#155 Balancing Parenthood and a UX Career w/ Ran Liu

Once I give birth to May, the early babyhood was actually really nice for me. I was at web flow at the time. I decided to like stay home for a little bit, a tad longer before I joined Shopify. I felt good. I was taking care of baby. I read like a stack of books, like what to expect the first year, sort of like months to months, week to week. I know what to expect and I'm handling really well. So I thought it was a good idea to join a new team, but like mistake number one is trying to go back to work from maternity leave and join a completely new environment. I thought it was easy, but questionable choice. And then things start getting really hard. When I go back to work, I send my baby to daycare full time. And then she was sick with a high fever the same day. So that started my whole year of getting sick constantly. Hello designers and welcome to a new episode of Honest UX Talks. Today we are tackling a topic that affects countless professionals in the tech industry, particularly those balancing demanding careers with intense responsibilities of raising a family, parental burnout. We're going to dive deep into the life of a designer who has had to navigate the pressure to succeed in tech, while simultaneously caring for human beings, which is a truly intense undertaking, and our conversation today will explore. The struggle of trying to balance everything while maintaining a career, the reality that parenting often gets harder after the new born phase, and the deep emotional and physical signs that signal when it's time to intentionally take a career break. But before we jump into that conversation, we want to give a quick shout out to a platform dedicated to recognizing excellence in the web creation community, Week Studio. If you're a web creator dedicated to delivering excellent work, you can stand out and establish your leader's status in the industry by becoming a Week Studio Certified Expert. The Studio League celebrates creators who regularly deliver high quality websites on the platform, and the beauty of the Week Studio Certification Program is that it is designed to let your expertise and hard work speak for itself. There are no tests, no applications, no extra steps, weeks, scouts, creators every month who meet their standards of excellence, and once certified, you gain peer and potential client recognition, validating your credibility across the industry, and potentially helping you attract more leads. So, e-certification is completely free and comes with an individual validated ID, ensuring its authenticity. So, ready to unlock the new recognition you deserve, start creating today and let your work lead to the way. Now, without further ado, I'm incredibly happy to welcome Rand to the podcast. I decided to invite Rand to talk to us about her experience as a new mother and tech after seeing one of her LinkedIn posts, which I am about to read because it sets the context and tone for our conversation, and it kind of gives you a very deep journey into Rand, who she is, what she experienced, and it's a very beautiful little essay. So, I'm going to read that. I'm going to give you a short intro about Rand's career, and then we're going to start talking to her because this is what we're here for. So, her LinkedIn post read this, "The Canary is Warning. Why am I taking a mandatory three-week break?" Canaries were once used in coal mines as an early warning system. When toxic gases built up, the canary would stop singing, or worse, alerting miners to evacuate before it was too late. I realized I'd become the canary in my own life when I suddenly hated everything I used to love. I'm a foodie who can remember the last time I cooked. My taste buds literally changed. Even ice cream and spicy food, my ultimate cheat foods, taste like cardboard. I felt like a zombie from my zombie going through the emotions without any joy. I was short with my three-year-old daughter. Everything I once looked forward to now felt like dread. I was constantly exhausted. This was my warning call. The truth? I've been running on fumes since returning from maternity leave. What people don't tell you about coming back to work, and daycare after a pandemic is the constant sickness cycle. Everyone's immune system took a hit during lockdown. My baby was constantly sick. I was constantly sick, including a brutal five-week full-ed Shopify. But I never had time to properly recover because I was juggling essentially three jobs. Just when I planned to take a career break, Gabel appeared with a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Chad can be quite convincing, so instead of resting, I masked the symptoms with a few short breaks and an extended Seattle trip to onboard in person. Once the honeymoon phase passed, and we were deep in series A prep and launch mode, I didn't ease up. Instead I decided it was a perfect time to seriously work on my YouTube channel, RAN Talks Design. Not the smartest move. Here I am forcing myself to take the break I should have taken years ago. My inbox is already crowded with recruiters and some incredibly tempting opportunities after my farewell post last Friday. In this brutal job market, it's carried to ignore potential roles, but I'm forcing myself to rest. Because whatever my next chapter is, I'm going all in and