Episode #432 – The ROI of Invisible Labor: A New Lens on Women’s Leadership with Aimee Rickabus

Cherylanne Skolnicki:

I am Cherylanne Skolnicki, and this is Brilliant Balance, the show for those of us who still dare to want it all, who have big dreams and bold ambitions, I think we deserve to have a big full life and the freedom to enjoy it. So, let’s design our next chapter together for brilliance, not burnout. Each week I’ll bring ideas, insight, and a fresh perspective to keep you growing into a life that feels as good as it looks brilliant. Balance your life your way. Now let’s get started. This is episode 432 of the Brilliant Balance Podcast, the ROI of Invisible Labor with Amy Rickabus. So listen, today on the show we are talking about something that every woman does, but very few people actually measure, and that is the invisible labor that happens behind the scenes, you know, and it shows up everywhere at home, at work, shows up in our communities, and there’s really no one better at showing the real return on that investment than my guest today.

Amy is an entrepreneur, she’s an author, and she’s a mother of six who wrote the manage her and hosts the podcast of the same name. Amy is also the CEO of Tomahawk Information Solutions, a woman and minority owned tech company where she’s built an eight-figure business while raising her family and taking great care of herself. So, in today’s episode, what we’re gonna do is explore how this invisible work that women do. Everything from running households to leading teams at work translates into executive level skills and really, I think it translates into strategic thinking and leadership and a lot of qualities that we don’t always get credit for. So, we’re gonna talk about how to make that value more visible, how to leverage it in your career, and even how to build a business that aligns with your life and your values. So, Amy, welcome to the show.

Amy Rickabus:

Oh my gosh, thank you so much for having me, Cherylanne. This is so fun. Thank you.

CS:

This is gonna be a delight. We’ve been warming up a little bit off camera, so I’m excited to get into it. So, let’s kind of start sort of at the beginning. I want to know what inspired you to write the manager and focus on invisible labor specifically?

AR:

So, in 2020, I became the CEO of Tomahawk Information Solutions. My husband got really sick and I ended up pregnant with our fifth child and running two companies for a moment all by myself. And I realized about a year later, after I came through the dust, two years, I think about in 2022, it hit me. I’d been doing it for about two years and it hit me how much the correlation between running a house and managing the people and managing the systems and managing the capital of the house was the exact same thing I was doing with the companies where I was managing the people and I was managing the systems and I was managing the capital. And I thought to myself, whoa, we’re doing a lot more than nothing by being wives, mothers, running households like we are for sure the CEO of our house. Mm-hmm <affirmative>. We are doing executive level thinking on a daily basis. I recently heard that a mother makes a thousand micro decisions a day.

CS:

I believe it.

AR:

In the mean the meanwhile she has interrupted approximately every three minutes. Yeah. Now imagine a high-level C-E-O-A-C-E-O of a billion dollar company trying to work under those kinds of circumstances. Right. You know, I had a, I was on a call with another group that I’m in and I, there was a man and he said, I have decision fatigue <laugh>, which should that

CS:

Hold my beer? Right. <laugh>.

AR:

I thought to myself, I can’t believe a man is saying this because he has no idea how many decisions a woman has to make in a day From everything from like what pair of socks your three-year-old’s gonna wear to, you know, an on and on and on and on and on. What goes in their lunch? What are they having for breakfast? I mean, for multiple people all the time. For him, I said, probably add some lion’s mane to your breakfast drink. ’cause you probably just need to work on having a little more strength in your brain power. ’cause I think that’s one of the things we can lean on as we, as we run through this experience of being working moms. Yeah. We need to support ourselves. We need to support our mental strength. Yes.

CS:

So you had this insight because you were doing it in sort of a torture test environment, running two companies, raising these children, dealing with a

AR:

Pregnancy and then I got pregnant again.

CS:

Yeah. Oh my gosh.

