Balancing Work & Motherhood with Lisa Abramson- CR28

Lisa Abramson shares her story of how she relaunched her career in mobile advertising and PR to become a maternal mental health advocate and mindfulness coach. We’ll discuss the impact of motherhood and post partum depression on your professional outlook and the importance of self-awareness in your career. In the Mental Fuel® segment, I'll share my own challenges staying present in the moment, and a couple ways I stay focused in my own career.

Have you ever felt overwhelmed trying to balance everything in your work and life? In this episode of Career Relaunch, Lisa Abramson shares her story of how she relaunched her career in mobile advertising and PR to become a maternal mental health advocate and mindfulness coach. We’ll discuss the impact of motherhood and post partum depression on your professional outlook and the importance of self-awareness in your career. In the Mental Fuel® segment, I’ll share my own challenges staying present in the moment, and a couple ways I stay focused in my own career.

Key Career Insights

Ambition doesn’t just disappear once you become a parent.
You can burn out doing work you hate AND work you love.
Staying mindful of what drives you and fulfills your purpose can help you create a life that’s rich with moments that make you truly happy.

Tweetables to Share

You can burn out doing work you hate AND work you love.


Lisa Abramson


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Being an overachiever doesn’t just stop when you become a mom.


Lisa Abramson


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Relevant Resources

More on postpartum mental health issues:

Learn more about postpartum depression from WebMD.
Learn more about Lisa’s struggle with postpartum psychosis in her Medium post.
Read more about postpartum psychosis from the Royal College of Psychiatrists.
Find more links to Lisa’s motherhood resources she mentioned in her bio below.

How to Spot Mental Health Issues, The Drum, Oct 31, 3017 article.
I also featured Hannah Fredenberg in the listener call-in segment. You can check out her post about Spotlight on a Trailblazer, over at her new Bright Steps blog she’s created after moving on from her retail copywriting job, where you’ll find her very gracious summary of the work I’m doing.

Listener Challenge

During this episode’s Mental Fuel® segment, I talked about my own struggles to stay present and undistracted in my own career. I challenged you to tinker with one new way of forcing yourself to be a bit more present when you’re working on an important task or project. If you uncover a method that works well for you, be sure to leave a comment below with your tactic!

About Lisa Abramson

Lisa Abramson is an entrepreneur, TEDx speaker, maternal mental health advocate and bestselling author of The Wise Mama Guide to Maternity Leave. She founded Wise Mama, the only pregnancy and motherhood site that takes into account that when you become a mom, you don’t stop being YOU. She also co-founded Mindfulness Based Achievement, the New MBA, which teaches high potential women leaders how to create sustainable success. Lisa’s MBA 30 Day Meditation Challenge is for anyone interested in starting a meditation practice, but short on time (like corp leaders & new moms!). It just takes 5 mins a day.

Lisa was recently honored as one of the 100 Most Influential Leaders Empowering Women Worldwide by EBW and lives in Menlo Park, California with her family.

Follow Lisa on Twitter and Instagram.

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Comments, Suggestions, or Questions?

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Thanks to the Forest App for Supporting this Podcast

Thanks to the Forest App for sponsoring this episode of Career Relaunch. Forest is the mobile app that helps you stay focused and present while also helping to plant real trees on the earth. Visit JosephLiu.co/Forest to download the app on iOS or Android today.

Episode Interview Transcript

Teaser (first ~15s): When you’re an overachiever, when you’re used to working hard, those things don’t just get shelved immediately because you become a mom. I know a lot of new moms, especially working moms struggle with this.

Joseph: Okay, Lisa. Thank you so much for joining me here on Career Relaunch.

Lisa: Thanks for having me.

Joseph: We are going to try to cover a wide range of issues today as they relate to your career, including mindfulness, maternity leave, postpartum depression, and some of the needs of working moms, which I know you’re an expert at a lot of these things. Can we just start by having you explain what you were focused on in your career and life before 2014?