in it for a long haul. I know I'm speaking from an incredibly privileged position and I'm deeply grateful to Kent Willis for his unwavering support and always being my rock through this journey. Here's what I've learned. Burnout, debt, compounds, ignore your canaries, warning at your own peril. This was very powerful because it also touched a lot of parts in me that resonate with the story and I'm very happy to get to unpack it with RAN and kind of vent together and share our experiences of dealing with tech as a new mother. RAN has had a pleasure and are of design for a variety of teams of all kinds of sizes. She served as the founding designer and head of design at KBOL AI, where she was employing number five and helped the company grow to about 25 people. Prior to that pivotal role, RAN was a staff product designer growth at Shopify, where she led design vision and strategy for monetization and retail hardware growth. She was also a staff product designer product growth at Webflow. We learned that RAN was at Webflow when she went on maternity leave and she spent time as a second UX designer at Amplitude, joining the round series P. RAN's experience also includes being a senior experience designer growth at Adobe. She holds an MS in computer science from the University of Maryland, College Park where she focused on human computer interaction and data visualization. She's based in San Francisco Bay area and is a parent to a daughter, May, who is three and a half years old. I think this impressive career and also the ability to raise a human while building it are already very interesting topics to start unpacking. So without further ado, I'm very happy to welcome RAN on our podcast and ask her to maybe share a little bit about herself and her own words just to set the context for this conversation about parental burnout and the life of a designer that has to make it in tech while taking care of human beings, which is pretty pretty intense. But before we dive into it, RAN, welcome to the show and just yeah, maybe share a little bit about you and your context and invite you to unpack this topic that I think touches on so many of us. So welcome. Yeah, thank you so much for having me as such a pleasure to be here. I'm a fan of the podcast. So my name is RAN and I'm currently unemployed. I'm taking a little bit of a career break before that I was the founding designer at a startup called Gable AI and before that I have the pleasure and honor to design for a variety of teams of all kinds of sizes, like Shopify, Webflow and Amplitude. Wow. For me, it sounds like, well, what are your dream companies? Webflow and Amplitude definitely on the list. Shopify, I think it's great. I think you had a very big company experience and I know they're Canadian. So I'm wondering whether you've noticed a different work culture from from the typical US enterprise. But yeah, you have a lot of experience. You have a wonderful career and then at some point in your life, there was a wonderful achievement on a personal level. Having your child, how old is your child now? My daughter is three and a half years old now. Three and three quarters. Oh, okay. Yeah. So I remember that for me, the hardest part wasn't their early days. The first year I was, I don't know, mentally prepared or I think I was in the right mindset that it's going to be a war zone and all the adrenaline was there. My system supported me. So I felt like more prepared than what came after like after she turned two and I know your post that I just read earlier in our intro hinted at this like having to deal with constant sickness from daycare and going out in the collective world. And I have also found that to be the hardest period of her growing up. She's nearly five now. But it was very difficult for me. I can also tie it to my personal experience of yeah, like it like you have described the landing in a burnout because trying to balance everything continued to have a career while all of these were happening in the background. But can you maybe share a little bit about your story? What were the early signs that this is becoming too difficult to manage for you? And yeah, what was the, let's say, timeline or the story behind your burnout if I may call it? Yeah, definitely. Yeah, I'm so glad you mentioned about two as when it's get hard because I completely resonate and relate to that. So it's kind of like a perfect storm for me. I was pregnant. One or two months after the COVID lockdown has released and opened. So it's like you were locked in with like no fun in a tiny space for so long. And then finally the world opened up like I remember we booked a trip to Mexico. So we're looking forward to that. And then bam, I discovered that oh, I got pregnant really, really quickly. And then the Mexico trip instead of from like adventure and fun being like a baby moon. And I was in my first trimester. It's not the best time. So I didn't really get a release from the COVID lockdown and I go directly into motherhood. Yeah. And then once I give birth to May and like you said, the early babyhood was actually really nice for me. Web flow has like a six months policy for maternity leave, which is pretty generous in the US standard. Not so much for the rest of the world. I decided to like stay home for a little bit, a tat longer before I joined Shopify. That's