Transcript 0:00 Today, we are thrilled to welcome Lori Michalik Levin. Lori is the founder of Mindful Return, the author of "Back to Work After Baby: How to Plan and Navigate a Mindful Return From Maternity Leave," 0:13 uh, co-host with her husband of the Parents at Work podcast, and a mom to two boys. She is also a healthcare attorney that now practices law on the side. 0:23 Her passion is helping parents develop strategies and tools so they can be present, both with their kids and their careers. We are so happy to have you. It's a delight to be here, Rachael. 0:32 Thanks so much for inviting me to join this conversation. I'd love to hear about your transformation from sort of full-time attorney to starting off Mindful Return about 11 years ago, I think. 0:45 Yeah, 11 years, going on 12. Anyway, it's been a, yeah, it's been a hot minute. 0:52 I would say that the beginning was Lori, the risk-averse lawyer who never saw herself as being an entrepreneur, in fact, that word probably never even passed my lips at any point. 1:04 And I'm a Medicare reimbursement nerd, and I really was not thinking about writing a book or starting a company. 1:10 However, I was working as a, a policy lawyer in-house at a healthcare trade association, and I had my two babies, and I went off the rails, and I had mom after mom come into my office, shut the door, burst into tears, say, "What is going on here, and why is this so hard, and why is nobody talking about any of this?" 1:32 And I'm certain I had undiagnosed postpartum anxiety, and the wheels were coming off, and, and I was like, "What the heck is happening to my life?" 1:42 And I was going through the professional and personal identity crisis and, and I had a baby and a two-year-old. 1:49 And somehow I found my way to a resource that I don't believe exists anymore called the Abundant Mama Project. 1:58 The person who runs it, Shawn Fink, is still a coach and still active, but back in the day, she did this cohort-based program where she invited moms with kids of all different ages, all different stages, all over the world, who were struggling to find the abundance in life instead of just the overwhelm, 2:17 and she invited us into this community and had a four-week program for us to go through. And at the end of four weeks, I said, "Wow, I feel so much better. It is not just me who can't get the Cheerios off the floor. 2:29 It is not just me who's struggling with guilt and all the other things." 2:33 And I turned to my husband, my dear husband, who's an MBA and is an entrepreneur, and I said to him, "Somebody needs to create a course like this, but for new parents who are transitioning back to work after parental leave, and why doesn't it exist, and why can I take a class on everything related to my baby from how to puree baby food to how to make a birth plan to how to da-da-da, all the things?" 2:54 I mean, I could take a class on massaging my baby, but I could not take a class on how to go back to work after parental leave without losing my mind. 3:01 And my dear husband said, "Well, what are you gonna do about that, sweetie?" 3:05 Um, that was sort of the impetus for, okay, fine, I have a toddler and I have a newborn, and yeah, I'm gonna start speaking up about this and writing about it and creating something. So that's the origin story, Rachael. 3:16 I think a lot of us can relate to that, certainly. How do you talk to parents, women in particular, who are in the overwhelm and are starting to prepare to go back to work? Yeah. 3:34 So in the midst of creating this Mindful Return program, I came up with basically a four-pronged framework. Why did I do this? Because I wanted to take, like, all the chaos and say, okay, there are four buckets. 3:49 If you focus on these four buckets, you will calm down a bit, you will feel more connected, and I'm gonna give you sort of a map to walk yourself through. It probably could have been any four buckets. 4:00 It just feels good to have buckets to put all the overwhelm in, right? 4:03 But my four buckets that I, you know, focus all of our courses and work around are a mindful mindset, so developing some mindfulness strategies for getting your head in a better place to go back. Second, the logistics. 4:16 It does help us calm ourselves down when we learn what all the nitty-gritty details are that we need to deal with. 4:22 The third piece, this is the one I get the most excited about, and the one that perhaps people talk about the least in terms of planning to return, but leadership in the space of parental leave. 4:32 I make sure new parents know that the skills they're gaining through parenthood are directly applicable to their jobs and their careers, and that we need to be talking about that because we are getting trained in things that people pay a lot of money for in workplaces in order to learn. 4:46 Then number four, community. 4:48 The isolating ourself crying on the kitchen floor thing is not recommended, and I wanna make sure people are intentionally focusing on finding other working parents who they can connect with and make sure that they're not feeling like they're the only or they're alone in that, that return after leave. 