Reality star spills on secret to juggling motherhood & work

Laura Byrne was once best known for winning her now husband Matty J’s heart on The Bachelor in 2017.

Now, the mother of Marlie-Mae, 4, and Lola, 2, has far outlived her 15 minutes of fame as she fronts one of Australia’s most popular podcasts, has authored a book, runs successful jewellery business ToniMay and acts as one-third of KIIS FM’s radio show The Pick Up.

Despite seemingly balancing so many roles at once, Byrne is quick to reveal that it’s all an illusion.

“I don’t balance it,” she candidly reveals.

“I think looking from the outside it’s easy to be like ‘oh God, wow, how does she get all of it done?’ It’s a massive juggling act.

“I have such amazing people in my corner.

“Matt does so, so much. My sister, she’s my business partner in ToniMay, Britt with Life Uncut.

“I’m so lucky that I’ve built incredible teams around me that allow me to do the stuff that I do.”

Her most special team, though, is undoubtedly her family unit, who have a fan base that love them for their authentic — and often comedic — social media content.

But it wasn’t always this way.

“When I first got followers and had a social media profile, I thought I needed to be this perfect person,” Byrne says.

“I would only post photos where I thought I looked really good, I really overthought the things I wrote in my captions.

“I was trying to emulate the version of who I thought a Bachelorette should be.”

Byrne found it exhausting, saying it still wasn’t good enough for a lot of people who would send her hurtful comments.

“I had this realisation just before I had Marlie: if I’m not enough when I’m trying so hard to be perfect . . . then maybe I should give up and be me,” she laughs.

And these days, the mother of two follows people who live by the same mantra.

“They’re not the most beautiful, they’re not the most well put together, they don’t live the most picture-perfect lives,” she says.

“And they don’t make me feel bad about myself.

“I love seeing mums who have messy houses — I’m like ‘Girlfriend, I feel you’.

“As I sit amongst my s…,” she laughs.

Byrne also keeps it real on her Life Uncut podcast with bestie Brittany Hockley.

The pair have dominated the entertainment industry, clocking up three Listeners’ Choice Awards.

They are also planning more live shows later this year.

But despite the incredible public accolades and a Life Uncut community that Byrne calls “phenomenal”, there’s one achievement that really sticks.

“Some of the most incredible interviews are not the famous people,” she says.

“Shonel Bryant was one of our podcast group members, she was a ‘lifer’ — she was such a beautiful woman.

“She was diagnosed with triple negative breast cancer and was terminally ill, and she chose to spend some of her time speaking to us.”

Bryant sadly passed away only a few weeks after the interview, and Byrne says conversations like the one with Bryant are the ones that stay with her.

“What an incredible privilege it was to speak to someone who could’ve done anything with their time — spend it with their own children. It makes me want to cry thinking about it,” she says.

Outside of podcasting, Byrne is on the current season of Dancing With The Stars, hoping to get further than her husband did in season 2021.

“I loved the whole thing . . . it was an incredibly supportive environment,” she says.

And despite being “profoundly nervous”, her experience proved a pleasant surprise compared to her first stint on reality TV.

“Coming from a reality show where you are literally in competition with each other . . . my feelings were that they must be quite undercutting and competitive,” Byrne says.

“But that’s definitely not the case with Dancing With The Stars.”

Excited to step outside her comfort zone, Byrne said her motivation was doing something for herself.

“I was just excited to do something that wasn’t necessarily to do with work and it wasn’t to do with being a mum. It was just truly something for me,” she says.

“I’m not a dancer. I don’t have any dance experience at all except for grinding on the DF (dance floor) down at the Glasshouse Tavern in Wollongong when I was in my 20s.”

And it seems the judges could tell, with Craig Revel Horwood jokingly referring to Byrne as a “praying mantis on acid” after her first dance with partner Danil Saveliev.

Despite an accidental elbow to Saveliev’s face during rehearsals, Byrne says the pair “got along really well”.

Catch the dynamic duo in their second dance on Dancing With The Stars this Sunday at 7pm on Channel7 and 7Plus.