Time management in motherhood — Episode 4 of Building a Coaching Business in Motherhood

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Gillian Bennett: Hello!

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Gillian Bennett: Hello, and welcome to another episode of Building a Coaching Business in Motherhood. I’m Gillian.

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Gillian Bennett: I am your coach, I am a fellow mother, which sounds kind of funny to say, but I suppose we are really all in this together. I think one of the most beautiful things that I’ve experienced in motherhood, even in the online space, is that

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Gillian Bennett: we can find so many incredible sources of support. I think, yes, there is a lot of mom shaming, and sometimes there can be some weird cattiness around the experience of being a mother, of like, I do this better, but overall, I have experienced

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Gillian Bennett: Hello, and welcome to Building a Coaching Business in Motherhood. I am your coach and mentor, Gillian, and today we are going to talk about the myth of time management in motherhood.

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Gillian Bennett: And I know this changes as our children get older and are in different phases of life, and as we also learn how to be a parent and have different experiences over time. I think one of the incredible things about motherhood is that

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Gillian Bennett: there’s nothing static about it, it is constantly changing, and I think this is just a testament to why having sort of a very specific time management approach can be really challenging, because…

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Gillian Bennett: We are constantly needing to adapt and change, and sometimes we become very rigid in our approach to time management.

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Gillian Bennett: And I think especially at the beginning of motherhood, there’s a certain level of loss of control over time itself. And so, the skill that we need as mothers running coaching businesses isn’t that we need to get better at scheduling. I think the skill that we really need is cognitive flexibility and the ability to let go of this belief that we need to control and plan

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Gillian Bennett: and predict everything in the way that we used to.

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Gillian Bennett: And so, let’s dive into

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Gillian Bennett: what this can look like, and how to actually get shit done, and manage your time without having this, like, very rigid time management system. Because…

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Gillian Bennett: usually when we talk about time management, we assume some level of predictability, and I think motherhood, to a certain extent, and again, this is gonna change over time, whether you have daycare, whether you don’t, but there’s so much unpredictability

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Gillian Bennett: in motherhood. And that just goes not for your child itself, but also how you feel. How we feel energy-wise, hormone-wise, whether, you know, weaning, that’s something that I have on my mind, is I’ve been breastfeeding now for 9 months, and eventually, I’m gonna have to wean my son.

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Gillian Bennett: Not looking forward to it, because I have grown to love breastfeeding so much, but I… I have heard that it really messes with your hormones when you wean, and so that can also affect my ability to manage time, because it affects my capacity, right?

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Gillian Bennett: And so, of course, if we are a coach, we do have certain commitments. Maybe we have one-on-one coaching calls, maybe we have sessions, maybe we have calls with our own mentor or our own coach that are sort of fixed things on our calendar, and that does require some planning and reliability in our schedule, but a lot of the work that makes our business sort of tick or run

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Gillian Bennett: Are things that sometimes we can’t schedule with certainty because of what happens with our children, or what happens with us.

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Gillian Bennett: But also, we need to be able to be flexible in order to run a successful business. And I think this is sort of the exemplification of being scrappy and really doing what we can. I think we tell clients all the time, you know, something is better than nothing, but then

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Gillian Bennett: we, as coaches, will often find ourselves paralyzed. Maybe we’re scrolling reels, being like, oh, I’m doing research, but really, we’re just sort of in paralysis, like, what do I even need to be doing?

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Gillian Bennett: And when you run your own business, there is always more to do, whether you can, you know, be educating yourself more, creating more content, doing more client work, checking in with clients more, and there’s this tension between, I should have time to be able to do this.

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Gillian Bennett: versus this reality of, maybe you don’t actually have the time, or you have the time, but you’re exhausted, your emotional capacity is totally zapped, or maybe what you need is actually to do something outside of your business. I think it’s so easy to lose ourselves in these two big roles in our lives, where it’s like, hey, I’m a coach, that is my livelihood, but it also contributes to my ego and my identity.

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Gillian Bennett: And then I’m a mother, and then where is the rest of us? And I talked about this in episode 2 of this podcast. If you haven’t listened to that, definitely go back and check that one out. But I think that we need to recognize that, yes.

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Gillian Bennett: it is challenging to quote-unquote find time for everything, but connection and rest are not things that we can just call indulgences that are for another period of time. Those are things that help us be who we want to be in all of these other realms of our lives.

