be somebody who meal preps for you once a week or a meal prep service. That could be having groceries delivered to your house, that could be doing a drop and pick up laundry service. That could be daycare, that could be friends, family, but figure out what you need and then figure out what's going to give. But what gives cannot be taking care of yourself. Like we always have to invest in that time for ourselves. So that would be how I would handle the after. And then again, go back to your ideal week exercise that we did before and see, okay, are there changes I could make in my job that allow this to be more feasible, whether that's entrepreneurship or that's working part-time or that's working remote or things like that that would help make the situation better.

SPEAKER_00 47:11

Thank you. I think those tips are so well thought and generous. And I would love to know more about how somehow you work with people. Do you work with people in a group setting, one-on-one? How does that work? I've never had a career coach, but I think I definitely would have benefited from having a career coach. All of my mentors have been informal, and sometimes the problem with that is that they are within the organization. And so there's a little bit of bias. They can't be as they can't, they they have that also loyalty to the company, so can't always give the best advice for you as well-meaning as they are. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 47:54

Yeah. And that is a common issue with mentorship, is like they they want to help you, they can in a lot of ways, but they're also limited in some. So for me, my coaching um is one-on-one. So I have a three-month minimum for clients that I work with because it takes time for us to kind of build some of these muscles that we're training. And in that we meet every other week. And then there's a course that supplements it. So the course you can also buy as a standalone. It's a do-it-yourself that has here's the lesson, here's the templates, here's how you execute. The course was the foundation for the book. So I made the course first and the book second. Uh, but there's a lot of overlap in the type of skills that it teaches and what it focuses on. But my coaching is primarily one-on-one because I fall under NDA. My clients get that one-to-one support. And everybody's situation is slightly different. You know, I always say we live the same life in a different font, right? It's a it's a similar problem we're facing, but it's going to be specific to each individual. So that gives me the ability to really tailor what we focus on to them.

SPEAKER_00 48:51

Great. And to finish, what do you hope that your children will see in your career choices?

SPEAKER_01 48:59

It's so funny that you ask this because just yesterday I was talking to my daughter and I was like, what do you want to be when you grow up? And she was like, I want to not work. And I want to be, I want to be rich and do nothing. And I was like, I love that for you. And I was joking with my mom that I was like, hey, if she gets nothing else from my career choices, at least she'll get a desire for like peace and work-life balance and free time, which we'll take. But I would say what I would hope my kids take away from my career experience is that they learn to be not afraid of the mistakes that you make. There are plenty of times in my career where I made a mistake and I had to learn from it to get stronger. There are times in my business where I made mistakes and I had to learn from it. And I hope that as my kids get older, I hope they're not afraid to be put in positions where they will make mistakes, but it will allow them to build their success long term.

SPEAKER_00 49:56

Thank you, Kendall. For today's takeaways, I have four. Career planning with kids. How do you do it? Kendall suggested starting with your ideal week. So first, design everything about an ideal work week. Then you can choose work that fits that schedule as opposed to trying to fit a career that no longer fits that ideal. 2. A career pause is strongest when it includes visible self-improvement. If you're on a career pause or thinking about a career pause, think about things that you can do during that to intentionally upskill yourself. Think about courses, a certification, reading, projects. What can you do to help you tell a confident story when you return? Things like this signal intentionality and growth. Number three, returning to work requires a village. You can't be superwoman alone. You need support. The sustainable path is deciding how you build that support and making sure you include self-care in part of that. Number four, career growth is often backed by soft skills, not competence. And Kendall shared common lack of soft skills. These are her top three. One is downplaying achievements. Two, poor conflict or negative communication. And lastly, not enough focus on building relationships. So working harder does not translate into the reward of a promotion. To connect with Kendall, you can reach her at thatCareerCoach.net and I will link that in the show notes. And her book is The Secrets of the Career Game. That's it for today's episode. Thank you for spending this time with me. I know how valuable your time is, and I hope you're walking away feeling encouraged to dream a little bigger about what's possible for your work and family life. If this episode spoke to you, it would mean so much if you shared it with another mom who needs this kind of encouragement. Make sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode. And if you want to keep the conversation going, connect with me on LinkedIn. Just search Amelia Koto. That's E-M I L I A C O T O. Until next time, remember, motherhood isn't the end of your dreams. It's just the beginning.