What Mentoring Coaches Has Taught Me About Returning to Leadership After Maternity Leave
I’m delighted to share a significant professional milestone: I am now a qualified Mentor Coach, supporting coaches working towards both Associate Certified Coach (ACC) and Professional Certified Coach (PCC) credentials with the International Coaching Federation.
On one level, this is an achievement within my profession. Mentor coaching involves listening closely to a coach’s work, recognising what is already effective, and helping them develop greater skill, confidence and depth. It requires an understanding of the ICF Core Competencies, but also the ability to look beyond whether someone is technically “doing coaching correctly” and explore who they are becoming as a coach.
As I reached this milestone, I found myself thinking about how closely this process mirrors another area of my work: supporting mothers returning to leadership after maternity leave.
Because becoming a stronger coach is not simply about learning better questions or adding more tools to an already crowded toolkit. It involves developing the confidence to stay present when you don’t know exactly what will happen next. It asks you to notice where you are performing competence, where you are relying on familiar habits and where you might need to trust yourself more.
These are many of the same questions women encounter when returning to work after maternity leave.
Returning to work is more than a logistical transition
The practical challenges of returning to work are real. There is childcare to arrange, routines to establish, calendars to coordinate and an entirely new level of mental load to carry. But beneath those visible challenges, something much deeper is often happening.
You are returning to a familiar workplace as someone who may no longer feel entirely familiar to herself.
You may still be ambitious. You may still care deeply about your career and want to continue growing as a leader. At the same time, your priorities, boundaries, emotional landscape and understanding of success may have shifted. You might feel more capable than ever in some areas and strangely uncertain in others.
This is matrescence: the ongoing physical, emotional, psychological and social transition into motherhood. It does not end when maternity leave ends, and it does not remain neatly at home when you open your laptop or walk back into the office.
Returning to leadership after maternity leave is not about choosing between the professional woman you were and the mother you have become. It is about learning to hold both, and discovering the leader who can emerge from their integration.
My work as a Mentor Coach has reinforced several lessons about how that development really happens.
1. Confidence does not mean having all the answers
Developing coaches can place enormous pressure on themselves to ask the perfect question. They may worry about what to say next, whether they are demonstrating the right competency or whether the client is making enough progress.
The more attention they give to proving that they are a good coach, the harder it becomes to be fully present with the person in front of them.
Something similar can happen when you return to work after maternity leave. You may believe that confidence means walking back in with a flawless plan, quickly catching up on everything you missed and demonstrating that you remain just as capable and committed as before.
But confidence is not certainty. It is not knowing exactly how every meeting, childcare crisis or leadership challenge will unfold. Confidence is the belief that you can meet those moments when they arrive.
You do not need to eliminate self-doubt before you can lead effectively. You need enough trust in yourself to act, contribute and make decisions even while some uncertainty remains.
2. Constantly proving yourself can get in the way of your leadership
When coaches become preoccupied with performing well, their attention turns inward. They begin monitoring themselves instead of listening. They work harder, but their work can become less connected and less effective.
Returning mothers can fall into the same pattern of over-proving.
You may feel pressure to show that motherhood has not made you less ambitious, less reliable or less available. You might say yes too quickly, work longer than necessary, avoid asking for flexibility or take on more than is reasonable because you do not want anyone to question your commitment.
It can look like confidence from the outside. On the inside, it often feels exhausting.
The uncomfortable question is this: what if trying to prove that you are still capable is stopping you from recognising how capable you have become?
Motherhood may have changed the way you use your time, energy and attention. That does not automatically make you less committed. It may make you more discerning. It may sharpen your ability to prioritise, communicate, tolerate uncertainty and recognise what genuinely matters.
Leadership after maternity leave does not need to be a performance of your former self. It can be an expression of who you are now.
3. Reflection is a leadership capability
Mentor coaching creates space to slow down and examine what is happening beneath the surface of a coaching conversation. We notice assumptions, habitual responses, moments of hesitation and opportunities that may have been missed.
