“When you spoke about planning for Mother’s Day programs, it gave me an idea. I’d love for you to join a call with me and Corinne Botz to explore it,” said my friend and colleague Lori Mihalich-Levin. Our first call was right after the holiday break. I was still tired from the year end rush and a bit frazzled from that morning’s get-to-school-scramble. But within ten minutes of our conversation, I felt liberated from months of exhaustion.
There was immediate professional chemistry. We all published books inspired by our postpartum journeys. Including the difficulties and mishaps reengaging with our careers. When you have an experience that leaves unexpected scars, it frees you to view those events through a new lens. And fires many of us up to engage in systems change like nothing else can. So, despite entering the new project feeling tired and crispy, the collaboration led to a positive shift in my mood and energy.
Professional “Passion” is Both Pro AND Con
On the call, Lori, Corinne and I all shared brief versions of our blurry, post maternity leave return to work adventures. We were lucky to heal, recover and learn from our experiences. But the rocky climb in our respective professional spaces led each of us to reorient our careers into parent advocacy because we experienced something meaningful. Personal, yet universal enough to prompt a passionate response. Do you remember getting the career advice to follow your passion?
Work you Love with Can Lead to Burnout
Of course, we all did at some point. “Follow your passion” is such a popular phrase delivered by well-intentioned family, teachers or mentors. But the reality is high-passion work can be so tightly woven to identity and intensity, if often erodes work/life boundaries without warning.
Harvard Business Review shares results from its research into the link between passion at work and stress. “It’s a vicious cycle: When our passion is at its peak, we become full of vitality, but we are less likely to notice the toll that extra exertion takes on us, and so we become unable to detach from work and engage in the rest we need to avoid exhaustion.”
Female Heavy Fields Tend to be Mission Oriented
It’s not just your neighborhood meal trains and parent teacher organizations that have moms at the helm. It’s also in big, human-good industries like nonprofits, government, healthcare, and education. Although we may be drawn to social mission fields, once we have kids, we’re less likely to find the conditions as flexible or family friendly. So, women continue to start businesses at high rates, often for more autonomy or opportunity but our pursuits are overwhelmingly under resourced. So, we generate less than 5 percent of the revenue of male-led ventures. Okay, you may be wondering why this is relevant, stay with me I’ll explain.
And Capacity Constrained by Default
We routinely make magic from tiny slivers of time. And most moms get really adept at working scrappy at home and in the workplace. In fact, the sectors hardest hit by cuts in federal funding and anti-DEI policies are female heavy. Like healthcare, education and nonprofits. The same industries that flipped upside down in the pandemic and remain capacity constrained.
Women, mostly moms and Black women, have exited the workforce in record numbers in the past 13 months. The top reason is caregiving, burnout from untenable work/life and inaccessible childcare. Of course it’s not just because we’re tired, many more women are pushed from the career ladder. So how do we sustain high passion professional paths despite the pitfalls?
So, Find Your Co-Conspirators
If you’re a small business owner, then collaborations like the project I’m working on, can elevate your work. It’s more fun and often, effective to have passionate colleagues share the workload and bring in outside perspectives. Camaraderie is a beautiful thing and helps form strong bonds. Many of my close, long-term friendships started through work.
If you work for a traditional employer, look for those choice assignments that involve cross-functional teams. Executing on a shared vision, especially if your work helps others, feels amazing. Access to more support from added voices, visibility, and people to share the effort, eases the burden and emotional strain. Although it may require more intentionality, this is especially true if you’re an entrepreneur.
Create Clear, Complementary Roles
If you’re on a cross-functional team with your employer, by design, other specialists bring something unique to the project. In small business collaborations, you can create the same outcomes. It requires thoughtful planning to leverage everyone’s strengths and create parity. For example, in the project with Lori and Corinne, we’ve each taken on different roles. Writing copy, visual design, reaching out to clients and sponsors, and determining the logistics. In this case, managing physical products and book shipments. It’s a shared effort and makes the project pace more manageable and enjoyable.
Build in Equitable Measurement and Upside
If you’re collaborating within your employer’s organization, then the financial part gets reconciled through budgets and revenue reporting. However, in small business collaborations there are still financial aspects to resolve up front. Determine shares of revenue that recognize the effort and underlying costs of products or services. If there are expenses, track and remove them from the proceeds to split any profits.
Most Importantly, Keep it Fun
Work with people who are delightful to spend time with and share your values. It helps foster an environment where you feel generative and psychologically safe to make suggestions or mistakes. If you’re not working from a physical space together, find people comfortable and experienced with working asynchronously. Then live check-ins are efficient and most of the work can happen with shared documents and emails.