AR:

So, so I actually, while I’m doing this, I got pregnant in 2020 with Indie, who’s now five. And then I got pregnant again in 2021 and had Paul in 2022. He’s three. So while I’m in the torture test, I am

CS:

Dealing with pregnancy, dealing with childbirth, dealing with postpartum. Yeah, that’s a lot. And

AR:

All of these other children, you know, raising all of these other kids at the same time, but realizing that time management is one of those big things that is can save anyone if you do it with intention.

CS:

Yeah. And I think what’s so interesting is that you translated this into there being a return on that invisible labor that if we characterize all of those decisions about the three-year-old socks and which mustard that 8-year-old likes, you know, knowing all of that information and, and keeping the household running, which so often is the woman. I wanna always be careful, like I know there’s households where it’s a man who’s the default parent, but whoever is the default parent, often mom Right. Is carrying all of that invisible load and doing all of this work that’s kind of just keeping the trains running on time. Right. What you found is there’s a return on that. It’s actually a training ground for certain specific skills. What are like three or four of the skills that you think women are building by doing that work?

AR:

For sure. Number one is your emotional intelligence. Mm-hmm. Um, women, you are honing your emotional intelligence when you are working with nonverbal people. You know, I, I think, I mean, imagine what we’re doing. Sure. We’re trying to understand exactly what this person means when they can’t say anything at all. Mm-hmm <affirmative>. And we were trying to discern one cry from another, you know, and we can do that. Oh, he’s wet, he’s hungry, he’s tired. I can hear other people’s babies and know what they need because I’ve had so many <laugh>. Right. But, you know, so our emotional intelligence really gets honed. And the more children you have, the more I think it develops our innate emotional intelligence.

CS:

Sure. And at some point you’re doing it simultaneously. You’re reading the room of, in your case, six children who all might need something different at the same time and being able to just, it’s like triage, right. Who needs it most and what do they need and how do I not offset one with what I’m doing with a different kid? Absolutely. Similar employees in some ways your

AR:

Spouse as well. And so when you’re working the same thing. And I found working, you know, also I learned how to say no when I was a mom, but when I was a younger entrepreneur, I’ve been an entrepreneur since I was 22, and I didn’t have my first born child till I was 30. I can say the one thing that motherhood has honed is my ability to say no. And it is a wonderful and powerful thing in business to be able to say no when something doesn’t suit, when it doesn’t work for you. It’s a fabulous tool Absolutely. That you lean on, but it’s something that you, you now have. And I think the other thing three would be having that sense of I need to protect this company the way I protect my family, because this company takes care of not only my family, this company takes care of all of my employees’ families.

Mm-hmm <affirmative>. So when I make decisions and from a leadership position, I feel like I’m coming from a place of deep empathy and love for all of my employees with a deeper understanding that this company has to provide for them and I have to make decisions that are gonna protect the company as a whole. Yes. And sometimes that means I have to fire somebody because they’re endangering the wholeness, the safety of the entirety of the company. Mm-hmm <affirmative>. Because that, those kinds of things used to be very difficult for me. But as I’ve become, as I’ve honed into this mother entrepreneur, this, it has really changed the way I look at everything. It’s really let, allowed me to see the bigger ecosystem of

CS:

Yeah, for sure. As I was prepping for today, I was thinking about my experience as a mother and what are some of the skills, like hard skills that I think you practice over and over again, maybe without them ever being called that. And project management is definitely one of them. You know, the complexities of something like planning a family vacation or, you know, getting a kid prepared to apply to and be accepted to college. Like those are projects that you’re running in your personal life. Multiple steps, milestones, key dates and deliverables that, you know, there’s different stakeholders involved that you really do have as like a training ground for the exact same thing you might apply at work. And I was also thinking about problem solving and how often there is like a, what would have to be true? How are we gonna make this happen? How are we gonna get through this? Like, we have to find a way, right? And we have stakeholders at, at play. And that constant problem solving under time pressure feels like something that’s happened a ton in as a parent.

