I've been on maternity leave twice, and the two were completely different. Not because of the babies. Because of what I understood, each time, about my own job.
The first time, I clutched everything. I held onto tasks like trophies and handed over as little as I could, and I told myself it was dedication.
It wasn't.
Busyness was how I proved my worth, to everyone and mostly to myself. So going had me quietly terrified, right up until I hired the person who'd cover me, and she turned out to be better at my job than I was.
I've written before about how that floored me. How I spent a chunk of my leave convinced it made me worthless, when what it actually meant was that I'd done something useful: made the thing run without me.
It took me a long time to see it that way round.
The second time, I knew better. I didn't wait to find out what would break while I was gone. I spent the months before building for my absence on purpose.
Developing the team so they could hold what they were capable of holding. Building the systems so the work didn't live in my head. Making sure that when I left, nothing was waiting for me to come back and untangle it.
Here's what both times taught me, and it's the bit most people get wrong about stepping back:
A holiday tells you nothing. Anyone can muddle through two weeks with the laptop half-open. You answer the one urgent thing from a sun lounger and come back feeling like the business coped. It didn't cope. It just paused.
The real test is a proper absence.
A month. A baby, an illness, or simply the urge to go and live off-grid in a cave for a while. Long enough that muddling through isn't an option and the business has to genuinely run on what you've built into it, not on your constant presence.
That's why, when we built lifestack, the question we lead with isn't "can you take a holiday." It's:
would your business survive thirty days without you?
I won't be having a third child to test it.
I've built the lesson in instead.
And the goal was never to make you disappear and watch what shatters. It's to find what would break before it does, and fix it while the stakes are low and you're still in the room.
What you're building toward is simple to say and hard to do:
a system your people actually trust, and a team that knows how to fix it when it breaks.
Get there, and thirty days without you stops being a threat and starts being a holiday you don't have to take your laptop on.
P.S. If you're reading this from a sun lounger with one eye on your inbox, because the business still can't quite manage without you, that's worth a conversation.