Start With Yourself: A New Vision for Work & Life by Emma Grede - 13

The most important relationship you’ll ever have is the relationship you have with yourself.

—Diane von Furstenberg

Women are overburdened, and arguably none more so than mothers. We all come from a culture in which the needs of women are an afterthought, leading to burnout, resentment, and rage. A big part of the reason why this happens is that we leave ourselves out of the equation, expecting and hoping that others will see that nobody is taking care of us and rush to do it—this is a fool’s errand. Early on in my life I decided that I wanted to not only understand myself, but I wanted to learn how to love myself and to really value my needs. We all need to fall in love with ourselves before we can properly love anyone else. We all need to love ourselves to feel like we deserve more. To quote Diane von Furstenberg, “The most important relationship you’ll ever have is the relationship you have with yourself.”

The single most important thing I do every day is look after myself. I bet some of you are arguing with me in your head: But what about your family? What about your four kids? How can you not put them first? We have a massive cultural blind spot that any woman who doesn’t profess to be kid-first exclusively is somehow deviant or defective. We don’t fault men for going to the gym, taking time to read the paper without interruption over breakfast, or watching four hours of football with their friends. We expect it. But when a woman starts with herself, we assume she’s a selfish bitch who has terrible priorities, and we judge her accordingly. But here’s the thing: If I don’t take care of myself, who will? And what’s more, if I don’t resource myself, I’m certainly not resourced to give my energy to anyone else. I know that I get shit done because I value myself—and I value my goals. I don’t want either of my daughters to labor under the belief that caring about themselves means they must care about other people less. It’s actually bonkers when you put it like that.

Taking care of yourself can mean a million different things, though I’m talking about taking care of myself emotionally and mentally. I’m not talking about splashing hundreds of dollars at a spa or taking myself shopping—we’re in a bit of a bind right now as women, where we’re equating those types of activities with self-love. It’s not exactly what I’m talking about.

I don’t always find it easy to love myself, but I begin every morning by talking to myself in the mirror. I remind myself of what I want, I remind myself of my favorite qualities about me, especially when those qualities feel far away, and I remind myself of everything in my life that is working. Usually, I say something like, “Emma, it’s a good day. None of the stuff bothering you matters—it doesn’t matter that your hair looks like shit and you don’t know what to wear. It doesn’t matter that this situation is bumming you out. You are healthy, and today you get to see this person, and that person, and do this, and do that. You have so much choice in your life. Look how far you’ve come: Today, you’ll likely be recognized for all you’ve achieved in some sort of public way, meanwhile it wasn’t that long ago when you were begging for money and hoping someone would even listen to your pitch.” It’s never, ever a bad idea to remind yourself of everything that’s good and going well in your life, and all the opportunities that might unfold.

At a young age, I began to recognize the power I had to predetermine the course of my day—before I even got out of bed. I knew it would be a good day or a bad day—regardless of what might happen—depending on my attitude. I remember Oprah saying something like, “I thank my heart because it gets up every day, without me thinking about it or telling it to, and pumps blood around my body.” This is so profound. You get up every day, and your lungs are lunging, and your heart is hearting, and aren’t we all so fucking lucky?

This is my version of a gratitude practice. If talking to yourself in the mirror feels too corny, you can write it down in your journal, or talk to yourself as you’re driving to work, or after you’ve dropped your kids at school. But I recommend looking yourself in the eye as you do it, ensuring it really lands. The reason I’m so insistent about this—the reason that this is the introduction to a section about family—is that if allowed, we will put ourselves off. It’s what we’ve been doing for millennia. And it has to stop. You must begin the practice of loving yourself first, of putting yourself first, before you turn to anything or anyone else. There is plenty to go around. Anyone who has given birth to a second child has worried they won’t have enough love to go around, only to find that love seems to exponentially increase. Loving yourself takes nothing, zilch, from the other people in your life. You will find that it means you can love them even more.

1. Old Thought: You’re responsible for your kids’ lives—and it’s your job to protect them from the world.

Don’t leave anything for later…. Later, people grow up. Later, words go unsaid. Later, you lose interest. Later, opportunities slip away. Later, the day turns into night. Later, you regret not doing something. Later, life goes by. And you had the chance.