AR:

Absolutely. Uh, 100%. I think I talk about strategic action plans in my book, and it’s like everything from buying a house to, you know, I’m gonna have a baby. There’s strategic action plans are what we call in business. We call it a strategic strategic action plan. I want this to happen and then I want by this date happens next. And that happens next. And we don’t have the language, the lingo in the household yet, but I hope that we allow ourselves to start using the lingo of business within our homes so that we can really own this invisible labor and make it visible.

CS:

And not in a way that’s corny of like, you know, I’m the CEO of my household. Like not, I think a lot of us have a big eye roll about that, but in a way that really gets a layer underneath it of there are practical experiences and skills that are being built here that translate into a paid work environment that that is important for us to honor. That where we really learn them may well have been outside the workplace, you know, so when we think about the, the ladder to leadership, the fact that there ultimately is like we, you know, come into a workplace and maybe we don’t have a lot of experience and we’re building some skills at work. I have a 21-year-old daughter, you have a 27-year-old, like they’re building skills, right. How can they, and then us, even as we’re older, really like get credit for or articulate the, what we’ve learned outside the work environment, inside work. Right. You have this whole like metaphor of success as a garden. Can you talk a little bit about that?

AR:

Okay. So I have interviewed so many women. My next book is kind of about human potential. And what I really realized is women who bought into the idea that life was a ladder, and I’m just gonna keep climbing to the top. I’m gonna climb, I’m gonna climb, I’m gonna climb, I’m gonna wear myself out. I’m gonna exhaust myself. I’m gonna have toxic resilience, I’m gonna get to the top. By the time they get to the top, they’re sick. They can’t go on, they have nothing left in the tank, they’re all alone. The end, they are unhappy. And what I realized that for women, I don’t know if it’s for men as well, but I certainly find for myself, life is more of a garden. And we need to tend the different patches in our garden of life. You know, we have to, we have to honor the seasons as well in our garden. Um, and you don’t, you know, the, the farmer doesn’t farm the entire farm at once. He rotates his crops. And I think that’s one of the things that we as women need to honor in ourselves is finding that ease and that grace of understanding that we don’t have to do everything at one time. Yeah, I

CS:

Get that. I love, I wanna stay on this for a second because in a program that I just released, we talk a lot about honoring the season you’re in and knowing, I think for a long time I believed we should always be in a season of growth. Just that was my goal. I was gonna be growing up into the right all the time. And of course, you live enough life, you realize that’s not how it works. And I think just being very transparent about that and helping women who are listening today honor the fact that your seasons change sometimes rapidly, right? It isn’t like, oh, the seasons of the year or even the seasons of life is I’m talking about things that can pivot on a dime where you have to be, um, attentive to when that season shifts so that you can sort of turn your attention to what truly requires it. So I love that that’s baked into your work is this notion that you cannot do everything at the same time. Different things will require attention in different ways in different seasons. And how does it shift the way women think about careers and maybe even personal lives?

AR:

Well, I’m hoping that we as women, and this is one of the big things for me, I talk about it in my first book too, I think that I had has, I was doing a documentary in film school and I did a documentary on Women in film, and it was on Amy Holden Jones. And I was interviewing a man named Haskell Wexler, who’s a cinematographer. And he looked at me and he said, Amy, I think that what’s really important is that women need to learn how to tell stories and make films in a woman’s way and stop imitating men. Interesting.

And I carried that with me in my life, in all of my business as a question that I always pondered to myself. Am I imitating a man right now? Am I pushing too hard? Am I doing this in a way that’s inauthentic to me? And I think what I’ve really found is if I stay in my ease, if I stay in my grace and kind of try to just stay in a flow state rather than a push, push, push, trying to push things where they don’t belong, that there’s more longevity to the things we can do. And, and you actually, your success is a little more smooth. Mm-hmm <affirmative>. It can, it can happen a it can happen a lot easier then we have been taught by, you know, imitating something that we aren’t. So I’m trying to find that,

CS:

You know? Yeah. So like less, what I’m hearing you say is less linear push, like push, push forward, climb a ladder and more like flow more of a move to kind of honoring what feels resonant and aligned and then trusting that that path may be winding, but it actually may be the thing that’s the most true to what’s gonna feel good to you and what’s gonna allow you to be the most authentic to yourself. And I, I love that. Like, same, same, right? I mean, I really love that.

