Christine Burns on Redefining Her Identity After a Layoff and Building Community for Childfree Women

Christine Burns spent 23 years climbing the corporate ladder before a single phone call took it out from under her. She was a CPA turned management consultant turned HR leader, the kind of resume that reads like a straight line up. Then in October 2023 she was laid off, and the straight line disappeared. What she found underneath it surprised her: not a career problem, but an identity one.

“So a layoff for somebody like me is, like, ripping your entire identity from you,” she says. For years, she had known exactly how to introduce herself. “I’m a worker. I’m a C-suite executive. I am an employee of ____. I make X amount of money. I manage X amount of people.” When the laptop shut off and the work phone went dark, all of it went with it. This is the story of what she built in the space that opened up.

Who are you when the job title is gone?

Christine grew up in the Bronx, the first in her family to finish a college degree, raised on a short list of acceptable outcomes: doctor, lawyer, accountant. She chose accounting because she was good at math, landed at a Big Four firm, got her CPA, and did everything she was supposed to do. And she was unknowingly burning out on the inside.

The body noticed before the mind would admit it. Her first panic attack hit on the 1 train coming back from a client, convinced at age 28 that she was having a heart attack. The paramedics found nothing wrong except stress she refused to name. “I am not stressed. I am not. I am not stressed. Does this look stressed?” Looking back, she is clear-eyed about what that was. Had the physical symptoms not shown up, she says, she would probably still be there.

For a woman without children, the stakes of that identity question run differently. “Not a wife, not a mom. So what am I? Well, I’m a worker.” Strip the job away and there is no default backup identity waiting underneath. That is exactly the hole the layoff exposed.

What money scarcity does to a new business

The package was generous. Her best friend, an Air Canada pilot, told her to come sit on a beach in Barbados. Christine’s nervous system said the opposite. The day she was laid off, she went to the grocery store and bought ham in a packet, water, and bread, and told herself that was all she could afford for the week. It wasn’t true. She had money. But the scarcity she grew up with took the wheel. “I white-knuckled every dollar.”

She names the trap plainly, because she lived inside it for weeks: “You wanna know the worst thing you can do to yourself? That will prevent you from making money.” Fear of running out is the thing most likely to keep you from earning. When her first contract finally came, she took it for a fraction of what it was worth, which is the same mistake she watches countless new entrepreneurs make. Chasing anyone willing to pay something is not the same as building something.

She also gave herself an almost cruelly short runway. Going into her 40th birthday, with an African safari already booked, she promised herself three months to land the first contract. As a former client-side buyer, she knew some sales cycles ran 18 months. “I think I actually have three months to do it in.” She feels tenderness now for that version of herself. “I feel bad for that part of Christine,” she says, the one who “didn’t believe that she could do it.”

Why does clarity matter so much for entrepreneurs?

The turning point was not a client. It was a sentence. Christine spent her early entrepreneurial months as a fractional everything, willing to solve any HR problem for anyone who asked, “and I’ll do it for a song.” It divided her bandwidth and confused the market. The fix was clarity.

“Clarity on what you offer in this world is one of those things that if I could just give it to everybody, which is what I do through executive coaching,” she says. “You are jack of all trades, master of none, and the reality is people need to know where to put you.” Once she stopped being everything, people finally knew where to place her. She puts it in two references anyone can hold: “I am the RuPaul for women without children, and I am building the Soho House for women without children.” The moment she said that clearly, the right people leaned in.

Where did Lady No Kids come from?

The idea arrived while she was working a 20-hour-a-week contract to quiet the money fear and using the other half of her time to create. Four months in, Lady No Kids showed up. Being an ex-consultant, she could not just launch it; she had to validate it. She researched what already existed and found the edges of the market. DINK clubs were built for couples. Childfree spaces sometimes carried a defensiveness she did not share. Childless spaces carried grief, some of it real to her own story as a survivor who is not sure she simply chose this. None of them were the room she wanted to walk into.

So she designed that room. Elevated, sophisticated education “by Lady No Kids for Lady No Kids,” the money and wealth and estate-planning conversations she never felt comfortable raising a hand for in a room full of “male, stale, pale men.” Inspiration from people you could actually know rather than only Oprah or Gloria Steinem. And, unapologetically, fun. Bourbon, cigars, travel, music, a space to do business and dance in equal measure. When she took it to women and asked if anyone else wanted this, the answer was immediate.

How does community become non-negotiable when you don’t have kids?

Christine moved to Toronto in 2018 to start a life with her partner, but kept her own apartment down the street to hold her independent ground in the process. Once there, she struggled to make friends for the first time in her life. COVID closed the border and the isolation sharpened everything. “I am not a mom, so my friends are my life.” Learning to sail, of all things, cracked it open. It changed how she found community, how she traveled, how she felt about herself.

It also handed her the insight underneath the whole business. When you don’t have children and everyone around you does, the drift is quiet. “It’s like a slow drip of an IV. Don’t even know it’s happening. And you turn around and you’re like, ‘Where did everyone go, and what happened to me?’” Community, she decided, could not be ignored. The question was only who needed it most.

The community she built has a firm first rule: vibe. Not anti-mom, not anti-kid, none of the jokey obnoxious stuff. And she found she never had to say that out loud. “All I had to do was talk about my vision, and the right woman came to the table instantaneously.” What she protects most fiercely is that this is not about division. “I’m just starting where I know. And guess what I know? I’m a lady no kid, and there’s tons of us out there.” Widowhood, divorce, empty nests: she plans to build the same kind of room again and again.

What actually happens to friendships when motherhood arrives?

This is where the conversation gets honest. Christine and one of her lifelong friends were, in her words, terrible to each other when the kids came. She kept saying the thing that felt true and landed like a blade: “This is what you wanted.” Her friend finally told her, “It is so hurtful coming from you like that. I know it’s what I wanted, and it is still what I want, but it’s so fucking hard.” Christine’s realization was immediate and unsparing about herself.

But she did something most people don’t. She asked for the same honesty back. “I don’t feel celebrated ever, and I need you to be there when I wanna say ‘I got the promotion.’” That one conversation reshaped the friendship. Every two years the two of them go away for four or five days, and Christine gets celebrated the way she needs, because they finally said what they needed out loud. “That is the key to any friendship, any relationship,” she says. And then the harder truth: “we don’t do that as a society.”

Can you love your work and still burn out?

Christine rejects the idea that burnout only comes from work you dislike. “I can love what I’m doing and still get fucking burnt out.” The reason is everything the work sits on top of: aging parents, a partner, a household, a sailboat, the acupuncture appointment, the gym. She has learned to see burnout coming earlier and to manage it faster, and the biggest tool she has found is the one she resisted longest. Asking for help.

She is direct about mental health: “Go to therapy. Talk therapy. I don’t care what kind of therapy you need to go to, go to it. And if you need to be on meds, remind yourself that it’s just for now. It is just for now.” And she is just as direct about hyper-independence, the habit of carrying everything alone. When she finally started handing pieces off, she found people were glad to take them. A landing page that stalled her app launch for weeks got fixed by a friend in 20 minutes. The price was a drink. “It’s the best,” as Emily puts it, when a thing gets taken off your plate and done better than you would have done it.

The rewrite

Christine’s definition of success used to live in a title, a salary, and someone else’s permission to feel valuable. The rewrite is quieter and sturdier: clarity about what she offers, community she can’t be laid off from, and the willingness to ask for help before the tank hits empty. She is building Lady No Kids in Toronto and New York now, with a first Lady No Kids adventure to Mexico City in April 2027, and a plan to keep making rooms for women the world keeps forgetting to build for.

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