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Gillian Bennett: And I think why we get so stuck when it comes to time and when it comes to actually being able to, like, get shit done

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Gillian Bennett: It’s not that we’re lazy, is not that we are unorganized, it’s often that we are too rigid.

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Gillian Bennett: In our belief and our perspectives around time and how we use it.

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Gillian Bennett: And I think what happens is we often feel behind or overwhelmed because we have very rigid thinking about when things are supposed to be done, what done looks like, how things are supposed to get done. And I just had a conversation with a coach that I mentored the other day who’s a mother, and we were talking about a sort of a big shift in her sales strategy, and she was like, oh my gosh, I don’t know when I’m going to be able to find time to do this.

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Gillian Bennett: And my job as a coach and a mentor is to, when someone says, like, something like that, I need to dig deeper, and I need to understand what she actually means by that, and so, of course, I did. And what we found was the way that she believed she needed to get that shift done.

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Gillian Bennett: was actually bigger than she had time capacity for in that week. So, for example.

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Gillian Bennett: she was like, oh my gosh, this is gonna take me a few hours. And I asked her, I was like, well, how are you planning on tackling it? And she had this idea of creating this big work block where she could just bang it all out in one go, and for this season of her life, that’s not realistic. And so when we dug into it, and we did a little bit of coaching around how she’s thinking about time, we realized that what would actually help her get things done is breaking it down into even smaller pieces.

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Gillian Bennett: So that she can theoretically do this in the cracks of time that she has, the 10 minutes that her son is occupied doing something else.

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Gillian Bennett: 15 minutes, you know, during a nap time. And when we look at time like that, it can often feel really scary, because we’re like, wait, I only have 10 to 15 minutes in different moments of the day to get things done, and sometimes that’s exactly how we get that big shit done in our business.

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Gillian Bennett: And so, when we are looking at making changes to how we do things, or refining our process, or refining our strategy, we don’t necessarily need to be looking for these giant work blocks like we used to.

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Gillian Bennett: And maybe that’s not ideal, maybe that’s not how you like to work, but when we build a little bit of flexibility and understand what fits our capacity now.

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Gillian Bennett: Well, now this mentorship client is actually able to make some big shifts in her sales strategy so that she can make more sales as a coach, but she did it because we challenged the rigidity in how she’s thinking about time.

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Gillian Bennett: And I have to deal with this myself. So, a real example of this, real time, is I have been dictating the outlines for my podcasts.

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Gillian Bennett: And that often happens as I am on a stroller walk, or specifically for this episode, I am dictating this, cleaning up after my son’s afternoon snack. He is making the cutest little baby noises, and I just picked him up as I was dictating the sentence.

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Gillian Bennett: Because…

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Gillian Bennett: I don’t have giant work blocks right now where I can do what I used to do, which is write out the entire episode sitting in front of my computer calmly. What I need to do is get this out of my brain, and then what I do is I plug it into chat… or not ChatGPT, I don’t use ChatGPT anymore, I plug it into Claude.

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Gillian Bennett: And I specifically tell Claude not to change my language, because it’s important for me that this is coming out of my brain, that it’s not AI’s brain, because we know how things that come out of AI just don’t sound like real people.

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Gillian Bennett: And when I use AI in that way, and I’m going to be recording an episode on 6 different ways that I use AI to help me in this season of my life as a mother.

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Gillian Bennett: But that helps me get content out. My goal right now is to be getting out an episode of this podcast every single week.

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Gillian Bennett: If I was waiting for the ideal circumstances where I could sit down and type out the outline and revise it a bunch of times.

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Gillian Bennett: that probably would mean I would be getting out about half the amount of content that I am aiming to get out.

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Gillian Bennett: So, this is the process, dictation and then revision. That’s the process that gets my content made in this season of life. And this matters for me when I think about this in the context of my business.

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Gillian Bennett: This matters for me because most of my clients come to me after binging my podcast episodes. So, they will maybe be a little bit interested, and then I will get a message, and they’re like, hey, I just binged all of your podcast episodes, I love the way that you think about things, this is what I need help with, can you help me? That is how I know most of my clients come to me.

