Navigating a Successful Career and Motherhood through Expanding Options and Opportunities

Claudia Miller: 0:07

This is roadmap to executive suite podcast, a place where we talk about accelerating your careers and how to get to the C suite, all tailored to the ambitious woman. We're here to have fun, feel empowered and get actionable steps to get you closer to your dream job and salary, no matter where you are in your career. I'm your host, Claudia Miller, and I'm a career coach who helps ambitious women get the jobs they want, all while getting them up to $50,000 in salary increases. I've been featured in Forbes, MSNBC, and a one of the top 23 Most Innovative career coaches of 2025 Business Insider. Welcome to the show. And let's get started. I'm so excited to have our next guest. Our next guest is Janice shawl and she's a coach, speaker, workshop facilitator and host of the money career and motherhood podcast. Janice helps professionals and business owner moms master money and career challenges so that they can feel confident and connected as a mom, while they'll build a strong financial foundation for their family. Listen to the money career and motherhood podcast, connect with Janice on Instagram or sign up for a free 30 minute Strategy Session. Janice, I'm so happy to have you on the show here.

Unknown: 1:15

Thank you so much for having me, Claudia.

Claudia Miller: 1:17

So it's interesting because I was on your show talking about, you know, Saudi negotiation and careers. And now you know, I'm so happy to have you on the show. Because you know, what you do, and like the help that you give women, especially moms, like you know, looking to pivot back into their careers, it's really helpful. And, you know, one of the things that I really enjoyed is some of the stats that you actually sent over to me. And it just to some of the listeners out there, one of the stats that you mentioned is that pre COVID 43%, of highly accomplished graduate level degree or higher women take career breaks, most often due to child related reasons. So could you tell me a little bit more about like, you know, what, is it the work that you do? And, you know, how do you help women with their careers, and, you know, navigating motherhood as well?

Unknown: 2:04

Yeah. So, it's so important to me to normalize, the experience that working mothers have, and the variety of experiences that working mothers have, because I think, you know, as we're building our careers, pre children, we kind of have this idea of how it's going. And we can imagine what the path is going to be in front of us. And then for many women, motherhood, really changes the trajectory of our career path. And it challenges us in ways that we weren't challenged before. One of the things that I like to explain to people is, you know, before children, the number of variables that you have to control in your life, to hit the goals that you set for yourself, are pretty finite, it has to do with you, maybe your significant other or meeting a significant other, it has to do with your health, it's really controllable by you. And it's quantifiable. Often, once you have a child, the number of variables are essentially infinite, because you have this new human that, you know, you don't know, yet, you don't know what their needs will be. And their needs are going to continue to change as they grow. And then also as you grow into motherhood. And so suddenly, we're rocked by this world of, oh, my gosh, I had a plan. But now my plan doesn't make sense, given the context of the environment that I'm in. So the first thing that I really just want to do is normalize the fact that regardless of how ambitious you are, as a woman, motherhood can change your plan. That doesn't make you less ambitious. That doesn't mean that you have to abandon your plan. But it often requires you to kind of recalibrate and perhaps pivot. The other thing is women do take career breaks. And I find it really interesting that despite the fact that nearly half of highly accomplished women, pre COVID and COVID only increased that number, you know, 2.3 million women left the workforce in 2020. Now, there are many reasons for that 2 million. Many were because women were in service industries that were directly impacted by COVID. But a large portion of those were due to Childcare and Education reasons. So again, COVID has really only exacerbated something that existed, but women are left to navigate their career breaks on their own. And that was something that hit me really hard. So I have my daughter when I was a VP and banking, and I was also getting my MBA. So I was in grad school and I worked in an independent study project and I was barely holding it together, like I totally underestimated how challenging my wife was going to be at that time. And this project really saved my career, because it made me realize that this challenging time that I was experiencing, and the under preparedness that I felt for how to manage my career through this time, was not unusual. It wasn't me doing a bad job of prioritizing. It wasn't me doing a bad job of anticipating what was to come. It was really circumstantial. And in, you know, highly accomplished women have many, many challenges when they're working through motherhood, but they're navigatable. So, you know, the research told me I wasn't alone. And it also told me where we were challenged. And then I looked at the corporate world, and didn't see a lot of support for this systemic problem that we experience. And I really wanted to start to support women navigate those transitions better. So that A, we don't have to take career breaks, if we don't want to. And B if we do take one, we know what to do during one in order to navigate a successful return to work. Or we're able to pivot in our careers when we want to when the time is, right.