the timeline. And I felt good. Like when I don't have to work, I was taking care of baby. And you get supports. And people send you doordash food in the Bay Area. It's very nice. I read like a stack of book like what to expect the first year sort of thing, months to months, week to week. I know what to expect. And I'm handling really well. So I thought it was a good idea to join a new team. Like Shopify is a company that I really admire. I love their product. Shop pay is probably the best checkout experience out there. Like I over purchase so much because of it. So I'm a big fan of the company. But like mistake number one is trying to go back to work from maternity leave and join a completely new environment. I thought it was easy, but questionable choice number one. And then she was sick with a high fever the same day, I think, the night off. I was very, very sick for five weeks, for a period. I had a flu. And then the doctor are not really wanting to give me antibiotics right away because I was still nursing. So it wouldn't get better. So I hang in there for three weeks. And then they finally give me antibiotics. So you last it like five weeks. I think I hit the top. How long you can take six days without going into the medical leave policy at Shopify. But unfortunately my my manager was also a mother was young child. She was also getting sick. So I feel a little bit better that I'm not just going to get fired or things like that. So she actually understand what I was going through. So that was really lucky, but ended up for the year I was at Shopify decided to leave and take a break. So that's when I start feeling some of the weight of the burnout, the sickness and all the caretaking and working essentially two jobs, your full time job and being a parent. So after that, unfortunately Chad, the CEO of Gabe away, I reached out. I think one week into my break, it's like the new. And I was like, oh shoot, this is my once in a lifetime opportunity. If I want to do a startup, I want to get in early. I decided and you know, fuck it. I would just do it. Because you never know when another opportunity seems to check all the boxes and something you really wanted to do come up. So I decided to do that and negotiate it for a later star date. So I had a little bit a few weeks of break. And then I leave with both feet into seed stage startup world. Like, you know, like I joined amplitude fairly early. Like I was there serious B higher. I was a second UX designer and amplitude. So it's like, yeah, I've done startup before I can do it. But a pre PMF startup is another whole new game. Very different. It was a little overwhelming. You know, growing up in China, like they teach you these principles of is called shru cool means eating bitter food. So you have to eat bitterness literally. Like you have to push through, do hard work and you just need to persevere. So that's what I did. I lasted for as long as I can as I think is two and a half years at this point. And I was employing number five. And now the company grew to about 25 people. Yeah, I'm proud of what I do. But then at the end, the last half a year was very, very difficult. So for me, like there are two very difficult stage. One is the two and a half year mark. When my daughter two and a half, that was so hard. I had a really low. I was contemplating on why? Like what's the meaning of life? Like how am I just doing this thing? I hate everything. But then like she got better. So with young kid in case you're listening and you don't know what it's like to be a parent, you essentially get shipped a new kid or like a new system update every six months. So you get a completely new kid every few months. And for me, like two to two and a half was extremely, extremely difficult. And then it got slightly better. And three to three and a half was really nice. So I got a little bit of break. I was I made it. I made it out of the dip. But then three and a half happened. And then the three major is real. So I'm dealing with that right now. Yeah. So I had a hit a low. I took a little like some measures and she got better. But then now I'm feeling it again. So that's when I decided, you know what? I need to be able to do this for the long run. I need to survive long enough to see grow us, see our growing up and achieve amazing things. So I can't just be like this anymore. Well, yeah. It's interesting that either all stories kind of share a similar core or we're very similar. And I think we are in many ways. Like I just learned that your daughter name is me and my daughter's name is Mia. So essentially playing around with the same three sounds. I had a very similar journey to yours. When I was in maternity leave, a startup reached out and I was like a phoning designer and I couldn't say no because they already got funding in the Romanian market. It was like a very rare opportunity to have a startup with 1.2 million seed or pre-seed. And I was like, I have to join them. The founder was very respected in the market and his still is. And he's a really interesting knowledgeable person. And I said, yes, it was like I do have been that in Romania. We get like two years of maternity leave. This was happening around the first year of March and I was like, you know what, I'm going to be home for the next year. So I might as well try to dabble into work until I