# Isabel's biggest career regret and what she learned

- **Episode:** [235](https://agents.truthliesandwork.com/episodes/235.md) (2025-09-25)
- **Type:** interview
- **Tags:** career-regret, work-life-balance, parenting
- **Time:** 4:24–6:44 (start 264s)
- **Listen:** [https://truthliesandwork.com/235?t=264](https://truthliesandwork.com/235?t=264)

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[4:24] Isabel Berwick: Yeah, I guess my biggest one is I have a lot of regret around the fact that when my kids were small, I took a step back with my career, or rather I didn't put myself forward for promotion or management jobs. Now I can sort of be slightly kind to myself and say culturally at that time, at the start of this century, it was much harder for women who wanted to work part-time to have senior corporate jobs. And I did have a terrible experience where I was essentially removed from a job because I was part-time, not because I was bad at it, And that really scarred me, but it took me a long time to step back up. I thought I wouldn't have enough bandwidth for my children and for work. And I regret that now because I think, you know, we can do everything. We don't have to be perfect in everything we do. And I think I was tripped up by partly my own perfectionism and partly by the cultural, you know, atmosphere of the day, but I think that's changed now. A lot of women now are able to work flexibly and, you know, fit work around family and caring commitments and other commitments. And not just women, people, men too. So, I hope I wouldn't have made the same mistake. No, but I don't know. I mean, we, we get, you carry a lot of guilt as a mother. When your kids are small, particularly. So I really don't know. And also, you know, I was able to pick my kids up from school 2 or 3 days a week, all the time they were at primary school. And that's, you know, in retrospect, that was a huge privilege
[6:08] Al Elliott: You mentioned something in the book which made me chuckle, and it was around this idea of the Andrew Tates of the world where white males are kind of feeling marginalized. Now, Obviously, all hilarity aside, it is a silly problem, but it's still a problem. So as someone as enlightened as yourself and someone who's seen, like in your book, you do talk about these stories of where workplace wasn't very friendly to women back in the day. How do you as a manager help these people, help these white males who are feeling marginalized to get over themselves?