Growing Pains of Business After Baby — Episode 1 of Building a Coaching Business in Motherhood

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Gillian Bennett: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Confident Coaching Podcast. I’m Gillian, and today I want to talk about a few things that have been…

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Gillian Bennett: Going through my head, I’ve been organizing these ideas around business after having a baby, business with small children, and what it all means, and why it can feel so incredibly challenging.

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Gillian Bennett: to understand, like, who am I in my business?

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Gillian Bennett: after I have a baby. And I really believe that someone that began their business before having a baby, specifically coaches that started their businesses before having a baby, I think we are in a very different position than a coach who begins their business after having children, and

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Gillian Bennett: Part of that

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Gillian Bennett: I think is very specific to service providers, nutrition and fitness coaches in particular, because we take up so much… like, we are… we are our business, right? It’s not like having a product-based business, or, you know, a coffee shop where you can, like, hire someone else to do a lot of that work. But as nutrition coaches.

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Gillian Bennett: when our businesses are pretty much, like, a one-person show, maybe we have a VA or something like that, we tend to get very sort of enmeshed with our businesses, and like I said, it’s… I think it’s a different relationship. Someone that started their business and built… and did their best to build their business before having a baby, and someone that had children and then started a business after having children.

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Gillian Bennett: And…

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Gillian Bennett: the… the reason I think it’s so different… I’m gonna talk about this in a second, but just on a really basic level, I think that when you start your business before you have a baby, you sort of almost think of your business as your baby, right? And when you start a business after you have a baby.

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Gillian Bennett: It’s kind of like you’ve already sort of figured out how this baby fits into your life, and then you’re building your business around that. And when you have a child.

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Gillian Bennett: your emotional capacity, your time, everything is now split in a way that you have never experienced before, right? So you have this child that hopefully you adore. Most of us do, right? They’re such a huge part of our lives now. But then we have our businesses, which, if you started your business before having a child.

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Gillian Bennett: it was for a certain amount of time, maybe a really long time, like in my case, it was quote-unquote, like our babies, right? And we also are so used to being very much in control of our time, we can take on a lot more kind of emotional weight within coaching.

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Gillian Bennett: We know coaching is very emotional, and a lot of that emotional capacity, the time capacity, energetic capacity changes so much when we now are, like, figuring out how do we fit also being a mother into our lives. And I think we carry a lot of guilt and shame around that, because for many of us that started our business before having children.

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Gillian Bennett: And I think this goes also just in general. I think anytime there is sort of a big shift in life, and you’re trying to figure out, like, how do I run my business now, we often get a lot of, like, validation and pride

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Gillian Bennett: from our businesses. And… I think there’s something to be said for, like, often with nutrition and fitness, we think about it as, like, a quote-unquote, like, oh, it’s just my little nutrition and fitness business. And so we feel like we almost have even more to prove, because we need to show someone that our nutrition coaching, our fitness coaching business is quote-unquote, like, legit.

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Gillian Bennett: And then, for those of us that have babies, you know, maybe we do take maternity leave, maybe we don’t. I personally took almost 4 months. A lot of people don’t, they… for many different reasons.

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Gillian Bennett: But then somehow, we expect ourselves to somehow manage everything that we used to do in our business at the capacity that we used to do it, even though our lives are completely different, our priorities have changed, most of us are running on, like, no sleep, and sleep is such a huge part of just, like, being a human.

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Gillian Bennett: But… I think… What happens is, like.

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Gillian Bennett: Sometimes we want to almost reject this idea that our identities have changed, especially when we are someone that has so much of our identity sort of tied into, like.

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Gillian Bennett: our business and how we run it. And our identities inevitably will change when we have children. And I don’t think that it’s just, like, all of a sudden you are only a mother. By no means… that is absolutely not what I think. I see my identity

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Gillian Bennett: has just expanded. I have now added mother to this, like, long list of the things that I am, and the things that I do, and what’s important to me. And…

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Gillian Bennett: We have to come to terms with the fact that

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Gillian Bennett: because our identities have expanded, the way that we interact with those identities also has to change. The relationship with our business and how we do things has to change.

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Gillian Bennett: And sometimes the way in which we do business, the way that we run our business, the way that we provide coaching, the way that we structure our offers, also needs to drastically change. And I want to give an example of this. I work with, in a mentorship capacity, I would say most of my mentorship clients are mothers, and especially now, I feel like I’m so much better suited to work with mothers.