5:02 Uh, it, it's so important, all of it, and I, you know, I'm gonna work my way backwards. The community, I think one conversation was the difference for me between feeling sane and insane. Yes. 5:13 So just a touch point, it doesn't have to be all the time, just kept me sort of even-keel through the hard times. 5:19 Can you tell us or give us language to explain how our leadership skills are transferable from becoming a parent to a career professional? 5:30 Well, let's play a little game, Rachael, and I'll offer one, and then maybe you can offer a couple of examples from your own life. But imagine a skill that you gained through parenthood that's also useful in your career. 5:45 I will start with meeting the needs of demanding clients who can't articulate their needs very clearly. Like, I do that all the time at home. 5:53 I also do that with my legal clients who sometimes don't exactly know what they need. I would sh- I'm sure you have one too, huh? What, what do you have? I mean, patience came to mind for me Yes, absolutely. 6:05 We were just talking before we started this call about learning to let things go, that the perfectionist in us almost had to die a little bit to be able to roll with the punches and be adaptable. 6:14 That was something that was a hard lesson for me to learn, but has absolutely translated to how I tackle projects that seem overwhelming, but can be broken down- Mm-hmm... higher priority, lower priority, 6:27 where there's- Yes... you can choose what's worth it, what's not. And we become prioritization ninjas, for sure. There's a neural- neurology professor at a univers- a medical school named Dr. 6:40 Ruth Feldman, who talks about the fact that the one-year period following the birth of one's child, as long as you are actively engaged in caring for that child, results in the most neuroplasticity in your brain in the entire adult human experience. 6:55 So our brains are literally being rewired in that first year after parenthood. And yes, we sometimes feel discombobulated with quote, unquote, "baby brain," lack of sleep, all of those things. 7:05 And there's also, I like to talk about baby brain, like, the brain that gets rewired and allows you to make all these new creative connections and, um, I don't know, like, office gossip goes out the window 'cause you don't have time for it anymore. 7:18 You know, there are all sorts of things, that empathy, the patience, the emotional awareness that you just don't always have before you become a parent that is really useful with your colleagues, and being able to regulate your own emotions and prioritize and all sorts of things we're looking for in leaders. 7:34 Have you found receptivity to these arguments? 7:37 Because, and this might just be be- my conditioning and, and experience of 20-plus years under my belt, where I would be really nervous to try to make the case, and maybe, maybe it's just me, but like, I would be nervous to try to make the case to say, "No, actually, I've been improving while I, while I've been on maternity leave." 7:55 I'll tell two stories. One is, I worked with a woman who was about to decide not to fill out her evaluation for the year because she said, "I've been on leave for like nine months out of this year. 8:07 Why should I bother filling out my eval?" 8:10 And we talked through that, and I encouraged her on the evaluation to write about all the ways, for example, that she had provided for an extremely smooth transition out to parental leave, and the ways that she was planning to manage her return that showed initiative, it showed organization, it showed leadership skills, and she did just that and was rewarded for that. 8:36 And so, I mean, that's just an N of one, but one person who reframed what she otherwise was going to tell her employer, "Eh, I wasn't even around," uh, convinced them to look at her in a different light. 8:48 The other example I'll give is that I do a lot of speaking at conferences and things like that, and a couple of years ago, I was at a conference, um, specifically for professional development managers at law firms. 8:57 So these are people in like, a very male-dominated industry, and we all got around tables and I challenged everyone at each table to start writing down skills that they thought parents gained through parenthood that, that were useful to parents in the legal profession. 9:10 And at first, people were just sort of like looking at each other, and then they started writing, and I can't tell you how many people came up to me afterwards and said, "That was a totally new way of looking at the parents at this firm." 9:22 So I don't know what the definition of receptive is, but if we can at least get people to consider it among the options of how they're thinking about parents, it has to shift the needle a little bit. 9:33 No, I totally agree, and I... It's kind of like bringing up sort of limiting beliefs that I had or in expressing my contribution, right? Yes. 9:41 So it's helpful in, in sort of two ways, where it's like we did do a ton of planning. 