Claudia Miller: 6:21

I'm so happy that you mentioned that because I mean, I've worked with clients where maybe they've been a stay at home mom for you know, 1516 years, and they have a lot of trouble finding, you know, getting interviews or being taken seriously, or if they're up to date with everything. So it really impacts women in a negative way. You know, when they take career breaks, even though it's not like they've just been sitting around doing nothing, they've clearly been very busy. They know how to multitask, they know project management. I mean, there's just so many critical skills as a stay at home mom, but it does make it harder to transition back into the workplace. And when you know, those situations do happen. So can you tell, give us an example of like, you know, what are some of the situations or, you know, success stories of clients that you've worked with, like, you know, here's currently what they were experiencing it, here's kind of high level overview and high work with them. And this is how the end result look like for them, which is what they were looking for. Because it sounds like, they can either go to you and say, Hey, Janice, I just had a new mom, I just had a child, and I don't necessarily know what to do next. So, you know, I still want to continue working, or it could be, I kind of wanted to say I want to take a career, like just take a break, I want to be a stay at home mom for the next two to three years, until my child can go, you know, back to school, and then I can come back and pivot back into the workforce. So can you tell me a little bit more about like, what does that look like for some of the listeners out there that are currently in those situations?

Unknown: 7:47

Yeah. So it's super different if you're kind of leading up to maternity leave and trying to figure out okay, like, how does this happen next? What am I going to do when I have a new person in my life, and then there's the, okay, I'm deciding to take a career break, which often doesn't happen at the time the baby is born, I find that one of the most challenging times is like, when your little one is 18 months, because that's this point where like you have been grinding through so hard, you have been managing your baby and your career, and you are doing an excellent job, but you are tired. And you realize that, hey, this parenting thing is going to be pretty labor intensive for a lot longer than you think it is. So they're super different circumstances. On the front end, when someone is pregnant, and is trying to understand how these two pieces are going to relate to one another. The first thing I have to say is save as much money as you can. I am a big believer in options, money gives you options. And this is whether you are having kids or not having kids having a savings account that is designed for you to have the ability to walk away from an employer that doesn't meet your ethical considerations that doesn't meet your lifestyle considerations and doesn't meet your family's needs is really important. It also relieves you have the burden from feeling like you have no choice. So if you have a safety net, a financial safety net, and you're going through a difficult time adapting to motherhood, and you have the option to leave, but you choose to stay that still feels better because you're in control. The worst feeling is when you feel like your choices are being taken from you. So you know I work with a lot of women on how to navigate and how to prepare for maternity leave. But to me that is really one of the most important things to consider is how do you maintain your options and that is financial safety net. Now on the career break side, there's a lot of angst and concern about D Skilling and how you're going to spin a story of what you did during your time off, and like, I really hate the term stay at home mom, I hate it, I don't like it, let me just make that clear. Because we're painting a picture of what the woman's doing, when we give her that title, and any high powered woman who decides to stay at home, like it's hard for stay at home mom, that turned to resonate. Because both of your identities, your motherhood, identity, and your professional identity are so important to who you are as a person, whether or not you're working. And when you're going back into the workforce, one of the real challenges is that we're trying to explain why we are still the professional identity that we are when we were a stay at home mom. And so that title tells a story to prospective employers. And what we need to do is tell the story of what we really did, while we were not employed. And so the way that I work with people to do that is to make sure that there are things that you are investing in, outside of motherhood. Motherhood is incredibly important, it is a very worthy and challenging job. But you have to explain how that time out of the traditional workforce has enabled you to become a better person to higher than the next person. And you have to paint the picture, the title stay at home mother doesn't. So what does that mean? There are three categories that I work with my clients on to make sure that you are developing a whole person. And