Social media f*cked our idea of what normal motherhood + business is — Episode 2 of Building a Coaching Business in Motherhood

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Gillian Bennett: Hello, and welcome to this podcast episode that currently is on the Confident Coaching Podcast feed, but I will be moving over to a new feed that specifically is focused around

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Gillian Bennett: More content around motherhood and coaching and balancing those two, and…

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Gillian Bennett: at this point, I am in the middle of a, like, real-time pivot in my business. You may have seen on social media, you may have read this in my emails if you are on my email list, where I am…

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Gillian Bennett: Making a pivot that’s been on my mind for probably the last 4 to 5 months.

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Gillian Bennett: I am shifting from mentoring nutrition coaches on how to expand their coaching business beyond macros, and I am narrowing my focus a little bit further, specifically to be offering business mentorship for mothers that are nutrition and fitness coaches.

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Gillian Bennett: And the reason I’m making this shift is, one, it’s work that I’ve already been doing with some of my mentorship clients that are mothers, and we’ve… we’ve started to work a little bit more deeply on their business and seen that…

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Gillian Bennett: So much of the business advice that many business coaches are giving doesn’t necessarily apply to who we are as nutrition and fitness coaches in this season of motherhood, whether it’s first baby, second baby.

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Gillian Bennett: You’ve got a toddler, whatever it is.

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Gillian Bennett: And… as I have really…

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Gillian Bennett: come into… like, I’ve been coming into my own identity as a mother, and felt really called to support other mothers, because it is so incredibly challenging. You know this if you are a mother. There are so many challenges that you don’t even know are challenges until you’re actually in them, and when it comes to building and growing our businesses.

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Gillian Bennett: I think it is so incredibly helpful to have someone that is

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Gillian Bennett: both a really skilled coach, I mean, I’ve been doing this for 10 years, I have training in

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Gillian Bennett: communication, motivational interviewing, I understand compassion-focused therapy, ACT, so much experience over the last 10 years, but also, I know how to run a business as a mother because I’m doing it now. And…

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Gillian Bennett: I have had mentors in the past that

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Gillian Bennett: Either didn’t have kids, or they were dads, and while they were lovely people, very great coaches.

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Gillian Bennett: I truly don’t believe that they would have been able to support me in this season of life. I’ve actually been working with a business coach that is a mother, and it’s been, like, a completely different experience.

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Gillian Bennett: So, all of that to say, I will be creating another podcast feed, but as of right now, my goal is to just get content out there that reflects what is truly important to me and the business I want to run right now. So today, we are going to talk about how to actually balance

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Gillian Bennett: all of our identities, and I think balance is probably the wrong word to use, because I don’t think we ever balance it. I think we just understand what to prioritize and when, and how to help these different identities live together.

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Gillian Bennett: But I wanted to record this podcast because so many women that started their business before becoming mothers, or even when they started their business after becoming mothers, there’s still this space where we’re trying to figure out, like.

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Gillian Bennett: how do I fit mother, coach, business owner, friend, partner, sister? How do I fit all of these together? And I touched on this briefly in my last episode, but I really want to dive more deeply into, like, the space that is required for this identity expansion and identity reorganization, basically.

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Gillian Bennett: And I think the core problem here is we try to somehow give the same amount of space to each one, or we completely ignore one part, right? So…

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Gillian Bennett: And I think the core problem here is we try to make all of our identities

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Gillian Bennett: fit into a space that can’t always hold everything at the same time. Especially because being a mother is so incredibly big, and so incredibly new.

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Gillian Bennett: And in many ways, being a mother is going to change and ebb and flow depending on so many different things. How old your baby is, you know, what your partner does for work, whether you have a partner or not, what your relationship is like, your friends, and what their…

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Gillian Bennett: status is in life, like, whether they have kids or not. And I think especially for those of us who started a business before we have kids.

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Gillian Bennett: we have sort of been in this pattern of business owner, like the identity of business owner, the identity of coach, taking up a lot of space in our life. And then we have this tension.

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Gillian Bennett: between, okay, now I have a child, and maybe I’m in a season of life where my child is taking up a lot of space in my life. Maybe I don’t have a ton of support, or maybe I do, but there’s still so much space at this

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Gillian Bennett: child is occupying in my life and my identity, and you want to do the things that are gonna move your business forward. You have the motivation to do it. You, in theory, are like, yes, I want to grow this business, but it can be really hard to find the emotional capacity, the time, the energy, or even the motivation to do those things.

