Startup Parent

#067 — Finding Your Artistic Voice As A Mother  ‘My artistic voice has emerged stronger and more clear than ever—more centered in the voice of a mother and a female, really coming from within with an agenda. This I only have because of my kids. It feels like it was a necessary process, but it was fucking hard.’ Peng Scheerer’s experience of giving birth was a difficult one. The birth itself was a...

#066 — Morning Routines There is a lot of noise on the interwebs around creating the perfect morning routine. But here’s the thing about being a parent: There is no such thing as ‘routine.’ The demands placed on you by the tiny human in your life are ever-changing, and every morning looks vastly different from the one before. I was interviewed for a book called My Morning Routine, and in it, I sha...

#065 — Planning Ahead for Maternity Leave as an Entrepreneur Planning for maternity leave is a challenge for any working mother. But if you’re an entrepreneur, it’s all on you to figure out just how to keep the business moving forward—as your focus shifts to the delivery and care of a tiny human. How do you decide what to automate? What to delegate? What to outsource? And how do you build those sy...

#064 — Mental Health Toolkit Life is an emotional roller coaster, and resilience is about handling the ups and downs without being swept away. Pregnancy and parenting present a brand-new set of challenges, and it’s incredibly valuable to have a mental health toolkit that equips you to navigate the sometimes-bumpy ride. Today, I’m sharing the five resources in my own mental health toolkit, discussi...

#063 — Changing Your Life In Four Minutes How do you do self-care as the mother of five? How do you do self-care as a mother of five who happens to be running her own business? How do you do self-care as a mother of five, running her own business AND a living on a farm that serves as an animal sanctuary? You might be surprised to learn that it is not only possible—but can be done in just four minu...

#062 — Building a Postpartum Support Team & Roadmap to Recovery The sad and scary truth is that postpartum care in the US is abysmal. In other countries, new mothers are provided with four to eight physical therapy sessions and their healing is monitored. In the States, however, we get a single 20-minute appointment at the six-week mark. Period. So, what can you do during pregnancy to prepare for...

#061 — Postpartum Recovery: Healing the Body, Being an Athlete Before + After Pregnancy If you’re a new mom and an athlete, it can be tempting to hit the trail or the gym asap after the six-week checkup. You want to regain a sense of normalcy and working out is likely a big part of your identity. But it’s incredibly important to be cognizant of what your body just went through and give yourself th...

#060 — Why to Join a Mastermind (And How to Start Your Own) It’s tough enough for entrepreneurs to carry the psychological weight of being the key decision-maker in their business, but things are further complicated if you also happen to be a new parent. Now you’re under immense pressure to make good choices when you are functioning at less than 100%. How do you exercise the best possible judgemen...

#059 — Postpartum Recovery: Healing, Being a New Mom, and Nutritional Health We place a lot of emphasis on planning for the perfect birth and making sure that our bodies are healthy during pregnancy. But what do we need to recover after the baby arrives? What are the nutritional demands on us as new moms? How can we best prepare for the postpartum experience? Despite being more prepared than the a...

#058 — Differences Of Opinion Put two people in a room together for any length of time, and you’re going to encounter differences of opinion. Engage in any partnership—business, personal or parent-child—and differing experiences will eventually manifest a misalignment of wants and needs. My husband and I encountered one such misalignment around checking in via text message during the workday: I’m...

#057 — A See-What-Sticks Approach to Product Development & Parenting ‘It’s okay to just try something and see where it goes and see where it sticks, and it doesn’t have to be perfect when you launch it into the world. It’s never going to be perfect. It’s always going to be a work in progress.’ When Michele Hansen and her husband started planning for the birth of their daughter, they quickly realiz...

#056 — Honoring Mother’s Day  Following Mother’s Day, I’d like to take a moment to honor the profound experience that is parenting—the unparalleled demands on your time, the general nonstop-ness of it all. Being a mom is overwhelming in the best way, and it qualifies as one of the biggest and messiest and strangest things I have ever done. So many women—and men—deserve recognition on Mother’s Day,...

