2. On Building Better Work-Life Integration with Heather Ainsworth

Overview

In this conversation, I'm joined by Heather Ainsworth, my friend and the CEO and Founder of Workable Concept. Heather is an expert in helping organizations, individuals, and leaders create circumstances for caregivers to thrive in work and life.

Heather is one of the best people I know who has for me modeled what I think of as Sustainable Ambition. And, what I LOVE about this conversation with Heather is not only how open and vulnerable she is in what she shares and the wisdom that comes from that openness, but also the insight that you can play BIG in your career and command what you need from work on your terms to have Sustainable Ambition.

If you're seeking Sustainable Ambition and better work-life integration at any stage in your career, this is a conversation worth a listen. If you're just starting out, listen and learn from Heather's sage advice.

So great to be in conversation with you, Heather!

More about Our Guest

Heather Ainsworth is the CEO and Founder of Workable Concept. She has been on the front lines of building caregiver-friendly workplaces for over 20 years. She created the Client Services team for the Employer Sponsored Child Care division of Knowledge Learning Corporation (now KinderCare Education at Work), where her team managed child care benefit solutions for Fortune 1000 employers. As a member of the global senior leadership team at Intrax, Heather managed AuPairCare to become one of the largest au pair agencies in the U.S., engineered the turnaround and sale of a nationwide chain of ESL schools to Stafford House, and managed an early childhood education franchisor business to over 100 franchisees nationwide. To pursue her passion for the intersection of caregiving and gender equity in the workplace, she served as Chief Operating Officer of The Representation Project, a national non-profit dedicated to reducing the threat of gender stereotypes. During her tenure, the organization worked with a wide range of employers including Harry's, Unilever, StubHub, Spotify, AT&T and Ellevate Network.

Heather has worked with a wide variety of clients, including AARP, Cambridge Education Group, Bay Area Discovery Museum, and Children’s Creative Learning Centers. She also currently serves as Advisor for Kinside, a child care benefits company, and on the Advisory Body of Build Up!, an initiative of the Silicon Valley Community Foundation and San Mateo County to increase the supply of affordable, quality childcare in Silicon Valley. She enjoys engaging audiences at speaking engagements, most recently at the Watermark Conference, for Stanford University alumni, Ellevate Network, Professional BusinessWomen of California and on the Working Mother's Mentor podcast.

She holds an AB from Duke University and an MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business, and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband and children.

Topics Covered

  • How Heather has defined success for herself and what's been a touchstone that has guided her career

  • A defining moment early in Heather's life that led her to lead a values-based, holistic life inclusive of a career

  • How in looking at her career, despite her many successes, Heather still wishes she took more risks and played bigger

  • She advises on the importance, which she wish she knew earlier, to create a personal board of directors and look for people you want to model across aspects of your life, picking from different people and each of their characteristics or behaviors

  • Heather hints at the fact that we are in choice around finding better work-life integration, and she also suggests that we can be more ambitious than we realize AND ask to have better work-life integration at the same time

  • But she also bursts the bubble that living whole, healthy lives doesn't mean never having to work hard

  • That "balanced and sustainable" isn't about moments in time, but rather looking over an 18-month time horizon

  • And then so many great pieces of counsel like: always take the call; ask when in new stages, "What do I want to learn in this phase?;" hold onto the parts of your life that anchor you; if you want better work-life integration, look for a great manager (it always comes back to the manager!); you have more power than you think to craft what you want; ask for forgiveness not permission; and keep at it with pleasant persistence

Resources Mentioned

Thanks for Listening!

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2. On Building Better Work-Life Integration with Heather Ainsworth

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2020Kathy OnetoRight Aspiration, Right Effort, Right Success