Can women really have it all?

Why intentional choices matter more than perfect balance

Carolin Rose in conversation with host Holly Staff

For decades, women have been told they can have it all: a successful career, a thriving family life and the ability to balance both without ever appearing overwhelmed. But what if “having it all” is the wrong ambition?

“I haven’t yet found a family that managed to maximise everything at the same time,” she says. “The conversation becomes much more about conscious choices and intentional trade-offs within the boundaries of your unique family model.”

Every yes becomes a no somewhere else

Before having children, saying yes to the next stretch project, customer dinner or business trip could feel straightforward. Parenthood changed the cost of those decisions.

“Every yes becomes a no elsewhere,” Carolin explains. “That customer dinner means you are going to miss bedtime. That workout sacrifices your sleep. That business trip puts strain on the entire family set-up.”

The challenge is not simply fitting a career around family life. It is accepting that even the basics can compete with one another: meaningful work, a meaningful relationship, being present at home, exercising and getting enough sleep. Choosing one inevitably affects another.

For Carolin, the answer has been to decide what matters most in a particular day, week or stage of life, then be fully present in that decision. That does not eliminate doubt, but it prevents every choice from being followed by a list of all the places she believes she should have been instead.

She is equally clear that intentional choices are not always perfect choices. A parent might attend a customer dinner while a child becomes increasingly ill at home, or cancel work only for the child to recover by the afternoon. Neither decision is made with complete information. Her advice is to evaluate what happened without punishing yourself for failing to predict it.

“We need to be kind with the decisions we made,” she says. “We never have full information. We never know how things are going to turn out.”

When a five-year-old asks the hardest question

Some of the most difficult moments have not come from colleagues or strangers questioning the family’s choices. They have come from Carolin’s children.

When they were babies, the arrangement was easier to explain. As they grew older, the questions became more direct: Why do you work so much? Why do other mothers collect their children from activities when you do not?

To him, the bicycle was the most valuable thing he owned. His offer forced Carolin to think more carefully about how she explained work. A job is partly about earning money, but a career can also provide friendship, purpose, challenge and enjoyment. Explaining that to a child is one thing. Returning to a difficult forecast call afterwards and asking whether he might have a point is another.

It captures the emotional tension at the heart of the episode. A decision can be rational, carefully planned and right for a family, yet still hurt.

It also prompted a broader reflection on why work can be so difficult to resist. Professional life often delivers immediate recognition: a deal is won, a team meeting goes well or a leader praises the result. Parenting offers far less instant feedback. Its rewards are usually slower, quieter and harder to measure.

When work begins to dominate, Carolin returns to one grounding thought: however meaningful her role may be, she is ultimately replaceable within a company. To her children, she is not.

A different family model, not a lesser one

Carolin and her husband decided long before having children that she would be the primary provider and he would take the leading role in their day-to-day care. The practical division of responsibility could be managed. The harder part was building identities and a relationship without many visible blueprints to follow.

They held regular conversations about responsibilities, priorities and the invisible mental load involved in running a family. During his parental leave, her husband founded a business and later returned to education to expand its services. Both were trying to preserve meaningful work while meeting the needs of their children.

Carolin is candid about the cost. During the early years, they sometimes felt more like “efficient roommates” than a couple. Becoming parents requires many people to reinvent their relationship; because their roles departed from the traditional model, they sometimes felt they had to reinvent theirs twice.

It also required Carolin to let go of control. If her husband was the primary caregiver, she could not dictate how he performed that role simply because she might approach it differently.

“I had to shift the question from ‘What would I do?’ to ‘Are my kids in a safe, loving and nurturing environment?’ If the answer was yes, I had to let go of the how.”

Her distinction is simple but powerful. This is not a man performing a traditionally female role. It is a father performing a father’s role.

Not every uncomfortable question is an attack. Approaching it with curiosity can expose the uncertainty behind every family model and create a more useful conversation than defending one supposedly correct way to live.

Career capital creates choices

Carolin did not become less ambitious when she became a mother. That surprised her. She had expected every priority to change, but ambition remained part of who she was.

“What worked well for me was not slowing down before I actually needed to,” she says.

She also challenges assumptions about sales being incompatible with family life. While some roles demand travel and evening commitments, sales success is not always tied directly to hours worked. Strong customer relationships can create trust and flexibility, while digital, internal and AI-supported sales roles offer different options at different stages of life.

The wider lesson is not that every woman should follow the same path. It is that women should not reduce their ambitions in anticipation of a future they have not yet reached.

