Lydia Fenette

So...

In my own experience, I had three children in four years.

So I was on maternity leaves three out of four years.

And as you can imagine, it becomes a very uncomfortable thing because you just assume that everyone around you is thinking that you're not good at your job anymore.

You're not doing it.

Plus, you have this incredible child, children at home where you're trying to balance everything.

And it's a lot of work, especially those very early years.

And I remember going back to work and someone said to me as I was walking through the office, hey, it's so good to see you back here again.

And I remember thinking, oh my God, they must be thinking that they haven't seen me and that's why they said that.

And then I just went into this negative spiral about how I'd had three children so quick.

It was just the most ridiculous thing because that's not what the person had said to me.

They'd said it was nice to see me back in the office.

And so I decided that day,

to make a change in terms of my mentality about when people said things to me, what I was going to take from them.

But I refused to put myself into that negative spin anymore.

It had taken way too much time and layered on too many layers of imposter syndrome for me.

The A is to accept that there are no gold stars in life as an adult.

So I don't know how many people you've interfaced with over the course of your life, Mike, but I oversaw a lot of different teams at work.

And one thing that I noticed amongst some of the people who worked for me was that they were always looking for a gold star from someone else.

They wanted someone to applaud them for work done or something that was just part of their daily job.