Startup Parent

#143 — Overwhelmed, Scared, Exhausted—A Note For You When we do things we’ve never done before, it can be crazy hard. Parenting made me feel overwhelmed, scared, and exhausted—all at the same time. Today I want to offer a short note of perspective, alongside some encouragement. I know you’re probably in the thick of it, and what you’re doing isn’t easy. Keep going. For me, whenever I get overwhelm...

#142 — Do you ever struggle with setting boundaries or saying no? Let’s talk about what to do when people ask you for things that you don’t want to do or you don’t have time to do. How do you handle the influx of requests in your inbox, or the deluge of “pick your brain” requests from family and friends?  Boundaries are something I could talk about for so long, but the first thing I want to do is...

#140 — How to design and facilitate group programs. In today’s episode, we talk all about the ways I think about building mastermind programs, facilitating community, and bringing people together. Yes, I’ve overthought all of it—to the tiniest degree. In this episode, we have a really fun question I am excited to geek out about. We are going to dig into the Wise Women's Council and the year-long m...

#139 — Lately I’ve been fielding a lot of questions from people about what to expect in the shift from non-parenting to the parenting world. Personally, I find it really challenging when people smile at you and say things like, “Wait and see,” or “You’ll get it when you become a parent.” No, thanks—please tell me now! So for this episode, I decided to dive straight into the daily tangle that is th...

#138 — Why does my kid keep getting sick? In the first few years of having kids, it can seem like the snotty, runny noses are never ending. In a way, that’s true. Young children are building their immune systems, and in doing so, they are dealing with all the colds and viruses going around. They get sick a lot. Whether it’s in the younger years because they are at daycare, or the older years when...

#137 — Broadway and Pregnant A friend of mine reached out a few weeks after the birth of her second baby girl and said, “I need to tell you my birth story.” “Absolutely,” I said, “What do you want to talk about?” “How I changed my birth plan and care providers for my second pregnancy—I was much more intentional about who I wanted around me, and the people I wanted to be in the room.” Today we get...

#136 — Not everyone has exactly nine months to plan ahead and prepare for motherhood — sometimes it can happen overnight, and other times it can take years. The process of adopting a child can be long, laborious and fraught with uncertainty. You never know when you’ll get the call or how long it will take, or when you might become a parent.  For Priti Krishtel, she got the call late one night that...

#135 — Is minimalism and motherhood possible? Cary Fortin, who many of you have heard before on the podcast, is joining us again today to talk about minimalism, motherhood, and decluttering. Cary is a writer, a storyteller and a designer, and she is the co-founder of New Minimalism, a company focused on de-cluttering and design. She and her business partner, Kyle, help people regain meaningful rel...

#134 — Careers Twists and Turns When Brea Starmer was seven months pregnant while working at a startup, she was laid off. In her third trimester, she started a consulting practice and interviewed for jobs—quickly starting her own consulting practice and then launching her company. Between having her first kid and then getting pregnant with her second, she decided to focus on building her own consu...

#133 — What does it mean to be an entrepreneur? One of the things I keep learning from gathering groups of working women together is how broad and diverse the realm of entrepreneurship is. Common culture would have you believe that entrepreneurship looks like a single white dude building a company out of his garage with a bunch of coding co-founders. Eating ramen. Dropping out of Harvard. Sure, Si...

#132 — How To Streamline Your Business: New Minibook Last time we talked, I was in the middle of a midstream flop. Sometimes forward progress doesn’t look like progress at all—because other things take a spot on the front burner. It’s hard to acknowledge all that’s happened here at Startup Pregnant without still feeling like I have twelve burners cooking and I’m constantly burning something. Maybe...

#131 — What happens to the dud weeks? Weeks can go by where it feels like no progress is being made. I’m back for a short and sweet update, and I’m a little nervous to share that I haven’t really made any forward progress over the last few weeks. In fact, I’ve been avoiding recording an update episode because I want to be able to come back and show off a shiny new project—like, voila! Here ya go!...