Did you know that beyond hosting this podcast, I also directly support women leaders at the intersection of work and life as a member of Bold, you get direct access to me, the women on my team, and a peer group of exceptional women who are rewriting the rules and redefining what it means to have it all together. Go to brilliant balance.com/bold to learn more and apply for your spot today. I wanna go back to this idea of invisible work and the fact that there’s so much that we step up to do at work at home, that’s like the fabric, that’s connective tissue, it’s keeping everything running, and we’re not necessarily honoring how much time and energy it takes. And it can be taking us away from things that are maybe more visible, you know, that that kind of give us more power, give us more prestige. Like, can you talk a little bit about that, about how that can really get in our way?

AR:

Yeah. So this is one of, been one of the really big things for me in the last couple of years, as, you know, I’ve had to have more production. So I had to be honest with myself about what I was doing. Mm-hmm <affirmative>. And I actually had a therapist who said, Amy, I want you to write down everything you do in your house. And I thought, ha, I can’t even,

CS:

No, you don’t want me to do that, right?

AR:

<laugh>, really seriously, I, me, I have six children, right? Yeah.

Okay. That’s a lot. So, but I realized, realized what I needed to do was bring the subconscious doing into my conscious mind. Yes. Because at that point you can kind of make better intentional decisions about what you really need to do. And then for me, I come from an IT background and I work in digital transformation for, for big, big companies. And so now what I’m working on is automating things, things that I never even saw as work that I was doing, like making sure there was toilet paper in my house. It was just always kind of running in the back of my mind. But can I set that up on Amazon and just get a subscription for toilet paper mm-hmm <affirmative>. And just not run out of toilet paper. Is that a possible, you know, thing for me? Yeah. Will that help free up my time and my mind?

Yeah, it will. Yes. So it’s like, it’s more than just our time. It’s how can we free up that mind share so that we can be more productive in the areas of our life that we want and be productive in. Like, can I spend more time with my kids? Can I spend more time writing books? Can I, you know, spend more time with my husband? That’s been a big one for me in the last, last month or so. Mm-hmm <affirmative>. But I think that it’s, it’s, we have to get honest with what invisible work we’re doing, where it is, and really bring it up to a conscious level because it really is living in this subconscious part of our brain right now. Until you

CS:

Bring back, I could not agree with you more. And I think that because of that, we aren’t even pausing long enough to double click on does this need to be done at all? Do I need to be the one who does it? Like is there a way to automate this or do it faster? Like, we’re not even thinking, we’re just sort of on autopilot doing the thing the way we’ve always done it, right? Or the way our mother always did it. And I, I think that that purposeful pause to just assess the situation and go, I, I’ve told this story before, I don’t know if I told it on the podcast. I’ve told it to coaching clients of, I could not remember to take the stupid coupons that the store sends you. Like our grocery store here is Kroger, they send you these very high values.

Sometimes it’s like $20 off right? Coupon. And I’m like, I am dumb if I can’t use this thing and I could not figure out how to get my butt in the store with these coupons in hand. And it, so finally I stopped long enough to think mm-hmm <affirmative>. And I was like, you know where they have to live? They have to live in the reusable bags because the reusable bags are making it in every time with me. So when the coupons come, I go right out to the car and I put’em in the reusable bags and then I never show up at that store without the coupons with me. Okay, now we could go on for two hours about how I could, I could make this automatic ordering and I could do all my deli whatever. I like to go to the grocery store, but this, those pausing long enough to think about where can I further optimize, right? Mm-hmm <affirmative>. Your toilet paper example. Like that was me with coffee. Why do I not have this on autoship? So we never run out of coffee. Right? The just those things have to become conscious for us to improve them. And it’s like if they don’t move through the level of consciousness, if they stay invisible and almost like we’re half dead while we’re doing them, we don’t even know we’re doing them. We’re not giving ourselves any credit. We can’t optimize. Exactly. Brilliant.