—Toshikazu Kawaguchi

“I think YOU should have the piano lessons.” I laugh about this still, but this came from my husband, Jens, and it was directed at me. We have a beautiful piano in our house. Naturally, I had been harboring fantasies of my kids being virtuosos and all of us huddling around it to sing songs during the holidays like you see in the movies. But I was getting tired of trying to convince all my kids to not only take piano lessons, but want to take piano lessons. None of them are musically inclined.

After listening to this hustling from me for many months, Jens finally turned to me and told me that as this seemed to be my ambition, I should take care of it myself. “Take piano lessons, Emma. You be our pianist.” I laughed, because as much as I love the idea of being a well-rounded savant, I don’t yet have the time. It was an excellent reminder though of the way that we can focus so much of our energy on other people—often trying to control them or convince them that we understand their needs much better than they ever will—that we lose sight of ourselves.

That might have been the point that I stopped being ambitious for my children. They have to find that for themselves. This is tough medicine for an ambitious person turned parent. I would love to engineer their childhoods to ensure they hatch well and do important things in the world, but I recognize not only that this is a fallacy, but also that then they’d be living the life I’d choose for them and not their own. Yes, there are a lot of things that I do do—namely, giving them a lot of love and attention; giving them opportunities to try different things and hopefully find activities they’re passionate about; enough travel to stoke their curiosity; and a high-quality education that fits their varied learning styles. But beyond setting the table and filling it with nutritious options, I can’t do the chewing and swallowing on their behalf. As part of this, I realize I can’t make my son’s anxiety go away (it’s his natural disposition), or solve their learning differences, or make a harsh world less harsh. I can be a soft lap but not a shield. They will need to experience the world and shape their attitudes to it on their own.

We’ve created a crisis for mothers in defining parenting as something you do full-time —or not. I understand that we do this to give parenting equivalency to a career, and we don’t want women who don’t work outside the home to feel bad about their choices—or lack thereof. I I get that. And still, parenting is not a job. Parenting is way more amorphous and difficult and uncontrolled than that. There’s no time clock to stamp, no merit raises (or material compensation at all), no annual reviews where someone tells you how you’re killing it and where you need to improve. There’s no boss . It’s much, much harder. After all, your child is not a product to be defined, managed, and ultimately marketed to the world, as much as our culture tries to convince us that this is our duty, or that certain inputs will result in certain outputs.

When I speak like this in public, when I tell people that I don’t get involved with the small details of my kids’ lives, that I don’t sit on their group chats with their friends (yes, some parents chaperone their kids’ chats), that I’m not panicking about scheduling their days perfectly, other women look at me cross-eyed. And some are pissed or uncomfortable. There is certainly a cultural belief that when it comes to parenting, there’s always more that should be done—and always more that you , specifically, should do. But I refuse to buy it. I believe this is largely just anxiety that we create and then foist onto each other, creating a type of doom loop where we’ll all try to outrun falling short of some sort of cultural ideal. I believe it’s largely a function of privilege, too. More resourced families, families that aren’t trying to keep their heads above water, are more inclined to think they can control the world—including their children—whereas when you have less cash, just keeping everyone alive can feel like a real accomplishment. Meanwhile, all of us are experiencing the global privilege of living in a much safer world than our ancestors—though we have a hard time convincing our fear-driven minds that things are relatively okay and there are no real threats lurking in the bushes outside our homes.

In Outraged , professor and psychologist Kurt Gray writes about the idea of “concept creep” when it comes to harm, and how we’re unable to turn off the hypervigilance that’s kept us alive for millennia. He points out that when it comes to global natural disasters, for example, more than five hundred thousand people lost their lives in the 1920s, when there were two billion people on the planet. Despite there being nearly eight billion people in the 2010s, we saw a small fraction of that number die from global natural disasters, only about fifty thousand. 1 After living through the Palisades and Eaton fires in Los Angeles in January 2025, it was remarkable that despite stunning damage, only thirty-one people died—the world feels far more murderous than that.

