Back to Work After Baby with Lori Mihalich-Levin of Mindful Return

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Lori Mihalich-Levin of the Mindful Return

Lori Mihalich-Levin, JD, believes in empowering working parents.  She is the founder and CEO of Mindful Return, author of Back to Work After Baby: How to Plan and Navigate a Mindful Return from Maternity Leave, and co-host of the Parents at Work Podcast.  She is mama to two wonderful red-headed boys (ages 9 and 11) and is a health care lawyer in private practice.  Her thought leadership has been featured in publications including Forbes, The Washington Post, New York Times Parenting, Thrive Global, and The Huffington Post. And she was my guest for a very “personal interview” about returning to work after baby,  mom guilt and mom FOMO, and how she made the flip to making Mindful Return her main focus. 

Mindful Return is a movement that helps new moms and dads navigate the uncertain terrain of working parenthood. Lori says it was birthed (pun intended) out of sheer desperation as she kept finding loads of snarky and unhelpful advice and almost no quality resources on how to navigate this personal and professional identity transition. “I spent way too much time crying on the kitchen floor not knowing how I was going to make any of this happen. And I wanted to give other people the chance to avoid that situation,” she said as she realized one key fact: she wasn’t alone. After watching other new parents burst into tears in her office, she birthed Mindful Return with a single blog-post. It grew into a course, then a “returning to work” community at her law firm, a book, and finally an international movement. 

And although this movement is much more robust than what we could cover in a podcast, she did share 3 foundational reframes for new parents. First of all, think of the return to work as an evolution not an event. “It’s a year-long process of return,” she said. Secondly, remember that you are gaining amazing skills in parenthood that are useful in your career. And finally, experiment: if it works, great! If it doesn’t, move on. Let go of the idea that what we pick today has to be perfect. 

Here’s where it got real for me. I struggle with mom guilt just like everybody else, but I also struggle with mom FOMO. When I asked Lori about this nagging fear-of-missing-out that I experience while working AND while playing with my kids she offered two paradigm-shifts. The first revolved around milestones. When we are away at work, we moms dread the idea that we might be missing that next “first.” Lori made a point that I’d never even thought about. “Your baby could learn to stand up in the crib at night, or while she’s with grandma, or while you’re in the bathroom. Even if you were a stay-at-home parent you may have actually missed that first milestone while you were in the shower and have no idea.” And conversely when facing the fear of missing out on some sort of career opportunity, consider the famous adage, “comparison is the thief of joy.” It’s never truer than it is in this space, and it’s what drove Lori to implement a daily gratitude practice. 

Finally, Lori expounded on the journey from full-time lawyer with a side hustle to CEO of Mindful Return who practices law in her own firm on the side. How did she make the flip?  As a self-declared “risk-averse lawyer,” Lori was never comfortable quitting her day job, so Mindful Return actually grew much like a third child, and that is how Lori refers to it. Eight years ago, when Mindful Return was just a baby, Lori only spent 20 minutes each night working on it. As it grew, she realized how much it lit her up, so she took a new position at a new law firm at 60% capacity. This allowed her to spend 40% of her work week with Mindful Return. Five years later she scaled that to 50/50. And in 2020 the pandemic dramatically highlighted employers’ need for guidance in supporting their employees who were also parents. So, she made the shift! And we are so glad she did. 

Links of Note:

Mindful Return: 
Parents at Work Podcast: 
The Abundant Mama Project Shawn Fink
FairPlay by Eve Rodsky: 
Brené Brown
Ruth Feldman, Neuroscience at Yale Medical School 
Maternal Gatekeeping
National Parks Program for 4th Graders