Mom Turns Setback Into Triumph After Being Edged Out Of Workforce

Learn more about Amy Shoenthal and her book “The Setback Cycle: How Defining Moments Can Move Us Forward” here.

‘Working Girl’

Amy Shoenthal has always looked up to her mom.

My mom is a badass. She got this corporate job that not many women were in, and she ended up being really, really, really good at it…When the hiring manager first hired her, he said, ‘you're just gonna get pregnant and not wanna work here anymore, so you probably only have a few years.’

She did get pregnant with Amy but kept working for 12 years then told her boss she wanted to focus on her family.

They were like, ‘please stay.’ …She was so damn good at her job. And again, don't forget, she's the only woman in so many of these rooms.

Today Amy keeps a photo of her mom on her desk.

She has this short, chic haircut and she's wearing this white cream color striped blouse with big tan work pants. I mean she could have been straight out of the movie ‘Working Girl.’ She was behind this gigantic wooden desk…with like the clunkiest computer you've ever seen, binders and binders on the shelves behind her. But it was a huge office, like that's what you see, it's a massive office and so obviously like she was well respected. She had like really climbed the ranks at this place and then there's a tiny little picture on her desk. And it's me. And I'm like, that's so cool, because she was crushing it at work, and obviously a young mom, and that's like what we all aspire to be.

So that’s what Amy set out to do – have her own career and be a mother. This is a story about how Amy did just that in a system that wasn’t set up for mothers to succeed. 

This is 2 Lives. I’m Laurel Morales.

Career Woman

As far back as Amy Shoenthal remembers she straddled two worlds. In high school on Long Island she split her time between kickline and the newspaper.

And there was a little bit of tension there. So everyone on kickline called me Lois Lane because I would be like frequently leaving to go do newspaper things. It was very different crowds, people who joined kickline in high school and people who joined the newspaper. And I was like straddling both of those worlds and it was complicated, but I loved it. I liked being in both of those worlds.

Amy didn’t know it yet but this ability to do two very different things at once would be the place where she thrived. Her dad gave Amy and her sister some advice that served them well. 

He always said to me and my sister, don't find a job, find a career. And that really, really stuck with us. With a little bit of a scarcity mindset implemented into you at a young age, you are very sort of hungry to make your mark, create stability and create something that can establish you so that you're not tied to one company. So it's like work hard, establish yourself, and always create many, many options so that you're not tied to one company because they're fickle. They were fickle back in the 90s and they’re way more fickle today.

Amy graduated from college in 2005 with a journalism degree but chose a career in marketing.

Because number one, I didn't want to move away from my family and go live somewhere by myself. Number two, I couldn't really afford to go take a $16,000 a year salary because I had student loans to pay off.

She landed a job at a public relations firm in New York City. She was able to live at home with her parents, save some money. Eventually she got a job with a bigger salary at a bigger agency that allowed her to get an apartment in New York. She’s since worked at four different agencies. 

I loved it because it just, you got to work on really big brands that had really big budgets and had really creative teams and you got to just really see the full spectrum of how an incredible 360 marketing campaign and a marketing team could come together to create something really impactful.

At the same time she freelanced for various publications, most notably Forbes Magazine, where she’s been a contributor for 10 years. At her last agency she worked on the digital team.

The culture of this particular team, not the whole agency, but the culture was let's go out to lunch a couple days a week, have as much booze as possible, and the saying was all business gets done at the bar. And so you hear that and I'm like, okay, I gotta really up my tolerance and go do this. And I did it and I definitely got caught up in that culture and it was really fun. 

Pregnant

Around this time Amy met the man who would become her husband. They dated for many years before moving in together.

We started talking about getting engaged but he wasn't sure if he wanted kids and I just kind of like assumed that that would happen. I've done a lot of soul searching and I've decided this is definitely something I want. He came around and he was like, all right, I think one kid, but just one. Now he's like the best dad and like loves being a dad. So we really, really went into it very thoughtfully, very intentionally.

In early 2018 Amy found out she was pregnant. 

I just, I was just shocked and I, it happened fast. I was mostly scared. Not only for career, but like for everything, because it's terrifying. But yeah, I hid it for as long as I could. 

She was the first woman in her department to go through this.

I kept going to the bar at lunch, and I would take my glass of wine to the bathroom and dump it in the sink to make it look like I had drank, like it was ridiculous.

Still Amy waited as long as she possibly could before telling people at work.

It was just getting obvious. And I remember when I like announced it in a meeting, the head of this other department started laughing and she was like, ‘I know you're showing…’ I hid it for like four months, which was ridiculous. And I was just scared. I was scared everyone would treat me differently.

And they did treat her differently. 