The perception of threat when it comes to parenting is even more prevalent, despite the fact that you don’t see many kids’ faces on the sides of milk cartons these days. Gray writes, “Whether you find parenting today to be overly coddling or appropriately protective, the undeniable truth is that our idea of what counts as ‘harmful’ toward kids has expanded. We let our kids do less on their own, and we see more danger in things that used to seem safe. Even though the world is safer, we remain afraid of danger—and perhaps even more afraid. Parents during the Industrial Revolution had to worry about their child being dismembered by dangerous machinery while working twelve-hour days in hot, dark factories. Parents today worry about the harm of walking home, or the trauma caused by the cruel comments of other kids. The concept of harm has crept.” 2 I get this wholesale; I believe that most people around me are coddling their children. It’s possible that this is easier for me to see because I was decidedly not coddled as a child and certainly found myself in situations that were not safe. Though when I speak to friends who were raised in entirely different situations, financially and otherwise, it seems like we all experienced a lot more freedom and what you might call, in today’s terms, benign neglect. There were no lawn mowers clearing our paths or helicopters observing our every move. And most of us turned out just fine. These days, to be the lone parent who resists over-involvement in parenting makes you an outlier—even though all signs point to the fact that our children aren’t doing well, locked inside with their screens. Kids need freedom, they need nature, and they need to test their own power and limits in the world. We cannot do that for them. It’s easy to be hijacked by fear. It’s easy to be hijacked by the anxiety of other parents, or to train your eyes on what they’re doing and push to conform your own parenting to their standards. But I’m not sure this does any of us any favors.

I think about Carl Jung’s idea that our kids bear the burden of our unlived lives all the time, particularly in the way that so many of us have been convinced to see our kids as containers for us to cultivate our own sense of worth, or fertile ground for us to find our own purpose and then make them live it. I get a lot of dopamine hits from being a mum, and I’m proud of who my kids are growing up to be, but I really work hard to give them a wide berth. I want them to feel like everything they achieve in their lives (or don’t) is on them. I want them to take full responsibility and full credit. I see my job as providing them with a lot of nutritious fertilizer: good food (though I’m not a nut about this); a willing and nonjudgmental ear; an hour or so every evening of devoted time and attention, including dinner as a family every night when phones and work are put away; access to enriching activities; and unconditional love. When it comes to all things—screen time, TV, junk food—we try to fill their plates with vegetables so there’s less room for dessert. But there’s still dessert. I ate a lot of shit when I was a kid, and I turned out just fine. It’s just not that deep.

When it comes to the hurdles they’ll encounter in their lives, those hurdles are their own. There’s a reason it’s their homework and not mine. You will never catch me doing it for them. I’ll help out, but I’m not in the lead. As women, we need to have serious conversations with ourselves and each other about the bounds of our responsibility, when we are horribly overreaching, and what we need to concern ourselves with. For what it’s worth, I see this at the office all the time—team members will come to me out of concern that another person on the team is working too hard, and I have to ask: Did they say that to you? (No.) Did they ask you to speak to me about it and intervene? (No.) Stop parenting other adults! The instinct in us to do this is strong. But since we’re talking about homework, eyes on your own paper!

Ultimately, this is the question I ask myself constantly: When it comes to the kids, what is my aim? I can honestly tell you that my aim is to have happy kids who are kind, curious, and engaged. That’s pretty much it. I cannot ensure that they’re not going to have anxiety. I cannot ensure that they’re not going to have learning difficulties. I cannot ensure that they won’t suffer bullying. My responsibility is to raise kids who are secure with who they are, who can speak up and advocate for themselves, including when they need help and additional support, and who approach the world with curiosity and an open mind. My responsibility is to raise kids who know they can figure it the fuck out when they encounter all the problems that will invariably arise. It is not my responsibility to snowplow the path or be their constant companion.

The other day at a public speaking event, a woman asked me if I spent my time differently on the weekends and whether I focused all my energy on my kids.

