Off the clock

The I should have known something was up when I started to come down with a cold two Sundays ago and I took a nap after two doses of daytime Sudafed. It’s my tried and true for giving me a pep in my step when I feel a bad cold or sinus infection. Nevertheless it wasn’t until my husband said “I think we have Covid” that I realized something else might be going on.

As I stood there watching the pink line slowly turn red, I thought to myself “how is this still a thing.” It’s wild to think that the entire world…all of us…went through this collective traumatic experience that changed our world. Our lives are never the same. And here it is, popping up again, on the week I was supposed to be processing my son’s last day of Pre-K. I didn’t even have time to think about all the parents getting together at the nearby pub toasting our newly minted Kindergarteners on the last day. I was busy napping and trying to make it to bedtime.

We are fine — thankfully we were able to get Paxlovid (10/10 recommend) and our symptoms took a reverse once the medicine kicked in. I can tell this would have been a bad one, though. We still felt awful. I’ve heard some people call it the same as a cold. It definitely did not feel like a cold to me.

A while ago I stopped getting upset when my plans for the week were interrupted with a sickness. Our kids had back to back ear infections that ended with ear tubes for both. I realized the sooner I accepted our fate, the sooner I would we cancelled dinner with our friends family, an annual camping trip with friends, and the aforementioned plans to celebrate the end of PreK for Z. I was disappointed but I didn’t let myself think about it too much. I’m sure I’ll process it in therapy.

There were three things that got me through the week - my new Suri toothbrush with a UV-C light that kills bacteria and some viruses, our Japanese futon that lived on our living room floor for naps while the kids binged iPad, and my soft pajamas that kept me cozy and cool.

Public schools start in 10 days but Kinders start the day after Labor Day. Z is home — and we had bike camp for him last week for 1/2 days. This week we have sitters. I’m getting a taste that is the insanity of broken childcare in the summer. I’m gearing up for summer camps next year.

Worth Stealing

I tried a head spa in Seattle this week and wanted to share this as a great way to relax (not sponsored, they had no idea who I was). It was influenced by the Japanese head spas overseas. My hair came out the cleanest it’s ever been and it was a lovely way to unwind. If you’re looking for a group experience that’s relaxing, I highly recommend it. Next time I’m taking some mom friends and then going up the street to the pub for a meal.

On the record

A couple of weeks ago, I published a Substack titled: The internal transfer is the most underrated career move. Part of it’s behind a paywall but I kept some personal stories before for the public. It’s mostly my take on how taking an internal (lateral) transfer in your company can actually propel your career forward and not stall it, as some career strategists claim. I share some of my hesitancies about doing it as a working mom and what I did to make it successful. Check it out if you’re interested.

The Read

The next month is going to be quite busy for me — we have a week of activities as Z ramps up to Kindergarten. I have domestic and international travel during September. And I’m trying to create a new routine for us with our meal planning and drop off schedules. It’s a time of transition and I decided a while ago that it’s work and family for me in September.

The Ask

The most successful women aren't doing more. They're doing less, on purpose. I’m in the middle of a Beta course with some of my followers from Mom Group and The Cabro Edit8 titled: The Cabro Method: Sustainable Ambition. It’s a self-paced method for working mothers who want the career and the season they're in. If you want on the waitlist for when it launches (at a special pricing), register here.

Sign up here

Before you go - would you mind tapping the ❤️ below? That small act of engagement helps with reach. Thank you!

Some posts may contain affiliate links, which means I may earn a small commission—at no additional cost to you—if you choose to purchase through them. I only share products I truly use, love, and would recommend regardless of commission. You can always click here for my and ShopMy recommendations and Amazon links.

1. You need to leave your company to make serious gains in your compensation and experience as a leader.

2. Changing roles in your company is one of the most underrated career moves a leader can make to grow their expertise.

Today, I want to focus on the second one — but first, I need to go back to the early days of my career to set the stage. For most of my career, I focused on the first strategy and it worked out quite well for me. In the early days of my career I was quite underpaid. And, in one move, I nearly doubled my salary. Another move put me solidly in the six figures bracket and just a few more got me in a range I never thought possible for myself. I’m a huge believer that moving outside of your company will prove to be incredible for your career, especially within the area of compensation. It definitely worked for me.

One of my greatest fears when I became a mother was not knowing how this colossal life change would rock my world. Sure, I’d been a nanny for years and understood the immense work that went into caring for children. I knew of other working mothers — my own mother had an impressive career of her own that I had modeled for me as a young girl. But for me, I worried that I would lose my edge, fall flat in my drive to succeed, and slowly slip into a malaise about how much I lost myself in motherhood. Sounds quite dramatic but I’m not sure I’ve ever voiced it so bluntly before. As I prepared to bring my son in the world, I wanted to hold onto myself and I feared that I would lose the person I’d known for over 40 years — the woman who saw the kind of career she wanted and spend two graduate degrees trying to get there. Yes, I wanted a baby - I went through grueling IVF treatments to have them. It was about as intentional of a choice as you can make with regard to reproduction. But it didn’t negate the fact that I also wanted to matter in all of this when it came to my career and drive to succeed. I wanted to know that I could keep the spark alive that I worked so hard to cultivate all of those years prior.

At that point in my life, anything less than moving up the proverbial career ladder was an indictment that my edges were softening. Interestingly, it took becoming a mother for so many parts of my life to open up to a third way of doing things — not the binary, black and white approach to live that I was so accustomed to. But one that brought in shades of gray and nuance that only came to me because I became a mother. Did I need to become a mother to have these revelations? No, but it was the path that I took to get there.

Now let’s talk about the choice to stay in your current company and leveling up. In my previous company, I held three roles over the course of 6 years. And none of those lateral moves came at convenient times. I started at the company in the middle of my Executive MBA program after a short stint at another company that didn’t end up being a good fit. The switching cost was great — I’d just done it a year prior at another company and now I was going to do it again in the middle of my final global project that was due a month later. But it needed to be done. The second move happened within the first 8 months I returned from mat leave into a marketing function that was net new to me. And the last move happened just 4 months after my return to mat leave with my second child. That role brought me into a new product line that was one of the hottest areas of tech at the time. After I accepted the role, I was told that there were several hundred applicants for the role — an indication of how sought after this area of tech would become.

Neither of those two internal roles gave me a formal promotion or increased compensation at the time (due to company policy with internal transfers) — though I most definitely saw them as a promotion given the competitiveness of the roles and the increased responsibility that both afforded me. But accepting both of those roles made me well positioned years later to accept a role at an external company when I was recruited years later In THAT move, I leveled up my career in ways that I never could have if I didn’t have the previous experience when I moved laterally in my company.

So today, I’m here to talk about how staying in your company can sharpen your edges and lay the groundwork for new roles unavailable to you because you lack the experience to be accepted into those opportunities.

The cost of switching roles that often gets over looked

When I moved to my current company, I was so focused on whether it was the right next move for me that I didn’t realize what it would ask of me — building new relationships, earning trust, figuring out who actually influences projects, new technology (Teams > Slack 4ever). I wrote a little about it here. While some of those same asks happened when I transitioned internally in my previous company, my reputation preceded me, I knew the tools, and the products I supported were different, but complementary.

When you leave the ecosystem you’ve built for years and years, everything gets zeroed out. You start from scratch with rapport, credibility. That’s capital you’ve compounded for years that you’re walking away from. Capital that makes it easier for you to ramp into a new role and learn a new skill much easier than if you’ve started over in a new company.

You can’t put a price on that kind of capital but you feel the cost of it when you move into a new role.

Internal moves are a lot like arbitrage

Arbitrage is when you see two different prices on an item. You buy the cheaper one before someone else does, and then you resell it at a higher price to make a quick profit. For example: you see a pair of like-new Visual Comfort lamps being sold for $350 a pair at an estate sale. They cost $1000 online for the pair brand new. You buy them and resell them for $900 on FBMP and pocket the profit.

In the analogy, you see a lateral move in your company and a role external to your company. You choose the internal role and pocket the profits: your reputation stays intact. You know who really influences projects. You know the leader you’re moving under. And you don’t even have to turn your computer back in.

A transfer doesn’t spend the capital you built on your team, it redeploys it. You keep the trust and the institutional fluency and point them to a new problem, role, or set of learning opportunities. You do it because the opportunity is too great to pass up. And while you might be “leaving money on the table” by not redeploying elsewhere, you’re building a better base for when you do negotiate out of your company.

Don’t play down the benefit of institutional knowledge

Once you’ve made it through one full cycle of seasons in your company, you have an inside view into how the company runs — which orgs are getting resourced, which leaders are ascending, where budget is actually flowing versus where it is supposed to go on paper. An external candidate is betting blind on a job description and three interviews. Maybe there’s a distant former colleague who tells you it’s great, while benefitting from your referral bonus. With an internal move, you’re placing an informed bet on a team you’ve watched, negotiated with, and worked alongside for months.

So how do you do this without being labeled a flight risk or problem for your current manager?

Making this kind of move requires that you’re intentional, genuine, and a bit calculated with your approach. Your move isn’t out of the company, it’s a sideways reinvestment into the success of your organization.