In addition to having a sense of humor, humility and candor, it’s satisfying to collaborate with people who are brilliant and have high integrity.
Many thanks to the talented Corinne Botz and Lori Mihalich-Levin!
While supplies last, ask your employer to order the Ultimate Pumping Room Bundle for your lactation spaces!
Get Corinne Botz’ beautiful new book, Milk Factory and check out her virtual talk on February 24th, Designing Motherhood Artists Focus. Get Lori Mihalich-Levin’s book, Back to Work After Baby and learn more about her working parent programs from Mindful Return.
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About Corinne Botz
Corinne Botz is a visual artist and educator based in New York whose practice encompasses photography, writing, and filmmaking. A sustained focus on space, gender and the body, particularly relating to women’s experiences, is central to her practice. Her published books combining photography and writing include Milk Factory (Saint Lucy Books, 2025), The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death (Phaidon/Monacelli Press, 2004), Haunted Houses (Phaidon /Monacelli Press, 2010), and Milk Factory (Fall 2025).
Botz’s photographs have been internationally exhibited at such institutions as the Brooklyn Museum, Museum of Art and Design, Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, Illinois; Kunstmuseum Basel, Basel, Switzerland; Wurttembergischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart, Germany; Wellcome Collection, De Appel, Amsterdam; and Turner Contemporary, Margate, UK. She has had solo exhibitions at Benrubi Gallery and Bellwether Gallery in New York City; Hudson Hall in Hudson, NY, Alice Austen House, Hemphill Fine Arts in Washington D.C. and RedLine Gallery in Denver, Colorado. Her work has been reviewed in publications such as The NewYork Times, Foam Magazine, Bookforum, Art Papers, Modern Painters, Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Village Voice, Exit, Slate, Time: Lightbox and Ciel Variable.
Botz earned her BFA from Maryland Institute, College of Art and her MFA from Milton Avery School of the Arts, Bard College. She is the recipient of residencies at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture; Atlantic Center for the Arts; Akademie Schloss Solitude and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. Her Oscar-qualifying short film Bedside Manner (2016) won the Grand Jury Prize at DOC NYC. She has received grants from New York Foundation for the Arts and the Jerome Foundation. Botz is on the faculty of International Center of Photography and John Jay College of Criminal Justice (CUNY).
About Lori Mihalich-Levin
Lori Mihalich-Levin, JD, believes in empowering new working parents. She is the founder of Mindful Return, author of Back to Work After Baby: How to Plan and Navigate a Mindful Return from Maternity Leave, and creator of the Mindful Return Maternity Leave E-Course. She is mama to two wonderful red-headed boys (ages 10 and 12), is the co-host of the Parents at Work Podcast, and is health care lawyer in private practice at her own firm, The GME Group, PLLC. Her thought leadership on issues related to working parenthood has been featured in publications including Forbes, The Washington Post, New York Times Parenting, Thrive Global, and The Huffington Post.
Called a “working mama guru” by Working Mother Magazine, Lori has been committed to promoting women’s equality and leadership throughout her career. While she was a Partner at Dentons US LLP, she founded and Co-Chaired for two years Dentons’ Parent Professional Network. In her prior job, she founded both the Returning to Work Community (RWC) for mothers at Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) who return to work from maternity leave and a D.C. Health Policy Lean in Circle. As an undergraduate at Princeton, she wrote her thesis on immigrant women in France who were victims of domestic violence. At Georgetown Law, she was the co-President of the Women’s Legal Alliance and represented clients through the Domestic Violence Clinic.
In her legal practice, Lori advises health care clients on issues relating to Medicare graduate medical education payments. Prior to joining Dentons, Lori worked as the Director of Graduate Medical Education and Hospital Payment Policies at the AAMC, and as a healthcare attorney at Vinson & Elkins, LLP and King & Spalding, LLP.
Lori holds a law degree from the Georgetown University Law Center (check out the Georgetown Alumni Career Spotlight on Lori here) and completed her undergraduate studies at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. Before beginning her health law career, she was a Rotary Ambassadorial Scholar in France, studying at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques d’Aix-en-Provence, and she served as a law clerk to the Hon. Neal E. Kravitz of the Superior Court of the District of Columbia.
Lori loves tickling her cuddly boys, reading them The Book With No Pictures thousands of times, sharing parenting adventures with her amazing husband, building supportive communities, and practicing yoga.
