Is it really best to swoop in every time our kiddos face a challenging situation? Or are we missing an opportunity to teach them patience? How taking a beat rather than coming to the rescue can be the right response.
How often do you consider how your actual feeling? How an honest look into physical wellness can change the way we interact, take pleasure in life and experience true joy.
You’re the trailblazer we need. The way work looks is broken. It’s not going to change by someone else. It’s going to change through us, building the future we imagine, fighting against what’s not working, and taking as stand. If you can parent, you can entrepreneur. Motherhood transforms you. These, and many more, are the words of wisdom from our first ten interviews for Startup Parent.
Stephanie Jhala enjoyed a healthy, medically uneventful pregnancy. But at the very end of the planned home birth, something went wrong. Her baby was not breathing. After a transition to the hospital, Steph’s newborn daughter was on put on life support in the NICU, consigned to a cooling sack and connected to countless tubes. Doctors predicted her death. But Stephanie knew instinctively that her daughter would be fine. And she was right. Her daughter improved by leaps and bounds, and is now a thriving, feisty 10-month-old. How did Steph access that intuition? How does she continue to trust and cultivate her mind-body connection on a daily basis? And how is she using the tools she learned in her business as a leadership consultant to become a leader in motherhood? In this episode we talk about intuition, deep listening, observation, and checking first with yourself as a source of wisdom.
Having children invites chaos into your life. So if your work focuses on minimalism and simple living, how do you align those themes with the bedlam of being a mother, a parent? As the mother of two children under the age of four, with a six-month old in the house, simple moments are even more precious to Erin. Today she shares how her background in history and public humanities led her to explore the idea of ‘living small.’ I ask Erin about her gentle approach to self-improvement and how she defines courage within the context of being a parent. Listen in to learn how getting comfortable with uncertainty a big part of parenting, why she cautions against speaking about pregnancy in universal terms, and how you can embrace the ‘idyllic and beautiful’ moments in your life.
Kate Northrup always knew she wanted to be a mother, and she pursued entrepreneurship partly because of the freedom it could afford her to be there for her kids. What Kate wasn’t counting on was the way pregnancy would change her drive and refocus her energy when it came to the business. She admits that it took her a long time to “get back in the game,” and that her husband and business partner, Mike, picked up the slack. But Kate credits having her daughter, Penelope, with initiating a personal evolution that allowed her to clarify her desires and ultimately renew her interest in the business and the way she thought about showing up for work in the first place. Perhaps there was something revolutionary here: because, as she shares in this episode, she found that she was able to achieve more even while doing less. And that some of her most productive weeks happened when she was working only 20 hours a week on the business. Today Kate shares her “shocking and awesome” birth experience, explaining how parenthood impacted her business as well as her marriage.