This part lives behind the pay wall.

Read more

The Readout

I’ve mentioned earlier this week on Instagram that I feel like we are facing an impending tsunami coming at us in September when my son starts Kindergarten. I have no idea how to prepare for it. Yes, I’ve read all the prep content. Yes we are doing all the special activities to prep for Kinder. Yes, I am talking about it to my son. To keep with the analogy, I have floats, boats, water bottles and whistles but I’m not sure what else I can pack that will be waterproof and useful once it all hits. I am a person who learns by watching and experiencing. I need to feel the tsunami to understand how to ride the waves. I know I’ll figure it out but for now, I’m clearing out calendar of any major commitments and protecting our peace as we transition to having two kids in two schools. Taking any and all tips and tricks. Thankful, as always, for Kelly Nolan (her next cohort for her time management course is open now - not sponsored, just a happy client and friend).

On the Record

This week I shared a new recording of some old content I posted last summer — some thoughts I have about women supporting women. I’m deeply convicted about how we as women (myself included) uphold the patriarchy with our own judgements and criticisms toward other women. Most especially when it’s disguised as “intellectual discourse” — looking at you fellow liberal women. I think it’s okay to disagree, but it’s how we disagree that matters most.

I’ve shared a few times about how our family will do a “charcuterie board” of snacks in a muffin tin instead of real dinner. The catch to that is that we have to hand wash our muffin tins and it is a pain to do. A friend used this travel container at the lake this summer and I immediately ordered and replaced my muffin tin hack with this DISHWASHER SAFE hack. Win win win.

I’m working on a Subscriber only Substack to publish this week (fingers crossed, it’s taken me 3 weeks to finish the draft). The working title is: The Sideways Move For Working Moms That Beats Quitting — Why a lateral move preserves your career capital while an external move forces you to forfeit what you’ve built. Yes, that’s my Claude generated title. And yes, it’s too long. I like to use Claude to organize my thoughts and then do 75% of the writing myself. The title is horrible for SEO/AEO so I’ll work on it before I post. The content centers mostly around why a lateral move inside your company isn’t always the set back some career experts say that it is. I share my personal career shifts and how I’ve been intentional about my moves to get to where I am today. It’s a LONG post, so it’s taking a while for me to edit it.

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Currently

While we are on the topic of AI generated content…Let’s talk about the announcement that Substack made about it’s partnership with AI detection tool Pangram. I had a strong, visceral response to it. I use AI every day at work, for personal use, and with The Cabro. I use it to brainstorm, draft, and edit a lot of content. A LOT of content. I am a very, very active human in the loop with anything that comes out of my LLM model usage. Because I know, at the end of the day, I am responsible for what I publish alongside my name regardless if AI helped me or not.

I’ve used many AI detection tools to test my content. I do it nearly daily. My thoughts? They are wildly flawed. And at the end of the day, if human was actively involved in co-creating the content (generating the topic ideas, guiding the LLM on creating the words, editing the outputs), how much AI involvement matters when someone else is reading the content? What constitutes AI generate content? The fist output? The original idea that the LLM model generated? The first draft outline? The final edits? The checking for nuance? The rewritten sentence…paragraph…page? As a ghost writer for many executives in my career, I can tell you that most C-level executives are not writing their comms, blog posts, or key notes. Someone else (or a team of people) is doing it for them. And yet, we are not calling them out for not creating that content themselves when their names are attached to press statements, blog posts, and canned interview responses. All we care about is that the content is useful, truthful, and relevant.

Why is AI any different? Truthfully, I think the vigilante nature of hunting for AI content will subside at some point. If your AI content sounds like canned AI, people are not going to read it or they will discountinue reading your content. They want interesting, thought provoking, human sounding content. Slop will lose in the end — but don’t confuse slop with AI supported content. In my opinion the two are being compared as the same and yet they are wildly different in terms of quality. Just some food for thought from a someone in marketing at a data and AI company. Views are all my own, of course.

I did not expect to release that very opinionated take on AI generated content during a weekly roundup and yet, here I am. Would love your thoughts.

Worth Stealing

My hero image for this post is one that I took immediately after my makeup lesson with my makeup artist, Gaylin. I can’t recommend a session with a good makeup artist who can help you create a look that works for YOU. It’s an investment, but it’s saved me so much time and money in the end. I could spend time trying to find something on YouTube but often I end up wasting money on looks that won’t work for my face, shape, and coloring. Gaylin is great — not sponsored, just a happy customer. And yes, I’m finally a fake eyelash convert. I despised them for years but Gaylin slowly and gently brought me to the dark side.

The Ask

I’m running a Beta online course with a small cohort of Cabro followers — those who have attended a live event, an online webinar, or a mom group — around a combo topic around work reputations and the B+ week titled Sustainable Ambition. The plan is to get the Beta attendees feedback and if all goes well, launch the self-paced online course in October. If you’re interested, join the wait list. I’d love to have you.

Join the Sustainable Ambition waitlist

Before you go - would you mind tapping the ❤️ below? That small act of engagement helps with reach. Thank you!

Some posts may contain affiliate links, which means I may earn a small commission—at no additional cost to you—if you choose to purchase through them. I only share products I truly use, love, and would recommend regardless of commission. You can always click here for my and ShopMy recommendations and Amazon links to see them all.

The Devil Wears Prada was a formative movie for me. Along with my Myers Briggs type (ENTJ), I realized at the end of my MA in counseling-psychology that I wanted to go back into a business/corporate role. There’s a whole part of psychology that talks about listening to what makes you come alive inside. A fast paced, high pressure job sounded fun to me — not to mention the fashion. I missed it when I was working through my degree and internship. Feelings are information, as they say. So I listened and went back into a business type role when I graduated. All of this to say, the sequel is now on Hulu/Disney and I can’t wait to watch it.

My book club at work is reading this. I’m enjoying it but am such a slow reader right now. I feel like my desire for reading comes in spurts with kids. I will devour a book but wait weeks, if not months, before opening another book. Fingers crossed I can finish before the book club meets.

Every summer I buy peaches from this online company and love eating them fresh or making cobblers. Even my son asks for the “peaches in the box, not from the store.” Not sponsored, just love a good Georgia peach.

If you’re looking for an impressive recipe that’s absolutely so easy to make but looks like you’re an accomplished chef, clam Iinguini is a fun flex.

My favorite top from the summer is on sale and I can’t stress enough how cute it is. It’s still on the pricier side but my price per wear is low — it’s an elevated white tee and it’s spoiled me for all white tees moving forward.

I posted my second quarterly review - an honest look at my life in the categories of career, family, health, finances, and ambition. It’s paywalled but there’s a link to see what that content looks like from the previous quarter (and that post is not paywalled). Let me know what you think.

I’ve been telling anyone and everyone about our camping trip where a bobcat stood outside our tent in the middle of the night making noises and screeching to another nearby bobcat. I have never felt the literal fight or flight adrenaline in the wild before. But it was unlike anything I’ve felt before to feel like prey in the wild. Turns out bobcats are just as scared of us (thanks Gemini and working WiFi). You just stay in your tent (done) and make really loud noises while turning on the flashlight. They will run off. I was able to go back to sleep knowing it wasn’t interested in us but it remains one of the wildest moments of my life. It gave me a quick glimpse of what it was like to be a human pre-civilization with zero protection in the wild. What’s crazy to me is this was not a remote campsite. We were less than a mile from a gas station on a main road and we were staying at a well inhabited campsite with RVs and tents that is consistently sold out every day. Truly insane.

My brother came to town to visit. He hasn’t been here in a few years and the kids absolutely loved seeing him. He truly embraced the idea of being a fun-uncle and I don’t know how we are going to make it back to work and daycare tomorrow when he leaves. Here’s to family we love and miss.

Before you go - would you mind tapping the ❤️ below? That small act of engagement helps with reach. Thank you!

Some posts may contain affiliate links, which means I may earn a small commission—at no additional cost to you—if you choose to purchase through them. I only share products I truly use, love, and would recommend regardless of commission. You can always click here for my and ShopMy recommendations and Amazon links.

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This week I spent a lot of time focusing on my family. We’ve needed to slow down, say no, and focus on being attuned to what our family needs in the moment — not what we may have agreed to on our calendars. I didn’t realize how much letting ourself off the hook would make life so much easier during this unusually difficult time. If someone in your family needs some extra attention during a season in your life, slowing down is a great way to do this. Turn inward, get a pizza, do some TV time as a family. Most importantly, get a read on your family and be flexible with plans. Don’t be afraid to cancel. And burrow down to tend to your family.

Currently

Later this month, I publish my second The Cabro Quarterly where I share what I’m doing across health, family, career, money, and ambition. The first edition was free and open to all subscribers so you could get a feel for what I’ll share but moving forward, I’m putting this behind my paywall. I plan to get a little vulnerable. For instance, I’m working toward a promotion — and that’s one thing I’ll be sharing as I head down this path. If you want to get the second edition later next week, become a paying Subscriber.