that is, first of all, you need to develop personally, you need to identify what your priorities are. The reality is there are things that took you out drove you out of the workforce, whether that's you know, you just made a choice that you wanted to be a stay at home mom, and that you wanted to invest all of your energy into that, or whether there were challenges in your workplace, that coupled with your motherhood challenges lead you out, which is most of the case most people leave because of a combination of issues. So identifying what's important to you, and what really took you out of the workplace. And then understanding the purpose versus paycheck analysis of what you want to do next, when you adapt to a lifestyle where you do take a break, and you don't have that income to really identify who you are, and kind of many of us identify as our self worth, then suddenly it opens up this opportunity for us to look at careers more as a purpose more as a calling. Many women who go through a career break, say I do want to go back to work, but I want it to be more meaningful than what it was in the past. Suddenly, it's not just about the money. So understanding who you are, and how you change is the first step to navigating your career break because you're going to need to explain who that person is not the person who's on your resume from five years ago. The next step is professional skills. You don't have to work a pegging job in order to continue to develop and maintain your skills. What that means is maybe it's free classes on Coursera. You know, there are plenty of ways that you can learn things that you've always been interested in. There are ways that you can stay up to date, if you are in an industry and you know, you want to continue on with that industry after your career break. You need to stay up to date, we live in the information age, we can access information on every industry on any topic that we want. And so staying engaged on industry periodicals, I like different consulting companies, like McKinsey puts out really good industry, intel on any industry that you're possibly interested in, look into that stuff stay engaged, because the goal is that you can have a really intelligent conversation with a prospective employer in the future that shows that you're engaged and shows that your ambition, your career, ambition didn't die. That's the important part is that you show that you are someone that they can understand how you relate to the work that they do. And then the third step is your network. This is the real challenging part. Women worry about de skilling. And they worry about well, how am I going to catch up to all the technology changes, but the reality is, it's your network that's going to get you hired. And that's your barrier to entry when you take an extended career break because most of us don't develop our relationships on the professional side when we're on a career break. So, you know whether you're starting at five years or 15 years into a career break, or you're five days into your career break, these are still the same steps that I want women to start taking before they start to look for their next position.

Claudia Miller: 15:01

Okay. And like, when will be like the best time for your clients to reach out to you? Is it, you know, while they're pregnant is it you know, once they have a child, and now they're kind of, you know, starting to think about like, should I stay in the workforce? Or should I just take a career break? What would be like the ideal time for someone to reach out to you in those situations?

Unknown: 15:23

So I think the best time is really, when you're at that transition point of how do I make a decision that's going to affect my life, and I don't know how to move forward. That's where, you know, I give out guidance for pre baby. But I think you know, every woman has such a different experience. And you have to get into it sometimes to really understand how it affects you. And one motherhood experience isn't going to be the same as the next. So at the point that you understand that you have a bottleneck, I guess that you have something that you're like, wait a minute, I had a plan. And I'm not sure that it works anymore. So that can be when you're in maternity leave. And you're you're thinking, I'm not sure how I'm going to proceed from here. Or it could be you're working, and you have a little one, and you're thinking, Should I take a career break. I love talking with women who has been on an extended career break. But it is so awesome when I can connect with women who are in the process of deciding or have just started, because then is like, so many of us, when we leave the workforce, we spent so much energy and so much time planning our exit. But we don't spend time in that moment, planning our return. And if we can plan our return, when we exit, then we begin with the end in mind, right? Like we figure out the path to stay the course, or to make the changes that we need it to enable the next career. And that just feels less burdensome when you're exiting than it does when you feel like you have a lot more wind in your face when you have been out of the workforce for a long time.