9:47 It was double work to prepare the team for when I was out, and the fact that it never crossed my mind to mention that is really, really helpful to acknowledge, you know, and say, "You know what? 9:57 There might be a lot of kinds of work that are, um, being done that I'm not talking enough about." Yeah. You know the dudes would claim it. Like, let's claim the stuff we're doing. Yeah. 10:06 We just do it and think, "Oh, well, of course that had to be done." No, it didn't of course had to be done. In fact, let me tell you one quick story about a dude. 10:12 I was at a law firm, and one of the HR people said to me, "You know, it's really embarrassing, but we have a guy who went on paternity leave, but he told everybody he was going on paternity leave for a month the day his baby was born, and no one knew that there was going to be a baby because there was no evidence of said baby and he hadn't apprised anyone of the situation." 10:31 And so there is a choice about- Yeah... preparing people or not. Maybe it's more obvious if you're walking around pregnant that you need to p- prepare. 10:40 But I would argue that you're setting people up for success when you do it right, and I've seen it n- not be done in a positive way, too, and let, let's take credit for that. I love that so much. 10:50 I mean, one could argue it, it's an opportunity to showcase, really test your ability, right? Because you're not gonna be- Absolutely. Yes, yes, and it's an opportunity to show initiative. 11:02 It's an opportunity to show your communication skills, your ability to collaborate with your team, to problem solve in advance. I mean, all of these things, yes. 11:11 I love this so much, and I'm like, "Why didn't I think of this?" [laughs] Why didn't it occur? 11:15 I think I, I think I wrote a blog post at one point, I'll try to find it and send you the link, about how the preparation for parental leave is hidden office housework that often goes unrecognized, like so many other things that, uh, women do in the office that are, I know you've had conversations about recently, not rewarded. 11:32 How do you give it support or help or advice to women who are maybe going back after longer than normal? Like, maybe they took a break from their career. 11:44 Maybe they needed to stay at home, or maybe it just didn't make sense financially for her to work because of daycare costs, and there's years maybe, this gap- Mm-hmm... of time spent parenting. 11:54 I know from speaking with a lot of women that there's a self-consciousness about going back and how to make that transition, because they're past that parental leave stage and now they're kind of in this, this time where they're still returning from parenthood, new parenthood, but it feels different. 12:11 Are there particular approaches or ways that you support or advise women who are in that position? Yeah. 12:17 So I will first just start off by saying that the focus of our work at Mindful Return really is around the parental leave transition, so we're not working with a lot of women who are coming back from a longer gap. 12:28 That said, I just wanna share that we have people from all over the world who have taken our courses and are joined our cohorts, and some of them have had what we in the United States would consider remarkably long parental leaves. 12:43 In Canada, they'll have 18 months. In Australia, they'll have a year, et cetera, depending on the, the person and the circumstance, of course. 12:50 And initially, I was wondering whether this four-pronged approach around mindfulness, logistics, leadership, and community were going to be relevant to someone who was a little bit further down that road. 13:02 Maybe they had a 12-month-old or an 18-month-old or a two-year-old. And to a person, the people who went through the program and were at that stage said, "Oh, no, no, no. 13:13 These four things are absolutely still completely and utterly applicable to me." The only thing maybe they weren't doing was pumping, right? 13:21 But, um, I think it's a human thing to be frustrated in these various ways when you go back, and society is telling you that you are not worth as much in the workplace as a mother, whether you have the six-month-old or whether you have the three-year-old, right? 13:35 And so I'm sure that there is an additional narrative that gets piled on for people who have taken more time away around, like, their skills or, you know, whether they're able to, to dive in in the same way, or whether they'll be considered as valuable as the people who took a shorter time off. 13:52 So I can't speak too much to that piece of it, but all the other elements are the same. Every person who comes back after a year is still like, "Oh my gosh, how do I leave my kid with a, another person? 14:02 How do I learn to trust that other person?" Right? It's not that your baby is six months old versus a year and a half old. You're still having to navigate those transitions. That's so reassuring to know that... 14:12 Well, maybe reassuring is the wrong word, but, uh, at least encouraging to me to know that that feeling is there, whether it's three months, six months, 10 months, 12 months. Yeah. Yeah, it's still hanging around. 14:24 I know when I was, when I was in the thick of it, I couldn't understand how I was supposed to make everything work, how make all these, uh, different cogs fit together, and I was like, "Man, this is probably so much easier if I just gave myself another six months." 14:34 But it sounds like maybe it's just hard [chuckles] no matter what. Yeah, I do think that there is such a thing as too little time off. Now, let, let's be clear about that. 14:42 In the United States, most people get too little. They're barely recovered from having their child. They're barely sleeping for any stretch of time at night. And conversely, I might argue that there might be a too long. 14:56 I think it's different for everyone. 