“No, absolutely not,” I responded. “I’m a max three-hour mum. After a few hours of focused quality time, I’m doing other things. I work out, I read, I do courses on things like Transcendental Meditation. But I don’t spend eight straight hours with my kids unless we’re on vacation—and I don’t think they would want that either!”

After, my publicist told me that she had groaned at my answer, wanting me to choose something more socially palatable. But I refuse to lie, especially around something that’s so crucially important for women. We don’t need any more gaslighting. I refuse to set up unrealistic expectations for other mums by lying about my own life. I believe women are in an untenable position because we feel like we can’t tell the truth—either about reality or about what we want—and then we try to convince ourselves that we’re supposed to feel a different way about parenting, and that we’re definitely the only defective mum because we’re not excited to get down on our hands and knees to have a doll party on a Saturday afternoon. Some women love that; many women do not. When I asked my publicist if she spends eight straight hours with her kids, she acknowledged that no, she does not. I’m very fortunate that I have an engaged co-parent, access to a lot of childcare and household support, II and an ease around screens: I don’t give myself a lot of grief for parking my kids in front of a movie or setting up some playdates so I can get some errands done or read a book. I don’t think my kids are missing out because I’m not their constant companion. Because guess what? Our kids don’t want us to be their primary playmates either. They really don’t. They want us to be more like the family cat—available for an occasional snuggle and always there on the periphery but largely giving them space. My kids seem to love “parallel play,” where we read in the same room, or I do work while they play Roblox; they’re not looking for me to be their best friend. But I do look for opportunities throughout the year to make really wonderful core memories with them.

Motivational speaker Jesse Itzler speaks very powerfully about time in a way that really connects for me. He points out that if your parents are seventy years old, and you see them once a year, you might tell yourself that you have ten more years with them. But really, you have ten more visits with them total, which is really not so much. You might be served to be a little more intentional and present with the time you do have left. Itzler takes the concept of time, which seems elastic, endless, and infinite, and grounds it down into something that feels a lot more scarce, and therefore more precious. We all saw that now-viral Instagram post that went around reminding parents that if you have a twelve-year-old, you’re already 70 percent through the time you likely have left with them at home. Ideas like this stop me in my tracks.

I use that now to think about the number of Christmases my family has while we’re still reliably under one roof, the number of spring breaks or summer vacations we all get to take together before these weeks become complicated by school vacations, sleepaway camps, and competing interests, like friends and significant others. It’s just not that much time. But rather than letting this spin me out into trying to make every single minute with my kids count, it helps me focus my attention on high-impact, core memory events. I think about all the moments, and the anticipation and lead-up to those moments, too: I want Halloween to be special, I want Christmas to be an event , I want to load the calendar with family game nights and theater trips and other exciting moments that we can really look forward to and then live them hard.

There’s a corollary in business, which is doing drop models and limited-edition collaborations that come and go really fast. One of the reasons I love these so much is that they feel like a big event rather than just merchandise that rolls in and sticks around for a long time, making seasons and time indistinguishable. You really get to see where you’ve come and where you’re going when you look at your business in this way. You get to build in anticipation, and you get to build in celebration after and really have a moment where you take stock and say, We did this thing. I feel the same way about the big moments with my family. While this seems like a lot of pressure, I actually feel that it’s relieved a lot of my anxiety, and conversely, it’s taken some of the pressure off every single day needing to feel special and packed out. It has helped me a lot mentally and also given me a lot of incredible moments to remember with my kids.

Every time I get fearful that I’m an inadequate mum, whenever I get swept up in anxiety that I’m not doing enough for them or that I missed an important child-related email, I remind myself of my core aim: healthy, happy, kind kids who are equipped to solve their own problems as they figure out who they are, not kids who feel compelled to be who I want them to be. This is weirdly hard, I get it. And there will certainly be times as they get older that I’ll want them to choose differently. I’m sure they’ll seek therapy when they’re older with long lists of my failures, but if I don’t give them stuff to work on, am I really doing my job anyway? They’ll need some resistance; they need to encounter a not-always-friendly world to figure out who they are.