return to my official full-time job. And so I started working on the startup and I realized that however clear I was on the boundaries from the beginning because in the beginning I told them I can't do it. I have a newborn and I just want to be here for her. And they said, no, it's okay. You can work a couple of hours a week. We can be very in like find a schedule that's flexible. We don't need a full-time designer at this point. We just need you to be there from time to time. And it's really hard to reinforce those boundaries in reality. So like what was beginning as a four hours per week turned into like, no, it's actually four hours per day. And then it's like, no, it's actually like a full-time job. We need you here. So it progressively pushes your boundaries unless you're very, very clear determined and vertical about it. Then I joined a large company again after the startup experience and my daughter went to kindergarten. So the disease started and my team was joking on this concept of disease of the week. So what's your disease? What do you have this week? I was working from Romania with the US. So we were on very different calendars and this also became very hard to manage because she was at daycare during the day and then in the evening I had calls with my team in the US. And so it was just constantly trying to figure out what's the right balance and that kind of got to me. And the last point I want to make is that what stood out and I think it's something that few parents realize until they experienced it in practice is this idea that your boss also had your manager also had a child. So maybe she wasn't understanding of you deep down, but at least you feel like you're in the same kind of tribe village. It's the same kind of problems. We have the same problems. At Miro, when I joined, there was no other parent in my team. All the developers were just single, young people having fun on weekends and my PM didn't have children, my engineering lead. When they try it, I was the only one with children. That was very difficult for me because they were understanding. They were nice people, but still they were working until APM and I had to go out and take my kid from kindergarten and it wasn't possible for me to work the same amount of hours and it became like a mismatch between my rhythm and the team rhythm. And so that's really important. Like I think I just want to extract this piece of advice if you're joining a company as a parent or a new parent scan for other parents around you because you're going to need that kind of even fake artificial village vibe, but at least it's something other than everybody has just time to work and that's what they do. I'm sorry. I went a bit all over the place because I think you touched on many things I personally very deeply resonate with because I have experienced them. I want to ask you so now you decided to take a career break. It's intentional. What were the things you've experienced internally that told you okay enough? Like at this point, beyond this point, it's dangerous and I want to make sure I will be there to experience me when she grows up. Are you dealing with health problems? Is it just a lot of anxieties? Is it mental health issues? Are you just extremely tired? Is it everything like what were the physical and psycho-emotional signs that enough is enough? This is the first question and the second question is how did you find your courage to actually say stop? How do you know something good will come back at you after you recover? So let's start with the first one. What were the signs? So other parents listening can recognize if they're on that path and if it's physical or just psychological, do I solve it in therapy or do I take pills or if I put myself on SSRIs to push through like you do in the Chinese culture just eats the bitter food. How did you know? Actually, like everything is out of whack. So we started from the sleep deprivation that all parents are very, very familiar. You started from the very beginning from the day you gave birth, right? For me, even when we sleep trained and a year later it stopped nursing and I don't have to wake up anymore when she sleeps through the night, I can't. My body just wake up multiple times a night and then my mind sometimes starts racing and that's just really bad. So I have essentially haven't had like a full night long sleep for two and half three years. So that's like when all the energy you had, all the fitness and health you had before I'll expect. So physically I was just always exhausted. I drink way too much coffee. I'm just functioning on coffee. That's my fuel. Not very healthy and I think the exhaustion mostly from the lack of sleep and then the summer when she was two and a half year old when I hit the low is when my mental state started to having issues. I just I find myself I don't want to wake up. Like one thing is that I'm just really exhausted and then another thing is I just really don't want to wake up and face another day. I procrastinate, I can want to just go back to sleep a little bit more. That's like a warning sign. We need to don't want to wake up to face the day at all. And I did some a little bit of measures to try to add a little bit more fun in my life. I remember that was the last October like you know they do this thing called inktober. You do one ink