#055 — Fitting Your Business Around Your Life People will tell you that the early days of your startup will require 80-hour work weeks, that you won’t see your friends and family. But here’s the thing: You always have a choice. If there’s 80 hours-worth of work to be done, you can slice that up into two weeks. Or rather than doing it all by yourself, two or three people can work together. Laura Ro...

#054 — Connection, Friendship and Kindred Spirits If you’re busy with work, busy with your kids, busy with life—it can be tough to prioritize friendship. And social media complicates things by making it seem like you’re in touch when you’re not actually connecting. I have developed an approach that combines connection with a gratitude practice, a simple proactive approach to reaching out that has...

#053 — Masterminds, Creative Risks and the Fuck It List Positive psychology asks us to focus on what’s right with us. What are your strengths? What are your values? What do you want? But what if you’re not sure what’s right with you? We all have built-in negativity bias, so it’s a whole lot easier to identify what we don’t like about our lives, what we’re not satisfied with, than it is to define w...

#052 — It's Okay If Your Baby Cries The sound of your baby crying? It’s intense. And when it’s your first child, chances are instinct has you scrambling to get to your kiddo immediately and take care of whatever it is that ails them. But here’s the thing: You’re not just responsible for taking care of your new baby. You’re also responsible for taking care of you, and if that means your crying baby...

#051 — Postpartum Depression, Daycare and Whether or Not to Be a Parent What if you’re doing everything right—exercising, eating right, self-care and meditation—and you’re still not okay? After Kathleen Shannon gave birth to her son, Fox, she was doing all the things, using every strategy in the Emotional Resilience toolkit, and on the outside, she appeared to have it all together. But she just di...

#050 — Your Body "I can’t wait to get my body back." We have complex relationships with our bodies. Women harbor certain expectations and assumptions about what our bodies are supposed to look like and what they are capable of. And it can be tough to come to terms with the reality when it doesn’t quite line up with what we had in mind. I am making a conscious effort to pay attention to the languag...

#049 — High-Risk Pregnancy and the Mind-Body Connection You don’t know Murphy’s Law until you’ve heard the story of Parijat Deshpande’s high-risk pregnancy. After being diagnosed with endometriosis, Parijat and her husband sought out a specialist and started fertility treatment. After an intrauterine insemination that ended with an ectopic pregnancy, they tried again with IVF. Ovarian hyperstimula...

#048 — Within Your Control: An Exercise We all know the importance of goal-setting. Clearly defining your objectives is key to achievement. But the way you frame those goals matters. Choosing targets that aren’t within your control (like getting pregnant) leads to frustration, helplessness—hopelessness, even. How can we reframe those goals to reflect the things we can control? And make peace with...

#047 — Starting Your Own Coaching Practice If you aren’t satisfied with the available options, Michelle Florendo suggests that you explore possibilities beyond the obvious. Michelle was working as a management consultant, watching her colleagues make the difficult decision to sacrifice time with their children to continue a career they loved—or give up their careers to be present in their children...

#046 — 3 Essential Postpartum Lists The first days and weeks after bringing home baby are tough. Postpartum You may seem all peaceful and serene to friends and family who stop by, but they don’t have the slightest idea just how overwhelmed you really are on the inside.  People want to help, but they don’t always know what to do. And it’s no fun for you as a new parent to explain your needs over an...

#045 — Life Happens  Despite our best efforts to be prepared, life happens. Case in point, I planned a trip to be there for my sister during her birth, but Baby was working on his own timeline and had yet to arrive at the end of my scheduled week in the Bay area. Society claims to value flexibility and laud the ability to adjust on the fly, yet somehow when it comes to pregnancy and birth, we view...

#044 — How We Break (And Build) Our Habits So you’ve gotten off track and you want to make a change—in your eating habits, your exercise regime, or maybe implementing a daily practice like journaling. Sweeping transformation is rarely effective and beating yourself up for a lack of discipline seldom results in positive change. What CAN you do to shift your habits and get back on the path you want?...

#043 — Real Food for Pregnancy ‘What I like to do is reverse-engineer a prenatal diet from the context of getting most of—if not all of—your nutrients from the food itself.’ The problem with conventional policy and food guidelines? They simply don’t reflect science. In fact, the current recommendations were designed for men and then adjusted mathematically for a smaller frame—and then modified aga...