We need to resist the urge to imagine that everyone else’s happiness and comfort is our problem— including that of our children. It’s our job to establish a stable foundation from which they can develop this capacity on their own. I know that when I am happy, peaceful, and content, my kids love it . This gives them the freedom to focus on themselves without worrying about me. I want to give the children the dignity of their own process, and I believe they will genuinely love me for this as well.

New Thought: You’re responsible for providing your kids with the nutrients they need to thrive; what they choose to grow in response is the fruit of their own lives.

2. Old Thought: Don’t work with your partner.

The most important decision you’ll make is not where you work, but who you choose to partner with the rest of your life. A spouse who is not only someone you care for and want to have sex with, but is also a good partner, softens the rough edges, and magnifies the shine of life. I have several friends with impressive careers, wonderful friends, and a spouse they love. But they aren’t happy, as their spouse isn’t their partner. They are out of sync on their goals and approach to life. Misalignment on what’s important and a lack of appreciation for the other makes everything… harder.

—Scott Galloway

When people learn that my husband and I are business partners and have been for eighteen years, the response is usually two questions: “You work with your husband? How do you stay married?” They don’t understand that we have different, albeit complementary, skill sets in both business and life. If you’ve been paying attention to this book, you know I would never do business with someone unless we were equal partners. This same mindset holds for our personal relationship: I’d never sign up for a marriage not based on equity.

About two years after the launch of Good American, the opportunity to work with Kim Kardashian on a new venture emerged, and planning for SKIMS started. I think Jens and I were a natural choice to be her partners because I had a long track record with the family after Good American. Given the scale we projected to do out of the gate, Jens took the lead in raising the funds. We needed substantial innovation, we needed a huge amount of inventory, we needed hefty shoot budgets, and we needed a best-in-class team and site experience from day one. Good American was on total fire, we had accelerated to doing $150 million in revenue incredibly fast, and I had learned a lot—but I knew Kim’s idea had the potential to be a billion-dollar brand out of the gate. Jens became the CEO, allowing me to do what I do best: I worked on developing the product assortment with Kim at the helm as creative director, serving up never-before-seen product ideas like the one-legged shapewear we launched with. I’d found my dream role: At SKIMS I oversee design, merchandise, planning, and production as the chief product officer. We’ve built a world-class team of the best talent imaginable in the fashion space, and I’m proud to have been able to have an opportunity to create generational wealth for myself and my family.

We announced the new venture under the name Kimono—a play on Kim’s name—which, given the climate at the time around cultural appropriation, was a mistake. People were furious. But we understood the outrage, we apologized for the misstep because we needed to, and we acted decisively to change the name, despite having printed a million units with the Kimono branding. That would be my issue to undo. SKIMS ended up being a far stronger brand name anyway. Aside from that, we were prepared for the company to be huge—though we still managed to underestimate demand. We sold out of the collection in ten minutes flat. I honestly thought the Shopify page would implode. I will never forget that day because everything went wrong, and we needed to delay the launch three times, pushing it an hour each time. I sat on the floor of the airport and missed my flight while we worked through site and syncing issues. We couldn’t afford to let this many customers down.

This time, though, we had a production calendar set fifty-six weeks in advance and weren’t out of stock with nothing to sell for two months. Progress!!!

While I had built ITB as part of the Saturday Group, Jens and I had never worked shoulder to shoulder before SKIMS—but even then, work doesn’t subsume our relationship. People assume that we’re talking about the business all the time, that SKUs and profit margins are our form of pillow talk, but we speak about the daily grind of work very little outside of office hours—and even then, we manage our own fiefdoms separately, staying in our own lanes. Up until recently, we didn’t even have offices on the same floor. We come together for executive team meetings and two weekly ninety-minute one-on-ones. We don’t even drive to work together, as we’re either rolling calls or dropping different kids at school.