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Gillian Bennett: And so we end up in this meta-motivational struggle, where there’s a part of us that wants to do all of the things that we feel like we’re supposed to do to build our business. We want

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Gillian Bennett: to, you know, raise prices, we want to launch, we want to bring on new clients, we want to maybe scale if we’re ready to do that. But then there’s another part of you that might be like, I don’t actually care about those things as much as I feel I should.

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Gillian Bennett: sometimes it’s like, I don’t feel… I don’t care about those things as I feel I should anymore, or it’s just…

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Gillian Bennett: as much as I feel I should, right? And some of that should comes from, I think, these two camps that social media sort of sells us.

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Gillian Bennett: And we are… we live in a world where we are consuming content all the time, and I think, especially as a mother, especially if you are breastfeeding or doing those night wake-ups, you might find yourself scrolling more than…

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Gillian Bennett: you maybe have in the past. I know that was definitely the case for me, and one of the things I started doing, I was like, I cannot scroll at 3 in the morning anymore, so I started reading my Kindle on my phone, and that, personally, was so helpful, because

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Gillian Bennett: All of this content that’s now coming at you is sort of like… of course, our phones have realized that we are mothers now.

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Gillian Bennett: And so we see the, like, I’m a mother, I can do everything to build wealth and build this incredible business, look at me go, somehow I manage it all, like, look how motivated I am. And then there’s the other side of this that’s like.

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Gillian Bennett: I’m in my soft girl era, I just want to nurture my children. I don’t need to work right now, like, I’m gonna do content creation all around motherhood. And I think those are the kind of two sides that we see.

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Gillian Bennett: And I don’t think either of those needs to be our personal case. I think many of us, especially those of us that are running nutrition and fitness coaching businesses, or running just our own businesses, this thing that maybe used to be our baby and is not anymore.

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Gillian Bennett: I think a lot of us sit in the space of, I don’t want to be a stay-at-home mother, I don’t want to be a mommy content creator.

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Gillian Bennett: I don’t want to be with my child 100% of the time, as much as I absolutely adore them, but at the same time.

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Gillian Bennett: I don’t know how to shift my business and the tasks that I have to do, and the way that I think about my business to sort of a space that only takes up

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Gillian Bennett: a certain amount of space, right? We’ve usually kind of gotten to the point where we put so much into it, and we feel a lot of shame around

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Gillian Bennett: Adjusting our businesses to take up less space in our lives, in part because that might mean less income, in part that might just be because a lot of our identity and our, like, ego is tied up in being a business owner and running our own business and making our own money.

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Gillian Bennett: And maybe we’ve also come to sort of depend on this external validation of, like, seeing our Stripe balance, or, you know, getting DMs, or signing up clients, and running a business, which is fantastic. Like, it is great that we

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Gillian Bennett: get some form of validation out of that, and that we find so much importance in that. But…

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Gillian Bennett: it ends up being this sort of, like, push and pull of, like, I don’t want to be a stay-at-home mother, but I also want to be able to be there when I want to be there for my child.

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Gillian Bennett: And maybe you think, like, well, if I go part-time, or maybe if I do take time away from work, it’s like we’re failing feminism, or something like that. And I think we need to talk about the money mindset piece here, because that, I think, is a huge part of, like, how we see ourselves as…

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Gillian Bennett: feminists, as we see ourselves, and I think feminist, unfortunately, gets this, like, bad rap.

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Gillian Bennett: of, like, a feminist now is… is, like, anti-family, and I disagree with that completely. I think

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Gillian Bennett: part of me being a feminist is I can choose to have a family and take care of my son, and I get to make the choice if I pull back on work or not.

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Gillian Bennett: Right? Because I could also tell my partner that he needs to figure it out. Like, he needs to figure out childcare. I personally don’t want to. I want to be there for my son. I am okay with being the one that pulls back on my work a little bit.

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Gillian Bennett: But…

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Gillian Bennett: the money mindset needs to be a part of the conversation, because our identity as a business owner is also tied to the money that we make. And we sometimes have this fear or anxiety around, like, well, if I pull back on my business intentionally.

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Gillian Bennett: I won’t be making as much money as I want to be making, or my income will drop, or I don’t know what will happen with my income. Sometimes what it looks like is sometimes we need to be okay with income being reduced for a little while as we build something that is going to potentially, like, really help us in the future. That’s also scary.