This reflection is not about criticising everything that went wrong. It is about becoming more conscious of the choices available next time.
Mothers returning to work rarely receive this kind of space. The focus is usually on practical readiness: childcare, keeping-in-touch days, flexible-working arrangements and the handover back into the role. All of these matter, but they do not address the internal transition taking place.
You may also need space to ask:
What matters to me now?
Which parts of my previous working identity still fit?
What am I no longer willing to carry?
What kind of leader do I want to be in this next chapter?
Without reflection, it is easy to slip back into old patterns simply because they are familiar. You may recreate a version of working life that was already unsustainable, then assume that you are the problem when it no longer works.
Reflection allows you to make more deliberate choices. It helps you distinguish between a temporary loss of confidence and a genuine change in what you value. Far from being an indulgence, it is part of thoughtful, sustainable leadership.
4. Growth is about becoming more fully yourself, not about becoming more formulaic
The purpose of mentor coaching is not to create a collection of identical coaches who ask the same questions in the same way. Coaching competencies provide an essential professional framework, but every coach must learn how to work within that framework using their own presence, instincts and voice.
The same is true of leadership.
There is no single correct way to be a working mother or a senior female leader. Your version may include full-time work, significant ambition and extensive childcare support. It may involve firmer boundaries, a different career rhythm or a new definition of success. It will almost certainly look different from someone else’s.
The work is not to discover the arrangement that nobody can criticise. Regrettably, that particular arrangement does not exist.
The work is to make conscious choices, take responsibility for them and stop measuring your life against models that were never designed for your circumstances.
Return-to-work coaching should not help mothers squeeze themselves back into outdated expectations of what a committed employee or credible leader looks like. It should help them develop a way of leading that includes, not conceals, the perspective motherhood has given them.
5. Meaningful development needs both safety and challenge
People grow when they feel safe enough to be honest and supported enough to look at what they might usually avoid.
As a Mentor Coach, my role is not simply to reassure coaches that everything they are doing is wonderful. Nor is it to evaluate them from a cold distance. It is to recognise their strengths, create space for real reflection and offer challenge in service of their development.
This balance sits at the heart of my work with mothers too.
You may need someone to tell you that the disorientation you feel when returning to work is understandable. That a wobble in confidence does not mean you have lost your capability. That finding the transition difficult does not mean you have made the wrong decision.
But compassion does not mean colluding with the stories that keep you small.
You may also need someone to challenge the belief that you must earn your place again, that being a good mother requires constant availability, or that asking for support makes your success less legitimate.
The most powerful coaching holds both truths: this transition is genuinely complex, and you are capable of meeting it.
What this milestone means for my work with mothers
Qualifying as a Mentor Coach has deepened my ability to listen not only to what someone says, but to what may be sitting beneath it: the assumption hidden inside a goal, the shift in energy around a particular word, or the old definition of success that is quietly shaping a new decision.
It has also strengthened my belief that real confidence does not come from being given more advice. It develops when you have the space to hear yourself think, examine what you believe and begin trusting your own judgement again.
That is the heart of my approach to leadership coaching after maternity leave.
I am not interested in helping women return to work as though nothing has happened. Something has happened. Motherhood has changed you, not necessarily in every way, and not always in the ways the world expects, but meaningfully.
Your task is not to erase that change. It is to understand it, integrate it and decide how you want it to shape the leader you become next.
Perhaps the most important question is not, “How can I get back to the person I was before maternity leave?”
Perhaps it is:
“Who am I now—and how do I want her to lead?”
If you are preparing to return to work after maternity leave, or you are already back but no longer feel entirely at home in your old way of working, my Return to Work After Maternity Leave Coaching Programme offers a confidential space to rebuild your confidence, redefine success and create a way of leading that fits the woman you are now.
If you’d like to get in touch for a chat, I’m here to talk - schedule a call today.