Claudia Miller: 17:00

I love that because it's your right, sometimes we focus a lot on our exit strategy. But you know, what are we going to return back. So it's like really work, it sounds like your work almost backwards saying, Okay, you do want to return maybe you want to make a pivot change into a whole new industry, you've hated this industry, you've been in this whole time and you want to change something new. And, you know, let's just work backwards. And you know, those free resources you mentioned, and I know even Google also has free resources for like other types of jobs, like marketing analysts, like free and once you get certified, they partner with other organizations as well, that can connect you and help you get those jobs as well. So I love everything that you're talking about here, Janice, because I feel that this is very helpful and useful. And I know that that some of our listeners out there, you know, they may be either planning or trying to conceive at the moment. But to know that there's options out there and you know, I've heard from like some of my friends, and we've had discussions where, you know, do you plan on taking a career break? Or, you know, when we start having kids like, how is that going to change our lives. And we honestly don't know until it happens. But it's good to know that there are options out there. And there's a good strategic way of taking that career break. And, you know, spending time and being a mother and taking care of your loved ones and your you know, your child as well. But still that there's a route back to the workforce, if they wanted to, you know if that time comes. So I feel like you know, it's a lot of possibilities just with what you're mentioning. And I love the way that you approach it overall.

Unknown: 18:26

But it is, you know, for many of us, we have ideas, and we've got dreams, and we've got things we would like to be doing. But we don't have the capacity to do that, because we work so hard, right. And that's whether we're moms or not, but taking a career break as a mother can be the opportunity that you can't possibly create, to try new things to invest in new areas. Because you struggle to do that when you're trying to also raise a tiny human and be an awesome professional person. So I you know, it is an opportunity for you to try things that you haven't tried in the past. I love strategic volunteering, because it gives people the opportunity to develop skills and develop relationships that they didn't have in the past to expand their boundaries. It really can be the catalyst for someone to do something new, and to consider new possibilities.

Claudia Miller: 19:27

I think I remember, I don't know if you saw this article, but it said, I took a career break. And now I'm the CEO of a company. Yeah, you're right that.

Unknown: 19:36

So I have so a couple of the guests on my show. They're absolute powerhouse women and this is like this is the important thing to understand is that we have this idea of who takes career breaks when it's women and they're doing it for family. And man. There is no mold. There is no mold highly accomplished. Amazing powerhouse. Women sometimes take career breaks and some times you don't know it because you only see them at the tail end of their career. And so those conversations are so important. So one of my guests, she is the founder of a cutting edge, like health technology startup company. And she's an absolute powerhouse. She's amazing. And another one is the CEO of flexible care. And she created an amazing solution, virtual childcare services for meetings and different events, because of her childcare challenges that led her out of the workforce. So highly accomplishment, women take career breaks, and highly accomplished women with time on career breaks, they sometimes create incredible things.

Claudia Miller: 20:45

Yeah, it's not like you just have to like, because of what I mean, like even from like that article in itself, and what you're just mentioning, it's not like you take a career break, and then you jump back in where you left off, it's, you can actually be continuing to move up that by the time you want to go back, you can probably move to the next step or move to the next level position or become CEO of a company, because you know, the way that you're doing it, taking a career break is strategic. And it's not keeping you at the stagnant or the status quo as you're continuing to grow and develop those skills that can accelerate you to the next step in your careers, whether you've been working in the workforce currently or just took that break, but you can still achieve that and continued that career path that you know, some of us are looking to achieve.

Unknown: 21:25

Yeah, in So Janice powers is the woman, she is the founder of longitudinal health care. And I have an episode in early January on the podcast. And she is such a great example of this because she did so many different things during her career break. And she was a consultant in the healthcare industry prior to her exit. And she actually did go to return back. And what I thought was so interesting is that, you know, this fear of de skilling wasn't an issue, what was really interesting was things had changed in the industry, and they didn't change the way she thought they should have. And it led her to create this solution to work on solving this healthcare problem that we have in our country. But it was the exit that allowed her to take a step back, and really formulate her thoughts on the industry, and understand what she believed needed to happen when she was in the weeds, so to speak, I don't know if she would have done the same thing, I don't know if her career path would have been the same. But so it's a great story of someone who, you know, intended to be on the same path, but actually was able to really catapult her career because of her exit. And she doesn't joke, like it was hard, it was not easy. And there are real barriers to returning. But, you know, you have to be confident that the person who worked the level you were prior to your break is the same person you are when you're going back in, and you can navigate that you can accomplish it.