Subscribe now

On the Record

Here’s a few spots I showed up this week:

• This week, I published a Substack that took quite a bit of brainpower to nuance: Keeping your executive presence intact when life is logistically complicated. I’m pretty proud of this post — it’s the culmination of a lot of trial and error in my own professional life and feedback I received from colleagues and managers. I don’t expect people to agree with all of it, but I think it’s a useful post. This one is behind the paywall — the IP is mine and I definitely want to have a controlled conversation around this topic with Subscribers only.

• On Instagram, I shared a parenting tip I learned from the parenting program we took in the Fall. Sharing the link to my post here so you can watch the video where I talk through it.

The Ask

I would love your feedback on The Cabro Substack. I source most of my articles from topics sourced on Instagram — usually things that warrant a larger discussion than a 20 slide carousel. If you have some topics you’d like me to cover, leave a comment below or shoot me a DM.

Leave a comment

Worth Stealing

This Substack was scheduled on Friday evening so I can spend most of my weekend offline. I will be Bricking my phone (that link gets you 10% off) as soon as I schedule everything and taking some much needed time off Instagram and Substack. I was an early adopter of Brick and loved this little gadget. I don’t remember who shared it with me first, but I’m so glad they did. Bascially you can shut yourself out of apps. The only way you can get back in is to tap your phone on the Brick. You only need one Brick — the app is what locks your phone. So it’s feasible you can have one for your entire family. I know people who keep one at work, one in the car, and one at home. This lets them have a flexible schedule of locking themselves out of their phone. I keep mine on my fridge so I have to physically get up and unbrick it. Bricking my phone at night does wonders for my midnight scrolling. Highly recommend it — plus it’s HSA/FSA eligible.

Before you go - would you mind tapping the ❤️ below? That small act of engagement helps with reach. Thank you!

Some posts may contain affiliate links, which means I may earn a small commission—at no additional cost to you—if you choose to purchase through them. I only share products I truly use, love, and would recommend regardless of commission.

Recently, I was thinking about executive presence as a mother and what this means when life is challenging logistically. When I think about the term “executive presence”, I think about being in a conference room, speaking up (but not too much) and keeping a level of personable professionalism that is engaging but stays on task with the right metrics and talking points befit for a CEO.

But for working mothers, I think there’s another layer that we deal with that most people aren’t juggling. It’s the challenge of carrying the mental load associated with being a parent — being the first call when kids are sick at school, or trying to do the mental math needed to determine if you’re going to make it to pick up when the 4:00 call that should have ended at 4:30 is still going at 4:52.

There’s so much advice about living loud and while I think this is a great way to normalize being a working parent, I think that in some situations, it also quietly undermines your authority as a working mother.

Hear me out.

I’ve been on teams where we all knew when each child was sick, which illness they were dealing with, and a play by play on whether their temperatures were going up or down ever 6 hours. That worked for the team. No one thought any differently about each other. It just was the norm.

And I’ve been on teams where folks had kids who were sick, home from school on holiday or were playing quietly in the background after early dismissal. While it wasn’t frowned upon, it just wasn’t announced or acknowledged. Maybe a manager knew what was going on. Maybe a teammate knew because a child’s voice can through the speaker from another room. But it was handled in the background quietly and with zero context to what’s going on behind the scenes. It wasn’t that we were hiding it — we all knew we were working mothers juggling life and work. We just didn’t draw attention to it.

There’s a binary that we are handed here — either perform a seamless life, one with limited constraints that acts as if you don’t have any dependents or external considerations to your job. Or explain, with detail, what’s happening, so that you get your version of the story on record or release the frustrations that only working mothers bear.

In some situations, both of these can slowly leak authority. One leaks it by pretending. The other leaks it by over-narrating to the wrong audiences.

Executive presence isn’t the absence of constraints. It’s the absence of the chaos you make other people absorb as a result of your constraints.

Read that again, because it’s the whole argument. Nobody in that room is actually tracking whether your life is complicated. They’re tracking whether your complications become their problem — whether your edges show up as their dropped balls, their last-minute scrambles, their “wait, who’s covering this.” Everyone knows that being a working parent — a working mother — comes with logistics and challenges that are unique to our demographic. Executive presence, for someone whose life has real moving parts, isn’t denying your reality. Instead, it’s managing what your constraints signal about yourself to other people and what that will cost them as a result of what is logisitcaly, your problem. It’s signal management. You are managing what your constraints cost the people around you, and you want that answer to be very little, if anything.

And that takes three things.

But before I go into this, I want to acknowledge a few things. First, the playing field is not level when it comes to the challenges working mothers face. It’s not fair. And truthfully, I don’t know when it’s going to be fair when women’s rights seem to be headed backwards in the United States. I don’t need to spend time acknowledging what this means for women. Regardless of this, we still need to navigate a playing field that’s ripe with obstacles that only a working mother will experience and full of bias that we need to manage. With all of this said, I want to share how I think we move forward as we continue to advocate for environments that are more conducive to family friendly policies.

1. Being clear about your parameters — not continually accessible

The reflex, when you can’t be everywhere, is to compensate by being reachable everywhere. Always-on becomes an apology of sorts — I can’t be in the 6pm, but look how responsive I am at 9PM. But availability isn’t the same as executive presence. It’s noise that happens to feel like effort. A leader who answers every ping in four minutes reads as reactive, not senior. A leader who makes a clear call, states it once, and moves on tends to read more like someone whose judgment you’d want in the room.

Being confident when you signal your unavailability is the higher-status move because it’s scarcer. And leaders take calculated risks. It says: I don’t need to be in every conversation to be trusted with the outcome. Availability says the opposite — I need to be here or else this won’t get done.

2. Predictability is the air cover for when you’re not available

Constraints stop being disruptions the moment they become patterns. If the room knows you’re offline at 5 and back at 8, that’s not a limitation — it’s information that’s easy to plan around. Plenty of situations call for hard stops — time zones, the closing bell of the stock market, the start of a press conference. The disruption isn’t the problem. It’s the surprise that the disruption creates. It’s the person whose availability is a coin flip, who’s heads-down for three days and then suddenly needs everything, whose team never quite knows which version they’re getting.

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The Readout

This weekend, we had plans to enjoy the 4th with two families who we love dearly. Toward the end of the week, it became apparent that one of our kiddos needed a quieter weekend at home. So, we canceled our plans. I had grand ideas of grilling kabobs, making tie dye t-shirts, and serving my aunt’s 4th of July ice cream cake that I dreamed of every summer as a kid. It was hard for Mr. Cabro and I to make this decision. I was really looking forward to having our friends over and making some fun summer memories. But, I’m learning that sometimes, the memories we want aren’t the ones our children need. So we will be staying close to home.

Currently

If you have any kind of pulse on social media trends, you might have heard about the woman who launched a content creator course and made 3 million dollars in one month selling her Yap Challenge (essentially learning how to talk to cameras on social media). It’s wild. Even she was shocked at her own success. I’m taking the course and can tell you that I’m already learning so much. Even with my undergrad in communications (emphasis in rhetorical criticism and public speaking) along with my MBA and MA in counseling AND my work as a marketing leader, I needed her course. She is such a fantastic hype woman and is helping me make the shift from a long form content creator to one who is succinct, authentic, and relevant. Sharing in case you’ve heard about the course and wondered what it’s like. I’m on Day 2 and sold.

On the record

Here’s a few places I showed up this week with The Cabro —

• I published this video speaking to our decision to cancel our Fourth of July plans. Share with a friend who might need it or save it for when you need a reminder. I think we all have holidays where we need to take a beat and draw inward as a family unit.

• Recently, I was on the Working Moms Movement podcast where I talked about building a personal brand in the era of AI. You can check it out here.

The Ask

If you’re into short, weekly tips and tricks followed by occasional updates on Cabro opportunities (like webinars and in person events), join my email list. I promise I don’t Spam and you can unsubscribe any time. This week, I reinstated my monthly review — a Top 10 listicle of highlights for the month of July. It’s the kind of email I like receiving and the kind of cadence I appreciate: regular updates without feeling like you’re being harassed.

Worth stealing

The Fourth of July weekend is a fantastic time to buy a new mattress. We've been a longtime customer of another premium mattress brand and purchased both of them during the holiday weekend in years past. Helix reached out in the Spring and we just happened to be looking for a new mattress. Mr. Cabro and I both deal with sleep apnea issues and poor sleep quality. A good mattress is a must for us and I don’t say that lightly. Truthfully, I wondered if Helix would even compare to the premium mattress. Well, I've been so pleased with the quality of my sleep. The coil springs, pillow top, and foam feel amazing. CATHERINEB gets you 25% off right now…and some mattress are 30% off with the code on their website. Check it out!

Before you go - would you mind tapping the ❤️ below? That small act of engagement helps with reach. Thank you!

Some posts may contain affiliate links, which means I may earn a small commission—at no additional cost to you—if you choose to purchase through them. I only share products I truly use, love, and would recommend regardless of commission.

Welcome to this week’s review. I’m trying a new format, so if you like it, tap the ❤️ so I know it’s a go.