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Gillian Bennett: And one of the coaches that I’m working with just had her second baby, she’s also got a very small child, and she’s recognizing, like, in this postpartum period, that

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Gillian Bennett: her desire to do certain things in her business and the way that she runs her coaching business has to change, because she just doesn’t have the emotional capacity, for example, of some of the heavier stuff that comes with coaching one-on-one nutrition. And her business for a long time was mainly one-on-one coaching. So now what we’re doing…

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Gillian Bennett: Is we’re looking at, how do we structure your business in a way that is supporting your life financially and structurally, in a way that helps you be an amazing mom.

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Gillian Bennett: but also in a way that is… is what your clients actually need, right? How do we help you make the money that you want to make, and coach in the way that you want to coach, while also being the parent that you want to be, right? And…

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Gillian Bennett: there’s a lot of growing pains there, because there’s this emotional process that we really have to go through of coming to peace with things needing to change, even when they maybe worked really, really well before having a baby. And…

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Gillian Bennett: I’m kind of in this process myself, and I’m recognizing how important it is and how helpful it is for me, specifically right now. Like, as I’m recording this, I’m in this sort of, like, couple-of-week limbo in which my partner went back to work after his paternity leave. I don’t have childcare until next week.

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Gillian Bennett: And… I can’t show up in my business in the same way that I did even when my partner was on maternity leave, and I couldn’t show up in my business the same way even when my partner was, like, there with baby.

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Gillian Bennett: even… even if I wanted to, is like, there’s…

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Gillian Bennett: there’s partly, like, I don’t want to show up in the same way.

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Gillian Bennett: And

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Gillian Bennett: I can’t show up in the same way. And I think often we create this expectation for ourselves, and I saw this, I saw someone post on Threads the other day. She was like, I’m pregnant, and I am just, like, planning to get right back in it. I’m gonna use my child as motivation for my business. And I think that that is so well-intentioned, and I think that

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Gillian Bennett: it probably will, like, the desire to create a better life for your family that is built on, like, what you can create yourself, I think is very true, but…

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Gillian Bennett: We really need to adjust the expectations that we have of ourselves and our output and our time management.

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Gillian Bennett: I realized this on my maternity leave, where I was like, wait a minute.

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Gillian Bennett: my… how I feel about my work.

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Gillian Bennett: I still love it, I still care about coaching, it’s still so incredibly important to me, but I need to do it in a different way.

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Gillian Bennett: And I tried things out for a few months when I came back of doing things in a way I thought I should do them.

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Gillian Bennett: And now, over the last couple of months, I’ve now been back at work for two… six months-ish? I’m realizing there’s a need for another shift, because we don’t know how we are going to be a parent until we are a parent, and we don’t know how we are going to be a business owner as a parent until we are a business owner as a parent.

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Gillian Bennett: And I think there is something to be said for having childcare, especially, like, family, like, part of your family that can provide childcare, parents.

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Gillian Bennett: Brothers and sisters, you know, cousins, whoever.

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Gillian Bennett: But I also think that it’s important to say that childcare doesn’t actually solve the deeper issue here, because I’m not talking about a time management problem. The time management of parenting with a coaching business is…

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Gillian Bennett: Yes, a problem that we need to solve, but it’s not the same thing as managing the emotional capacity and the emotional shifts and the expectations of yourself, being a parent.

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Gillian Bennett: while also running your coaching business. And so…

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Gillian Bennett: all of this to say, I think we love to, like, plan ahead, we love to prepare, we love to think we know what’s coming, especially as, like, Type A individuals. I personally am not Type A, I’m very much Type B, but a lot of the coaches that I mentor, and a lot of the coaches that I talk to.

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Gillian Bennett: are Type A. You know, Type A, oldest daughter, like, we’ve got to have shit under control. I’m Type B, but I do feel like I need to have shit under control, because I am an oldest daughter.

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Gillian Bennett: And we want to be able to predict and plan and know what’s coming, right? And it’s usually coming from some, like, perfectionist tendencies, which might be why we run our own businesses and want to have, like, so much control over things. And there’s so much about motherhood that requires us to surrender.

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Gillian Bennett: And surrender, I think, for someone that has perfectious tendencies, or is Type A, or, like, wants to be in control.

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Gillian Bennett: it… that feels really, really scary, because we associate surrendering with, like, I can’t control anything, I just need to, like, let everything wash over me.

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Gillian Bennett: And I don’t think surrendering is about that. I don’t think it’s about just, like, letting yourself float and, like, well, just wherever the wind takes me.

