The program for ambitious women navigating the shift to working motherhood
Welcome, Manager
Great to have you here
Your team member has indicated she would like to attend The Mother Mountain. Thank you for taking this time. The most important thing an employee wishes for around the time of early motherhood is a supportive manager, so your willingness to investigate her request means a lot. On this page you will find everything you want to know about The Mother Mountain to make a solid decision.
Matrescence: The developmental process of becoming a mother. This time of transition changes her physically, hormonally, psychologically, socially, even politically
IN SHORT
What is The Mother Mountain
The Mother Mountain is an online program uniqly designed for ambitious women navigating the shift to working motherhood. While it helps her to process her transition, and get clarity around how she wants to navigate this part of her life, become more confident and at ease, what happens below the surface is pure leadership development.
Across 4 months, the women will be led through 3 modules.
Module 1: Understanding the science behind what is happening in her transition to motherhood (called Matrescence) and applying that to Adult Development Theory (foundational to Leadership Development). Specific focus on the topic of career within motherhood.
Module 2: an evidence-based mindset-shifting BootCamp called Positive Intelligence®, created by NYT Bestseller author Shirzad Chamine. This app-based program is unique in its effectiveness to shift ways of thinking towards more health-sustaining and positive outcome-creating ways. This program is often leveraged in work contexts within leadership teams as well.
Module 3: Integrating insight, new ways of thinking and own values, strengths and vision. Leveraging the Matermorphosis Family Model Canvas©, the mother (potentially in cooperation with her partner) will come to an integrated picture of how she wants to run her family, what she wants from work and how she can do that in a sustainable way.
The course will leverage pre-recorded videos with reflection questions, 11 facilitated group sessions on zoom and 2 times an individual 1-1 check in with Babette. Included as a bonus is the partner module.
Why is it relevant for her professional development
Because becoming a mom has a huge impact on a woman, navigating this well is a 'hygiene' factor for career effectiveness.
Many new mothers (recent research indicates 80%) struggle when going back to work after having a baby, impacting her well-being and her effectiveness both at work and at home
Many mothers experience a bewildering shift in identity that they were not prepared for and feel alone with. This makes it hard to make sustainable decisions about how to manage her family and work
But more so, becoming a mother has a huge potential to develop her leadership capabilities:
Neurological effects of pregnancy and motherhood create enhanced neuroplasticity, priming her to be more open to change
The developmental process of becoming a mother invites and expedites deep mindset shifts, the exact same ones we are nurturing in leaders to become effective leaders
The act of mothering has been shown to develop skills like Emotional Intelligence, Sense of Purpose, Collaboration and Efficiency and Courage. Those skills are the exact same skills that effective leaders leverage in their leadership
This potential comes online if the woman understands the processes at play and is supported in her journey. That is what The Mother Mountain provides.
Cost of this course is €1500,- excl. VAT for corporate employees.
80% of participants has either made a career shift, or has been promoted after participating in The Mother Mountain
What participants say about The Mother Mountain
Eveline - Mom of 1 and Finance Leader at Shell
It really was ground breaking. If I look back on it, it's the most favorite course I probably have ever done as a leader. It has been more transformative than the courses I took at Berkeley, Insead and Yale, because you work with my lived experience, and the course provides both an understanding AND the tools for how to actually be a more authentic leader.
Aline - Mom of twins and Project Lead at Pfizer
The course offers a valuable opportunity for self-reflection at a crucial moment in your life, allowing you to explore a new work-life balance that goes beyond part-time work or being a full-time stay-at-home mom. You will receive practical tools to shape this transition, alongside a group of like-minded, ambitious women looking to redefine their careers after becoming mothers. The program supports you in making conscious choices for your future.
Who is Teaching?
Nice to meet you, my name is Babette Lockefeer.
I'm a mom, business owner in the leadership development space, facilitator and ex-corporate employee (internships at Unilever & Shell; strategy consultant at McKinsey&Co and Leadership-trainee for Alibaba in China).
Having spent the first part of my career as a receiver of leadership trainings and development, I shifted to becoming the creator and facilitator of leadership development in the second part, with the founding of my first company called TheoryY. With TheoryY the focus is on helping to grow Trust-Based Organizations, which I do through designing and facilitating team- and leadership development trajectories. I'm still offering services with TheoryY, among others the Positive Intelligence program for leaders.
The longer I was doing this work and the more I got to know about motherhood, the more I started noticing similarities between the personal transformational work needed for effective leadership development, and the trajectory of Matrescence. I also noticed in my own environment that a lot of talented women didn't know how to navigate this monumental shift of motherhood and that they didn't know how to integrate their work and ambition with their new role of mother. Thats when I started Matermorphosis. My vision:
I envision a world where all woman that became mothers will be supported through her unique experience, so that her innate wisdom to lead can evolve, and she can lead from the fullest of her potential
I'm a licensed facilitator with additional training in facilitating transformational learning online. I'm a licensed Leadership Circle practitioner and Postive Intelligence Coach. I'm mentored by Dr Sophie Brock PhD, a leading authority in motherhood studies.
