“She Pivots,” a podcast hosted by Hamptons resident Emily Tisch Sussman, in partnership with Marie Claire, aims to empower women to redefine success for themselves. Each episode highlights the intersection of the personal and the professional through the stories of inspiring women.
For the podcast’s season two finale episode, Tisch Sussman interviewed actor and entrepreneur Shay Mitchell, known for her role as Emily Fields in the mystery-thriller-drama series “Pretty Little Liars.”
During her interview Mitchell shared her thoughts on mourning the loss of “single Shay” and becoming a mother, the myth that moms need to breastfeed, launching her luggage company BÉIS, and keeping a healthy work-life balance for her and her team.
“Now you are a mom and things and responsibilities and the way you look at things are going to change and that’s life,” Mitchell said on becoming a mother. “We move through different versions of ourselves. I think I just had to be okay with mourning the loss of the single wild shit… But truly, that person is gone.”
Her advice to mothers is “to be kind to yourself. You can’t breastfeed, fuck it, who cares?”
She also talked about about how she was bullied in high school. “If only I could have told the girl eating in the bathroom that she wouldn’t be able to make her high school reunion because she was doing this,” Mitchell shared after missing her reunion to film “Mothers Day” with fellow stars Jennifer Aniston and Julia Roberts, “it would have made for a less lonely day.”
Mitchell shared her love of travel, which she developed at a young age. This led to the founding of her luggage company BÉIS where she hopes to inspire others to “seek new places.”
“I didn’t go to school. I have to always start with that. You say the word entrepreneur, you say, starting a company, and people are like, ‘How do you do that?’” Mitchell said. “I had an incredible team around me, and I always brought people on that were smarter than me, that’s my biggest word of advice.”
Mitchell left listeners with some final thoughts on how to pivot out of difficult personal experiences.
“Even if you are in tricky situations where you can’t see the light at the end of the tunnel, just know that you may not be able to see it because there’s a curve or a corner, but like it is there. It is there,” she said. “I have to believe that things happen for reasons that we may not understand at that moment.”