The Readout

I shared on Instagram stories that this week was a hard week for us with parenting. We have some things going on with both of the kids that won’t ever make it on The Cabro. But that kind of showing up for your kids requires a lot of self-regulation — something that isn’t very plentiful after a long week away on a work trip. So I’d give myself an A+ on parenting this week. And since work was an A++ last week (I was at our company’s 30K person customer conference managing the executive customer speaker track), I gave a solid B+ this week at work while I recuperated. I still had some really big things I need to oversee (B+ isn’t about dropping the ball, btw). But the urgency on everything else melted a bit and I let myself take a breath while I quieted the feelings that I needed to execute and get ahead. This week is the time to rest so burnout doesn’t creep in.

I don’t remember which content creator shared this but someone on Instagram made a Reel talking through a travel challenge they were having in real time with their partner. At one point she said: we’re fighting the problem, not each other. And that stuck with me. How many times have I “fought” someone else instead of the problem — a coworker, my husband, a friend, a stranger. I’m taking this one with me and thought I’d share it with you as well.

Currently

I don’t know what it is about Frame denim but it continues to be a brand that I come back to again and again. During my many trips to SF this spring, I stopped by their store and tried on this top. I could not get it out of my mind and went back twice on two separate trips to try it on. I finally purchased it and in the past week I’ve worn it three times. I’m an unapologetic outfit repeater, so it doesn’t surprise me that I did this. But it goes to show how amazing the top is. Plan to see this on repeat. There’s a price warning attached to this shirt — I don’t do bargain buys.

I would be remiss in not calling out the drink in the hero image for this week’s debrief. My friend owns Hapsy, an NA beverage company and she has created such a lovely product. Not only do I love the branding of her can and box the drinks are so good. Mr. Cabro is banned from using them and I’ve claimed them for my own. You can order them here.

On the record

Sharing a few things that I published this week that you might be interested in:

• On Substack: The quiet career insurance of being known for something is a piece that published this week about a topic I feel passionate about. I left off the paywall to give readers the chance to see how I talk about building your personal brand. I’m not referring to becoming a content creator, though that’s one way to do it. It’s more that I am passionate about making sure that people know you for who you are, what you do, and even more importantly, what you’re capable of. I’m working on releasing an on-demand workshop that walk through how working mothers can spend just a 15 minutes each week to keep their brand fresh and relevant.

• On Instagram: I shared 7 unique ways I make time for my kids as a busy working mom. Truthfully, I learned many of these from some of my crowdsourced posts years ago. And I shared an example of how comfortable I am sharing personal information with my Faye advisor. It’s a question I get asked a lot so I made a Reel to discuss it. BTW if you haven’t tried Faye, CABRO20 gets you 20% off your first month.

The Ask

I’m genuinely curious…

Worth Stealing

When I need a quick recipe, there are two places I go: NYT Cooking and All Recipes. This morning, I made pancakes from scratch and they were the best pancakes I’ve had in a long, long time. The recipe had 20K reviews and a 4.6 start rating but I was skeptical that I would be impressed. I am notorious for burning pancakes so I’ve been on a mission to fix this. I much prefer this recipe over pre-made mixes. Ridiculously easy and ridiculously good.

Off the clock

I’m taking 3 days off this week and it’s going to be glorious. I can’t wait to relax, focus on a few projects around the house that I want to complete, and just detach from responsibilities for a bit. I might watch some soccer. I might start watching Off Campus. We’ll see.

For those of you in the US, I hope you have a lovely holiday weekend.

Before you go - would you mind tapping the ❤️ below before you go? That small act of engagement helps with reach. Thank you!

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But I’ve found something to invest in where the compounding interest far supersedes any time I dedicated to it. Being known for something specific is career insurance — and like all insurance, the premium is cheap when you don’t need it and impossible to buy at the moment you need a payout. The payout moments (a reorg, a re-org-adjacent layoff, re-entry after maternity or medical leave, defending scope, a negotiation, a pivot) are exactly the moments you have the least leverage and least bandwidth to start building your brand. And as working mothers, the moment when you need to be building a brand happens to be the exact time when you “need” it the most. In other words, you don’t build your brand the moment you need it but before you need it. And usually it’s the least compelling time to be building it because it’s not the most immediate need you have to prioritize. Life is busy, the carpool needs to be run, the presentation deck is due tomorrow, you have a plane to catch, your child is getting sick, and there is always a never-ending pile of laundry that needs your attention. There is never, ever a good time to build a brand.

Building a brand is not about becoming a content creator on Instagram who spends time sharing her favorite kitchen gadget (but I do have a few in case you were interested) or finding time to post on LinkedIn about how your kid’s morning drop off taught you another lesson in how to hustle harder for your company’s mission (my ultimate cringe example). It’s not about shameless self promotion. It’s about educating others on what you do, how you do it, and what they might benefit from learning from you when you share it.

Do you notice the difference?

What are you known for?

In order to have a personal brand, you need to understand what you’re known for. And you need to make sure people know what you’re known for with or without you telling them. Here’s what I mean. Being called a “marketing leader” doesn’t survive a hallway conversation — but “she understands how to position content so that c-level audiences engage with it” does.

Here’s a thought. If three colleagues described you in one line, would they say the same thing? If not, why? And if it’s not what you want to be known for, why? It can feel risky to be known for one or two things — but that’s the point. You want to be known for something that can be remembered with or without your resume. These days, we all know that a person’s career can be multifaceted. But having a few things you’re known for makes you memorable during times when you want your brand recalled.

Who are you known by?

Building a personal brand can feel vulnerable and loud, but I’m not talking about making noise or drawing attention to yourself obnoxiously. I’m talking about making sure the right people who decide your scope, comp, and career mobility know you. And even more importantly, you want to make sure you have a well-defined external circle (not a large undifferentiated LinkedIn audience) who knows what you’re known for. In other words, you want people internal to your company and external to your company to know your brand.

Here’s an exercise you can do right now. Name the five people whose opinion of you changes your trajectory in the next 18 months - a manager, a skip level, your org’s executive, a recruiter, your future manager outside of your company. Imagine how each of them would finish this sentence: “She’s the one who —.” Do you like what they would have to say about you? Do they even know what you’re doing without reading a promotion packet about you or your resume? That’s what’s going to determine the direction of your scope, promotion, and reputation.

Recently, I led a webinar on building a personal brand. It was well received (some people were able to move companies, retain a larger scope at their other company or start building their external brand for when they might need it at a later date). Of all the things I’m talking about on The Cabro right now, I keep going back to as I think about how mothers can create more value for themselves at work without having to actually do more work. Most of us don’t need to take on another project, we need to make sure the ones we are working on are seen by the right people.

I’m working on developing an on-demand webinar that walks through how you can integrate building your brand into an already busy career. I’m keeping most of what I taught in the past workshop and adding a few new thoughts that I’m learning in real time. If you’re interested in joining the waitlist, I’m opening up registration later this summer for my next cohort.

Join the waitlist

What proof do you have?

Proof of your personal brand is what gets cited when you’re not there to advocate for yourself — talks, docs, shipped work, a body of writing. And those conversations happen quickly - in hallway chats, quick Slack messages, and over drinks mid-conversation when your name comes up and someone blurts out “she’s so great at developing audience personas.” Building the right proof is hard. Because it takes some legwork on your side. It’s the slowest to build and the least immediately gratifying. But it’s a lot like investing in the market. You put the money in, you ride the market, and overtime, your value compounds, doubles, and the ROI was worth well over the few dollars you initially invested. It only takes 15-30 minutes a week to build a brand. The people I admire most have done it. I’ve done it. And the people I’ve helped with my webinar have done it.

When you leave the room, what’s left behind with your name on it? If the honest answer is “people’s memory of me being good,” you have no proof — you have goodwill, and goodwill doesn’t survive a reorg. It simply means people feel bad when you’re left behind, even if they know you did some great work (though they can’t quite articulate it enough to bring you along).

The reason this feels uncomfortable is that we’ve been taught to build a personal brand is — loud, unnatural, self serving — when it’s actually an asset. And assets don’g just happen. You choose to either build it or you don’t.

You don’t have to do anything performative. But you do need to decide what you want to be know for, make sure the five people who matter can say it, and leave enough proof behind that the claim holds when you’re not in the room. This is not about self-promotion. This is the most boring, defensible risk management there is — and you do it now, while the stakes are low, precisely so the coverage is in place before the day you need it.

Let me know what you think in the comments — how have you quietly (or loudly) built a personal brand and what did you do?

Registration for my next personal brand workshop (on demand) opens up later this summer. Join the waitlist to be the first to know.

Join the waitlist

Before you go - would you mind tapping the ❤️ below before you go? That small act of engagement helps with reach. Thank you!

Some posts may contain affiliate links, which means I may earn a small commission—at no additional cost to you—if you choose to purchase through them. I only share products I truly use, love, and would recommend regardless of commission.

I’m not sure what my point is by telling you this. It feels a little cliche to complain about how women have so much more to prepare for than men. We know this and yet we do all the things to make sure we feel confident about our appearances. I think I just wanted to share my panicked last minute prep so that when you find yourself in a similar situation, you can create a better work back schedule in your calendar (a la Kelly Nolan) before you head on stage in front of a camera. Next time I book my flights for an event where I’ll be on camera, I’ll also book my appts that help me feel by best.