14:58 One thing I would say in terms of those longer leaves is that the UK, for example, has this, um, KITT program, or Keep In Touch program, where you can come back to your job for, like, one day every now and then and get paid for that day that you come back just to help keep you connected to what's going on, um, internally. 15:16 Some people, like, are using that KITT day to take our course and connect to other people who are returning, that sort of thing. 15:21 So I think organizations can manage longer leaves in ways that help people still feel connected. 15:27 I've heard complaints from some people who have taken the 18-month leave, who, for example, then want to have another child, and they're like, "Well, I came back for two months, and then I went out again." 15:34 And so, um, I, I think there's probably some sweet spot, but it's also each person has a different need and different preference. I think it might even be different for what, uh, number kid you're on. Like, I- Yes... 15:48 felt very differently after my first than I did with my second. With my second, I was like, "I need to get back to work." 15:53 I mean, I had a nice, healthy four-and-a-half month maternity leave, which is very generous in the US, you know, all things considered. 16:01 But I was very much happy to sit in a room by myself and close the door that first day back. [chuckles] It was COVID times, but it was- Mm-hmm. 16:09 My, my nervous system regulation needed that at the time, as opposed to with my first one, where I really wanted, uh, it to be longer. Yes. Yes. You make a great point. 16:19 Nothing is inherently the same for one child versus another. In terms of pumping, I had such a struggle with baby number one and, like, was fighting for every ounce and blah, blah, blah. Mm-hmm. 16:29 Baby number two, holy moly, I was just the biggest milk machine, and I only had to pump twice a day instead of three times. And, like, I just... You never know what's going to be different with a subsequent child. 16:39 And that certainly speaks to our ability to go into unknown territory and figure things out. [chuckles] Yes, exactly. Pivot is like the word of parenthood, right? Pivot, I'm just pivoting. I'm pivoting again. 16:49 I'm pivoting again. Well, I'm comfortable with it. I'm comfortable with it. I'm just... [chuckles] Just keep telling yourself that. Uh, I... 16:57 What principles are transferable from going back into the workforce, um, you know, right after maternity leave or parental leave that you should continue on or should be helpful as you continue to parent and grow in your career? 17:14 Yeah, that's a great question. So I have two boys who are 12 and 14. We are th- in the thick of tween-teen stage, and I think so many of these principles, you just keep, keep at it with the reps, right? 17:28 Your muscles grow stronger as you become deeper into parenthood. I'll also... 17:34 I, I wanna list a couple of specific things, but before that I'll say that when my kids started reaching that tween phase, I almost felt like I was a brand-new parent again because none of the skills and tools that I was using in parenting them seemed to be at all applicable to, like, the 12, 13, 14 years. 17:50 And so I felt like I was back at ground zero, and now I'm, like, moving up the learning curve of being the parent of a teen, right? 17:56 Um, so I think it's normal to feel like you're starting over at various points in parenthood. 18:01 Um, but I wanted to offer a couple of things that I still continue to use, um, whether they're principles or mantras that I really, really relied on in the early days. 18:11 One is, um, the Teddy Roosevelt quote, "Comparison is the thief of joy." 18:16 Um, when I was walking out of my office at the end of the day to pick up my kid from daycare- You know, when they were little and the daycare was gonna close at 5:45, and they were gonna charge me $10 a minute if I was late. 18:27 I just kept having to repeat this mantra as I saw other people working. I'm like, "I can't stay," right? Comparison is the thief of joy. I do me, they do them. 18:35 And I feel like especially now with children who are 12 and 14, and they've got different interests than the kids next door, different neuro spiciness than the kid next door, different, uh, activities and desires. 18:48 And I've had to really put that comparison as the thief of joy hat on with my own career, with other f- you know, I'm not a partner at a law firm anymore. I took that title off. That was a big change, right? 18:58 Um, another thing, so you used the word balance, so I don't like that word very much. I just prefer to use integration. I love, love, love Dr. 19:07 Yael Schoenberg's work on work-family enrichment, and I try to remember this every day. 19:12 So the pr- the idea is that psychologists have studied that conflict between work and family and work and all the other things, and have found that rather than, um, be a zero-sum game, 19:26 in fact, work and family do enrich one another in so many different ways. 19:31 So if, on a daily basis, I can remind myself that I am a better parent because I have professional goals, professional aspirations, that, you know, I go off and do the conference and my husband is on task for the kids, that is making me a better parent. 