
Episode #14
14 - Having a Baby Doesn't Mean Derailing your Career, with Ashley Chang
Here's a plot twist for you: Ashley Chang built a business for working parents before she was a parent herself. Ashley is the founder of Sundays — an executive assistant service that pairs working families with (mostly) mum-run support, both at work and at home. She spent years deep in the research, talking to exhausted parents, watching the drop-off that happens the second ambition meets a baby. Then she had her own son, four months before we recorded this and got to test every assumption on herself in real time. I loved this one. It's rare to talk to someone who studied the juggle or parenthood from the outside and then lived it from the inside. We get into: - Why she scrapped her plan to build an app and built a team of humans instead, because parents didn't need another system, they needed capacity - The "make impact vs. save your life" framework her husband uses, and how she's learned to slide up and down that scale instead of picking a lane forever - What actually changed for her once she had her son – it wasn’t a big philosophical shift, just a much harder line around what's worth her time at work - Taking two months fully off her own company and having to trust her team to run it without her - The coaching question that cracked her open before maternity leave - Why she went into leave trying to just be present, instead of chasing another goal to hit There's a line in here about how the messaging we get is that having a baby derails your career for years — wait until they're at school/secondary school/the kids have left home. Ashley's four months in and already proving it doesn't have to be that way. Not because it's easy, because she's decided she gets to choose. If you're in the season where you're trying to work out how much of you gets to stay you and chase your own career goals while you're also somebody's whole world, this episode is for you. You've Had a Baby, Not a Lobotomy is an independent podcast, produced by Decibel Creative.