Motherhood is Leadership
The reality is that new moms are often struggling with their new identies and the practicalities of going back to work. This often comes as a surprise because surely, everyone can do this right, why do I find this difficult? They often feel lonely and don't know how to navigate this. This in itself has an impact on her work and her career, and support on this phase could be seen as a 'hygiene factor'.
However, what is unknown to most, and only emerging in recent years out of recent research, is that the transitional process of becoming a mother has the potential to develop the same mindsets, beliefs and skills in a mother that we are looking to develop in effective leaders. On top of that, an emerging field of research of Matrescence neuroscience shows that her brain becomes extremely neuroplastic, which increases the likelihood and speed of this transformational learning happening. In fact, Matrescence is the only period in Adulthood where this neuroplasticity becomes available. The only 2 other periods are 0-3years and adolescence.
Motherhood is Leadership
Extensive research on Leadership Development has taught us what makes an effective leader. It is not about the skills a person has, its about the mindsets and beliefs they hold. The ground breaking research of The Leadership Circle has found that for leadership to be effective, a person needs be able to hold a certain level of mental complexity (perspectives on themselves and the environment). This is based on the foundational theory of Adult Development, which says that there are patterns of development that are discernable in how people grow their levels of complexity of mindsets and beliefs. When we design leadership development pathways, we design ways for these patterns to unlock and develop. We nudge people to shift their mindsets and beliefs, so that they can built new skills upon this foundation.
In motherhood, mindsets and beliefs are almost involuntarily being shifted through the identity change of now also being 'mother'. When a mother understands these patterns and is supported through her experience, she can make the shift to the same level of mental complexity that is needed for effective leadership to come online. With this foundation in place, she is also building the same type of new skills in motherhood that are needed in leadership: emotional intelligence, courage, efficiency, sense of purpose and effective collaboration.
Pair that with the neuroplasticity happening and you have a very potent cocktail for sped-up personal development leading to leadership effectiveness. This is exactly what The Mother_SHIFT is providing women. We use the exact same leadership development foundation, with partly the same tools that I use in more traditional Leadership development work, wrapped in the Matrescence layer. Towards the moms, we don't even mention the word leadership until module 3. Because they are not concerned with leadership now, they just want to be able to make sense and navigate through their experience of new motherhood. and rapidly growing their leadership potential along the way.
Oh and fathers and other partners, this opportunity applies to you too, but only if you spent significant time caring for your newborns and young children in a nurturing way. That is why parental leave is SO critical.
All of the above is backed up by extensive research, which is shared with participants during the course. If you're interested to learn more, sign up for the newsletter.
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THE DETAILS
Would like to understand in more detail what the program entails?
Module 1 - Making Sense
After this module she will be able to understand and have reflected on the following:
The science of neurological changes in pregnancy and motherhood. She has a mom brain but that is something altogether different then what we think it is. She is not losing her memory, in fact, the neurological changes make her very susceptible to develop the very areas that need to be developed for effective leadership.
The sociological science of the 'economy of motherhood' and the 'care-career conundrum'. There is a very vast body of research on the discrepancies between what is expected of a mother and of a professional. Did you know that more than half of the Dutch population thinks that moms of kids under 4 should not work more than 2 days a week (2020 research)? Did you know that resume research shows that childless women with less experience are preferred over more qualified mothers? Do you know that the motherhood penalty means that moms have 46% lower earnings than fathers, whilst this gap was only 13% between men and women before kids(2021 research)? Name it to tame it.
The effect on relationships, especially the one with her partner. The changes in her viewpoints (political, environmental, spiritual) that she might be experiencing and how to navigate those in an integrated manner.
Module 2 - Birthing change
Founded by NYT Best-seller Shirzad Chamine, the POSITIVE INTELLIGENCE Program® is a mental fitness program that enables sustainable and long-term performance, well-being and positive relationships. The six-week program empowers people to create sustained change toward a more positive mind by laying down neural pathways to form new habits through consistent daily practice. This program is used by leaders and their teams in organizations across the world. What the PQ Program® includes:
PQ® app - available on Apple and Android, as well as a desktop version
Focus - weekly hour-long videos and daily 15-minute app-guided exercises
Gym – includes guided sessions to practice and log PQreps®, a foundational practice for building your mental fitness
Modules – lessons essential for understanding the concepts
Pod – support and accountability group, to meet once a week to discuss the week's training, guided by your facilitator
Module 3 - Solidify your potential
In this module, she is asked to integrate the learnings from module 1 and 2 in a structured way. We will revisit her values, her strengths and also her wishes in terms of career. We will investigate several different forms of shaping careers in a dual-career couple with kids. The conversation with her partner about roles and responsibilities at home is facilitated. The new approaches she wants to take both at work and at home are structured and captured in the Matermorphosis Family Model Canvas, so that she can embrace her new identity as a working mother with a lot of clarity and confidence. And step into the leadership role that she inherently is capable of.