In this episode of CEOs & ABCs, Kevin sits down with Isabelle Brenton, former Chief Communications Officer at IPG Mediabrands and recipient of the 2026 Working Mother of the Year award from She Runs It, to explore what it actually costs to hide a part of yourself at work and what becomes possible when you finally stop.

Isabelle spent the early years of her career in fast-paced agency and media environments, motivated by external validation and driven to prove herself at every level. When she became a mother, she did not slow down. She had two children 20 months apart, returned from both maternity leaves as quickly as she could, traveled to Asia when her son was five months old, and spent years removing her wedding ring before job interviews and moving family photos out of her background on calls so no one could tell she had children. She was not hiding her family because anyone told her to. She was hiding them because of a story she was telling herself about what ambition was supposed to look like.

The shift came slowly, then all at once. A culture change at Meta where colleagues openly led meetings by talking about their kids. Then COVID, which put her children literally in the background of every Zoom call and made concealment impossible. Then a layoff, right after receiving one of the most meaningful professional honors of her career, which forced a different kind of reckoning entirely.

Kevin and Isabelle trace the full arc: from people-pleaser to senior executive, from compartmentalized mother to someone who told her kids she was laid off the same night it happened, cried through the conversation, and made it a lesson in resilience. This is a conversation about identity, the hidden cost of not bringing your whole self to work, and what it means to model the things you most want your children to learn.

In This Episode, You'll Learn:

Why high-achieving women often feel pressure to conceal their identity as parents and what that concealment actually costs
How external validation drove Isabelle's early career and why the shift to intrinsic motivation changed everything
What it was like to step into one of the most senior roles of her career at the same moment she was becoming a mother
Why the culture at Meta became a turning point in how she saw herself as a working parent
How COVID made it impossible to keep her two identities separate and why that turned out to be a gift
What she told her children the night she was laid off and why her husband told her she did not have to
How she is using her career transition to model resilience, self-worth, and healthy decision-making for her kids
Why being present is not about being available, it is about actually listening when you are in the room
What she is looking for in her next role now that she is no longer willing to leave her whole self at the door
Why parenthood became her greatest professional asset once she stopped treating it as a liability

Top Takeaways:

Hiding your identity as a parent does not make you look more committed. It just means you are carrying the weight alone.
The shift from external to intrinsic motivation is when careers stop feeling like performance and start feeling like purpose.
Parenthood made Isabelle more ambitious, not less. Embracing it is what accelerated her career, not what slowed it down.
Your kids do not need you to be perfect. They need to see you navigate something hard and come out the other side.
Being present is a choice you make in the small moments. Your daughter knows whether you heard what she just read to you.
A layoff is not just a professional event. It is a parenting moment. How you handle it is what your kids will remember.
Culture change happens in the opening of a meeting. When leaders talk about their weekends and their families first, permission travels fast.

About Isabelle Brenton:

Isabelle Brenton is a communications executive with nearly two decades of experience leading corporate communications, brand strategy, and marketing across major holding companies, global platforms, and agency networks. She served most recently as Chief Communications Officer at IPG Mediabrands, where she led B2B communications through one of the most consequential periods in the company's history. Before that she held senior communications roles at Essence and spent two years at Meta as Industry Marketing Lead. She was recognised as Working Mother of the Year in 2026 by She Runs It. She lives in the suburbs of New York with her husband and their two children

Share this episode with a colleague navigating work-life balance, and comment below with the biggest lesson you took from Isabelle Brenton.

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LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/isabelle-brenton/

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