I would continue going out to lunch and like having seltzer. But I think people just felt awkward inviting, like as I started to get bigger, people just felt awkward inviting the pregnant lady to the bar. I tried to still hang and be part of the culture, but it changed. 

 At one point she went to her office and picked up the photo of her mom.

And I remember staring at that photo just being like, look at her in her giant office with her giant desk in her awesome power 80s outfit. She just came back from maternity leave. She's thriving in her career. They're begging for her to stay because she's done such a good job. I can do that too.

Before her maternity leave she did everything she could think of to prepare her team for her 12 week absence.

I worked so hard. I worked my ass off. I stayed late and I was like, if I can just go crazy leading up to my maternity leave, I will feel secure in leaving and then coming back. But that is not how it worked. I remember promising a client that I wouldn't go into labor until a product launched, which was ridiculous and she was like ha ha ha.

In September 2018 Amy’s daughter was born. Amy loved being a mom. And during her maternity leave she found time to write a few articles.

Back To Work

It all goes back to I like straddling two worlds. I like straddling the two worlds of being on kickline in the newspaper. I like straddling the two worlds of being at a marketing agency while doing freelance journalism on the side. And I really like straddling the two worlds of being a mom and being a person in the workforce who takes pride in her work. I like that. And so when I'm relegated to just one thing, it's not where I thrive.

After 12 weeks she went back to the agency but quickly found things had changed. She couldn’t go to the bar or work late. She had a nanny to relieve. And she was pumping breast milk four times a day. 

So I definitely lost a little bit of the camaraderie. I didn't love the lugging the large backpack to the tiny pumping closet. Let's not even call it a room, it was a freaking closet. I didn't love the visible sign that I was going to squeeze milk out of my boobs near where other people were working. That was super weird. And again, I'm working at a marketing agency full of young people who like are not in this world because I was lugging this large suitcase around with me and leaving at 6 p.m. every night, the perception was that I wasn't as committed. And it was really hard to combat that perception, especially when you're pumping four times a day or like someone needs you immediately and you're like, I'm in the closet right now, I can't come out for a few minutes.

But the biggest adjustment she discovered when she came back: she’d been taken off two accounts.

…and there was no discussion of like what would fill that gap and I didn't love that. But I also didn't feel like I could be vocal about it because hey, I'm fresh back from maternity leave. No one was really equipped with the tools to handle like, maybe we should figure out, maybe we shouldn't just take her off the two accounts...maybe we should acknowledge the work that she did for the five years leading up to her leave and like honor that in some way. Like there was no thought put into that. And it wasn't malicious, it was just thoughtless. 

LAUREL: And when you came back from maternity leave and you were told you were kicked off these two accounts…walk me through this moment because I think it happens to so many of us, these subtle things that can really be a gut punch like when they hit.

AMY: Yeah, it was a gut punch. It was definitely a gut punch…I had two replacements, by the way I had two replacements because I was doing the job of two people before I left. 

She went from running three accounts to one so she had a lot of free time on her hands.

I started working on other stuff. And I got another promotion. I didn't just wither away. I fought for my place. I guess my workload being reduced when I returned from maternity leave opened up some space as I'm getting more inquiries, can you interview this person? Can you talk about this person? Can you write this article? I was like, my god, I'm getting some pretty big names that want to talk to me. And one person who is this incredible leader of a company, remember she posted something. I was lucky to something about how she was lucky to be the recipient or the subject of ‘a classic Amy Schoenthal Forbes article.’ And I was like, my God, is that a thing? So I was like, all right, I'm going to just lean into this. 

She was still senior vice president with the same salary and the same hours.

AMY: I was like, why am I being paid this cushy, large agency salary to only run one account? Like, this doesn't make sense. I would like plug into other accounts here and there. I would do what I could. I would join new business pitches. I took ownership of this big agency marketing initiative. But again, like I can do math. I'm like, these numbers don't make sense. They do not need to be paying me this inflated salary while I'm doing the work of like half a person.  

Some people told her to just enjoy it – the great salary with low expectations. 

AMY: Even if everyone was telling me, that's amazing, you came back from maternity leave and you have less work to do, that's amazing, that's so cushy... It did not feel good. And people really need to listen to their instincts around this because I knew it didn't feel good. I wanted to feel needed at work. I wanted to feel.

LAUREL: Right, right and valued.

