Ep 01. How Motherhood Changed My Business
Listen here, on Apple Podcast App or Spotify:
Welcome to the Abundant Mamas Podcast! To kick us off I share how my business changed when I became a Mama and what that meant for my mindset along the way.
In this episode I chat about:
What my business looked like before becoming a mama
What inspired me to change my business when I became a mama
The mindset shifts I had to make to create the business I wanted
How to create more alignment in business
How I use intuition in my business
The importance of simplicity in business, especially for mamas
The beauty of developing a scalable business
What my business looks like now
I’d love to continue this conversation on Instagram - you’ll find me at @amelia.anderson.coach, if you come and follow jump into my DMs to say hi!
Learn more about my Abundant Mamas Mastermind HERE!
Click HERE to take the quiz: What's your Mama self care style?
Episode Transcript
Hello, and welcome! I'm so excited to be here recording this first episode for you! Thank you so much for making time in what I'm sure it's a very full day as mama life is to come and hang out with me. Whether you're cuddling a baby or feeding a baby or wrangling a toddler, or you've just dropped kids off at school, or you're, you know, folding laundry, thank you so much for making the time.
I'm really looking forward to sharing today how motherhood changed my business and some of the things that I think are so important for business and motherhood to coexist peacefully and in a way that is going to only energise you and make you feel like you can be a more present more peaceful mother, and also do work that you really love and feels really fulfilling. And I feel like when I say it like that, it almost sounds like this fantasy like, you know, you can't have it all. I hate the idea of not being able to have it all! And I think it really depends on the definition of that. But to me, having a business has supported me so much to be the mother that I wanted to be. So I want to talk a little bit about that today.
I'll start with when I became a mum, which was in April 2019, to my first son Lachie. Before I had him, I had been coaching for about six years and working with one on one clients predominantly, especially for those three years before I had him I was really deep in the one on one work. So business coaching life coaching clients, I was seeing about half and half, and just loving, being able to form those relationships and how much I was also learning about it exactly how to support people and what they needed to know. And just seeing the transformations that were able to take place from you know, this, this little business idea into a thriving business with a range of different offerings. And as well in my life coaching clients from people who were really stuck or overwhelmed and just didn't really know where they were or what they wanted from life to being able to see really clearly what they wanted and being well on the way to creating that. So there I was loving my one on one work.
About two months before I had Lachie I wrapped up with my last one on one client before I had him and had the last couple of months to just really enjoy my pregnancy and kind of prepare for motherhood and just relax and prepare for birth as well. At that point, I kind of had the idea, okay, when he's like eight or nine months, I think I'll be ready to go back like three days a week into my business.
Of course, I had him and my whole world completely changed, as it does when you have your first baby! So towards the end of 2019 he was coming up to eight months old and I was going there is no way that I want to be apart from him for three whole days a week. Like that's just not going to work for me! We even trialled this beautiful nanny who was just so gorgeous. And I've literally never seen Lachie take to somebody so quickly. And she left and I just like burst into tears and was like I'm she's so amazing. And that makes it even harder for me to acknowledge the fact that I'm just not ready for this yet. We also had some things going on in our extended family that really changed the way that we would be supported as a family and as parents.
As a result of that, I ended up taking a little bit more time off just to be with Lachie and to support myself, I didn't feel like I quite had the energy for my business at that point because I was getting my head around these big and really sad things happening in out extended family. And so when he was about 14/15 months, I felt like yes, my energy is right. I'm feeling good. I'm feeling excited, I'm ready to come back. And I know that that is such a privileged position to be in that I was able to take as much time as I needed. It breaks my heart that that isn’t the norm, that mothers aren’t supported to take the time they need to adjust to this huge shift. I am very lucky to have such an incredibly supportive husband who was really happy for me to ease into motherhood like that and was and is my biggest cheerleader.
