“Happy Mother’s Day!” – we hear and see everywhere today. Some of us are lucky to celebrate with our child(ren), some with their own mother. Some with the whole family, parents and children, grandparents and grandchildren, siblings and other relatives and friends celebrating all mothers, grandmothers, step-mothers together. I am super grateful for my children who make every day special… Being their mom is absolutely the most wonderful experience… However, at the same time, no

KMWorld (Knowledge Management World) and ESDDC (Enterprise Search and Discovery) are two conferences co-hosted the same week, same location in Washington DC every year. Without any doubt, this is the most important professional event of every year: all the thought leaders are there, and it is always a great opportunity to see fellow colleagues, partners, clients, have outstanding and deep discussions, make new connections… This year is not an exception… KMWorld and ESDDC are

Being a mother of three children, running a business, having a husband who travels every other week, and trying to fit my own travel schedule into this lovely mess while having time for myself, too… is a HUGE challenge. If something, I’ve learned something, especially since I became a mother almost seventeen years ago: there’s never a dull moment. There’s always something happening… And if you have two or three (or more) children, it all adds up… Have a business? – Great, add

It was March 4, 2020, when my almost empty flight from Copenhagen, Denmark landed in Budapest, Hungary. The pandemic already had been around us, and already had impacted my travel plans for the rest of March and April — but I had no idea the magnitude of its impact on our lives in the following months. I think, nobody had. March 4, 2020 was 300 days ago. Before that, I had had a life with frequent travel opportunities: mostly for work, but also to relax. In 2019, I traveled

Wednesday morning. Wake up at 3:30am to catch my flight at 6am. Work in Antwerp and Brussels Wed and Thu. Thursday evening, two conferences and several meetings later: let’s go home! Massive flight delay on the way back, due to thunderstorms above Europe. Landing at BUD at 1am then driving home. Almost 3am when I finally get to sleep. Actually this is Fri morning already… Less than three hours later, at 5:40am Fri morning: “Mum, mum! Good morning! Mum is back home! Mum is bac

As a mother of three, unexpected things are constantly part of our lives. Someone gets sick. Something is needed for the school — the very next day. Something gets lost. You name it. The only way I’ve found to work for us is to expect these unexpected things. Of course, I don’t mean to worry all day and night about what can get wrong the next minute. Not at all! But getting prepared, and being flexible to make a plan “B” or plan “C”… or even plan “Z” (the alphabet has 26 lett

In the last few days, I was reading Sheryl Sandberg’s book: Lean In — Women, Work, and the Will to Lead. (Thank you my friend, Vanessa for the recommendation!) I am planning to write a separate post about the book itself, but one sentence of Sheryl resonated me a lot. She writes: “Guilt management can be just as important as time management for mothers.” Guilt. I am sure you know this feeling. Everyone does. I am not an exception either. When I travel and leave my kids home —

Being quite addicted to traveling (yes, I have to admit that!), I love taking my luggage and heading to the airport, visiting new countries or getting back to familiar places. Although I was over 25 when I took my first flight, travel became an addiction soon. I’ve been to more than thirty countries in the last few years, visiting some of them dozens of times. I have friends, sisters, and brothers around the world. I always look forward to seeing them and spend some time toge

‘Thought Leader’ and ‘Influencer’ are very much buzz words across the digital space (that’s another one!). Very few people who become leaders in this field actually set out to self-style themselves to be a thought leader or influencer in my opinion. I think they just did their thing, shared it, and people began to be interested and a following developed. Digital marketing has made it an aspirational value to be a leader of this style. We are encouraged to now position ourselv

One of my favorite Facebook pages, A Mighty Girl, posted a great article recently which really resonated with me as a mom and as a mentor: I’ve mentioned their page before and the reason I especially like it is that it is specifically for our young girls and young women. Their messages are always positive and empowering — you can never have enough of that at any age and for our next up-and-coming generations there are some really wonderful role models and attitude modeling wh

I share the (quite common) belief that if you don’t have a habit of open and continual communication with your kids, then neither will they with you. I don’t intend to simplify the syndrome typical to many kids who, upon reaching teenage years, think that the last (cool) person on earth to talk to is their mom. What I do hope though, is as my children grow, and grow away from me, when their sense of independence and new influences begin to take precedence, that they will stil

Making a plan vital in order to be able to meet all the children’s needs. If you have to drive the kids to school as well as afternoon activities like we do, it needs to be feasible. First, because you cannot be in two places at the same time. Second, because driving always needs time and you have to be able to allocate this time every week, for years. This is one reason why I work as an entrepreneur — working from home gives me the freedom to be able to spend the afternoons

Some of you might know that I’ve been a Certified Scrum Master for several years. Being passionate about agile techniques has its own benefits in my professional work, but also in my everyday life. Sure, we don’t live our family life in sprints, and don’t start our days with stand-up meetings. But we definitely have some nice challenges that we solve by using agility: I am a working mom and usually travel a lot, about one week per month on average. Sometimes it’s less, but so

I’m sitting in my home office, watching the melting snow outside and thinking about playgrounds. No, there’s no playground on our backyard (yet), but I’ve seen a blog post recently that started me having a kind of nostalgia… The story is that my very first “real” job was in the ArchiCAD team at Graphisoft. As soon as I joined in 1999, I’ve got to be a member of the GDL Team (Geometrical Description Language), and my first task was to learn this language in depth, obviously. I