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Matrescence Unfiltered

Rose Soffel and Bianca Bass

Matrescence Unfiltered is LIVE, a new podcast exploring motherhood, career, identity and ambition. ✨

We made this for the woman who loves her career and may be dreaming of becoming a mum, expecting, or already raising little ones. For the woman who couldn't find content that spoke to both motherhood and ambition at once.

We're Bianca and Rose. A Chief Marketing Officer in her third trimester and a coach, consultant and organisational psychology researcher specialising in matrescence and sustainable high performance.

We've been friends since we were teenagers, the first of the great neurological shifts of a woman's life, as it happens.

Matrescence is the transition into motherhood. It is as neurologically significant as adolescence. And it is almost entirely absent from the professional conversation. That's what this podcast is about.

💡 Motherhood isn't a hindrance to your career, it's a accelerator. Research proves it's a neurological upgrade. 💡

Each episode, we take one thing about motherhood and work that doesn't hold up under scrutiny and break it down properly. Research, lived experience, and honest conversation about what it actually means when your identity is shifting in the middle of everything else.

If this helps even one woman feel a little less conflicted and a little less alone, it will have been worth every second.

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  • 23 episodes
  • Avg 39 min
  • English

Episodes 23

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  • #5
    April 28 · 41 min

    Building the Village: Loneliness, Cost, and the Patchwork Nobody Prepares You For

    Content note: this episode touches on birth anxiety and navigating pregnancy without a close support system nearby. It takes a village to raise a child. Everyone says it. But nobody really tells you that the village doesn't just appear. You have to build it yourself, often while pregnant, while working, and often far from the people who know you best. Episode five is about what that building actually looks like. The patchwork of support that most women are quietly stitching together on their own. And what happens when pieces of it fall through. Bianca shares what she's been doing in her third trimester. Working with a doula who insisted on meeting her partner before she'd even begin. Sitting in a pregnancy yoga class in a village hall where two minutes of conversation with other pregnant women did more for her than months of scrolling ever could. And the reality that so much of this costs money, and not everyone has it. Rose brings the research. Over half of new mothers in the UK report feeling lonely after having a child. One in five experience perinatal mental health difficulties during pregnancy or in the first year. And when women do have real community around them, the difference is significant, not just emotionally, but in birth outcomes, confidence, and the return to work. If you've ever felt like you should be able to do all of this on your own, this episode is a reminder that you shouldn't have to. And that building the village, as messy and imperfect as it feels, is one of the highest leverage things you can do before your baby arrives.

    • Transcript
  • #4
    April 22 · 35 min

    The Announcement: The Conversation That Changes Everything

    Congratulations, you're pregnant! And now you have to tell work. Telling work you're pregnant is one of the most anxiety-filled moments of a woman's career. Not because anything has gone wrong, but because something has irrevocably changed. This episode is about that conversation and practical things that can help. The rehearsing, the bracing, the relief that doesn't quite arrive the way you expected it to. Bianca shares what it actually felt like to say the words out loud as a senior leader. We get into what the data says, what helps, and what to do if the reaction is one of the bad ones. This episode is for every woman who has ever stood outside a door, taken a breath, and wondered how the next ten minutes were going to change everything.

    • Transcript
  • #3
    April 14 · 39 min

    The First Trimester: Hiding, Exhaustion, and Questioning the "12-Week Rule"

    Content note: this episode includes a brief discussion of baby loss and miscarriage. You're pregnant. You know. And for the next twelve weeks, nobody else can. Episode three lives inside the most neurobiologically intense period of the entire matrescence journey. And the one most women are expected to navigate entirely alone. The nausea, the exhaustion, the brain fog, the hypervigilance. All of it happening beneath the surface while you sit in meetings, hit your targets, and perform a version of yourself that no longer quite exists. Rose makes the case that the twelve-week rule, the social convention that asks women to conceal early pregnancy until the risk of loss has passed, is one of the cruellest contradictions in modern working life. Bianca shares what it actually felt like to be in it. The survival instinct that kicked in not despite the pregnancy but because of it. The doubling down. The determination to protect something that nobody around her even knew existed yet. If you've ever sat in a room full of people, carrying the biggest thing that has ever happened to you, and said absolutely nothing, this episode is for you.

    • Transcript
Showing 21–23 of 23 episodes