Claudia Miller: 23:01

Yeah, and I love that too, because it helps women with continuing to build up that salary. Because I feel that, you know, some of the clients that I've worked with, they're like, you know, I want to go back into the workforce, I'm willing to take an entry level job, I know, I'm not gonna get paid as much as I used to back, you know, when I took that career break, but it doesn't, that doesn't have to be the case, you can continue building on that salary. And you're kind of like with the strategies you mentioned, you keep building on those skills. So you won't have to take a pay cut, you won't have to go back to entry level position. And you can just, you know, go back into like, where you were at or step above as well, in order to really help with also with the salary portion of it. Because women, I feel like that's where we take the biggest hit. Not only are we getting paid pennies compared to like when men are getting paid$1 portion. But now it's the career break. And it's just, we feel like we need to take a pull back and take those salary cuts of 20 3040 50k cuts when we're already being underpaid. So it's just stacks up against each other and are trying to find like, like fight against it. So taking the career break isn't going to take an impact on that, especially with using your strategies.

Unknown: 24:09

Yes, in statistically, women do take a hit when they take a career break, you know, and that can range from it's like almost 20%, almost 40% Depending on the length of your break. And the industry that you work in. There are some industries that are more impacted like the finance industry. But that doesn't have to be the case. And I love what you're highlighting here because one of the reasons is that we do kind of feel so badly almost that we took a break and as an apology, we said, well, we'll take a step back. We're negotiating against ourselves before we even have a prospective employer. And that is really dangerous, because like we aren't even giving ourselves the opportunity for the positions that we're capable of, because we're just so grateful that anybody would want Want us in our current state. And so continuing to develop those professional skills and grow and expand our network is not just because it's going to look good to an employer. So much of the reason you need to do that work is because you need to maintain your self confidence. And you need to know who you are as a professional, whether you're working or not, you know, one of the women I work with, she said, the first thing that goes before you even missed the paycheck is your self confidence when you take a break. And I think that there's a lot of truth to that, you know, because we think that we lost this part of our identity, but we don't, it's our responsibility to try and maintain that while we're on a break.

Claudia Miller: 25:43

I love everything, you're talking about your Janissa home, and especially like those actionable steps that you know, women can take, if they're currently in that situation. You know, people want to reach out to where do they find you? How can they reach out to you?

Unknown: 25:57

Yeah, so you can email me directly at Hello at money career motherhood.com. And I'm on Instagram and Facebook, and I'm on clubhouse at Janis show, also, if anybody is in there, and I'm hopefully going to be starting some more career break conversations on there. Because, you know, the other thing is, I think we need to start talking about these more openly, and sharing ideas, because every time we hear someone else's story, it may not be our path, but it can inspire us in ways to try new things and find a new path to navigate.

Claudia Miller: 26:31

And I'll include all the links to Janice, in the show notes. That way, if you want to reach out to Janice, you'll have all her information. Of course, you can always connect with her on social media. But thanks again, Janice for being on the show and sharing so much great expertise, some of the success stories you've had with your clients and you know how you're able to help others you know, who may be in this current situation or maybe they're trying to conceive or planning or kind of feel in that position of, maybe I need to career break, or I just need to talk to Janice, I can decide whether I need to stay in the workforce or not. But thanks again for being on the show. Janice.

Unknown: 27:03

Thank you, Claudia.

Claudia Miller: 27:06

Thanks for listening in. If you liked this episode, you can go to our website roadmap to the executive suite.com For show notes and sign up to get alerts. All new episodes will be posted every Thursday. Talk to you next week.