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Gillian Bennett: I think surrendering is about letting go of the need to do things the way that you think you should, and opening yourself up to doing things in the way that

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Gillian Bennett: might work for you in this phase of life, knowing that that will inevitably change, because having a child is essentially being like, oh, well, I guess we’re in a routine, and then realizing that you are not in a routine at all, right?

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Gillian Bennett: And… So, aligning parenting and business and coaching

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Gillian Bennett: it does require a lot of re-evaluating, like, who am I? What’s actually gonna work for me? I think it’s so helpful to have someone external to you that understands your life experience, but can help you, sort of, like.

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Gillian Bennett: Be less emotional about it, because it is so easy to be so emotional about something that you’re so close to, like your business and your baby.

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Gillian Bennett: And… this is something that I’ve been working on with

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Gillian Bennett: with a couple of mentorship clients, because as I mentioned, I do work with a few mothers, is looking at, like, how do I want to parent, and how do I want to be a coach and business owner, and what does that look like in a way that actually supports the kind of life that I want to live?

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Gillian Bennett: Which includes this business that is so important to me. And that means that we do need to adjust expectations, we need to know how to adjust those expectations.

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Gillian Bennett: We also need to understand that strategy in our business needs to change. Sometimes the offers themselves need to change, how we launch needs to change, how we show up online.

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Gillian Bennett: And sometimes our ideal client has changed as well. And I think this is also a huge part of why I have essentially completely started to reject

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Gillian Bennett: any kind of business advice from anyone that is not a mother, and I’m even a little bit wary of business advice from mothers that have older children, or business advice from mothers who started their business after they had children.

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Gillian Bennett: Because, like I said, I think that when you start your business after you have kids, you’ve already sort of figured out how

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Gillian Bennett: having children and being a parent sort of, like, emotionally fits into your life, and then in the space sort of left over, you can create your business. It doesn’t mean it’s not challenging, I think it is very, very challenging.

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Gillian Bennett: But there is this huge identity shift when you have a child. And being in that identity and the expansion of that identity when you are already a business owner, and when being a coach and being a business owner takes up so much space is different than that identity expansion

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Gillian Bennett: When you step into being a business owner after you’ve already sort of experienced being a parent.

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Gillian Bennett: And so, all of this to say, I just wanted to share some thoughts that have been going through my mind, basically on repeat, and I think it’s so helpful to talk about this stuff, because I think we see so much online about, like, you know, moms that look like they have all their shit together, and, like, somehow they’re, you know.

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Gillian Bennett: sending out emails while also, like, looks like they’re playing with their kids all the time. And, you know, I think it’s really helpful to talk about, like, there are a lot of growing pains, and it is a very bumpy road.

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Gillian Bennett: When we are trying to figure out how all of this stuff fits together, I do think it’s very possible to be extremely successful in your business after having a baby.

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Gillian Bennett: But I think that it requires a lot of re-evaluation of what actually is going to work, rather than trying to just go back to what was working in the past. And one of the reasons I wanted to talk about this as well is, like, I was talking to a coach the other day who just had a baby, and she was like, I’ve talked to my therapist about this stuff.

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Gillian Bennett: But she’s really the only person that, like, I’ve really talked about it, because nobody else gets it. Like, people in my life aren’t, you know, aren’t

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Gillian Bennett: coaches, or they maybe don’t run their own businesses, and so, yes, there are unique challenges of, like, having to go back to work in an office, for example, after having a baby, but I think when you run your own business, especially coaching that is so human.

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Gillian Bennett: And there’s so much connection there, and so much emotion there, and you do really need to be able to offer emotional space to your clients. It’s like, we need to talk about the challenges there, and we need to have people in our world that understand those challenges.

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Gillian Bennett: So…

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Gillian Bennett: If this resonated with you, let’s talk about it, or maybe you just thought this was interesting. You’re like, I don’t have a baby, or I, you know, I don’t relate. Fantastic. I hope you enjoyed this. Maybe you just found it cool to listen to.

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Gillian Bennett: But I think this is something that we need to discuss more, because it does affect how we are as coaches, it does affect how we are as business owners, and…

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Gillian Bennett: I think that the more we talk about the uncomfortable stuff, the better off we are. So, I hope you enjoyed this. Let me know if you did. My DMs are always open, my Instagram is in the show notes, and… and also, if you know a coach that just had a baby, send them this episode. Maybe they need to hear it, maybe they don’t, who knows?

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Gillian Bennett: Anyways, thank you for being here, thank you for listening, and I will talk to you again very soon.