Checking in on the B+ week

I mentioned on Instagram what my A+/B+ focus areas for the week were. And I feel like I did a great job of focusing on those. Next week will be A+ on work as I deliver the track at our conference and my children will get the A+ for attention via their father. My B+ will be everything else.

This Substack article went viral on Instagram last week and continued to gain engagement this week. It’s always so interesting to see what resonates with people. I’m so glad that my thoughts on the B+ week encourages people to think differently about what great looks like.

The hairbrush that everyone was talking about

My Instagram DMs were hopping this weekend when I shared my favorite brush. People told me stories of their husbands purchasing it for Christmas, of their mothers passing down the brush to them in high school, and finally splurging to buy it after a special milestone. It’s not cheap…but it’s definitely an elite experience for smooth, fizz free hair. Don’t say I didn’t warn you about the price.

Where to find me this summer

I’m a bit quiet on the webinar front this summer as I think about what my next offering will be. But my 1:1 sessions are wide open for July and August if you want to talk building your personal brand, embracing a B+ week, becoming a content creator, or any other topic you need. You can book at the link below.

Book a 1:1 Session here

Before you go - would you mind tapping the ❤️ below before you go? That small act of engagement helps with reach. Thank you!

Some posts may contain affiliate links, which means I may earn a small commission—at no additional cost to you—if you choose to purchase through them. I only share products I truly use, love, and would recommend regardless of commission.

Next week I’ll be in San Francisco for our 30,000 person customer conference. I’m running one of the session tracks — Data Strategy — where I’ll be emceeing the event and meeting with 40+ customer executives who are speaking in breakouts and lightening talks. I’m also seeing some of my own company executives this week from teams that I support but rarely get to visit with face to face. Additionally, I’ll cross paths with many of my marketing colleagues including skip managers, marketing leaders, and sales executives. I want to be prepared to have important conversations, if I can have them, and ready to talk about anything in the business that needs a quick “can I get your perspective” lead in. I also want to see my work friends — deepen our camaraderie and enjoy the time in person. That’s a tall order for a week.

For me, what actually changes the week is what happens before it starts. Not more hustle on Monday but getting clarity the week before. The leaders I respect aren’t the ones who move fastest into a heavy week. They’re the ones who walk in already knowing what matters, what’s likely to break, and what they’re not going to let take them down. Put you head down and grind isn’t something their apt to endorse.

That’s the part AI is pretty good at, and it’s not the part it gets sold for. I think AI is a fantastic thought partner — pointing out things we might have missed. Highlighting a different perspective we may have overlooked. We get pitched AI as a way to do the work faster. The real leverage is using it to think before the work starts — to triage, pressure-test, rehearse, and protect your capacity instead of reacting.

So these aren’t prompts for writing your emails faster. They’re the ten I’d consider running before a high-stakes week - if not all of them then a few that are highly applicable. To walk in oriented instead of catching up by Wednesday. They fall into three jobs: see the week clearly, prepare what carries the most weight, and protect your capacity so the week doesn’t quietly take over everything.

The first two are below. The rest are for paid subscribers. These prompts are copy-paste-ready, with brackets showing you exactly where to make them yours.

See the week clearly

Before you prepare for anything, you have to know what the week actually is — not the version your calendar implies, where every block looks equally important. These two get you oriented: what matters, and what’s most likely to go wrong.

1. The Week Triage

You are my chief of staff. Here is my calendar and task list for the coming week: [paste], plus last week’s notes on what’s still open: [paste]. My top professional priority right now is [X]. Identify the 2–3 outcomes that actually matter this week and the meetings or tasks that don’t move them. Flag any scheduling collisions or overloaded days. Tell me what I could cut, defer, or shorten. This is just for me to plan from, so be blunt — I’d rather hear it now than Wednesday. (Note, if you have an integration already set up, you don’t need to past a copy of your calendar and/or tasks. Simply reference it in your prompt that it’s there.)

2. The Pre-Mortem

You’re a sharp, skeptical advisor who’s seen this kind of thing go wrong before. I have a high-stakes [decision / deliverable / presentation] this week: [describe it]. Here’s the relevant background: [paste any context, prior feedback, or constraints]. Assume it’s three weeks from now and it went badly. Work backward: what are the most likely reasons it failed, and what blind spots am I probably not seeing? Give me the three things to de-risk before [day], ranked by impact, so I can act on them this week.

Those two get you oriented. The next eight are where the week actually gets handled.

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That sentence makes most high achievers flinch. It took me a long time to write this publicly. But I realized that it’s the secret sauce to so many accomplished men and women. They aren’t doing it all at an A+ level.

Somewhere along the way you and I learned that anything less than your full effort, applied everywhere, all at once, is the beginning of slipping. The phrase "what is worth doing is worth doing well" is a famous proverb encouraging excellence and commitment to a task. Somewhere along the way we told ourselves that doing something “well” meant doing it with a level of excellence that demanded near perfection. Less our reduced devotion lead us to slacking off when it counts. So when a week comes in at B+, you don’t just notice it. You apologize for it. To your boss, to your partner, to yourself. And then you carry the guilt that supposedly “pushes you to excellence” the next time you need a reminder that A+ is all that counts.

This post is about why that apology is a mistake — and why the thing you’re apologizing for is the most sophisticated professional skill you have.

Here is the equation running underneath the guilt, the one almost no one says out loud: a B+ week means I lowered my standards, which means I’m slipping, which means this is who I’m becoming, which means my edge is gone, which means I won’t live up to my full potential which means I’m leaving opportunities on the table. It moves fast and it feels like logic. It is not logic. It is four different ideas dressed up as a good work ethic and I’d like to unpack them together.

Watch how it actually plays out. There’s the launch week when dinner was takeout four nights in a row. And not the Sweetgreen type of takeout. The high fructose corn syrup, lots of additives, not a lot of protein and a good sprinkle of red dye 40 kind of takeout all the health blogs warn you to avoid but never seem to give you a real alternative as a working mom when there just isn’t enough time. But you answered Slack at a red light, and the launch shipped clean, on time without any fires. And yet your brain still filed the week under barely held it together instead of executed under a real load.

There's the week your daughter started kindergarten — the transition she'd been nervous about for a month — and you decided on Sunday that you were doing every drop-off and every pickup, no exceptions. So at work you let the wheels turn on momentum you'd already built: you skipped the optional sync, sent the good-enough version of the update instead of the polished one, kept your hand down in the meeting where you'd normally have something to add. Nothing broke. Your standing didn't move an inch, because reputations are built over quarters, not one week in September when everyone, and I mean everyone, is thinking about back to school for their own kids. And you spent the week with a low hum of I'm coasting and someone's going to notice — while doing exactly what that week required.

And finally, there's the quarter you stopped raising your hand for the splashy cross-functional project, the visible one, the flashy resume one, because you were quietly protecting your energy for a promotion-worthy project that was coming down the pipeline a month later. So you spent three months after that wondering if you'd gone soft because you didn’t “try to manage both” but chose to be strategic with how you spent your time leading up to your promotion consideration.

Look at what those weeks actually were. Every single one of them was a correct call. The launch mattered more than the red dye 40. The launch mattered more than a home-cooked dinner that week. The promotion mattered more than the optics of one more project. You read the stakes, you allocated your effort to match them, and you were right. And every one of those correct calls generated shame anyway.

That gap between sound judgment and the guilt that arrives right behind it is the thing this post wants to close. Because the guilt is not telling you the truth. The pressure you feel is real; the cost of running this thin shows up in your sleep and your patience and your assumption that you’re the only one barely keeping it together. But the standard underneath the pressure — that you should be able to run at 100% across every domain of your life at the same time, indefinitely — is a fantasy. It was never real. And you’ve been holding yourself to it anyway.

I want to help you, and ultimately help myself, rethink this way of engaging work. And I’d like to propose a new way of doing work that I’ve witnessed other high achievers do.

So let’s take the equation apart, starting with the conflation at the center of it: the belief that lowering your standards and protecting your capacity are the same move. They are not. They are opposites. But they happen to look identical from the outside.

Are you lowering your standards or protecting your capacity for bigger things?

Here is the difference between standards and capacity. Standards are the arbitrary rules you put around your work that dictate what good work looks like. They are the rules you hold to the deck, the dinner, the conversation, the deliverable — it’s the bar you hold yourself to when you want to achieve excellence.

Your capacity is about you. It is the finite, renewable energy you draw on to keep clearing that bar, not for one impressive week, but for years. Standards are a measure of what you produce. Capacity is a measure of what you have left to produce it with. They are not the same thing, and the whole trap is that we have been treating them as if they were.

When you lower your standards, the bar itself drops. The work that goes out is worse than it should be. That is the thing you are actually afraid of, and you are right to guard against it. But that is not what happens in a B+ week. In a B+ week the bar holds — the launch still ships clean, the kid still gets walked into kindergarten, the promotion case still gets built — and what you protect instead is the reserve underneath it. You are not lowering the floor. You are refusing to treat your ceiling as your floor every single week. Read that again. You’re not saying that a standard of excellence doesn’t matter. You are simply saying you will stand on what your bare minimum will be and not push yourself to reach a ceiling you were never going to be able to meet.

