The Juggle is Real

Motherhood is a full-time job, one that comes along with many highs, lows and challenges. Add in a full-time career, and it can be hard to find a balance and juggle it all. Lincoln is a proud partner of HeyMama, a network of working mothers who share resources, advice and experiences to help with those challenges.

Joy Falotico, chief marketing officer for Ford and president of Lincoln, sat down for a virtual fireside chat with brand ambassador Serena Williams for this year’s HeyMama Summit. The two women are both mothers with strong careers in male dominated industries, discussing their challenges and how they maintain their own balancing acts.

“It’s really about the work/life balance, and that’s the constant challenge whether you’re at the starting line of motherhood, or well into the home stretch,” said Falotico. “You have to make some trade-offs, and I’ve learned that you have to be smart about it – you can have it all, but you can’t have it all at the same time.”

Falotico, who has high-school aged children, said something that has and continues to help her is organization throughout her whole life – at home, and at work. She says maintaining linear organization helps her to be her best self, as a mother, as a wife and as a high-level executive.

Williams considers herself at the starting line of motherhood, juggling her career as a professional athlete and her toddler, Olympia.

“I was stuck in this place for a long time, where I worried that I wasn’t doing enough for my daughter, that she wouldn’t remember me and that I was missing too much,” said Williams. “I had to really come to terms with the fact that I am a great mom, I am balancing my career and I’m going to forever be learning.”

Aside from the challenges of juggling life both at work and at home, the women talked about the challenges of working in male dominated industries – and finding their place to normalize it.

“My whole life, I’ve been inhabiting these spaces that really were just built for only men and had no right to have a woman around,” said Williams. “I have always played tennis for the love of the sport, not for anything else, and everything sort of just fell into place. While it is a space traditionally for men, I made my own space for myself.”

Falotico can agree, as a senior leader in the auto industry which has predominantly been male-dominated, it’s all about using your voice and making yourself known as a strong female leader in a male dominated industry, and while it’s come a long way, there’s still work to be done.

“The first thing we need is flexibility in work policies, and parental leave policies that engage mothers back into the workforce need to be improved as well,” she said. “Women also need equity – in pay, in opportunity and the resources to be successful because of all the things that we’re balancing.”

Through it all, there’s also the importance of taking “me-time” – to do something that allows a decompression period and time to “recharge” – not as a mother or a career woman, but as an individual.

To watch the full fireside chat, click here.