Team Spotlight: Michelle Friedman

Hi, I’m Michelle Friedman and I treasure my relationship with Carol Fishman Cohen and the entire amazing iRelaunch team. In addition to the work I do as an executive coach and organizational consultant in my own firm, Advancing Women’s Careers, LLC. I serve as a Special Advisor to iRelaunch. In that role I wear a range of hats, such as collaborating on corporate consulting projects with Carol, coaching members of the leadership team and facilitating iRelaunch strategy offsites. Working with iRelaunch fits perfectly into my mission of increasing gender parity in the workplace because reintegrating women (and men!) after career breaks is such an important piece of the puzzle. I am honored to be a small part of the incredible impact iRelaunch is making.

I live in Westchester County, New York with my husband Darren, three sons (ages 20, 18, and 16) and our dog Lola. (Yes, I told the kids that if we were getting a dog, it was going to be a girl!). In terms of my professional background, I spent the first 12 years of my career in corporate banking and software marketing, before taking a 6-year career break when our youngest son was born. I’ll be honest; hitting the pause button on my career was a really hard (but satisfying) choice. While I wasn’t enjoying my job at the time, I was super-reluctant to give up that business card! Thankfully, my career break gave me an incredibly valuable chance to reconsider what I wanted to be when I grew up. I doubt I would be doing what I do today had it not been for that time to think and intentionally design the next chapter of my career.

In my spare time I am learning to enjoy cooking again and see it as a new hobby vs a chore. Recently I have been using an app called MealBoard that helps manage my recipes, shopping list and meal planning calendar all in one! An amazing app makes everything better! And another love of mine is our Peloton spin bike which allows me to get my endorphin hit anytime.

Now that my kids are slowly leaving the nest, I value our time together even more. When it comes to family vacations, my boys were never fans of laying on a beach, so we have always enjoyed traveling to adventurous places together such as Cuba, Peru and Nicaragua. In just the past few weeks we loved spending time in Copenhagen visiting our oldest son who is studying there for the semester.

Thanks for this chance to tell you more about myself!