You Won't Hear From Me for a While. Here's Why.
You won't hear from me for a while
I started working during my university days and never quite stopped. The moment I graduated, the gear went straight up. The only real pause I can remember taking back then was a single month to finish my MBA dissertation. The next one came when my first child arrived. A month off, back on minimum hours by the second month, and full-time again soon after.
Every bit of that was my own choice. I liked being in motion. I wanted to keep working.
So writing this feels a little strange, because I am about to do the one thing I have always quietly avoided. I am taking a long break.
The part the second pregnancy made very clear
Being a team leader, a working mum and a working wife all at once, while my body does the quiet heavy lifting of growing a whole person, is a lot. Some days it is more than a lot.
And that brought me straight to the S in our CARES framework: Sustained impact. Managing your own health so you have the energy, the discipline and the focus to actually deliver.
Can I give my team my best while I am getting Braxton Hicks contractions and there is a toddler mid-meltdown beside me? Not really.
Can I coach someone properly, sit with their problem and really listen, while half my brain is tracking the walk I am meant to take after lunch, the glucose test two hours from now, the water I need to keep drinking and the bathroom I seem to need every half hour? Also, not really.
None of this is new, and that is the point
Millions of pregnant professionals go through exactly this, and millions of them are showing up and doing brilliant work while they do. I am not holding myself up against any of them. I am simply looking honestly at my own physical and mental health and making a clear call about it.
So I am taking a proper break. Long enough for the pregnancy and the delivery to go well. Long enough to settle my growing family. And long enough that when I come back, I come back whole, ready to give my team everything and to keep building CARES across organisations the way it deserves to be built.
I had a quiet fear about this
I will be honest about the part I did not expect. I carried a small worry about taking maternity leave. That I would drift away from the corporate world, lose my edge, lose that private little sense of mattering.
Then I started noticing the women who had walked through this season without losing any of it. Shoko Kawata, at 35 the mayor of Yawata in Japan and the youngest mayor in the country, is about to become the first sitting mayor there to take maternity leave, with her deputy stepping in while she stays across the big decisions. Years before her, Jacinda Ardern gave birth while running New Zealand, took six weeks, and walked back into her first cabinet meeting to applause. She was only the second elected leader in modern history to have a baby while in office.
If you can lead a country or a city through this season, I can certainly trust my team and our structure to hold things steady for a few months.
It also made me curious about how differently this is handled across our part of the world. The range is wide. Vietnam gives mothers six months. The Philippines offers 105 days. Here in Malaysia it is 98. Some places lean on the employer, some on the state, some on a mix of both. The policies differ a lot, but the direction across Asia is slowly bending towards giving parents more room, not less.
The timing is not lost on me either. This Sunday, Mauritius celebrates Mother's Day. I am stepping into this break with a new kind of clarity about why the S in CARES matters every bit as much as the rest of it.
My CEO always asks me the same question
Every time I take a break, he asks. Will you come back? I suspect a small part of him genuinely wonders if I might not. (I find this very funny.)
But how could I not come back? The work we do at Leadapreneur is full of purpose. We upgrade the mindset, the skillset and the spirit of real people, and I get to watch it happen in front of me.
I am almost addicted to the end of every AI Talent Accelerator season, because that is where the stories live. Here is one a participant wrote just last week, when we asked how the programme had changed them.
"This program changed how I approach problems at work. I became more proactive in identifying inefficiencies, more confident in proposing solutions, and more aware of how communication, stakeholder support, and execution planning affect whether an idea succeeds or fails."
One line in there is the whole thing for me. I became more proactive in identifying inefficiencies, more confident in proposing solutions.
Did they learn AI tools? Yes. Did they build something real with AI? Also yes. But honestly, the building part is something most people could teach themselves in an afternoon with a decent YouTube tutorial.
What the accelerator actually does is walk people through the first layers of CARES. The Creative spirit to care about a better solution instead of just finishing the task in front of them. The Adaptive skillset to handle messy, shifting situations. The Resilient mindset to keep going when it gets hard. And the Expertise in AI to actually build the thing. People come out the other side different. They stop waiting for the manager's next instruction. They start spotting the problem themselves, reaching for AI to solve it, and making the wheel turn.
That is the gap between knowing about AI and genuinely changing how your team works with it. Different planets.
Signing off, and oddly proud of it
For a long time, I thought sustained impact meant pushing through everything. It does not. It means protecting the energy that lets you keep doing meaningful work for years, rather than burning all of it in a few intense weeks.
I will be back. Rested, recharged, and ready to build.
To every mother reading this, especially the ones doing the work while growing a human, happy Mother's Day.
Dare to be great.
A small invitation before I go. If your team has done the AI workshop and you are quietly wondering why nothing really changed afterwards, that gap is exactly what the AI Talent Accelerator is built to close. Reach out to Leadapreneur, and we would love to show you what that can look like for your people.