We work hard to stay aligned at the office so no team members ever feel uncomfortable or like they’re choosing sides, and he works hard to back me on product, even when the rest of the team is balking at the gambles I want to take. As he says, “Let Emma be Emma.” After all, my batting average is good: If I think a collaboration is worth the risk, or that I can sell ten thousand of a single SKU, Jens will back me to roll the dice. And for the most part, this has worked out. When it doesn’t, we take the hit together. From the first day I met him, long before we were ever romantically involved, Jens has always believed in me, maybe even more than I believed in myself.

Jens is very engaged with our family, and he’s there for the needs of our kids. While I don’t think he’s ever cut any of their fingernails or cleaned their ears (that’s my purview), he makes up for it in a bunch of other ways. I haven’t booked a vacation in sixteen years, I don’t even know where the trash goes when it leaves the kitchen bin, and when there’s some weird beeping noise coming from somewhere in the house, Jens takes care of it. Among my jobs is to listen for when my kids’ toenails get so clawlike they’re scraping against the floor. We didn’t sit down and commit our duties to paper, but we have distinct roles that we execute without debate. We have such a successful partnership because I don’t try to micromanage his stuff, and he doesn’t micromanage mine. Ultimately, I knew exactly whom I was marrying: Jens is the most reliable and steadying presence in my life, and he’s never boring. And I knew that he wasn’t going to dump anything on me or expect me to be his mother.

While my home-life situation is a little unusual, I don’t think the qualities of our partnership should be. Because, even if we don’t share office space, we all work with our partners . Or, if we’re going to be in an effective marriage, it’s wise to think about it in this way. To that end, talents and competencies should be respected, and duties must be divided. Doing this well requires each partner take on an equal measure of savory and unsavory tasks so that the woman isn’t left with all the crap while the man takes all the glory. And doing this well also requires understanding the full scope of each person’s contributions. As Eve Rodsky outlines in Fair Play , making dinner isn’t just turning on the stove; cooking also requires planning, shopping, prep, and cleaning. While we haven’t done her process, we understand this intuitively.

One of the things I love about Jens is that he was able to see me before I could see myself. He is incredibly encouraging at every turn, especially in moments of doubt. Whenever he hears me saying, God, this feels outside of my comfort zone , he reminds me of all the things I’ve done. Jens is a great conceptual cheerleader. I know he has my back, and I have his. And yet, he’s not involved in all my stuff. He’s invested in my happiness and success by encouraging me to focus on what I want—not by telling me what I should want. We both offer each other a lot of autonomy and space. If you really want to run for it in business, that’s what you need from your partner: someone who supports your belief in yourself so you can do what you need to do, and someone who is interested and curious about who you are and how you’re changing. Jens and I have that in spades. It’s fine if you get less than that in your partner, as long as they’re not actively working against you, envious, or sucking your energy or self-belief.

Jens and I have been together for a long time—and hopefully we’ll stay together for a long time to come. But I never, ever take that for granted. Life is weird—shocking really at times—and I don’t believe in complacency. Just as I’m always applying myself at work, learning and evolving to stay in touch with our businesses in the present moment, I work hard at my relationship, too, understanding that what we need from each other today is not the same thing we’ll need from each other in the future. Jens and I also have trade-offs: In 2024 to 2025, when I launched my podcast and wrote this book—while continuing to work on SKIMS, Off Season, and Good American—Jens took the lead on parenting. How we’re going to find a balance between us is something we actively discuss all the time. I also recognize that we’re slowly shifting and changing as people, too—I hope we stay connected as we age, but many people don’t. This might sound like a wild way to talk about your husband, but I’m more interested in reality than fantasy, and reality would suggest that we all stay awake and alive in our relationships and continue to assess whether they’re helping us grow or keeping us stuck.

New Thought: Your romantic partner is the most important work relationship in your life.

3. Old Thought: Get your career dialed in before you have kids.

Wherever you go, go with all your heart.