AR:

I feel like this, we’re in a time of massive optimization for

CS:

Women. A hundred percent. If

AR:

You choose to optimize your life, you are in the perfect moment to be doing it. There’s a million ways to do it with technology right now, but you have to first understand what you’re doing. Yeah.

CS:

And everybody’s so bent outta shape about the technology and you know, it’s taking jobs, it’s taking whatever. I’m curious for you, what do you want more time for if you’re able to automate more things? What do you personally want more time for?

AR:

I have, well I just wrote my second book <laugh>, so that’s a good one for me. Honestly, since I started automating a lot of the things in my life, I’ve had a lot more time to write and podcast. I have, I’ve, you know, been nine months doing my show now and I can’t believe that I’m finishing my second book already. And for me it’s, it was, you know, I wanted time to leave a bit of a legacy for my, for my daughters, uh, this is for them. I dedicated my first book to Indie and Hannah and my second book I really want, you know, it’s for them. But I really wanted to tap into this idea of human potential beyond the female be for all of my children. You know, I wanted to take some time that I have left in this lifetime to do something that was a legacy piece for them.

And so I, I feel like as I turn, I’m now 47 and it’s, for me, I, I work, I wanna work on my legacy, you know? Yeah. In my full time I wanna do the charity work that I wanna do. I wanna write the books and I wanna go out and be a voice for women and help women make this transformation and optimize their lives instead of just being afraid of technology. Te the technology’s here. I wanted to fight the internet. I wanted to fight cell phones. <laugh>, <laugh>, I really did. I was not, I was not down with either one. But I’m realizing that this technology is here, it’s not gonna go away. And the sooner we can actually learn this, be stop being afraid of it and learn this technology and use to use it to implement in our lives so that we can actually free ourselves up. ’cause I don’t think women realize how much time and mind share has gone into the invisible labor. Right. You know, I don’t, I think that it’s just been, we’ve been on autopilot for we

CS:

Do people say it is what it is and they’re not stopping to think about could it be different in any way. Yeah, I agree. Yeah.

AR:

I think it’s okay for us to take pause and take a breath and say, you know, is it plausible that this technology could sit like insanely change the way that women do things? Mm-hmm <affirmative>. It really could, it could really optimize our lives if we allow it. Mm-hmm <affirmative>. You know, if we allow it to. And I, I, I would, I don’t know, I don’t know if fighting the technology is, is a good use of our time, I think.

CS:

Yeah, I think so. What I’m kind of synthesizing is we want to extract the lessons that we’ve learned from doing it for so long. We’ve had this invisible labor, we’ve done it, we’ve done the things, okay. We’ve gotten zero credit in all likelihood. But what we did get as a return on that enormous investment of time are some skills. Now the question is, do you wanna keep applying those skills to the same like mundane tasks or do you wanna get those automated or into someone else’s hand and you take that skill that you learn and now go invest that in a higher leverage activity. Writing the book, starting a company, taking care of yourself, whatever it is that you’re like, I have some like skills here that I can apply to something that I actually am gonna get an even higher return on. That’s a really lovely, like up loop. Yes.