drawing every day. I think I did about 25 ink drawings in October and that felt really good. So that's when I realized like I need to add a little bit fun in my life. Because again, if you you're not a parent, there's this book titled "Outroi and No Fun" that I thought it was brilliant. It really summarized early parenthood for you. There's a lot of joy like you know like oh I love watching my kids grow up and they grow up so fast. There's a lot of joy. But then there's absolutely no fun. Like it's not fun to change diapers, clean up messes, make food that they throw away. And there's no fun. And you have to actively look for things that that gives you a little bit more fun in your life. And for me, I started drawing and then I started creating YouTube videos again. So I started before I found out I was pregnant. Like I posted like single digit like five videos. And then I'm pregnant. I was okay. New powerities. So I took two year break. And then I decided to come back after inktober because I got a little bit momentum. One part of that is kind of tortures. When you're a accountant creation, that's a lot work. But then on the other hand, it brings me a little bit channel where I can talk about what I want to talk about. It gives me a platform to express my feelings through the lens of design professional content. That helps a little bit. But then most recently I'd find myself stop doing a lot of these activities. I dread doing anything. For me, I'm a foodie. Like I made a lot of life choices because of the food. That's why I went to school in Sichuan province in China because I like the cuisine. That's why I ended up in San Francisco because of good food. If you like food, you want to come to San Francisco. But I realized I haven't cooked forever. All the things that I used to enjoy eating, like even cheat food, like ice cream, taste it different. It just doesn't taste good. I no longer have joy from eating food. That was a really big wake up color. It's like something is messed up with me. I mean, I keep nodding here if people were to see me because I resonate with so many of these. My side phone project UX goodies became like you were mentioning just a place of dread. And I felt like I wanted to close this account and everything on Instagram so many times. I just give up on everything. But then I was like the sun cost fallacy. I put so much effort in it. At least let it live like see where it goes if I don't invest energy in it. And then at some point it started producing money. Finally, it was giving back some of the work I put into it in a reward other than just helping people, which is the main reward. But it manifested into a side job. I have to continue because now maybe who knows where it just takes me and it took me in a good place. But at that point, I felt like I was just in survival mode every single day. I was feeling I could sink and then just trying to start over the next day. So I was also in a similar point. Everything felt and I remember asking on a group of mothers online like is everybody else just making it through the day? Is this like what parents do? Is it the life of all parents? Or is it just me? Like I felt like I couldn't finalize properly. Any task. The house was a mess. I was behind work. The UX goodies project wasn't fun anymore. Like nothing was working. My relationship with Mia went through all these stages of having a different child. She was a pretty opinionated child, which was full of tantrums and personality, which now manifests into a very nice kid close to five years old. But at those points were like when you're tired and exhausted and just push yourself to make it through the work day and then what you get next is just tantrums and dealing with all this level of challenge and difficulty. That was like, yeah, very, very difficult for me. So yeah, at some point I felt like I can't do anything and I just couldn't. I don't know you maybe made an intentional decision and I admire you for setting in even if maybe too late, even if you try to do too much or more than as humanly possible. And that's not necessarily something I would recommend other people doing or experimenting with, just pushing so far. To my early point about how much I feel like in a way, I also come from a culture of putting up with shit. Like in Eastern Europe, we have that both in personal relationships. Like it's very common to accept your husband's aggression and in our culture, it's like you'd never leave your husband even if you beat you. You just have to be there and accept it. And this is like the local Balkans view of the world. Life is pain and we just push through it, especially since we transitioned from communism to democracy and many people couldn't adjust. They were very stuck in that mentality like our parents instructed us to grow in a path where you have stability and security and the same job for 20 years. That's the definition of success. So whenever I kind of contemplated going on my own and making the space to rest and be productive and be creative, I kind of immediately associated that scenario with guilt and doing something wrong now. I understand you better than I wish I would. And I think I'm wondering how many parents or people contemplating parenthood and just trying to prepare for what's about to come can already feel that they might go in some of