After struggling with burnout, Alia Eyres, the CEO of Mother's Choice, has learned the value of delegation, self-care and renegotiating duties at home
Welcome to How I Work It, where women we admire share the time management routines, rituals and motivations getting them through the week
Alia Eyres doesn’t do small. Born and raised in Hong Kong as the eldest of seven kids, she is expecting her seventh child—a girl who will join six brothers, ages 10, 8, 5, 3, 2 and 1. As CEO, she’s also responsible for a large team: 150 staff and 800 volunteers at Mother’s Choice, a charity founded by her parents and their friends.
“I don't like to just scratch the surface; I like the things that are going to totally change somebody's life story,” says Eyres. “That's why I like working at Mother's Choice, because we're not just dealing with a girl’s pregnancy or helping her make a decision or bringing her to safety. We're really dealing with the root issues.”
This desire to inspire transformations prompted Eyres to leave a career in M&A law in 2012. Her family moved into one of the Mother’s Choice dormitories for pregnant teens, where she was both CEO and an emergency onsite officer responding to all kinds of scenarios—from an abandoned newborn to a threatening boyfriend or a drug dealer. Covid-19 has only exacerbated these social problems, with more calls for help and kids being referred.
“I felt like this is a time it will be healthy for me to have some boundaries and space,” says Eyres, who chose to move into their own apartment in October 2020. “It’s tempting to say, I’m just going to focus on all this case work and set the self-care aside, but the self-care actually becomes more important so that I have enough bandwidth to care for others.”
Here Eyres shares more lessons learned, including how she prioritises her time and manages work-life balance alongside her husband, also a CEO.
See also: How I Work It: A Green Developer And Single Parent On Organising Her Work Life
MY SECRET WEAPON: SLEEP
I learned the power of a full eight hours of sleep and how much it affects my physical and mental health when I was a rower on my university’s crew team. Unless we have a big event or dinner out, you’ll find me fast asleep by 9:30pm. I take a hot bath beforehand, with candles and uplifting music or a podcast, and let the problems of the day go down the drain. I’m not just fanatical about getting sleep for myself, I am also good at training babies to sleep through the night—which is probably why I have so many kids.