—Confucius

Jodi Kantor looked at me like I was a little crazy. She was moderating a New York Times DealBook Summit panel on women and work-life balance, and I was telling her that even though we offer it as part of our packages, I think egg freezing is a bullshit corporate benefit. I explained, “As women, we have to take partial responsibility for this. I’ve been one of those women in a leadership position giving women false hope and telling them, ‘Wait it out, it will be fine.’ Guess what? It’s not fine. Like it really isn’t, unless you’re one of those people who doesn’t really, really want to have a baby. But for a lot of women, that isn’t the case. They’ve waited, and they’ve waited, and they’ve put their career first. And when they’ve ‘chosen’ to have a baby, it’s no longer their choice. This has been me. My frozen eggs didn’t turn into embryos. And my embryos didn’t turn into babies. This idea that you can put your life on pause and run at your career and then revisit your life when you’re forty-two is bullshit. How many people does this work out for? Almost none.” 3 I refuse to participate in a culture that tells thirty-year-old women to blindly work their asses off for years, and then to think about a family when their chances of having a baby are really low—all because as a country, we provide little to no benefits for mums and families. Understandably, most women feel they need to work and “get ahead” so they can afford to pay for childcare—and then there’s no child to take care of. If we want to give women benefits, we need to give them that: paid family leave, access to subsidized childcare, universal preschool. Not bullshit egg freezing. We’ve created a suite of benefits as a corporate play that’s masked as being really great for us when it’s not.

I work with and mentor so many women in my companies who are in their thirties and forties, and there is heartbreak all around me. This heartbreak is compounded by the fact that there’s so much shame for women in not being able to have children that it’s rarely discussed or shared in a professional forum. Even among my friends, friends whom I know had to do IVF or use surrogacy, lips are firmly sealed while it’s happening. It’s like we can’t speak about IVF until it’s all done and hopefully successful. I remember being on a boat with a bunch of friends a few summers ago—each one of those friends had confided in me about a fertility-related issue, and I knew that of the five of us, I was the only one who knew what was going on. It remained unspoken. It felt very sad to me, as I knew we could have a really powerful conversation if people felt they could be more open. This is one of those conversations that we need to blow up in the culture so women don’t feel so alone, or so broken.

I’ve also had my own fertility journey that felt, at times, full of despair—and this was after I’d managed to “naturally” conceive my first two kids. It is devastating to not feel like you have reproductive agency, like you can’t control your body. And I mean this in all ways. As a parentified child, I didn’t originally know if I’d even want to have kids, as I had spent so much of my childhood looking after my younger sisters, but once Jens and I started, I didn’t want to stop. I’m sure many women understand this: Once you decide you want a baby, it is entirely consuming. Jens would ask me what I wanted for dinner, and all I could say in response was, “Another baby.” Except my body wouldn’t comply.

After what felt like an endless number of rounds of IVF and three miscarriages at nine weeks, eleven weeks, and devastatingly, sixteen weeks, I felt like I was going to break. I was in the clinic after the third miscarriage, and the woman taking care of me pointed me to a door and told me that it was a match service for surrogacy. While I knew a bunch of people who had used surrogates, I never thought it was for me. In my mind, it was for my gay friends, for those with severe health complications, or those who couldn’t be bothered to get pregnant. I looked at her like she’d lost her marbles.

“Listen,” she said. “This is hard on your body and it’s not working. You should think about it.”

I went home and I called a friend who had needed the help of a surrogate. She gave me the best advice, reassuring me that her kids are her kids, and she felt and feels the same love for the child who didn’t come out of her uterus. I went on to meet a lot of surrogates, but I ended up working with the first woman I met. She carried my twins, the single greatest gift someone has ever given me. It was a profound, incredible experience with an amazing woman who went way beyond our contractual commitment. It was also profound because I’m someone who is used to getting her way by working toward her goals, and I couldn’t achieve this without the intervention of a very kind woman.

In operating businesses, it’s very important to me to encourage the women who work for me to come back into the office after they’ve had a kid. I know this period of time can feel like emotional quicksand that takes a lot of women out of the game, but if they’re ambitious, and they want to actually do the thing, I want them on my team—and if they can’t do it at one of my companies, under my watch, I don’t know where else they’re going to pull it off. Partly, I try to lead by example. I know people are watching me and thinking, “Okay, if Emma is doing this with four kids, then I can do this, too. If she leaves for an event at her kids’ school, then I can leave, too. If she leaves at 5:00 p.m. every day without compromise, then I can, too.” On the flip side, I am incredibly honest about the trade-offs that are required. Recently, a mum on my team came to see me to ask if she could leave every day at 2:00 p.m. She was eating herself up with guilt about not being at home with her baby and convinced that doing this for her kid would be the right thing to do. She was also experiencing a lot of external pressure that she should be at home more.

