Startup Parent

#117 — Ambitious Entrepreneurship + Parenthood: When Two Moms Co-Found a Startup  What happens when you and your co-founder are both mothers? Can you modify your work schedule without altering your ambition? What type of project is worthy of your precious time and attention?  Sometimes it takes a while to find the career path you really love. For Sonia Chang, it took a while to settle into and rea...

#116 — Crossing the Threshold to Motherhood: Ceremony, Ritual, and Healing Rites of Passage How do you prepare for birthing another child when your first birth experience was traumatic? Can new mothers be realistically expected to process and integrate their birth and transformation experience when they work up until 40 weeks and are back just a few weeks later? How can we create space, ceremony,...

#115 — The Myths of Miscarriage, The Lean In Fallacy, and Mothers’ Rage What happens when you get pregnant as you are trying to launch a podcast about bias in the workplace against mothers? Why is the dominant cultural story about miscarriage and fertility trauma that if you end up with a kid, it's all okay? And who should you be looking for in a company when you're considering a new job? Today we...

#114 — From Unexplained Infertility to Planning a Small Business Maternity Leave How can or should entrepreneurship change in order to meet our changing life needs? What does it look like to be a business owner as a person without children versus one with kids? And what does it feel like to go through unexplained secondary infertility? Today we get to hear from Reina Pomeroy, coach, business owner...

#113 — How to Raise Successful Children: Trust and Respect in Parenting, School, and Business Why is so much parenting advice seemingly in direct conflict with others? How do we determine who is correct? How do we make these emotional decisions for ourselves? Esther Wojcicki is considered the most influential educator in contemporary times and her pedagogical and epistemological philosophy is bein...

#112 — Universal Paid Family Leave By 2020: Meet One of the Women Pushing for Our Rights Why is the United States the only developed nation without any guaranteed family leave? How did we fall so far behind Europe, Canada and South America? And who is suffering the brunt of the impact from this lack of policy? “One in four people {in the US} who give birth go back to work within two weeks. That’s...

#111 — Data Driven Parenting: An Economist on Breastfeeding, Sleep Training, and Vaccinations Why is so much parenting advice seemingly in direct conflict with others? How do we determine who is correct? How do we make these emotional decisions for ourselves? Emily Oster, author of the wildly popular “Expecting Better” is back to apply her economist’s data-driven lens to the big questions of early...

#110 — Redefining Motherhood: Matrescence and Debunking the Myth of the Perfect Mother What do we call women who experience emotions ranging from completee joy to anxiety to ambivalence in new motherhood? In the words of Dr. Alexandra Sacks: totally normal. In her work studying “matrescence”, or the identity transition to motherhood, Dr. Sacks shines light on the wide range of these normal emotion...

#109 — Co-founders Elena Rue and Catherine Orr on being pregnant at the same time The two co-founders were both already parents. They’d done the pregnancy thing before. Then they found out they both were pregnant again, and at the same time. Elena Rue and Catherine Orr are co-founders of StoryMine Media, a company that creates documentary videos for mission-driven organizations. They’d been in bus...

#108 — Optimizing your fertility as the gateway to healing your body As young women, we’re taught about our menstrual cycle in relationship to two things: our periods and pregnancy. In an attempt to avoid pregnancy, fix irregular cycles, or alter heavy periods, we’re often prescribed The Pill in our teens and twenties. We are flummoxed when we come off the pill after years or decades of use to fin...

#107 — April Preview: Amy Schumer, Women and Doctors, and Being the Expert of Your Body This week Sarah and guest Cary Fortin break down some of the most powerful takeaways from recent podcast guests and what we’re looking forward to in April. We cover what makes us laugh, cry, and get fired up in a brand-new segment called “In The News.” IN THIS EPISODE WE TALK ABOUT: Episode # 106 with Iman Gatt...

#106 — Healing from Trauma and Grief: One Woman’s Journey and Story At six years old, Iman Gatti witnessed her father brutally murder her mother. Her father was sentenced to 25 years in prison and Iman, now parentless, spent the next twelve years in foster care. Fast forward to today: Iman is a published memoirist, grief recovery specialist, certified coach, a wife, and a mother to a beautiful bab...

