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There’s a version of working motherhood that most of us quietly subscribe to.
You build a career and keep climbing. You show up at home and keep striving. You create a never ending task list and try to never drop a ball. And underneath all of this, is the pressure to do it all, in order to have it all.
Alison Lange Engel doesn’t buy that premise.
Alison has built an extraordinary career – rising from early startup operator to VP of Global Marketing at LinkedIn, CMO of Stripe, venture capitalist, and most recently becoming a CEO. All while raising two daughters and helping care for aging parents. Yet instead of trying to meet every expectation, Alison has taken a different approach: defining what matters most in a given season, and letting everything else fall away.
Her approach offers a different path forward for those of us who feel caught between ambition and motherhood - not by “doing it all,” but by being intentional about what matters most and rejecting the rest.
Why “Trying to Do It All” Is Actually the Problem
One of Alison’s early lessons was that being a “multitasking hero” is a trap. Like many high-achieving women, early on in her motherhood journey she found herself juggling everything: career, family, relationships, responsibilities. And for a while, it worked – at least on the surface. But over time, the cost became clear.
“You can feel like you are getting all of the things done… but you’re doing a fraction of all of them and frying yourself in the process.”
The instinct women have to carry everything - literally and metaphorically - isn’t accidental. It is hard wired into us, often from birth. We want to excel in everything we do, many of us trying to prove to ourselves and our families that there is no challenge we can’t tackle.
In this pursuit, women often balance multiple roles simultaneously – professional, parent, partner, daughter, friend – while also absorbing societal pressure to excel in each. It’s like trying to carry 4-5+ different jobs all at the same time, and pretend we can do them full-time, at an A+ level. It’s simply an impossible task.
The result can become a constant sense of being stretched thin and never quite enough. For Alison, the shift came when she began to pause and ask a different question: not “How do I do everything?” but “What actually matters right now?”
Intention Over Perfection
If there’s one thread that runs through Alison’s story, it’s intentionality. She talks about the difference between attention and intention - and how spreading your energy across too many things dilutes impact and fuels self-doubt.
“There’s a finite amount of time every day. Where are you spending it?”
Instead of trying to maximize everything, she focuses on defining what matters most in each season and aligns her time accordingly. This shows up in both big decisions and small, everyday choices.
For example, Alison left a stable and high-profile role at Microsoft while eight months pregnant because it felt right to take her next ambitious career step. She believed that her next employer (LinkedIn) would be both a pivotal career move and support her in doing the role with a newborn at home – and she was right. In that season, she wanted to capitalize on a career opportunity and she listened to her own intuition rather than what society might deem “inconvenient timing.”
Later, when her mother fell seriously ill with cancer, she took the time to be fully offline to support her mother through treatments, even during a hyper-growth leadership role and with a 4 and 2-year old at home. She was, as she stated, unapologetic about what she needed and why with her employer and her family. Each decision wasn’t about balance or even pragmatism in the traditional sense. For Alison, these moments were about living in alignment – being clear on her primary intention and what she needed from those around her to make it work.
“When you’re leading at hyper scale…it feels like an outlier decision to not be all in 24/7. But that’s the wrong lens. It’s not an outlier if it’s the decision you need to live in an authentic way…and [honor] the people in your life that will be with you far past that company.”
Alison makes it clear that she heavily weighed the demands of her job and it was not easy. But she has found that deep intentions have a way of making room for themselves, and other responsibilities can often flex to accommodate them.
The key, Alison shares, is to partner openly with your manager or company to find a solution that honors what matters most in a given moment, so that you can continue to show up well and authentically at work.
The Moment That Changes Everything: Seeing Through Your Child’s Eyes
Sometimes, clarity comes from the moments you wish you could redo. Alison’s journey has not been without regrets or guilt. Instead, she is continually learning and improving along the way.
One of these moments came on her birthday. Many years ago, after an executive offsite ran late, she arrived home on her birthday to a quiet house - her kids already asleep, their planned celebration for their mother missed. At first, she brushed it off as “just another birthday.” But her husband reframed it: “It’s not about you. It’s about the girls.” That shift - seeing the moment through her children’s eyes - changed how she thought about time, not just for her but for her kids.
A similar realization came when she tried to “optimize” her schedule to catch just part of her daughter’s important school presentation - only to walk in as it was ending, having missed the whole thing.
The lesson? When you try to optimize everything, as opposed to remaining focused on your primary intention for that day, you risk missing the moments that matter most. Your attention only matters if it’s focused on one primary intention - so Alison reminds us to revisit and redefine our intentions regularly.
One of the things that struck me the most was how unapologetic Alison was about the stories and lessons she shared. Rather than striving for perfection, she acknowledges the times when she would have done things differently and embraces the lessons they have taught her - not with guilt, but with appreciation.
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How to Reject Mom Guilt (Without Lowering Your Standards)
Alison doesn’t try to meet every expectation, which is exactly the point.
Instead, she defines success for herself and her family - the rituals, the intentions and goals they have for themselves, and then she lets everything else fall away. That means saying no (or “not now”) without apology, not competing with other parents’ standards, and letting go of things that don’t actually matter to her family.
“I don’t sign myself up for impossible mom-gilded bars.”
Most importantly, it means being explicit about what does matter. Because when your values are clear, your decisions become clearer too.
Alison is equally clear that making this work requires systems and support. Over time, she and her husband treated their family like an evolving organization - continuously reassessing needs and building solutions: choosing childcare that matched their work realities, building trusted support networks, dividing responsibilities intentionally, and adapting as their children grew and schedules changed.
The most powerful lesson I took away from this conversation is that what we allow ourselves to fixate on - what we give attention to - has a lot more weight on how we view ourselves and our mom guilt than we might think.
By rejecting other people’s standards of motherhood, clearly defining her own definition of success, and revisiting her primary intention at a given time, Alison has navigated the tough balance of working parenthood with an admirable and steely resolve.
Alison’s story challenges the idea that “having it all” means doing everything. Instead, it means defining your version of “all” - and protecting it. For Alison, that includes a meaningful, high-impact career, along with deep, trust-filled relationships with her family, and being present for the moments that matter most. Everything else is noise.
Alison’s Tips:
Define your non-negotiables early: Decide in advance which moments or “unmissable” events matter most to you (e.g., dinner, bedtime, school events) and hold the line. This removes decision fatigue and regret later.
Stop optimizing the margins: Don’t try to squeeze everything in. If something is important, make it your key intention and give it the full attention it deserves. Otherwise, it’s best to say no or “not now.”
Let go of expectations you didn’t choose: You don’t have to meet invisible standards you didn’t choose. If something isn’t required for living your own values and views - question it, don’t succumb to guilt over it.