the corners of this immense light, but also darkness, which is very odd, like the extremes that trying to balance the modern life with the very natural organic thing of growing a human. It's like big conflict there. So what I would like to explore next is what are your plans now? What would the perfect setup be on the outside? At least if we can define it, maybe we can search for it or we can create it for ourselves. But what would you feel would make you want to work again? What would be an important rule you're not gonna overwrite again? Like how do you see the next thing that will not bring you back to the same point of what am I doing? Am I gonna be well if I continue to do this? That's something I'm actively exploring right now. I need to figure out what exactly is the thing I want to do. So at the time being, I think I'm going to start either advising or work fractional with founders for a little bit, maybe one or at most two times a day. I have a few founders I might reach out to for now. But I think long term, I mentioned this in another podcast that my ultimate goal is I really want to found my own company, but unfortunately I don't think this is the right time. Like any time soon. So I'm thinking when maybe when May is 10 or like when she become a teenager that don't want anything to do with you, you deal with another type of struggle. Maybe that's would be the time. But for now, I think there's a couple things that I'm thinking through like a couple criteria. One is I do really enjoy in-person time. So like you mentioned Shopify is a Canadian company, like it's a fully remote. That's a COVID change. They used to do more of a in-person meet-up thing every quarter. But then I don't think when I joined they're doing it as much. I've been to one during my year of tenure there. So I'm stuck in the house out day and it's not very clean and tidy as I would like. And there's just a lot of things that I want to do. I crave outside the home. So I would probably look for logistic wise something loco in the bay area with a hybrid schedule that I can go into work one or two times a week. So that's the ideal. And I'm also thinking I really miss redundancy. So one thing that was really tough for me as the founding and only designer at a startup is you don't have any redundancy. I feel self-conscious taking breaks and vacations. So I actually just said no to family vacations. So like my husband took a week off just by himself, staycation, because I didn't want to take off as much. Even though I don't think anyone told me no, you're taking too much vacation. Don't do that. It's like a self-imposed thing because I'm the only designer. Like I need to be there to deal with anything visual and customer related. So I think mentally I'll feel a lot more at ease if I have redundancy just at least have another designer. And it's also helpful when you can talk shop with someone. They know the context, they know the people and you don't have to sign NDAs so you can talk to someone about design. So that's something I would definitely look for. And another thing is I'm looking at the sectors. I'm a firm believer of work life integration, especially when you have kids because sometimes like I have to do pickup and then I'll go back on my computer at eight or nine after bedtime. So it is pretty much integrated into my life. If I do do work, I want it to be at least something I'm passionate about. So I want it to really align with my expertise and mission a little bit more. I am thinking exploring maybe I want to get into the health and wellness space because I'm going through this. It's important and I love cooking so like that space interests me. But I'm never like a B2C type of person. I'm always B2B. So I think maybe something that's the overlap of the fitness and wellness space overlap with a prosumer space. That would be a good intersection for me. So that's something I am exploring. I appreciate how well you can articulate this vision of what you would feel most attracted to at this point. This is really really useful for everyone to make as an exercise. I'm okay. I kind of experienced what didn't make me feel well and everything that led me to this point, like what would be a different model for that. And to your point about in office, I also want to build styling on top of it. I've been working remotely for Miro for one year and then at Uipad, I was not going in the office very often because it was still post-COVID, like not many people were there, but I tended to go. But then there was one year fully remote, just remote. And we met in Berlin and Amsterdam a couple of times a year. And then this year was the first year fully solo. So I'm also just working by myself from home. I feel extreme loneliness. Like I don't know if extreme is the word because I get to hang with people that have kids in the park and I see people somewhere. I maybe work from a cafe and so on. But to your point about a kind of chemistry and intimacy and kind of complicity that is built between people and the same team, dealing with the same struggles, dealing with the same difficult peer. All that kind of water cooler conversation and vibe. I miss that so much and I feel lonely. Like most of my day is spent in my head and working without having conversations and that's very, very taxing for creativity and also for a person