#105—Disruption: Managing Your Career Whenever I feel stuck or I’m looking for a mentor, career-wise, one of my favorite things to do is to identify people whose careers I really admire, and watch them from afar. I study how they work, what they’ve done and what changes for them over time. I learned about Whitney Johnson after I read her first book, Dare, Dream, Do. It’s about building dreams for...

#104 — The First Weeks of Parenting: What Nobody Tells You Why is it that so many parenting books begin with some version of this little, deceptive, awful phrase? They all say this one dang thing: After the first few weeks... But what about THE FIRST FEW WEEKS? The first weeks are some of the longest and most challenging of a new mother’s life, from healing physically and emotionally processing th...

#103 — How To Hire A Nanny Why is childcare so overwhelming? Childcare can be so hard! When I started looking for a nanny after my second son was born, I didn’t know how to begin thinking about the search. I reached out to a friend—who is also an amazing business mama—and asked for help with the process of hiring a nanny. Enter Anna Frandsen! Anna is a business coach and a mentor, and she’s the fo...

#102 — It’s not you, it’s February. My husband and I have a joke every year that it’s not you—it’s February. February can be rough, especially for people in the Northern Hemisphere when winter, doldrums, lack of sunlight, and all-around slushiness sets in. In our household, we make an agreement to let ourselves snack a little more, pour the wine liberally if needed, and basically catch up on any s...

#101 — Wait, Motherhood Makes You Better at Work? How will motherhood change me? Will I be different? Will I end up on the “mommy track” and never want to work again? These are questions that people ask themselves when they start thinking about getting pregnant and parenthood. Expectant parents and people considering having kids know that parenthood will change them, but they don’t how. Today we a...

#100 — What I've Learned From Recording 100 Episodes of the Podcast It surprised me that we’re here at the hundredth episode. I couldn’t have told you back in the early summer of 2017, when I began to brainstorm the idea for a podcast, that this show would still be here today, week after week. I knew that I wanted to start a conversation around women, motherhood, parenting, and entrepreneurship, a...

#099 — From Music and Brain Scientist to Brand New Career with Christine Koh Christine Koh has a fascinating backstory: previously, she was a music and brain scientist who was on track to become a professor after a long career in science. Then, she left that career to become a self-described “internet unicorn.” This was no small leap: she had been awarded prestigious fellowships and one of the hig...

#098 — Entrepreneurship, motherhood, and figuring it all out What does it take to be a parent and an entrepreneur in today’s work world? It takes a lot—and it takes a village. Today I talk about the Wise Women’s Council, our nine-month mastermind program for women who are navigating business and parenting. Applications are now open, and they’ll be open until February 25th. But don’t wait until the...

#097 — Baby Update: Welcome Back, Sarah It’s been about four months since I gave birth to my baby boy, and now we’ve got two littles in our household. A toddler and a baby and a business is a handful, for sure. I’m slowly getting back into the studio and back into recording. I’ll be honest—I was a little scared to get back behind the microphone because I’m not sure my words are coming together. Al...

#096 — The Science of Personality and Why It Matters for Your Business  Personality science is a fascinating discipline. That’s why most of us know our DiSC profile, our Myers-Briggs type, and even our Hogwarts House. We want to understand how we are wired and how that impacts the way we react to the world. But what if we took it a step further and applied an understanding of personality science t...

#095 — Creating ‘Mantras in Motion’ as a Dancer, Teacher, and Entrepreneur Mantras can be powerful in helping us reprogram our thinking. Yet, many of us have a hard time making them stick. So, how do we rewire our brains to make affirmations part of our conscious programming? Erin Stutland’s background in dance combined with her interest in personal development and grew into a practice of ‘mantras...

#094 — Trauma, Sex, and Somatic Experiencing: How to Better Understand Birth and the Postpartum Periods It seems obvious that sustaining a wound the size of a dinner plate would merit extensive physical therapy and a long period of rest and healing. But because new mom wounds are unseen, we push ourselves to ‘get back to it’ as soon as possible. And foundational postpartum care (like having someon...

#093 — Not Your Typical Schedule: Lean into Business Freedom Part of the appeal of entrepreneurship is the freedom to set our own schedules. Yet many of us fall into the trap of keeping traditional hours, feeling obligated to fill our days with eight-plus hours of nonstop work.  What if we leaned in to the freedom and flexibility that entrepreneurship affords? What if we took advantage of opportun...