Carolin’s experience also challenges the assumption that motherhood creates a completely new person with entirely different ambitions. Priorities change, but the qualities that made somebody driven, curious or fulfilled by their career do not automatically disappear. Meaningful work can remain part of a woman’s identity without diminishing the importance of motherhood.

The danger of becoming only work and family

Continuing her career helped Carolin retain an important part of her identity, but it did not protect every part of it. Work and children could each consume every available hour. Somewhere between the two, she deprioritised herself.

During workplace introductions, she realised all her interesting facts and hobbies came from before she had children. “There was career and there were kids,” she recalls. “I had no fun fact.”

Recently, she has started reclaiming some of those missing pieces: snowboarding with friends, hiking with her husband and asking family for help before everything reaches breaking point. These are not indulgences added once every other responsibility has been completed. They are part of sustaining the people and relationship on which the family depends.

One of her simplest lessons is to ask for that help explicitly. Relatives may step in when work or childcare is falling apart, but they will not necessarily realise that a couple also needs time together or that each parent needs time alone. Waiting until exhaustion is visible means waiting too long.

Creating boundaries in an always-on world

Being physically at home is not the same as being present. Smartphones have made it possible to remain permanently connected to work, often without noticing how frequently attention is being pulled away.

During a family camping trip, Carolin’s son looked around the site and observed that nobody was looking at a phone. The comment made her think about how often children hear, “I’ll be there in a moment,” while an adult finishes an email or checks Slack. Her children recognise the word Slack even though they do not know what it means.

Her practical solution is intentionally uncomplicated. When she returns from an office day, her phone goes into the cupboard with the coats and shoes and stays there until the children are asleep. It does not work perfectly every day, but it establishes a default. If she walks back to the cupboard to check it, she knows she is actively crossing a boundary rather than drifting across it.

The principle applies beyond parenting. A boundary only becomes useful when it is specific enough to recognise, communicate and protect.

What supportive leadership looks like

Individual choices only go so far. Employers and frontline managers shape whether ambitious parents can continue progressing or are quietly pushed towards the margins.

Carolin believes managers do not need to wait for a corporate inclusion programme. They can start with the basics: know when part-time colleagues work, avoid repeatedly scheduling meetings outside those hours and occasionally replace team dinners with breakfasts.

She remembers preparing for a business trip when her eight-month-old son was teething, feverish and refusing solid food. Nervously, she asked whether she could bring her husband and baby. Her manager’s response took seconds: “Of course you are bringing them.” At the event, she went further and invited Carolin’s husband to join the team for dinner.

On another occasion, the family unexpectedly lost their daughter’s daycare place. Carolin’s manager recognised the effect immediately and told her to drop everything, solve the problem and return when stability had been restored.

Good leaders do more than tolerate boundaries. They help people establish them. But flexibility must not become another form of exclusion. Managers can assume that a new parent is less ambitious and, with good intentions, stop offering travel, stretch assignments or visible opportunities.

Carolin’s advice is direct: even if somebody declines an opportunity ten times, ask them the eleventh. Let them decide what fits their life rather than deciding on their behalf.

Her own experience shows why this matters. Shortly after returning from her second period of parental leave, a leader placed her on stage to moderate a senior leadership session. It sent a clear message to the organisation and to Carolin herself: she was back, visible and still trusted with important opportunities.

That support was paired with the career capital she had already built. Carolin recognises that not everyone has the same combination of credibility and supportive leadership, but it demonstrates what becomes possible when flexibility and ambition are treated as compatible rather than contradictory.

A rich life can feel divided

There is no neat ending in which Carolin reveals that she has finally mastered balance. Plans still collapse, children become ill, flights are delayed and phones creep back out of the cupboard where they were placed to protect family time.

That honesty is precisely what makes her perspective valuable. Feeling torn between different parts of life does not necessarily mean somebody has made the wrong choices.

“It can mean that you have cultivated a rich life with a lot of different chapters that are meaningful,” Carolin says. “As long as we are being intentional and making active choices about those trade-offs, I think we are on a good path.”

Listen to the conversation

In the first episode of The Women Behind the Network, Carolin and Holly explore the realities that sit behind career and family decisions, from guilt, identity and the mental load to boundaries, supportive leadership and the importance of continuing to offer women opportunities.

Listen to the full episode to hear Carolin’s honest perspective on building career capital, creating a family model that works for the people within it, remaining ambitious through motherhood and learning to make conscious choices without expecting every decision to be perfect.

Whether you are building a career, raising a family, considering what the future might look like or leading people through different stages of their lives, this conversation offers practical ideas, reassurance and a more realistic way to think about success.