When do you finally get to start living your life?

When the kids sleep through the night? When they start school? When you have a balanced day?

My 2-year-old daughter was sick last week, nursery cancelled, work piling up. I had every reason not to go to the gym.

But I went anyway — and on the way there, it hit me: I've been waiting for a full stop that's never coming.

Here's the thing: life with young children IS the trenches. The coffee goes cold. You sit down to eat and someone needs water. You haven't drunk water yourself all day. There's always another nursery event, clothes they've grown out of, another illness coming. It's relentless.

So instead of waiting for life to settle before I start living, I'm learning to live IN the chaos.

I want to know that waiting until they leave home to discover who I am means losing 15 years of becoming. That the margins aren't second-best — they're where life actually happens. That I can start a podcast in my dressing gown without makeup, go to the gym when I "don't have time," build systems that make the impossible possible. That progress beats perfection every single time. That self-compassion isn't soft — it's what keeps me going when I miss a week.

Because maybe the goal isn't to wait for the full stop... but to build a life worth living in the commas. The chaos doesn't end. But you can live anyway — with systems, audacity, and kindness toward yourself.

What happens when a Fortune 500 exec stops hiding her identity as a mother at work and starts leading with it instead?

Lucy Watkins, mum of two, had a realisation: the same leadership skills she used at work - structure, empathy, communication, strategy - could transform her family life too. She stopped hoping things would just work out.

She started designing them.

The result? She went from burnout to impact, won an Employee Award for changing workplace culture around parenting, and created The Family Playbook - a weekly rhythm that helps ambitious parents move from surviving to thriving.

In this episode, we explore:

• Why "work-life balance" is BS and what intentional integration actually looks like
• How she built a Family Playbook the same way she builds team playbooks at work
• The visibility revolution: bringing your full self to work instead of compartmentalising
• Why motherhood became her leadership superpower (not her limitation)
• Weekly rhythms vs rigid schedules
• Energy management over time management, presence over perfection

Lucy doesn't treat family life as something that happens TO you - she treats it as something you LEAD. Because leadership starts at home.

What do you teach your children about hard times when you know you can't protect them from everything?

Not if they'll face heartbreak, loss, or situations they didn't see coming — but when?

I've been thinking about this a lot lately. The person I am today was shaped largely by hard times. This podcast wouldn't exist without those experiences. Not just the recording or content — but going through difficult things forced me to learn resilience, find joy, be disciplined.

Here's the thing: I can love my children with every breath and still know I can't shield them from life's hardest lessons.

So instead of trying to prepare the world for them, I'm preparing them for the world.

I want them to know that people will show up differently in hard times — and that's about capacity, not care. That healing is theirs to build, like a warrior seeking out the dragon before it burns down the village. That there's a better version of them waiting on the other side of pain. That even in the darkest moments, life is still passing by — and finding joy in small things isn't giving up, it's choosing to live.

Because maybe the goal isn't to spare them from hard things... but to give them the foundation to move through them with grace, self-respect, and unshakeable resilience.