AMY:  …to feel valued, I wanted to be challenged. You know, I took a lot of pride in my work leading up to that moment and I didn't want that to stop. 51 I look back and the only thing I wish I had done differently has been more vocal about how it made me feel and how I felt undervalued. And then maybe we could have done something about it, but also maybe not. And then I might have seemed like someone who's complaining…And so I don't even know that there's anything I could have done or my manager could have done at the time because everyone in the department's leadership is also just trying to figure out what makes sense for staffing all the accounts. And there's just no perfect answer… this is not pregnancy discrimination, but it is the subtle I guess tiny decisions that are made on a daily basis that slowly edge a new mom out of the workforce.

Amy worked at the agency while building up her own consulting firm on the side creating a website and forming an LLC. 

Setback Cycle

At the same time Amy was interviewing some of the world’s most prominent leaders and researchers for a book about how to emerge from setbacks. 

People would tell me like I only came up with this great idea once I had gone through this horrible experience, but it gave me this clarity to do this thing. And I was just like, why is this everyone's story? Why is everyone coming out of setbacks with extreme clarity and confidence and the ability to sort of like be a visionary? 

I spoke to behavioral scientists and neuroscientists and executive coaches and psychologists to get a sense of like why this happens. And there is a lot of science to prove that this happens for a reason. 

Amy called it the “Setback Cycle.” With the help of experts she wrote about how people can turn a stumbling block into a path forward. She breaks it down into four parts: establish, embrace, explore and emerge. One of the people she interviewed for the book was Reshma Saujani.

She not only lost her election when she ran for Congress, she lost it in really public way. I think she called it like a spectacular loss… And so, and it's so funny because she talks about how that's what led her to create Girls Who Code because on the campaign trail, she saw the disparity between young boys and girls… being discouraged from computer science training…And that organization has now trained like half a million girls or more on how to code. When we go through something unpleasant, that doesn't necessarily need to define us. It's what we do next that can be our defining moment.  

As Amy was finalizing her manuscript she hit a setback of her own. She was laid off.

AMY: I knew it and I knew it wouldn't last forever and I planned accordingly. Because my dad said, get a career not a job. And so my identity and my whole self-worth, financial worth was not tied to this one agency. And like maybe me writing this book is my emerge phase and coming out of it. And I think that was really true, especially when I handed in the final manuscript to my editor and 48 hours later I got laid off. 

LAUREL: Wow, the timing of that.

AMY: And so I begged her to give it back to me so I could write that in there, which I did. 

Two months after Amy was laid off she landed two big contracts as a marketing consultant.

I remember calling people to be like, I was laid off, I have some free time. Who do you think you could recommend me to for work? And one person I called, I said, ‘I was laid off.’ And she was like, ‘oh my God, congratulations.’ I was like, ‘what is wrong with you?’ And she's like, ‘no, this is what you've always wanted. You were just too scared to make the jump yourself.’

Ted Talk

Amy knows first hand it’s not easy to embrace the discomfort but that’s where the change happens.

There's a lot of neuroscience to back that up it’s a dopamine dip, the moment when everything kind of falls apart and you have to stop, think, use your creative problem solving muscles and forge a new path forward. That's when you come up with your best ideas. And that's when you learn how to do things differently. The way you exercise a muscle is you break it down that muscle little by little and rebuild it as strength. And it’s the same way with your brain. People who have endured more setbacks are better at problem solving and reasoning because they have had to start from scratch all over again and try to find new ways to do things. That's what I've been doing, you know, since I was a kid, creating my own path … straddling those two worlds and making sure I also forge my own path in some way. And so by forming my own business while employed full-time, I was creating the foundation for a path that I knew I would one day take.

A year ago Amy published her book “The Setback Cycle,” then took to the TedTalk stage.

TED TALK: Remember that setback I asked you to think of at the beginning of this talk? Visualize it again. Now ask yourself how did that setback set the stage for your reinvention? Thank you. (Applause) 

LAUREL: What are your hopes for your daughter in the work world?

AMY: I hope she has as many choices and opportunities as she possibly can. I don't want her to feel like she can't do anything because she's a woman or because she wants to or doesn't want to become a mother. I don't want her personal choices to impact her decision.

One of the people I interviewed, Amanda Goetz, her quote from her own setback story was, ‘women especially feel like they are constantly holding up a giant wall that is falling down. And once they just let the wall fall down, all of a sudden the whole room opens up.’ And I love that quote because the visual representation of stop trying to make it work, just let it crash down and rebuild. The rebuilding, again, the crashing down and the rebuilding, it's not fun, but the other side of it. Not only are you going to be so amazed by how capable you are and by just the amount you can do, you're going to take so much more pride in what you do because you have rebuilt it. You have taken control. You have rebuilt your life your career your relationship whatever setback you faced you have come out of it the other side with confidence, grace and resilience. Because now that you've done that, you know you got through that so you can get through whatever comes next. 

This is 2 Lives. I’m Laurel Morales.