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Career Advancement

Become a Badass Working Mom One Step at a Time

Can having kids make you more successful at work? Kari Clark has two young children, and post-kids, she’s made significant progress at work and in life. While being a working mom can be overwhelming, Clark says having kids “made me even better at my job at Google.” To share what she has learned, both through her own experiences and from interviewing other working mothers, she founded Uplift, a digital learning platform that treats motherhood as a competitive advantage in the workplace.

Clark knows that the typical working mom doesn’t have much time to spend on professional development, so Uplift provides small-group coaching sessions, brief activities, and tools to make life easier. In the Forté webinar Women Lead: Become a Badass Working Mom, Clark video-chatted with three moms in Forté’s network to demonstrate how the group coaching experience works. Afterward, she shared some mom-specific career advice and answered questions from working moms in the audience.

Clark asked each of the moms she coached during the webinar to share a recent “mom win”—something they’d done well as a working mom in the past week. She explained, “It’s so easy as a working mom to just focus on that to-do list of things that you haven’t done, or all the things that you’re not doing and that you might feel guilty about, instead of relishing all the things that are going well.”

She had a short conversation with the three working moms in which she helped each of them identify one small change she could make in her life. Clark said Uplift likes to ask, “How do we shrink whatever change we want to make into something that feels so small, it’s almost laughable that you wouldn’t do it?” One mom decided that instead of scrolling mindlessly through Facebook on her phone each night after her children were in bed, she’d try going to bed early one night and see how she felt the next day.

After each mom decided on one small change, Clark asked what the chances were, on a scale of one to ten, that she’d follow through on it. She says this question is important, because “If it’s not a nine or a ten, the action is too big, and you should shrink it to something smaller.” If you succeed, Clark says, “You’re much more likely to then go do something else positive the next day.”

To see Clark’s coaching session with the three moms and hear more of her insights, watch the on-demand recording of the full Women Lead: Become a Badass Working Mom webinar.

A full library of previous Forté webinars is available to Premium Access Pass members. For $100/year, Access Pass members receive exclusive invitations to Women Lead webinars.  If your company is a Forté sponsor you may be entitled to free Access Pass.  Check our sponsors to see if your organization is involved.  Access Pass members also have exclusive use of the Forté Job Center; you can browse positions and post your resumé to be seen by leading companies seeking top talent.

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