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Gillian Bennett: And sometimes we really need to look at what is actually the amount of money we need to be making in order to have the life that we want.

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Gillian Bennett: versus the amount of money that kind of satisfies us, or the amount of money that we see on social media as, like, the number that we are supposed to be reaching, right? All of us constantly see the, like, 10K months.

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Gillian Bennett: And sometimes that kind of, like, gets into our head, is like, wait, I need to be doing that too? But often, what needs to happen is we need to be having conversations. If we have a partner that works, we need to be having conversations with our partner about finances, and about

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Gillian Bennett: hey, this is how I’m feeling about my business. If you are thinking, I really need some time to sort of figure out, like, how do I make these identities live together as I’m feeling this push and pull?

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Gillian Bennett: And for me personally, I’ve got a lot of money bullshit, right? I’ve got a lot of my ego tied up in my work, and for a long time, I really felt like I had to be making a certain amount of money for me to feel like I had a legitimate

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Gillian Bennett: business. And when I started this business, I was literally making, like, 500 bucks a month off of nutrition coaching. And then, I got to a point where it was sustainable, and it was my full-time income.

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Gillian Bennett: And as I’m looking at figuring out how to fit motherhood and business owning and finances all together in my life right now.

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Gillian Bennett: I actually really did have to look at finances and ask myself.

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Gillian Bennett: can I pull back? Can I potentially dip into my savings? Because that is what feels right for me right now.

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Gillian Bennett: And the answer was, okay, this is the amount that I can do that, knowing that I am going to choose to be the primary caregiver for my child. I could have put him in daycare sooner, right? I could have done that, but I chose not to.

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Gillian Bennett: And… I… I had to have a conversation with my partner about our finances.

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Gillian Bennett: Because I really wanted to look at this, not from a place of fear, or a place of, wait, I’m not gonna be a legitimate business owner, but a place of, what is actually realistic for my family?

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Gillian Bennett: And… that had gotten me to a place where I knew that I was going to be making a certain amount of money, and I knew that I could put in the work to be making a certain amount of money, and…

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Gillian Bennett: at the same time, had I not been really, really clear about what that was like with my partner and what that would look like for our family, I think it would have really gotten into my head from an ego perspective, right?

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Gillian Bennett: And…

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Gillian Bennett: this was so helpful for me to understand how motherhood fits in with business owner, because it let go of the pressure that I was putting on myself to make a certain amount of money based on what I was seeing

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Gillian Bennett: on social media, for example, or what I had always told myself I needed to be making, and I think that a lot of… a lot of business coaches or mentors maybe won’t admit this, because we’re always supposed to be like, I am making more money than you, right? But really, what it comes down to is, am I aware of

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Gillian Bennett: And… and connected with.

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Gillian Bennett: For a lack of a better way to say that.

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Gillian Bennett: my income, and what my role is in that income. And…

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Gillian Bennett: I want to move on now to talking a little bit about making the space… making space for parts of you that are not mother and are not business owner, because that is often what sort of gets thrown to the wayside.

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Gillian Bennett: As… as a parent, is…

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Gillian Bennett: We let go of the space that we used to hold for the things that bring us joy.

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Gillian Bennett: And…

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Gillian Bennett: there is something to be said for, yes, I could probably, over the last few months, have worked a bit more, had I decided I’m not going to make space for me to see my friends. I’m not going to make space for me to do things that actually bring me joy outside of being a parent and being a business owner, right?

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Gillian Bennett: And…

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Gillian Bennett: We can be really, really busy being a parent, a business owner, a partner, a friend, all of these things, and then we have this added layer of guilt for doing things

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Gillian Bennett: that truly are just, like, other parts of who we are. For example, creativity is really important to me, and when my baby was first born, it was really hard to find time to read fiction, which is really helpful for my creativity and how my brain works, and so I…

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Gillian Bennett: had to sort of take a step back and be like, wait, how do I actually make space for that? And for me, I decided I might go to bed a few minutes later, but at least I get to read my, like, 10-15 pages of fiction, which sounds really small, but makes a difference.

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Gillian Bennett: And… Another part of this is where we can… we can look at.

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Gillian Bennett: what does my day actually look like right now, knowing that sometimes with children, routines change. They last a week, and then they go out the door. Maybe you are a very sort of routine person, but I would ask you, where are you bringing joy and space for the parts of you that are not a coach and not a mother into your day? And…

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Gillian Bennett: for example, one of the spaces for me is I have decided that I’m not going to try to watch my son and work at the same time.