#130 — Goal Setting, Making Progress, and Minibook Updates It's almost the midpoint of the quarter and I want to check in with progress notes. My goal this Fall has been to step back from the weekly recording to gain enough space and clarity to do some of the writing projects that have been on the back burner. It turns out “doing all the things” isn’t a useful plan or viable option when you’re a p...

#129 — If you feel like you don't have enough time for it all, you might be right. I’m tired of all the advice to hustle harder and put better productivity systems in place. I’m great at systems and great at productivity and I’m really good at working harder.  Sometimes you don’t have more bandwidth to give, or more strategy to apply. For me, realizing that I have to shift things around and really...

#128 — What's it going to take? As business owners—and parents!—we’ve got limited time. SUCH LIMITED TIME. It’s crazy how fast the days fly by and how maddening it is to slot in all of the family logistics across work time and still get anything done. As we approach the end of the year, and think about the last quarter of 2019, it’s a great time to focus on one final project or sprint. What would...

#127 — Should I stop podcasting? As we geared up for Fall, I felt the urge to stop this podcast for a while. To be honest, it scared me a little—I couldn’t stop, could I? So I asked the group of smart women in our online Startup Pregnant community group and got a ton of wonderful feedback. You all helped me think about this process and what felt like a hard decision from so many new angles.  In th...

Every week, I get questions from listeners about business, life, parenting—and more. And I want to answer them! From building a company vision to dealing with burnout to negotiations in your partnership, I’m willing to go there and share everything I know. So, we are experimenting and trying something new here at Startup Pregnant. We're starting a private monthly podcast, a fireside chat session b...

#125 — What's next? We’re back from summer hiatus, and it was wonderful. Better than expected, honestly. I didn’t take enough time to rest after either of my babies, and this break, while three years delayed, was everything. In today’s episode, I share how we set up a family sabbatical, why breaks are essential for entrepreneurs, and what’s next on the horizon for Startup Pregnant. If you’re strug...

#124 — Summer Break? Where Do the Kids Go While Their Parents Work and Other Thoughts On Summertime Summer break. As a child there was no sweeter words in the English language. With its promises of long, warm, lazy, school-free days, summer break was essentially synonymous with freedom. But now that the vast majority of households include two working parents, summer means something very different:...

#123 — How to Focus When You Feel Totally Overwhelmed or Unclear You wake up in the morning, look at your to-do list, and find that you have 27 things on it. Then throughout the day, somehow projects just keep unfolding and expanding in front of you. No matter how much coffee you drink or deep breathing you do, you just feel totally overwhelmed by it all and don't know where to start.  Sound famil...

#122 — How to Win More Business, Make More Friends, and Get More Money, aka: How to Listen Better What happens when we listen fully? Without interjecting with our own opinions or experiences? Without asserting a best possible outcome or stating facts to support a specific viewpoint? How often do you leave a conversation—with a friend or colleague—and think to yourself, “They just don’t get what I...

#121 — Redefining Startup Success: Shutting Down A Lucrative Startup  What happens when your vision of success changes while you're building a wildly "successful" company? Allie Siarto built an incredibly successful company by all of today’s metrics and standards. She and her partner were ready to sell the company—but then she hesitated.  What changed?  In today's episode, we talk with Allie about...

#120 — Beyond Mom: Exploring and Nourishing Our Non-Mother Selves  What does it look like to take your work from the corporate world to the freelance world and begin the path of entrepreneurship? How do you take the piecemeal career acquired from many different projects, companies and job-hopping and then go into starting a business? One of the things that I am fascinated with here at Startup Preg...

#119 — The Myth of Equal Partnership in Parenting Why is it that the burden of childcare, children and the home is so unequally dumped on women's shoulders? Where did this come from? Why is it happening and what can we do about it? Women have fought for equality in the workplace for a long time. It’s something that is publicly talked about and advocated for and a current movement in today’s societ...

#118 — If You Work Hard Enough You Can Do Anything, Except Get Pregnant: A Journey Through Infertility What happens when the medical establishment ignores your concerns, complaints and symptoms? When your doctor tells you everything is normal even though everything in your body is telling you it's not? How do you recover from a traumatic birth and near-death experience that could—and should—have b...