My paywall starts here for paid subscribers. You can pay to get the rest of this article and/or join me for an even deeper dive this Sunday, June 7th for my webinar “Embracing the B+ Week.” I hope you’ll do both.

Join the B+ week webinar

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Momma needs a minute.

This weekend was a full one. We spent time in the yard doing some heavy manual labor clearing out ivy, cutting back bushes, and digging out weeds. On Instagram this week, I talked about the tradeoffs our family does to keep a house manager once a week. We were quoted $1400 to do the landscaping (which was the bare minimum clean up, nothing fancy). Do I like yard work? Absolutely not. But I really like having a house manager and I like having a nice yard — so the tradeoff was a weekend of yard work. I’m going to start sharing more of the tradeoffs we do as a family to make some of the financial decisions we make. Feel free to join me on Instagram Subscriptions to hear more about my low buy journey.

Purchase of the week. We do not need another boat and tote for our collection. Or do we? I was tired of having to take two bags to the pool with the kids. We couldn’t handle all of the towels and swim gear in one bag. So I grabbed another extra large in the regatta blue. I must say, she looks great with all the navy handles.

J and I went to the zoo with some girlfriends in her preschool class this weekend and it was a fun mommy-daughter outing. The conversations were fun and it was really special seeing J with her school mates. I watched the girls’ mannerisms and realized that much of J’s personality is just a bunch of cute inside jokes between her and her friends. What a special thing to watch.

In case you missed it, earlier this week I shared The 30 min personal brand audit for working moms and AI for working moms: Why your AI forgets what you told it 20 minutes ago. The 30 min personal brand audit is a taste of the session I delivered earlier in May and the AI tip comes from my AI starter guide that’s already helped nearly 300 women start their journey in AI fluency.

June is going to be an insane month. In addition to prepping for our 30K customer conference, I’m prepping for a launch in July, a webinar recording in July as well as Father’s Day, the World Cup (we’re headed to Bosnia v Qatar) and a myriad of nights at sporting events for the kids. I’m already tired. Or, am I thankful? I keep reminding myself this life I’m living, the one where I’m tired and exhausted, and so so sleep deprived is one that I deeply desired for much of my 20s and 30s. It doesn’t change how hard this season is — it helps me get perspective when it all feels really overwhelming.

Friendly reminder that if you’re a mom to young children, you should make sure you’re stocked up on this. There’s nothing more demoralizing for parents, or kids, than running out of something during a lazy summer night of independent play.

My B+ week webinar registration ends tomorrow. Join us for an intimate conversation around high performers who learn when to give 100%, 90% and 80% in their personal and professional lives.

Register for the B+ week

Before I go, I wanted to add that liking this post, re-stacking it, or commenting below can go a long way for reach on this platform. It’s a great way to support your favorite Substack writers. I’d be so grateful for your endorsement.

Thank you for reading and supporting The Cabro. If you’re new here, you can also find me on Instagram @_thecabro, where I share daily reflections, working mom tips, and behind-the-scenes content.

I offer private 1:1 mentoring sessions to explore career next steps, building an online brand, and cultivating community on a social media platform with tens of thousands of followers. People often ask how I did it: How I grew my audience. How I navigated career pivots after having children. How I scaled a brand and stayed sane doing it. Now you can ask me.

Some posts may contain affiliate links, which means I may earn a small commission—at no additional cost to you—if you choose to purchase through them. You can explore more of my favorites anytime on my Amazon Storefront and ShopMy page.

You're 45 minutes into a chat with ChatGPT or Claude. You've given it your brand voice, your tone preferences, the project background, and three rounds of edits. Suddenly it starts repeating itself, contradicting earlier instructions, or writing in a tone you specifically asked it to avoid. Your first instinct is to think the AI is broken or getting worse. It's not. You've hit something called the context window, and almost every regular AI user runs into this without knowing what's happening. Once you understand what's going on behind the scenes, you can start working with the tool the way it was actually designed to work. The good news is this is a fixable problem with a simple workaround.

What is a context window

Think of the context window as the AI's short-term memory for your current conversation. It's the amount of text the AI can "hold in mind" at one time, including everything you've typed, everything it has written back, and any documents you've uploaded. When you start a new chat, that memory is empty and ready to go. As your conversation grows, the AI is juggling more and more information at once. Eventually, you hit a ceiling. The model can only handle so much text before it starts losing track of what came earlier. This isn't a flaw in the design. it’s just a real technical limit that exists in every AI tool on the market right now, including the most expensive ones.

What hitting the window actually looks like

Here are the signs you’ve maxed out your context window:

• The AI repeats answers it already gave you

• It forgets specific instructions you set at the start (”write in a casual tone,” “no bullet points”)

• Responses start feeling generic or disconnected from your project

• It contradicts something you both agreed on 20 messages ago

• The quality of the writing noticeably drops

Most people keep pushing, get more frustrated, and eventually walk away thinking the tool doesn’t work for them. The real issue is almost always that the conversation has simply gone on too long.

Why longer chats aren’t better chats

There’s a common assumption that the more you chat with AI in one session, the better it gets to know you and the better the output will be. I’ve certainly been fooled by this assumption. Long conversations can actually make the AI work harder because it has to re-read everything you’ve discussed every single time you send a new message. The longer the thread, the more crowded its working memory gets. Eventually, it starts dropping details to make room for new ones, and the details it drops are usually the ones you set up at the beginning. So the very instructions you cared most about get pushed out first. This is why you’ll sometimes get amazing results in the first 10 messages and steadily worse results after that.

The fix: start a new chat

When you notice the AI losing the thread, the answer is almost always to start a new conversation. I know that feels counterintuitive because you’ve invested time getting the AI up to speed. Here’s how to make the transition painless:

• Before starting fresh, ask the AI to summarize the key context, decisions, and preferences from your current chat

• Copy that summary

• Open a new chat and paste it in as the first message

• Add anything else the AI needs to know going forward

You’ve now transferred the important information into a fresh memory with full capacity. It takes 60 seconds and immediately fixes the quality drop.

When to start a fresh chat on purpose

You don’t have to wait until things go off the rails. Smart users start fresh chats proactively in these situations:

• Switching topics entirely (work email to meal planning is a new chat)

• Starting a different project, even if it’s similar to one you already worked on

• Returning to AI after a few days away

• When you want a clean slate without prior assumptions influencing the output

Each chat is its own conversation with its own memory. Treating it that way produces consistently better results than trying to make one giant thread do everything. Think of it less like texting a friend and more like booking focused 30-minute meetings, each with a specific agenda.

Paid plans help but they don’t solve it

You might be wondering if upgrading to Claude Pro or ChatGPT Plus fixes this. The honest answer is partially. Paid plans come with larger context windows, which means the AI can hold more of your conversation in memory before things start slipping. That’s a real benefit if you regularly work with long documents or have extended research sessions. But even the biggest context windows have limits, and you’ll still eventually hit them on heavy-use days. The strategy doesn’t change. Whether you’re on the free tier or paying $20 a month, knowing when to start fresh is one of the highest-leverage skills you can build as an AI user. The tool is only as good as your ability to manage how you use it.

One habit to start

If you take one thing from this post, let it be this: a fresh chat is your reset button. The moment you feel friction with the AI, don't fight it. Open a new conversation, bring forward only what matters, and keep going. This single habit will save you more frustration than any prompting trick I could teach you. AI isn't getting worse over the course of your chat. You're just asking it to remember more than it was built to hold. Kind of like asking your 5 year old to remember the morning routine by heart. Now you know why, and you know exactly what to do when it happens.

If you’re interested in building your AI fluency and learning how to start using AI at work and home, I wrote an AI guide for working moms. Inside you’ll find the CLEAR Method, a full prompt library, and the AI vocabulary that helps you speak intelligently about AI at work.

Download the AI guide here

If you found this post helpful, would you hit the like button below? It goes a long way with reach on Substack. I would be forever grateful.

This post was originally on Instagram and repurposed for Substack.

It exists in the adjectives that repeat in your performance reviews, in the kinds of problems people bring to your desk, in what your skip-level says about you in a capacity planning meeting you’ll never sit in.

Why this is a working-mom problem specifically

Personal brand usually gets sold as a volume game. Post more. Show up more. Be more visible. And for working mothers in leadership roles, that advice is both unrealistic and beside the point.

But there’s more to it than this. One in five women say they’ve been passed over for a promotion they were qualified for (McKinsey & LeanIn.org, Women in the Workplace). Seventy percent of hiring managers research candidates online before an interview (CareerBuilder). And peers who can articulate your value make you three times more likely to be flagged as “high potential” (Herminia Ibarra, Harvard Business Review, “How Leaders Create and Use Networks”).

Meaning: the promotion committee can’t always speak to what you do well, the people considering you for the next thing can’t find the proof, and the room you’re not in is making decisions about you with incomplete information from the brand you display at work, online, in meetings, and at happy hours.

