Where it began
I’d just found out I was pregnant one day, and the next I was being told that due to a major client I looked after leaving the agency roster, my role would be made redundant. Let’s be clear, they couldn’t have known I was pregnant because I’d only just found out. However, they did ask me to sign a compromise agreement and slope off quietly.
I wasn’t totally broken because I’d known for a while I wanted to move on from that agency. I had become more and more interested in the human behaviour and health promotion campaign design and planning, and there wasn’t a lot of that coming in. I built my own client based and prepared for change.
Fast forward to year 1of motherhood and (as mentioned above), I was in the most amazing, challenging, exhilarating, boring, discombobulating chapter of my life. I remember my community midwife telling me not to be too hard on myself because “it’s often the high achievers who struggle with the change”. My peers and I would often wonder ‘Well, why in the world is nobody preparing us better’.
Of course, people say that you don’t know what you don’t know until you’re in it. And that’s certainly true. But how can antenatal education and perinatal support not have evolved over the decades. Why is it so focused on the physical and not the mental and emotional, especially when it has a direct impact on return confidence, ambition and therefore gender diversity.
When I became pregnant with my third, I figured that rather than trying to control the riskiness of taking another leave, and the intensity of the experiences of the first year, I would do what the system couldn’t. I would prepare my mindset as well as my body, and I’d plan for the inevitable challenges and how I would respond to them with intention instead of with anxious reactions and fixes.
I would really think about what I’d love my leave experience to feel like this time (for me, my family and my clients) and what might help me get there, and what would hold me back. With the help of a counsellor who was well versed in the perinatal anxiety I had experienced, I looked at how I might create my own personal and professional conditions to thrive based on who I was, not who I thought the world expected me to be (something that is long conditioned into us professional women in particular from a young age).
I explored how and why professional parents were such a talking point amongst midwives, and I built my own approach joining the dots between how conditioning, patterned behaviours, personality and ‘this is just how it is’ had taken us down such a self-limiting path. Sure, I flicked through my birth planning app but I also devoured voices that would build my mindset and help me continue to grow and come out stronger from parental leave. Anyone who has worked with me will tell you that I’ve introduced them to at least one brilliant learning from Brene Brown amongst others!
And given you’re reading my story right now, it worked (or I’d probably be still reflecting on my career and thinking of what might have been).
Building the Talent On Leave approach took time. I trained in all the things – perinatal and parental mental health, birth trauma, breastfeeding, antenatal education and of course, career and leadership coaching. I built my muscle over a couple of years from when littlest 1, supporting peers and building out the approach based on patterns I was seeing.
Then in 2019, with the encouragement of my brilliant coach, Danielle MacLeod telling me ‘go before you’re ready because you’ll never be ready’ and remembering Brene’s ‘courage over comfort’, I launched to a room full of forward thinking HR directors and people professionals who knew the norm wasn’t serving anyone.
And here we are. It’s 2025 as I write this and we’re still going! We work with some incredible clients at both a corporate and individual level and we’re still growing. I’m the sole director in charge of all delivery and results, and I’m supported by a network of brilliant associates who complement my own expertise and experience making sure that we are delivering the bespoke, high impact services that we’ve become known for.
Running a business can often feel like labour, but it’s most definitely a labour of love. We’re building a whole new narrative where leave and all it brings is a springboard for talent and business alike. Want to be a part of it?
Lynn, Founder