Startup Parent

#092 — New Year’s Annual Reflection Process The holiday season serves as an ideal time to take a CEO Day—a structured space and time you set aside to dream, to plan, to dig into the work you want to do in the coming year. I have developed an annual review process that allows me to reflect on the goals and ambitions I had a year ago, evaluate what went well and what was challenging, and use that in...

   #091 — From Doctor to CEO: A New Vision for Healthcare Our current healthcare system focuses on the disease, rather than the person. A patient spends a few minutes with a doctor, and then they’re handed a stack of prescriptions that address their symptoms. What if we stopped to ask what was causing the problem in the first place? What if we took the time to look at the whole person and create a...

#090 — Rainbow Babies When we invite life into our lives, we also invite death. Though stillbirth is fairly common (impacting about 1 in 100 pregnancies in the US) it is a painful topic of conversation. But Christine McAlister likes talking about Maeve, the daughter she lost, to keep her memory alive. In fact, Maeve inspired Christine’s business, Life with Passion. So, how did Christine move forwa...

#089 — Mom Life, With Cancer: You’re Not Dead! There are two contrasting narratives around cancer: We hear stories of survivors who beat the disease. And then we hear stories of people who are on their deathbeds. In reality, there is a much greater spectrum of experience. Emily Garnett is 32 years old. She recently celebrated her fifth wedding anniversary and her son’s second birthday. She was dia...

#088 — Building An Online Community That Works  “At its bare minimum, what Chairman Mom is combating is loneliness and isolation. We all know that is the biggest problem in our country right now and the biggest casualty of the trillion-dollar social media industry.”  Sarah Lacy is building an online platform where women can discuss the most important issues they face in their personal and professi...

#087 — Birth as a Portal: An Invitation   We know that pregnancy and childbirth is a time of profound transformation for women. Beyond the physical changes we experience, giving birth affords the opportunity to let go of our past selves and emerge as something new. But could birth be just as powerful for fathers and co-parents? How about our communities at large? What if everyone could tap into th...

#086— Prepping for Maternity Leave We live in a society that pressures us to do more, a cult of busyness if you will. In our holiday letters, we brag about how hectic our lives are, and as women, we have a much harder time experiencing leisure and play than we do work. So, what happens when you need to slow down and take leave from work to have a baby?  In the US, pregnant women are typically expe...

#085 — The Fatigue is REAL At 33 weeks, I am dealing with a serious case of pregnancy insomnia. My Fitbit reports that I slept for 2:45 last night, and I was restless for 4:20. I feel like I’ve been hit by a truck. Pregnant women and new moms deal with fatigue on a grand scale. Our bodies are doing a lot of work, and we are sleep deprived like never before. So, how do you function? Is there anythi...

#084 — Making Friends: A Few Helpful Strategies Sure, you know a LOT of people. But how many of those people do you consider true friends? Who would you really feel comfortable calling on in a crisis? Maintaining meaningful friendships as adults can be a challenge, especially if you move to a new city or change jobs, but you can take a proactive approach, seeking out new people you connect with on...

#083 — Cultivating Adult Female Friendships If you are working parent, chances are that career and family dominate your time and attention. Yet we all know the immense value of cultivating friendships with other women who share similar circumstances, interests, or values. So, how do you carve out the time to nurture established friendships? Even more challenging, how do you build new female friend...

#082 — The Friendship Series: Doing Less in Business If your business could only do one thing, what would it be? In planning for my second pregnancy, I thought about how to design a business in Startup Pregnant that would serve my life as an expectant mother. Given the constraints on my time and energy, what was mission critical and what could be eliminated from my to-do list? I got strategic abou...

#081 — Honest Conversations About the Hard Things With Co-Host Cary Fortin Deep female friendships are one of the greatest blessings of my life. But I didn’t really have meaningful friendships with other women until my late 20’s. Then I discovered what a gift it is to have judgement-free, deeply thoughtful conversation partners who engage in honest conversation about the hard things—sex, the patri...

#080 — Caffeine, Alcohol, and Television: What’s True? — Episode 080 Conventional wisdom—and most official recommendations—tell us that we must abstain entirely from coffee and alcohol for the duration of pregnancy to avoid very serious consequences. And once our kids are born, experts urge us to keep our children away from screens to prevent behavior problems and poor academic performance in the...