What is a brand audit

A brand audit isn’t a re-brand but it’s made up of three things:

1. Surfacing what your brand already is (whether you want that to be your brand or you’d rather it be something different).

2. Comparing it to what you want it to be.

3. Closing the gap with small, repeatable moves.

All it takes is 30 minutes with a notebook and the willingness to be honest with yourself.

Two questions to ask before you do anything else

These are the two I’d start with if you only had ten minutes and a coffee.

1. What problems do people bring to you?

Look at your last week of work. Not the meetings on your calendar but the the unscheduled pings. The “hey, can I think out loud with you about…” type of Slacks. The forwarded emails in Outlook with “Thoughts?” at the top.

Those are a leading indicator of what you’re known for. Not what you want to be known for. What you actually are known for, right now, in your current company, by the people who matter most to your next move.

Write down the top three. Then ask: is this the brand I want?

2. What adjectives repeat in your last six performance reviews?

Pull up your last six performance reviews. And if you’re not making a copy for yourself, start doing it immediately so you can return to them for leadership development opportunities. Highlight the words that show up more than once. Strategic. Calm. Trusted. Reliable. Sharp. Detail-oriented. Steady.

Those repeats are your brand and they are confirmed in writing, by people who chose those words on purpose to describe you when it came time to review your work.

If you love what you see, your job is to reinforce it. If you don’t, your job is to start reshaping it. Either way, you can’t make a plan until you’ve seen the data.

The rest of this audit is for paid subscribers. Below the paywall: three more audit questions, the internal-versus-external brand map most working mothers get wrong, and the one reframe I give every executive woman who tells me “personal brand” makes her cringe.

I taught the complete version of this with the 3 E’s framework, the brand bank, the internal/external playbook, and the 10-item action plan — in The Cabro Edit: Building Your Personal Brand, my live workshop on May 17. The playback is available for the next two weeks. If this post resonated, the class is where the actual work happens.

Watch the playback

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But that’s just me. I spent a lot of quality time with J. I am her preferred parent these days and she shows no signs of wanting her dad who she has declared “is not my best fwiend.” We ended t-ball for Z, started swim team for Z, and Mr. Cabro rode the bike portion of the Ski to Sea relay. I shared a bed with one or both of my children for most of the month. Somewhere in there I slept.

I don’t share this to glorify busyness — more to say that even without a child in public school I think I got a taste of Maycember and it was a lot.

Let’s get to the weekly update.

You need these shorts

I found the best shorts and I’m telling anyone who will listen. I even dusted off my Reels skills and created a fit check promoting them. I have no idea if they will go on sale this weekend. My gut says they won’t — these are new to the season and I suspect they are pretty popular. They are expensive, but I find the nicer jean makers make some of the better shorts. I’m contemplating getting a pair in cream because I like them so much. I own 1 pair of shorts that’s appropriate for public facing engagements…so that’s saying something.

New Substack series with some vulnerable disclosures

I shared a new series on my Substack that was very well received. Lots of comments, DMs, texts from friends and general feedback that told me what I’ve veered away from over the last year or so - vulnerability on the internet. This is my 3rd blog in 15 years and every time I write a personal essay, I get feedback that it’s appreciated. So, I’m taking that feedback and trying to incorporate it more into what I’m doing on The Cabro.

On that note, here’s a vulnerable moment from the week. I’ve been much more impatient this week with my children. The kind of week when I’m using a tone of voice, and level of volume, I’d rather not employ. One of my children is going through a phase — dare I say a developmental leap — and it’s been challenging for me. I needed to lock in at work and with the shift from baseball to swim team plus prepping for MDW, I just needed everyone to fall in line with the status quo. I have a saying that helps me when this happens. “The sooner you let go of what you want, the easier this week will be.” I learned this “mom lesson” When J was a year old and Z just started daycare. The illnesses were relentless between them. Back to back to back until we ended up with ear tubs for both kids. Every other week I was adjusting my work schedule to accommodate doctors’ offices, pharmacy visits and two working parent’s meeting schedules while one of our children felt good enough to go back to childcare. Early on in that season, I remember finding out one of the kids would need to be seen by a doctor and I nearly lost it in the kitchen. I was late for a meeting, I hadn’t changed out of my pajamas, and I didn’t have time to make my coffee. I thought “When is this going to be easier?” Immediately a voice came back to me: “When you stop expecting it to go the way you want it to and surrender to the unexpected disruption.” That shift in my mindset has helped me more than once. And so I share it with you.

Making the case for simple summers

I saw a Reel recently that made me laugh. And it got me thinking about the kind of childhood I want my children to have. There’s so much pressure to make summers count because “you only get 18 summers.” I have so many thoughts about this and wrote an entire blog post about “Why I’m letting go of the 18 summers mindset.” When I was a kid, there were a handful of things that made me happy and that stick with me — summers at the YMCA pool, trips to Mexico Beach, 4th of July with my cousins, staying at my grandmother’s farm for the weekend, Otter Pops, riding my bike around Valdosta State University, and going with my mom to her office to play with her office supplies, eat a My Buddy Bar and take home some pastel copy paper. None of it involves crazy magic. This summer, I’m looking forward to a lot of nights by the pool with our family and friends, celebrating the kids birthdays, going on some camping trips, a visit from some family, and lots of time on our back deck for dinner. I might throw in a paint job or two inside the house. We are fortunate that summers in Seattle are were people vacation to instead of vacation from.

Happy start of summer. Let me know what family magic you’re making that’s simple. Would love some fresh ideas.

Every month I’m offering a new webinar on a different topic and June’s webinar will focus on the concept: “Embracing a B+ week.” If you’re interested in joining, I’d love to have you. It’s going to be a fun, intimate session with like minded women who want to learn how to stay high performing while giving less effort where it doesn’t matter. The session will be recorded so you can watch it if you’re not around.

Register for the B+ week

I’m launching a new series on The Cabro: a quarterly retrospective across the five areas I actually track — career, family, health, money, and ambition. I’m doing Q1 retroactively to give you a feel for what these will look like, and then I’ll pick up Q2 in a couple of months. This one’s free. Future ones will live behind the paywall, because they’ll get more specific, more nuanced, and more personal than I want fully public.

Let’s go.

Career: The real work isn’t always visible

The work that mattered this quarter wasn’t the work that would show up in a performance review. It was meeting with cross-functional leaders and peers — people whose teams touch mine, people whose perception of me will determine whether I get a real shot at the next level when the time comes.

This is the part no one tells you about promotions: they aren’t won by working the hardest or longest. They’re won by being visible to the right people, doing work that ties cleanly to the business’s core priorities, and having advocates in the room when your name comes up. I’ll go deeper on this for paid subscribers, but the headline is that I spent Q1 building infrastructure for a conversation that hasn’t happened yet.

And yes — I know some of the people I work with might read this. I thought about that. It feels vulnerable to put it out there that I’m working toward a promotion. But, I’m writing it anyway. I’ve found that the fear of being seen wanting something can be one of the quietest career-limiters I know. I won’t share everything I’m learning and doing — but I’ll be open that I’m working on this milestone and sharing some learnings along the way.

Family: Ending couples therapy together brought us closer together

We ended couples therapy this quarter. Not because therapy stopped working. We’ve been in and out of it for ten years with the same therapist who agreed this was the right move. We’d reached a point where we were holding things in until our session and it was getting in the way of just talking to each other. We’re each doing individual work now, and the marriage is closer for it.

This isn’t a “you don’t need therapy” post. It’s a “sometimes the next move isn’t more of what’s been working” post. It’s worth noting that I miss our therapist. She’s been with us since we were engaged — through our wedding, business school, IVF, two pregnancies, a pandemic, and a lot of heartache from some dynamics outside of our marriage that felt particularly hurtful.

The backdrop to all of this: one of our kids had a hard time this past fall health-wise. The details are not for the internet, but it reshaped how Mr. Cabro and I show up for each other. The lesson I keep coming back to is that flexibility is how you survive a hard season. The version of the holiday, the vacation, the Tuesday morning you pictured would actually happen? Let it go faster than you think you should. You’ll be better for it.

Health: High-functioning depression hides in productivity

This was the first PNW winter that actually got me. Seventeen years in, and I underestimated the need for sunlight. I’m calling it what it was: a stretch of low-grade depression dressed up as exhaustion and overwork — which, as my therapist gently reminded me, is how high-functioning people often experience it.

I’m back on my physician-approved supplements (talk to your doctor but I’m on good ole’ Vitamin D), and I’m building a real plan for next winter instead of white-knuckling through it. If you’ve cracked this, I genuinely want to hear how.

Money: Stable income isn’t stable

My affiliate income shifted this quarter. It consisted of algorithm changes, payout changes with a major vendor, and the usual platform-dependency lesson learned the hard way. When your account is dependent on anything outside of your own email list and website, you’re at the mercy of the platforms you’re using (Instagram, LTK, Shopify, Substack…). The Cabro isn’t my livelihood, but it funds a specific debt I’m paying down, and watching a “stable” line item move sharply was a useful reminder of why I’m not interested in going full-time on this.