It was really nice to be able to have that time and then come back and start with just half a day a week! I started by opening up spots to my waitlist and from there started seeing a few one on one clients again. And what I of course happened as tends to happen when you go through this transition, I started to attract clients going through the same transition into motherhood as I was. All of my new business coaching clients, were kind of mums having that moment of ‘I don't think I want to go back to work because I don't think I want to be away for my kids’, so kind of experiencing exactly what I'd experienced, but without having a business there that they could lean on, and that they could go back to work in instead sort of going, Okay, so my option here is like, I put my kids in daycare three days a week, I go back to work, pretty much all my income goes to daycare bills. I don't see my kids, but I'm at least doing something in my career. But like, I don't really know, if this is gonna be it for me, like, it doesn't feel great, it doesn't feel exciting. It feels a bit heartbreaking.
So with these clients I started supporting them to create a business. Let's see if we can replace an income, let's see if we can create something that's going to be more flexible. And it was so exciting to be able to do that with them that that was really the birth point for my Abundant Mamas Mastermind, which is how I still support mums who are creating those businesses or growing their businesses that allow them to be mothers first. And I get goosebumps when I say that because, of course, we should be mothers first, if that's what we want to do. And it is such a shame that our society is not set up for that. And our society doesn't really honour that transition and the bigness of the shift that comes with having a baby and becoming somebody's mother. And to be able to create space in my work for women to honour that transition and honour that big shift in their priorities. Just gives me gives me chills gives me all the goosebumps makes me feel so incredibly grateful, because I saw how easy that transition was in my own life. And I saw how hard it was for people who didn't have that option.
So now that I get to help create that option for mums to be with their families, and do work that actually energises them and fills them up so that they are the mother that they want to be even more is really, really incredible. So I came back to work and I was sort of feeling out…okay, what's this container going to look like and had some beautiful conversations with my kinesiologist about it, who is an incredible mentor and support for me. I also did tonnes of journaling, tonnes of meditating as I felt into this new way of business had to let go of quite a lot of mindset stuff, which I will go into even more detail about in another episode.
I will talk it about now too because I had to let go of this idea that work had to be hard. And that I had to prove myself in order to be of value - that I had to give something up to be valuable! That I had to give up time or that I had to give up energy or that I had to, push my boundaries a little bit further than I felt comfortable in order to show that I was valuable with people investing in me. But as mums, we just don't have that wiggle room. There's no room for hustling. There's no room for hard work. There's room for work, and there's room for fulfilling work and aligned work that feels really exciting. It doesn't mean that we're not working, but it means that doing it in a way that feels hard, there's just no space for it. Because most of our energy is going towards raising our babies!
As I was mapping out how the Abundant Mamas Mastermind would look, my kinesiologist would often say to me, like, how can you make it easier? And like she was so good at helping me figure out like when are we going into hard work territory? How do we pull it back. And the end result of that was creating this structure for my mastermind that not only supported me to be able to show up full energy in my complete power as my very best self, but also is a container that is so perfect for mothers to be able to get the support, because only once a month is there a in person call where you have to be somewhere at a certain time. Also, if you miss the call, that's fine, there's recordings.
In the mastermind there is a lot of pre-recorded content, and then you get voice messaging coaching. So you're able to be flexible and show up when it works for you. I'm able to show up when I can give you 100% of my attention. You’re able to ask questions when you’re in the moment with your own business. It works so beautifully because it allows everyone to be present and in their flow.
I took a bit of time to get the whole vision for this new way of doing business and supporting my clients really clear and flowing and when I opened doors to the Mastermind, I was already pregnant with my second son. And that was in March 2021. And I had my most financially successful month in business the month that I launched that mastermind! I immediately started to see the power of really truly understanding what comes with motherhood and what mums need from me as their business coach. After I became a mum, I felt really strongly that when I’m getting support in my own business, I need to work with coaches who either really, really get motherhood or who are mothers themselves, because it's a whole different ballgame doing business as a mum! It's completely different to how you're able to work when you don't have children.