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Gillian Bennett: And that has been so helpful, because now I can let go of the pressure to, like, I have to be doing this thing today, at this moment in time, and really look at when does it fit into my day? And…

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Gillian Bennett: And also allow space for myself to be, like, when I’m with my son, maybe what brings me joy is, like, listening to music. Or maybe what brings me joy is, like, maybe we can cook together… cook together. He’s a baby, he doesn’t cook. But sometimes he likes watching me cook, right?

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Gillian Bennett: And there was a moment

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Gillian Bennett: And there was a moment in the process of, like, becoming a mother and understanding how these identities all fit together, where I did feel guilty for doing the things I wanted to do, or I did feel guilty for being, like, to my partner, hey, I’m gonna leave the baby with you, here’s a bottle, I am going to go do something with my friends, or I’m going to go do something with myself.

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Gillian Bennett: And it felt like I could really, if I wanted to be a quote-unquote good business owner and a good mother.

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Gillian Bennett: I could really only give space to those parts of my identity, whereas all of the other parts of me are part of what make me an amazing mother and an amazing business owner.

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Gillian Bennett: And so, here’s what we need to think about when it comes to making space for these different parts of us. Because balancing this, again, balance is not the right word.

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Gillian Bennett: it requires really hard conversations and honesty with ourselves. We may need to look at

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Gillian Bennett: data, while we may need to also, like, look into, like, our hearts, right? Which sounds a little bit woo-woo, but sometimes we need to look at numbers and facts, and sometimes we need to look at how we feel. And often, the right decision, like our quote-unquote wise mind.

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Gillian Bennett: is where those two things fit together. So business-wise, that might look like, hey, do I need to adjust the way that I’m delivering my programs, or do I need to adjust my pricing to

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Gillian Bennett: reach a certain income goal, or to adjust the way I’m showing up with my clients? Do I need to adapt my launch strategies so that they don’t take up so much space or energy or time, and I can be more efficient with them?

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Gillian Bennett: Maybe it looks like, Looking at the data from successful content, and repurposing that content.

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Gillian Bennett: instead of creating a bunch of new content. It might even look like taking a step back, allowing your income to not be your focus right now, so that you can create an entirely new offer that fits the capacity that you have right now, instead of trying to push yourself into the old capacity that you used to have.

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Gillian Bennett: And for the other parts of who you are, you might need to ask, what are the activities, the experiences, the moments that help me feel like me, that I might be ignoring or avoiding or telling myself I don’t deserve, because I’m trying so hard to run my business and be the version of the mother I think I need to be?

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Gillian Bennett: So… with that, like I said at the beginning, I…

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Gillian Bennett: am making a pivot right now in who I work with, to work specifically with mothers in nutrition and fitness. Mothers who are trying to figure out what does it look like for me to run my business as a mother.

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Gillian Bennett: and be both the business owner and the mother that I want to be. How do I weed through what is right for me as far as business advice, and create a strategy that fits the capacity that I have? And so, I see this more of a partnership than anything else.

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Gillian Bennett: Because I will really help get into your business with you. This is not gonna be like, oh, well, you just, you know, here’s a template, go figure it out.

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Gillian Bennett: Let’s actually look at what you already have built, what you want to build, what feels doable for you right now, and let’s prioritize, let’s get honest about your actual capacity, let’s define a strategy that fits with this season of life.

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Gillian Bennett: And… I… I truly…

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Gillian Bennett: believe that this is what our industry needs, because working with a business coach that doesn’t have the experience of being a mother, and is just, like, throwing information at you, that you’re now trying to, like, be like, whoa, wait, what do I do with all of this information?

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Gillian Bennett: that is probably not gonna fit the capacity that you have right now. So that said, I have… I’m opening a few beta spots because, like you, as a mother, my time and capacity is limited.

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Gillian Bennett: So, if you would like to learn a bit more about those beta spots and what that looks like, it is going to be at a slightly lower rate than it will be once those 3 spots are filled.

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Gillian Bennett: please go ahead, I’m gonna link my Instagram in the show notes, so you can shoot me a DM there. You can also send me an email, I’m gonna add my email in the show notes. And if you would like to keep up with sort of the real time of how I’m developing my business to adapt to the different identities that I hold.

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Gillian Bennett: make sure that you are on my email list, because I’m going to be sharing a lot more of, sort of, the inside workings of my brain there.

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