The Low Buy Year I ran last year is back on for H2. The first round worked in 2025 and I carried over several new habits into 2026. But our discretionary spending is creeping up again, and the economy isn’t doing any of us favors. Locking it in tighter this time and sharing my experience over on Instagram in my Subscriber stories.

Ambition: High achievers don’t give 100% everywhere

I’ve been teaching a version of “B+ Week” for a while now: the idea that high achievers are not, in fact, giving A+ effort everywhere. I first heard the concept of giving B+ effort from a woman on Instagram. They’re strategically pulling back in some places so they can push harder in others. What I’m working on this quarter is saying that out loud more often and in more rooms — including this one. If you’re interested in this concept, join me for my June webinar titled: Embracing a B+ week on June 7.

That's the public version of Q1. The next one, Q2, landing in July — will go deeper on the promotion work, the actual numbers behind the Low Buy reset, and what I'm doing differently as I head into the back half of the year. That one lives behind the paywall. I hope you’ll join me.

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I work in data and AI. I watch the labor market the way some people watch the stock market. So when I started seeing knowledge-work job descriptions quietly rewritten to include AI fluency as a hard requirement — not a nice-to-have, a requirement — I didn’t need anyone to tell me what that meant. I already knew.

That context matters for what I’m about to say.

I read a piece in The Cut recently called "The Girlbossification of AI," and it crystallized something I'd been watching build for months across online spaces — feminist spaces, progressive spaces, spaces I generally call home. The instinct in that piece, and in dozens of similar conversations playing out elsewhere, is to treat women who advocate for AI fluency as suspect. The argument goes something like this: women who promote AI have financial stakes in it, which makes their advocacy self-serving. The urgency they're selling is fearmongering. And the whole enterprise is just corporate feminism with a new coat of paint — a girlboss move dressed up as sisterhood.

I’ve been watching this instinct build for months, across comment sections and essays and social media threads. And I think it deserves a nuanced conversation. Not because the people expressing it are wrong to ask hard questions — they’re not — but because the conclusion they’re reaching is one that I think will hurt the women they’re trying to protect.

Let’s start with the word itself, because it’s doing a lot of work in this conversation and it deserves a conversation.

“Girlboss” as a critique was built for something specific. It described women who used feminist branding to disguise toxic, exploitative behavior — the executive who preached empowerment while burning out her staff, the founder who rebranded her hustle culture as a movement. It called out a real pattern: feminism as a marketing strategy, sisterhood as a sales funnel.

But that’s not what’s happening when a woman discloses a partnership, tells other women their jobs are at risk, and charges for her expertise (or audience). That’s a woman doing a job with the partnership or lens she created. The word “girlboss” has a meaning — and when we apply it to anyone who profits from knowledge they’ve legitimately built, we’ve stopped using it as a critique and started using it as a way to end a conversation we don’t want to have. And somewhere along the way the word stopped being a critique of anything specific and became a general-purpose eye roll at ambitious women. Women who work hard. Women who celebrate what they've built. Women who want more and aren't quiet about it. None of that is wrong. Different women value different things — that's not a flaw in feminism, that's the whole point of it. 'Good for her, not for me' would be a more generous way of addressing someone whose values might look different from yours at that moment. Girlboss is what you say when you want to skip the generous part.

There is a quiet expectation that asks the “AI girlboss” to promote AI for free, from a position of no financial interest, with no partnerships, no upside. She must give away her expertise as a kind of feminist tithe — an homage to the unpaid labor most of society still expects of women. The moment she profits, she becomes suspect. The moment she succeeds at the scale men routinely succeed at, she becomes a girlboss. Which is to say: a traitor.

Here is what bothers me most. The women being criticized for advocating AI fluency are doing the exact thing we have been begging women to do for thirty years. Get into the rooms. Build the skills. Take the equity. Speak with authority. Don’t apologize for your expertise. Don’t give away your work for free. And then when they actually do it — when they do the thing — we punish them for it. We dress it up as critique. We call it “complicating the narrative” or “asking hard questions.” But the function is the same as it has always been: make the successful woman small. Make her the problem.

The questions around AI safety and usage are important ones to ask and many AI companies are addressing them with rigor. The questions about how this technology gets built, governed, and deployed matter — and they deserve serious, ongoing attention. I say this as someone who works in this space and takes these questions seriously. But here is what I know about every transformative technology that has come before: the answer has never been to stop using it. The internet raised serious questions. Social media raised serious questions. In each case, the path forward was to stay in the conversation, push for better guardrails, and refuse to cede to something that was going to be built anyway. Women stepping back from AI does not make AI more ethical. It makes women less powerful — and leaves the building entirely to the people who were never going to wait for permission.

The critics of AI advocacy never quite get around to the math. They never ask: what happens to the women who don’t get fluent? What happens to the women who hear “this is just girlboss capitalism” and decide to stay away? Where are those women going to be in five years? In what rooms? At what salaries? With what leverage?

If you are a working mother in a knowledge-work role right now, this question is not abstract. I've seen roles quietly rewritten — not eliminated, rewritten. The job descriptions now include AI fluency as a requirement. Not a bonus. A requirement. These were the kinds of roles that used to be considered safe, stable, and skill-protected. The bar moved and no one announced it. I’m also selling a guide on this, so yes, I have skin in the game — and I’m telling you anyway, because what I saw was real and it rattled me. The women who worked hardest, stayed in school longest, and climbed highest are sitting directly in the path of this shift. Calling that “fearmongering” doesn’t make the job postings disappear. It just makes it easier to look away.

The critique of women who advocate for AI gets dressed up in the language of systemic analysis — capitalism, complicity, ethics. But systemic analysis asks hard questions in all directions and follows them wherever they lead. What's happening here is narrower than that. It starts and ends with the women who are most visible. I don’t see that as a systemic critique. I see that as a familiar story with a new backdrop.

I am tired of watching women (and it’s mostly women) do this to each other. I am tired of watching smart, accomplished women second-guess whether to share what they know because they are afraid of what other women will say. I am tired of feminism being used against the women who are actually doing the work.

The women sounding the alarm are not the problem. The question worth sitting with is this: when a woman who knows this industry tells you the ground is shifting — and shows you the receipts — what does it mean to respond by calling her a girlboss?

If you're a working mother trying to figure out what AI fluency actually looks like in your role — and what to do about those quietly rewritten job descriptions — I built a guide for exactly that. I hope you find it useful.

Let’s get to more of this week’s review:

If you’re a Gen X follower (I’m technically Gen X dressed in millennial garb), I have a playlist that even Mr Cabro appreciates. And he’s a hard one to please on the music front. If you’re into Smashing Pumpkins, The Cranberries, Better
Than Ezra, Collective Soul, Green Day and The Nixon, consider this my summer gift to you.

I frequently sing the praises of the NYT Cooking app. Anything that makes it so that I don’t have to add to cart every single ingredient makes me a dedicated customer. The Instacart integration makes that so easy. This morning, I made my favorite granola recipe (it’s also the hero image for this post). It’s really easy to make and worth the effort. Recommending it to Cabro followers (again).

I have a post brewing for later this week addressing the backlash against prominent women who have come out in support of AI. I’m baffled that we would retaliate against women who have — checks notes — disclosed partnerships and investments in AI. I’m disturbed that we would tear them apart for supporting the very thing they have a financial stake in. We rarely pushback against men who do the same, in fact we call it being a responsible investor to believe in the products you’re promoting. A note here — I’m not talking about advocating for the responsible use of AI. I’m a former product marketing manager for trustworthy AI and am in support of this, no need to what-about that side of AI. I’m here talking about the sexist, anti-woman name calling that is happening to women who support AI. Calling women girl bosses for wanting to help other women with one of the most disruptive technologies our generation has seen is unnecessary and patriarchal. Educated, well-paid women are at risk for being displaced more than any other group. I’m glad someone with a larger voice than mine is speaking out about this. More to come in a longer form essay. My fingertips are hot from typing.

Let’s end on a high note. I am reading this new book by the author of The Help and loving it. I’m 50 pages in (this book is a beast with 500+ pages) but I can’t wait to see how the characters cross paths and where it takes them — and me —as the reader.

Tonight I lead my Building your personal brand workshop (join the waitlist for the next time I offer it). I’m excited to talk about one of my favorite topics for working moms.

If you want to join me for the June workshop: Embracing the B+ week, registration is still going. You’ve been told that anything worth doing is worth doing perfectly. This workshop will challenge that — and give you a framework for getting more out of your career by giving less where it doesn’t count. I just had a mom at a birthday party this weekend talk about how she used this mindset to balance a vacation, hosting a party, and manage a lot of activities with her kids and husband’s career in between it all.

Register for B+ week

Thank you for reading and supporting The Cabro. If you’re new here, you can also find me on Instagram @_thecabro, where I share daily reflections, working mom tips, and behind-the-scenes content.

I offer private 1:1 mentoring sessions to explore career next steps, building an online brand, and cultivating community on a social media platform with tens of thousands of followers. People often ask how I did it: How I grew my audience. How I navigated career pivots after having children. How I scaled a brand and stayed sane doing it. Now you can ask me.