who is an extrovert like myself even more. I started going in the office of some friends that were working in the creative world and that kind of helped, but still I felt like an outsider, right? Because I wasn't in their problem space. I was there like just an intruder in the playground, but it was really useful and pointed me towards this. Unfortunately in Romania you don't have the same opportunities as you do in San Francisco. So here we have offices from I think Google and Adobe and that's pretty much it. Or UI Path which is my former employer. So this is the kind of big company you get here. I really appreciate your direction and clarity. Maybe just one last question before you wrap up our conversation. I'm wondering whether underneath all the conversation artists at the surface there were a lot of things that surface does advice to anyone who's contemplating this. If you were to start over like let's say you're a parent now you have a three months child and you're supposed to go back to work or maybe you even have the freedom to choose what are things to bear in mind with our maybe tips and tricks that helped you push through and be better than you would have been without them even if you didn't end up in the best place. And I know we kind of touched on them sporadically throughout a conversation but like kind of your recipe for surviving this stage of someone's life. Yeah so first of all I want to just give a warning if you are at the stage where you're contemplating going back to work. We said before the babyhood is actually easier like they're less mobile, they're less opinionated. You are well rested and you don't have a work. Powerhood is like a marathon. The last five miles is the hardest when you are already tired but you have to keep pushing on. So it gets actually harder not easier. Before it gets maybe easier again when your kids is a little bit older and not enough parents talk about that. So most of everybody's attention they warn you to give you baby books is because we think a newborn baby is fragile but nobody really talk about the later stage that was really hard and even they talk about they just say terrible twos, terrible three three-nators and these words and then you don't really understand until you truly go through it. So I just want to give a warning that parenting does get really really hard after newborn. And that's also when your support network stops supporting you as much because they're like, "Ah, they've had kids for a year. They got this but no, that's actually the place you should support your friend more because they're probably really tired." And if you are like more career-oriented chances are you live far away from your like immediate family members so you don't get a lot of support with child care like we do in some cultures like the Chinese culture where like what we used to do. So it does get hard and then learn from a mistake. Going back to work is not the best time to get a new job. So if you you're lucky enough to be in a country that has extended maternity leave, chances are even if you go back to the same company you're gonna join a different team. That's what femke actually talked about that in one of her YouTube videos. She joined a different team so you have to start over again. It might not sound like much but there's actually a lot of hidden things you have to do with a new team, a new environment, just you have to rebuild trust, start building relationships and you have to prove your value really early on like in your first 90 days. So all of those things are hard to do in addition to like learning the new knowledge, get onboarded and just transition into from not working at all for six months to a year to just start working again. So there's a lot of transition and I would ask you to give yourself a lot of grace, take it slow and make this transition easy and if you can you can join a work part time. It's a good idea. I know Dropbox has that so you start at part time for a little bit and then you go back to full time. In Romania we actually have that by law. You can return to a six hour program if you want. Like if you want to have a child, I think Romania is a very good place to have it but you don't have the same professional opportunities. I saw friends that did that. They went part time in the beginning four hours or six hours. It really made a difference in how they experienced this. Like it wasn't a full-blown crisis, mode. It was like more of a gradual adjustment and it really matters and I don't think I have a lot to add to that. I think maybe just from my own experience try to not to start ups while you're in. Yeah maybe I mean cozy jobs we all are in this race to prove and to achieve and to get somewhere. We don't even know where but we have to make more do more be more and I think that sometimes we underestimate a cozy job and so recently I had a couple of mentorship calls with folks from the community coming through my coaching offer. They were telling me I went on this my job and find I don't know what and I was like I don't know I think you should really think well about it because if you're happy there and if it's not mentally destroying you and the market is in a very strange place right now. A couple of years ago I would have said wow jump at a next thing like if you have the drive to experiment to learn