19:46 And when I am pausing to parent, you know, at night, pausing to parent, whatever. I'm parenting all the time, right? 19:52 But when I'm doing that work of parenthood, it is actually making me more effective and efficient at my job. I think that's another thing that I, I like to repeat. 20:00 The last thing that I'll say is, um, I had a leadership coach once who taught me the reframe about guilt, which is when you find yourself saying, "I feel guilty because," to flip that to, "I made this decision because." 20:12 And I think that's even more important now that I have teenagers and I'm making decisions about what they can and can't do and what I can, what, all the, all the things we worry about. 20:21 I find myself saying even more often, "Okay, I made this decision to go to XYZ event because it's going to help me in my career, and I know that I can be fully present with my kid when I come home." 20:34 And so I think that's sort of just a theme that I've tried to carry forward from the baby years and grow the muscle around that as, as my kids have gotten older. I mean, honestly, as you saying that, I could think of 20:47 a lot of times, and I'll do it moving forward where that would help me because that guilt comes up faster than, um, the remembrance of my logic in the first place. Yes. Yes, exactly. Dr. 20:57 Pooja Lakshman always says, you know, "Guilt is the faulty check engine light." 21:01 There's actually nothing wrong with the car, but the light's coming on and you're having the guilt, but there's actually nothing wrong with your moral compass. 21:06 You are not doing anything wrong, but your brain is flashing at you, so yeah, we need to check that. No, it's funny how quickly I can forget the rationale that made sense- Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm... 21:16 that has got me there in the first place. Yeah. 21:18 So one of my final questions, and Rach, you may have more, is about negotiating around coming back and potentially needing sick days now, not just for you, but for your child or another family member and, and how do you talk about flexibility after baby? 21:36 Yeah, that's a huge question. It's probably people's number one concern, or rather maybe the number one thing they're looking for when they come back is a little bit more flexibility than they had previously. 21:46 And I have a couple of suggestions around this. One is I think it's really important to get clear on what it is that you want to ask for, and really like be intentional, sit down, brainstorm, write it all out. 21:58 Some people come up with just like one little thing that they want and think that that's all they can ask for, when in reality they might be able to have a more expansive request that they can make. 22:09 I'll, tell a little story. There was a Mindful Return alum who all she wanted to do was to shift her day back by an hour, right? And show up at 8:00 and leave at 4:00. 22:19 And she was so worried about this one specific request, and she reached out to her manager, and she went in a few weeks before her leave was over to ask. 22:28 You know, she was gonna have lunch with her, and they sat and had lunch, and she was shaking in her shoes, and her hands were clammy, and she was all worried about this request. And her manager said to her, 22:36 "Oh my gosh, I thought you were here to tell me that you weren't coming back. Like, what else do you want?" And she didn't have a list. She was like, "I think all I want is that different time." 22:43 So you never know what answer you're going to get. You might not always have the, the manager who's like, "Oh, please, like, let me do whatever's going to make you happy." In that case, I really often recommend 22:55 negotiating for, lobbying for something with a, a time-defined outer endpoint so that you and the manager can view it as an experiment and say, "Okay, like, at least for the first two months that I am returning, can we do X, Y, and Z to help my return go more smoothly?" 23:11 If they say no, can we do it for one month, right? I mean, whenever I went back to work after parental leave, this was pre everybody's on Zoom all the time times, and um, you know, everybody was in the office every day. 23:22 And I was asking for one day a week work from home. And I, I did have a colleague who came up to me and said, "It's not fair if you get one day a week work from home because the rest of us can't." 23:33 And my retort to her was, "Have you ever asked for it?" When I did ask for the one day a week from home, my manager said, "Let's try it for the first three to six months, and then we'll revisit it." Well, guess what? 23:46 We never even revisited it. I just did that for years because it seemed to be working just fine. So I do think knowing that you have value, knowing 23:53 that you can ask for different iterations of things, different tweaks on things. 23:58 Maybe have a list and see how many of them you can get, and if you can get three out of the five, great, and if you get one out of the five, maybe it's okay. 24:05 At the end of the day, though, if an employer is not willing to be flexible about anything and all of your values are being crushed and stomped on, then you do need to make a decision about where you're working. 