I had to be candid with her: “No, you can’t do that if you want to stay on track; it’s not concurrent with what you want to achieve at work. Let’s talk about both sides of this. You want to be home for this tiny baby who is sleeping all the time? You are up in your head. How much of this feels like you think you need to do this because you feel bad, versus what your baby needs from you?” This is the question we need to ask ourselves: Is the feeling coming from you that you need to go home to be with your baby, or is it a fear of judgment from the outside? If it’s the latter, think again. This is where you have to lean in to start with yourself. You must decide what you think and what you believe. In working with a lot of mums, and being a mum myself, I know there’s no simple compartmentalization that makes this all go down easier, where nothing gets sacrificed in the process. It is very difficult to go 100 percent on work ambition and 100 percent on parenting simultaneously. The math doesn’t math. In reality, for work to work for mums, women need to feel like they have agency over their lives at the office and that they’re able to make fluid decisions based on all the factors that aren’t fully in their control. They need the conditions of the office to not only allow this, but to expect it—and the flexibility and trust from managers to make it work. Honestly, we all need this. If your kid is at home sick, or if you’ve broken up with your partner, you’re not going to be very useful to me or anyone else at the office—it’s fine and it happens.

I would much rather that we all operate at a level of honesty where people feel comfortable doing what they need to do, and we all acknowledge that none of us are robots. It drives me crazy when employers approach mums in particular as though they’re inclined to take advantage of them if you give them flexibility. There is no woman with kids who takes the piss with flexibility. They don’t exist. I have never, ever had an experience with a working mother where she’s taken advantage of me and the benefits or the flexibility I’ve afforded her at work. In fact, the opposite happens: The working mums in my businesses use the flexibility and are without a doubt the most productive and the best at growing teams and results, precisely because they need to be able to make things work for themselves.

I want to caveat that I’m not talking about working dads here because that idea has somehow not punctured the consciousness of America. Most men do not list “dad” in their bio, much less think about how to spend their days without sacrificing quality time with their kids. To this end, paternity leave in America is bullshit, too, because men don’t take it . They feel like they’ll be penalized for taking the chance to help their partners out and bond with their babies, and they don’t want to take any time off from their careers and eventual ascension. This is a cultural issue, as it’s not this way in Scandinavia and other parts of Europe, where you’ll see a lot of “latte papas” taking time away from their careers at the local coffee shop with Bugaboos and babies strapped to their chests. Thasunda Brown Duckett was on a New York Times panel with me—she’s one of the few Fortune 500 female CEOs—and her husband, a former marine, now looks after the kids. She spoke a lot about what happened in their relationship as he decided to let her career fly, a story that’s all too rare in our culture. In Europe, nobody looks at you sideways if you’re a man who looks after your family. Theirs is a too-rare example in our culture.

We’ll talk about this later in the book, but I also urge my teams to remember that work is not your family: We’re here to do a job. But there’s a balance to this where I see my team members as people and not “functions.” There is a huge piece of what we get up to at work that has nothing to do with the goals or the strategy of the business. I tell the people who work with me the following: “Because I care a lot about where the business is going, I need to care a lot about you. If I care about you, I know you’ll care about my business. If we both do those things at the same time, we’ll be fine.” In my experience, working mums feel like they’re making a big sacrifice for their children, and they want to understand what they’re getting in return. This is about flexibility and respect, but it’s also about offering women a clear path and career progression. They need a bit more than their wage and next job title. Mums need community, a good fucking time, and a positive environment that gives us an identity outside of motherhood. And we all need a sense of purpose, to be surrounded by people we enjoy, and to have fun.

New Thought: There’s no time like the present to manage both work and life; there is no “right” time, so don’t wait.