to do something else just do it but now I'm like you know what cozy is important because at the end of the day is just a job and sure we can achieve things professionally but I think to your point it doesn't matter if you get at the top of the mountain and then you die when you get there like we need to be able to enjoy success so just making sure that we balance ambition with self-care is we're struggling with as a generation. Rand I want to thank you I feel less lonely now and very energized even if it's close to 8 p.m. here in Buickers while we'll recording this I think you have a very grounding presence and I'm sorry that you've had to experience this but at the same time I'm very grateful you share your knowledge and story with us because I think it will help many people who might expect a similar difficult time of balancing life. Are there any last things you might want to add or any idea that we didn't touch on or just if you have any good wishes for our audience I'm going to give you the opportunity now. Yeah definitely so thank you so much for having me again I think this is a topic that we don't talk nearly enough. Working parent is kind of a group that's very underrepresented in the content world so I'm glad you are picking up this topic and I just want to tell everyone else that's out there struggling or experiencing burnout that you're not alone I'm pretty sure as every parent they can all relate. If you want to chat more my DMs always open just connect with me and LinkedIn I'm happy to support another parent and just really really important I think you have to believe in you have to put your air mask on before everyone else and I think modern society give us this idea there's a notion of you should be able to do everything like the movie I don't know how she does it or like there's this book by Laura Wendercam I know how she does it so this is like all about this romantic notion of if you are a working mom you have to be a martyr you have to do everything perfectly and that's just very very hard I wouldn't say impossible because somebody is doing that it is very very difficult for you to do alone without like a dedicated caretaking team it's okay to reprioritize and I know it's very hard like it was a very hard decision for me to say I'm going to take a break for a no amount of time until I feel better because we're all ambitious if we're working parents and if you made it as far into the podcast like you have to make the hard decision do I choose my house do I choose my quality time was my kid versus this career thing that was probably our number one priority for the longest time in our lives it's hard I still at the back of my mind saying oh I'm going to be replaced by AI one day and I'll never find a job again maybe I need to learn how to bake sourdough bread better and open a microwave it just keep face I just keep breathing and notice the thought is there long term you have to do what's the best for you so really take time to add in fun and refueling activities and not just binging like passively binging Netflix things like that do things that require a little bit more effort go workout go for hike do some inktober is October again I really really resonate with everything you've shared and this is just a very quick last story to your point about doing things that require presence for the first time in my life last year I went on a kite trip which I'm not a sports see person at all I do pilates but that's all I do I don't know bored I don't so I went on this kite trip and I thought I was gonna hate it but I just wanted to do something fun like at least try to go out of my comfort zone and it was incredible because this sport is so difficult and complex and dangerous hey you really must be focused on it at all times and then after four days of camping I realized whoa I had the best meditation experience of my life I wasn't so present for something like learning a new thing but also being careful to not die and being careful to handle the complexity and sophistication of so many things that need to come together to practice the sport and I realized this is the kind of experience that my brain needs and not necessarily with kite now I'm learning Italian and all sorts of like just new the novelty and the focus and being present and doing something that is not on autopilot because our lives were being pushed by technology into this autopilot mode and tech industry even as a job is like repeating the same challenges over and over again like toxic environments difficult people stuff like that right so I think that everything that takes you out of that repeatability of monotony for our brain and just not nourishing things that we have to deal with all the time so thank you so much for pointing out all these important matters it really helped me reflect again on them like as I'm closing I'm hearing my first year on my own and you really helped me ground and remind myself what matters and what I want to do next and in my life as well so thank you Ran for joining us we're going to add the LinkedIn contact for Ran in the show notes you can find it there I'm again very grateful for this conversation and thank you everyone for tuning in if you have any other podcast episode topics send them over because we want to be there for you as we've always tried and have a nice day bye