24:16 And it may not be that the employer is willing to change, and that's a hard truth to grapple with, and it is sometimes the truth for people. 24:23 Yeah, it occurs to me that in many ways this is just helping put ourselves- And our needs up front more than we would have before. And that's- That's right... not a bad thing. That's actually a positive thing. Yes. Yes. 24:37 And ideally, your manager, your team does not want you to burn and flame out and not be able to contribute [chuckles] to the team ever again, right? 24:46 I mean, you would hope that they would support a positive and healthy reintegration into, into your role. Doesn't always happen, but you know, sometimes it does. 24:56 Oh, one other tiny point I wanted to make was just it can also help to ask around within your employer to find out what other arrangements people have, right? 25:03 It's not necessarily published somewhere like, "Oh, here are all the 12,000 things people have negotiated for." 25:08 But if you can talk to other parents and see what they've been able to get, um, that might give you ideas for what you might also ask for. 25:14 Realize now, looking back, 'cause my daughter is seven, that I missed out on a lot of self-advocacy opportunities at the time. Um, I had both, both the managers that were not flexible and- That's right... 25:27 the managers who, the day that I came trembling to tell her I was pregnant, she was like, "I already knew," like, "I already had figured out." You know, I had both ends of the spectrum. Yes. 25:35 And regardless of the scenario, I still didn't know what opportunities I had to advocate for myself. So I'm looking back and I'm realizing like, wow, I probably could have asked for more. 25:45 I probably could have stood up for myself more. Um, I wish the people around me also knew those things, you know, that it wasn't just on the parents in the office to have to push for this. 25:55 Because a lot of what you're talking about sounds to, sounds a lot like disability access that would benefit lots of other people, not just people who are coming back from parental leave. 26:06 Like you said, there's all these classes for baby, not so many classes about what life looks like after, like the reality logistics. Yeah. And we know what we know when we know it, right? 26:17 You did the best you could when you were in that position, and you'll be able to advocate for yourself more in the future. 26:24 You know, when I first had my babies, I was terrified to ask for anything, and I grew that muscle over time. And eventually, I became a partner at a law firm on a 60% schedule running Mindful Return and the other 40%. 26:35 Why? Because I dared to tell somebody that that's what I wanted. And they were like, "Oh, yeah, we can do that." I mean, who would have thought that I could just create a partnership position like that? 26:44 But I did, and I scaled it back to 50%. And was there a, um, rainmaking partner who didn't like my arrangement and would tell me that I was the French employee? Yes. Was that a microaggression? Yes. 26:57 Did it affect my life? Not really, 'cause I kept doing what I was doing and succeeding at it. [chuckles] So, um, yeah, I think I've become braver over time, and I suspect that's what you're saying too. 27:06 Like, as you learn more, you know more, you try more things, and then maybe someone else will be able to do it faster because you've shared with them what, what you have learned from, from your own regrets. Absolutely. 27:20 I know I'm gonna change things even with five and eight-year-olds based on this discussion today. Like what, Rachael? What are you gonna change? 27:27 I need to get better at figuring out how to communicate what I'm doing and not sort of thinking I'm never doing enough. So I think that that has always been a downfall of, of mine, and 27:39 the idea that you never know what you're gonna get if you don't ask is also a really good one. Yeah. Yeah, never enough-ness is a pervasive problem in our culture. Thank you so much for sharing these insights. 27:49 Where can people find more about Mindful Return? Thank you for asking that and, uh, the invitation to have this conversation, Rachael. It was so fun. 27:59 You can find all things Mindful Return at www.mindfulreturn.com, or you can sign up for our Saturday Secrets newsletter so that you'll get a dose of w- working parent wisdom in your inbox every Saturday morning. 28:14 Um, as you mentioned earlier, my husband and I co-host the Parents at Work podcast. You can find that in all the places one finds podcasts. 28:21 You can find my book, "Back to Work After Baby" in all the places one finds books. 28:25 And I will add that I created a Preparing for Parental Leave, um, course on Insight Timer that you can access, uh, by going onto the app, and as long as you have, I think the premium subscription is, I don't know, $60 for the year or something, you can access all of their courses, including the Preparing for Leave course. 28:47 And if you're in the midst of returning from leave, I'd invite you to join one of our cohorts too and get to know other parents who are all returning around the same time you are. Excellent. Thank you so much. 28:56 Thanks for having me.