Lisa: I was running marketing at a technology company, and this technology company was focused on mobile advertising. I was a marketing executive, and doing the traditional over-achiever, climbing the corporate ladder thing, kept getting promotions and raises, and ended up, before I was even 30, sitting in on board meetings and being an executive at this company.

On paper, everything looked great. I was named a ‘Woman to Watch’ by a leading trade publication, and as soon as I got that award, I said, ‘Watch me leave this industry.’ That was the first reaction. I wasn’t actually excited or proud. I was like, ‘Watch me leave and do something else,’ because in my heart, I knew that especially in the world of mobile advertising, putting ads on people’s phones or selling things to people that don’t need more stuff, I was never going to find deeper purpose and meaning in that. So my crisis came early.

Joseph: Winning that award, was that somehow a trigger for you to want to make a move out of the corporate world?

Lisa: It some ways, it made me realize how misaligned I was, because everyone was congratulating me on it, and it felt like it should have been a really cool accomplishment, but it felt meaningless. For me, it was eye-opening to say something that looks so good on paper and it seems impressive, inside, it’s like, ‘Who cares?’

Joseph: When did you start to realize that it was time to leave the corporate world and make a move to do something else?

Lisa: I had this stroke of enlightenment in my car, driving up and down the freeway here in California in the 280. I was in my car for about three hours every day because the traffic was really bad and commuting from San Francisco down to Mountain View. It was in those car rides where it just struck me that life is too short, and really, it’s time to make a change.

For me, that change didn’t happen quickly. I actually went in and got all the courage I could muster up to go quit to my boss who is the CEO, but the timing wasn’t right. The startup needed me, and we were raising around a funding, and he said, ‘Please don’t leave right now. This is really a bad time.’ I ended up staying a whole year after initially quitting.

Joseph: What were your plans at that time? Were you thinking you were just going to continue to stay on indefinitely? What were you planning on doing next?

Lisa: I knew I wanted to do something drastically different, but I didn’t have any idea. I sort of impulsively quit and thought I’ll figure it out after I quit.

Actually, that year gave me a lot of time to work on some small projects. I ended up managing a digital detox retreat where we went up into kind of a cabin in the woods. We actually took people’s devices and had a weekend of connection with absolutely no technology. It gave me a lot of time to work frameworks and talk to people and start to noodle on ideas while I was still at the company. I felt like it was kind of a relief to know my boss knew that I was planning on leaving, but I wasn’t going to start anything competitive.

Joseph: The reason why I mentioned 2014 before was I know that, in early 2014, you had a life change.

Lisa: Yes.

Joseph: Can you just take us through what happened then?

Lisa: My husband and I decided we also wanted to start a family and that why not start working on trying to start a family while I was starting my company because you never know how long it’s going to take or what that road will look like. I ended up getting pregnant about a week after I quit my job and had to start a business, so that was a lot at once.

At the time, I really didn’t know any different, and it was motivating for me to know that, come January 1st, I better have something that I’ve created and I’m working on, because otherwise, I might have committed career suicide inadvertently.

Joseph: Before you went on what I’m going to call maternity leave here—I know that, at this point, you’re working on your own business—before the birth of your daughter, what did you envision your career plans to look like post-maternity leave?

Lisa: I think I was a bit naïve. I thought everything would keep ramping up. I take a short leave, maybe a month or so, be off of email for a short amount of time, and then just jump right in guns a-blazing, because that is the hardest, and once you find work that you love and that motivates you, I was already a hard worker, and then I think I turned that dial up to 200% when it was something I was really passionate about and I love.

I think if you have a tendency to burn out in the corporate world even in a situation where maybe you aren’t entirely fulfilled, once you find that thing that fulfills you, you can also burn out doing work you love. For me, it was I had a really hard time stepping away. I didn’t want to stop. I had a lot of momentum I had built up in my business. It was exciting, and I felt like it was helping people and making a difference. So it was hard to step away.

Joseph: Can you take me take me back to the moment when you had the shift from focusing on your career and this thing that you loved to focusing on being a mother and a parent?

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