AR:

That’s what the manager of the book is all about. Yeah. It really is. I it was, I, when I first started writing it, I called it the feminist manifesto of the fourth industrial revolution because as I was doing digital transformation for these big companies, I realized I, you know, I walked in the door at one of the companies and I had a woman who had a master’s degree and she said, I’m still hand inputting purchase orders. I have a master’s degree and I’m, my, my, uh, vice president looked at her and said, I have a software, we can automate that for you. And a couple years later we were back at the company, we were getting an award and she came up to us and said, I now have more time and more mind share. And that was what really sparked that part of the book where I really realized that this technology is about a lot more than the robots taking over the world. Right. This technology actually has, um, could have a huge impact on the way a women’s freedom and time. That’s

CS:

The thing is that what is on the other side of that is freedom to truly enjoy and embrace this one and only life that you have and to decide where am I gonna apply my only finite resource my time? Like you and I talked before we started recording, where am I gonna pour my energy, right? And where am I not? And y’all, when you’re listening to this, it is a constant trade off and we want those trade offs to be upgrades. So what are you gonna let go of graciously, right? So that let the robot take it so that you can move on to something that is more personally fulfilling or has more rewards back to you, to your family, to your organization. And I will say this, I, I picked grocery shopping earlier for a very specific reason. I do like grocery shopping. I automated grocery shopping for a while and I was like, Nope.

I enjoy choosing my own produce and walking through that store and using it as a bit of like discovery and exploration time on things I might wanna bring into my household. I don’t just wanna order the exact same things on autopilot. Now that’s not true for everyone. There are people for whom automating grocery acquisition is absolutely the right move, but you get to choose, right? You the listener get to decide what do I care about enough to do? And what do I want to look for opportunities to outsource or automate or have somebody else handle. Like that’s the power of it.

AR:

It really is. And we were finally coming into a time where we’re going to have a choice. Yes, yes.

CS:

Absolutely. Like

AR:

The first time maybe in human history, you know, and it’s kind of, it’s a beautiful thing to me as a, I mean, I do think of myself as a feminist. My mother was a total feminist. So, and I think as, as a feminist, I really do, I think how cool that we get to live in this time where women may actually be able to automate the mundane and uplevel to the place of where men kind of have been able to be there for a long time. It was always their choice.

CS:

Uh, brilliant. That’s, there is the soundbite I want from this episode that is absolutely brilliant. I think. So for women listening today who are like, yes, I believe what you believe, right? Where can they go to find your book, your work and kind of get more of this?

AR:

Absolutely. So the manage her.com is our website. You can get the book on Amazon, it’s called the Manage Her three words and then go to at the manage her on Instagram and at the manager her on TikTok. And I am Amy Holgan RBAs on LinkedIn if you wanna find me on LinkedIn. And I also have the manager her on LinkedIn as well.

CS:

Perfect. We will link most of those in the show notes so people have a jumping off point. If, if the website gives them a jumping off point to other things, that’s usually our safest bet. But the manage her like three words when you’re, if you’re trying to type it in while you’re in your car or something. And I hope that you do, I have to tell you, you know, I get to talk to a lot of people through this podcast and every now and then you find a Kindred somebody where you’re like, oh yeah, I believe what you believe. There’s a lot of, like, this is in the zeitgeist, it’s getting given to a lot of us. At the same time we’re saying it in our own words to our own audiences. But there’s a movement building here of really embracing what is available in this era of human history to move ourselves further toward freedom. Right. To move ourselves further toward really being able to fulfill our own potential. And, um, I’m excited that you are doing that work, as am I, and that so many people are tuning into listen.

AR:

And AI is the washing machine of our lifetime <laugh>. We did that. That the washing machine changed the lives of our great grand of our grandmothers and our mothers AI is that, and some people resisted it. Yeah. And other people embraced it. And the ones who did freed up their time and the ones who didn’t eventually got around to it.

CS:

Yes. It just took a little longer. Just took a little longer. <laugh>. Amazing. Well, thank you so much for being with us today. It has, it’s really been a great conversation. I’m so glad to have you. And thank you for tuning in and listening. If this is the first time you found your way to this show, I’m excited and I hope you got a lot out of this episode. If you are a longtime listener, this would be a great one to pass on to a friend or somebody in your workplace that you think would benefit from hearing these ideas that Amy and I talked through today. So check out the links in the show notes to find your way to Amy’s work. That is all for today, my friends. Till next time, let’s be brilliant.