Business as a mum has to be something that's really sustainable and really aligned. And one of the most important things, I think, when it comes to motherhood friendly business, is creating that alignment. And this is something that I think people skip over. Because it's not necessarily the most exciting stuff, it's not the stuff that will directly bring income in. It's also kind of hard when you’re not sure what you’re doing!. And when I talk creating an aligned foundation for your business, I'm talking about connecting with who your ideal client is, creating a way of working, that is going to be really supportive for you, creating offerings that are going to work for you creating marketing strategy, content strategy, that is really friendly to your life that has that as the priority.
Whenever I'm working with my clients, yes, we have their goals as a priority. But we're also making sure that in that picture is the answer to the question ‘How do we need this business to work for you to be able to be the mum that you want to be?’ And those things, those two things, we're not choosing between them, we're not going oh, okay, today, I'm choosing motherhood. Tomorrow, I'll choose my goals. We're going how do we get to the goals, but we also make sure that mum life is going to feel really good for you.
I am very passionate about supporting my clients, not just in their business, but as whole people. Sometimes when my clients jump into our voice message chats for coaching, they’ll say, you know, ‘I'm just having one of those days as a mom and I need to vent’ and I am here for it! Like,we can't separate ourselves from our business, especially when it's coming from this very soul lead place. So we do that work to create that alignment. And it's incredible, the shift that that creates! To really feel really connected to the mission of your business, the big vision for your business, the big vision for your life, really connected to your ideal client, not by knowing her demographically and knowing, you know, the magazine she might read or where she shops or her income, but knowing how she's feeling and being able to like plug into where she's at and what does she need and what does she want and how can you help her bridge that gap.
I do a lot of that deeper work with my clients, not just through using our mind, but we use visualisations and journaling techniques to get this information from our intuition. I think we can't create alignment without bringing our intuition to the table. Because that's the voice that knows, it’s the voice of our heart and soul. So it's our intuition that can guide us towards creating that alignment in our business. And that creates a really, really solid foundation for a business that is not going to go into hustle mode, a business that it's also going to be really easy for you to share about excitedly, you're not going to feel sleazy. When you sell, you're not going to have as many mindset blocks around selling and growing and marketing and making money as you would if you're not in that alignment with your business.
Making sure you’re in alignment creates such a connection to the knowing of this is what I'm here to do. This is what I’m meant to do. And because I've created this from my soul, I'm SO excited for it. And I'm so connected to the knowing that this is what the world needs. And this is what my ideal client really needs. And they're going to love it and, and a lot of that mindset stuff can actually drop away when we create that beautiful deep alignment in business. That's such an important piece of the puzzle, allowing our intuition to come to the table and creating that very aligned foundation that we can continue to grow a business from.
As mums, we also need to have something that is super simple while being super effective! I don't do any convoluted, complicated content or marketing strategies. We don't do any 50 step marketing funnels with arms off in every direction, we do simple, effective strategy, we work in a way that is easy for a tired mama brain to easily get her head around.
The other piece that is so important when it comes to business as a mother is something that is scalable. The beauty of a scalable business is not just that it has unlimited earning potential. But if it's scalable, it means it doesn't need you there every part of the way there might be some parts where you are required to show up for example on a group call or you know in a Facebook group or something like that. But the whole business is not dependent on you actually being there all the time.
So something scalable is something like an online course, or a mastermind or an online program or a membership or digital products that you can infuse with your incredible energy and your incredible knowledge and intuition and insights and everything else that you have to offer. But then that's able to go out into the world on its own and create something, it's got an energy of its own. So it's not dependent on your energy. And I think as mums, we need that scalable part of our business, because there are times where we want to pull back and especially if you're still in the zone like I am of pregnancies and small babies, being able to create a business that works around that is really incredible.
When I look at my first pregnancy, because I was working one on one, I stopped working and I had a really big chunk of time off work. My second pregnancy, I sort of went, I don't think I want to do that! I want to create something that actually allows me to continue to do this work, because my work is one of the things that makes me feel like me and helps me feel connected to myself. And the way that I had created this mastermind, my work became like this incredible nurturing space. And that's always where I'm aiming to get with my clients as well. How can we make work almost feel like self care. And I do want to reiterate, it's not because we're not working, it's not because we're not doing the things, it's because we're doing it from this beautiful aligned place. So it doesn't feel hard, it doesn't feel like it's asking more of us than we have to give.