#079 — Fostering a Community of Breastfeeding & Pumping Mamas ‘Breastfeeding can be really challenging and really isolating. The onus for us is that what makes it easier is … being connected to other women and other mothers who’ve been there.’  Like many entrepreneurs, Amy VanHaren uncovered a need in her personal life, and a creative idea was born. While she loved breastfeeding, Amy had no choice...

#078 — Loving Yourself, Mental Health, Starting a Business We all have things we hide about ourselves. Things we are afraid of sharing. Things we need to ‘come out’ about. Learning to love yourself is a process, and for Mason Aid, it began when they came out as gender queer. Mason grew up in rural northeast Missouri, where identifying as LGBTQ is not widely accepted. At 17, they were in the hospit...

#077 — A Kind of Freedom It takes a great deal of courage to leave a lucrative career that feeds your self-esteem for an uncertain future—especially if it takes years for the new venture to pay off financially. How do you learn to live in faith over fear, giving yourself the freedom to pursue something you love? Margaret Wilkerson Sexton was working at a prestigious law firm when she took that lea...

Episode #076 — Hacking Parenting, Mindfully & Intentionally  Motherhood is wildly unpredictable, and it is easy to feel incompetent if your baby doesn’t behave the way the parenting books promised. How do you learn to live in the moment and accept that your experience is okay, even if it’s different from what the experts advertised? Can you parent in a mindful way, giving your intuition the same w...

#075 — Transitioning Back to Work After a Career Break If you’ve taken a career break to raise children, reentering the workforce can be a challenge. Though motherhood is arguably the most difficult—and important—job on the planet, it isn’t a paid position. And the gap it leaves on your resume often seems to erase the experience you had before becoming a mom.  How do you rebuild your confidence as...

#074 — Operating Best Practices + Systems Manual for House and Home Renée Warren was depleted and depressed. She had a terrible relationship with her husband and felt little connection to her two boys. What WAS working in her life? The PR agency she had founded was thriving, surpassing its goals and growing to a team of 10. Renée wondered what might happen if she applied a business philosophy to h...

#073 — Building the Courage Habit There’s nothing wrong with fear in and of itself. The problem is when we respond with fear-based habits like perfectionism or self-sabotage and get stuck in our fear. Kate Swoboda has built her coaching practice on the principle that these fear-based habits can be replaced with courage-based behaviors, that we can be afraid and do it anyway. And responding differe...

#072 — Journaling For Clarity If you’re chewing on a tough problem, journaling is one way to get clear on how to proceed. There is something astonishing about how quickly the insights come when I take the time to put words to paper. But it can be difficult to know where to start or how to structure my writing in an effective way. My good friend Mathias Jakobson of Think Clearly has developed a sys...

#071 — Meditation and Mindfulness Anna Gannon was 7½ months pregnant when she lost a job she loved as a full-time yoga teacher. She had struggled with depression off and on for most of her life, and Anna was worried that her precarious emotional state would have an impact on her baby. That’s when Anna got an email from a friend who was supporting a project called Expectful. He encouraged her to tr...

#070 — What Surprised Me Most About Parenting No one ever told me that ________ would happen in pregnancy. No one ever told me ________ about parenting. Without a doubt, you have multiple responses to these fill-in-the-blank prompts. And when I asked the Startup Pregnant community to share what surprised them most about pregnancy and parenting, the answers were funny, thought-provoking, poignant—a...

#069 — The Power of Sisterhood Nisha Moodley came to understand the power of sisterhood by accident. She started a group coaching program simply because she was out of one-on-one slots and something magical happened: The women involved experienced profound, lasting transformation. Since then, Nisha’s work has come to focus on the power of women in groups to create a nourishing container that suppo...

#068 — How I Launched the Mastermind + Lessons Learned The first pillar of Startup Pregnant involves the podcast interviews I do every week with exceptional women, and if nothing else grew from this venture it would still be MORE than worth it to learn from the conversations we are having around business and parenting. But I recently launched the second pillar (and first paid offering associated w...