So I came to my second pregnancy going, I think I want to keep working through the pregnancy and post partum. And I've now created this incredible container of the mastermind, that feels really possible for me to do that. And I trusted my gut on that. Because part of me was like, Are you crazy? What if you, you know, have this baby and go, I don't want to work and I don't want to support these clients. And these amazing women have signed up for 12 months, and what if you're not going to be able to support them. But my intuition was so strong on that, that this is the container that will allow me to be with my baby and with my clients. And this is all part of the business, the creation of a business that doesn't have the stop and start stop and start as you grow your family - this is what I want to show them is possible! So I really leaned into that.
I was so pleasantly surprised after I had Teddy, a slightly dramatic birth, you may or may not have read about it on my Instagram…. I had a lightning fast labour - like an hour and a half. He was born on our front verge as we were trying to get into the car so we could go to the birth centre. On the coldest night in two years. It was winter solstice at 3am in the morning. It was a rather dramatic entry. And thank goodness everything was totally fine. So he came into the world dramatically but hilariously, he is this incredibly serene child. And he was totally chill through that whole thing as well, like came out and was sort of oh hi, what's the big deal guys?
My experience of the second baby was it's so much easier because you know what you're doing and I think it wasn't until I had my second that I realised how much I was learning with my first. How the amount of skills and information that my brain was trying to process every day as I adjusted to being a mum the first time! I just didn't have any of that mental energy being taken up the second time because I knew how to I knew how to feed, I knew how to burp, I knew how to dress him, how to change a nappy, how to bath him, all these little things that (for me anyway) really added up with the first baby to me not just being like physically maxed out and emotionally maxed out, but really mentally maxed out.
So with my second baby, I was like, Oh, I have all this mental energy because this part's easy. Yes, I'm learning how to juggle the two, I’m continuously learning how to juggle the two. But I did and do have all this mental space and I have this itch to use my brain because it's a very different part of our brain than the part we use when we're in mama mode compared to the part that we get to use when we're in business mode.
For those first few months, Teddy came along with me when I worked just from my home office. On all the alignment calls in my mastermind he'd be on my boob or asleep in my lap. And often my my clients have their babies and kids around as they're doing these calls, which are the only the only part of the mastermind where we actually are in a place at a time each month. So, I was so pleasantly surprised to see that this new way of doing business worked for me and for my clients.
I've learned over so many years that trusting my intuition is 100% always going to lead me to where I need to go. But it was so beautiful to go, I actually can do this, maybe I don't have to let my business that I love grind to a stop because I'm having a baby, these two things can actually exist together.
That was such a huge shift in my belief systems. Because I'd never seen someone with a little baby, doing work that they enjoyed and being able to be fulfilled in their career and making great money with ease. And as a mother, at the same time, I think we're always presented that as you know, you've got to make the choice, you've got to sacrifice career or motherhood if you want the other. And I really don't believe that that's, that's what it's like. And that sort of takes me back to that idea that I spoke about at the beginning - the idea of having it all. You can have the business, you can have the career. And you can have the family alongside it.
But to do that, a lot of us will need to let go of a lot of mindset stuff. We need to believe this reality is possible before we can create it. So a lot of the work we do in the mastermind is of course mindset work as well and being able to embody this version of us that knows I can have the business I can do the work that's really fulfilling, I can have these incredible four or five figure months that give me more abundance and more freedom for my family while being the mother I want to be. It’s possible for me to be beautifully present and beautifully peaceful for my children.
So that's just a little overview of how I got to where I am and how motherhood changed my business and a little peek at how I support mamas who also want to be able to do work that they love without sacrificing time with their kids. I am just endlessly grateful that you've joined me for this first episode. I’ve you’ve enjoyed it, maybe you’d like to take a screenshot, let me know on Instagram that you've listened. If you have any questions if you want to continue any of these conversations that I've touched on, I am always chatting away in my DMs. Thank you for being here and I'm so excited to see you again next week!