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Gillian Bennett: So, for me, it is so important that I release this attachment to having X amount of time to perfectly pump out a podcast episode, and actually, this is an example of how I’ve adapted to the time capacity that I have in this season of life, right? And I know that the women that I work with that are mothers are in a similar position. They don’t have full control over their time, they don’t have

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Gillian Bennett: the same time that they used to have.

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Gillian Bennett: And so part of my job as a mentor is helping them adapt the things that they need to be getting done in their business, the things that they want to be getting done, to the approach to time that actually fits what they’re going through now, knowing that that may change.

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Gillian Bennett: And so, I want you to think about this. Are you actually being strategic with the things that you are doing, or just feeling productive? Are you doing busy work that helps you feel like, I got things done, but…

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Gillian Bennett: are you filling the time that you have with, like, scrolling for content ideas, redoing or rewriting or scrapping content, without actually asking, like, is this the thing that is going to help me build my business? Is this the thing that is going to help me be a present mother while also being a successful business owner?

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Gillian Bennett: And sometimes, it is genuinely the right thing to do to say, hey, I’m gonna spend 10 minutes just seeing, sort of, like, what reels are really getting a lot of engagement. Maybe that is what your business needs right now, because, let’s say you’re in a growth period, you’re like, I need to grow my audience. Maybe that is actually what is gonna help you.

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Gillian Bennett: We need to know if that is the thing that is going to move you forward first. Because sometimes it’s more comfortable to do things with our time that make us feel busy than actually take a step back

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Gillian Bennett: And look at the structure of our business, or look at the strategy that we’re using to move people closer towards buying from us.

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Gillian Bennett: And sometimes what can happen is we’re wondering, like, am I using my time right? And that can end up eating into itself more than just doing the work. But before we know if we’re using our time right, we need to be a little bit more meta with it. We need to know, like.

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Gillian Bennett: am I doing the things that are actually supporting my business in this season of life?

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Gillian Bennett: And, again, I want to give another example of this. So, I am working with a coach who is currently in the middle of a launch, and when we were planning for this launch, she has two little ones, one very, very little one, and no childcare.

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Gillian Bennett: And we looked at, okay, so you have a very limited amount of time in order to actually execute the things that you need to do for the launch. So, what is going to be the best leverage that we can use so that you can get content out there, which we know we need, to bring people into your audience and bring people into your program? Sorry, bring people into your program. We’re not building her audience at the same time as a launch, that’s crazy.

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Gillian Bennett: what do we need to do? And we… we really got down to, she would have, without this conversation, she would have gone into, well, how do I create more posts?

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Gillian Bennett: the goal wasn’t to create posts. The goal was to leverage what she already had, which meant that she could end up getting out two posts in the time that it would have taken her to create one new one. And so, I think this is just a testament to how important it is

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Gillian Bennett: To give yourself a moment to actually examine, where am I spending my time? And sometimes that means time tracking. That can mean creating a note on your phone and just spending a couple of days being like.

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Gillian Bennett: what am I actually spending my time doing? And that can help you understand more clearly, like, am I doing the things that are going to move me forward in this season of life without just feeling like I’m stuck being busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, but not actually hitting the goals that I want for my coaching business, not actually serving my clients the way that I want to serve them, etc, etc.

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Gillian Bennett: And I think For me.

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Gillian Bennett: This is where I often turn to an external perspective, and that’s not to say that every decision I outsource to a coach or mentor, by no means at all.

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Gillian Bennett: But, when you are building something and trying to figure out, in this season of life, what is actually right for me, especially in a season of life where you’re like, I’ve never really lived this experience before.

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Gillian Bennett: Having an outside person that can actually help you define, do we need to let this go? Do we need to do this differently?

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Gillian Bennett: do we need to think about time and how we’re using it differently? That can often really relieve a lot of the internal pressure and the self-imposed shoulds and the rigidity that happens when

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Gillian Bennett: We are trying to do it all ourselves. And I would say that having an external perspective that you trust, that understands the very…

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Gillian Bennett: unique experience of being a mother is so much more valuable for mothers specifically, because we need to maximize our time. Our schedules are less predictable than other busy professionals. Like, when you are a mother, running a coaching business, working with people, it is not the same as someone that is…

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Gillian Bennett: working a 9-to-5 job, and then they’re building a business outside of it, because they still have much more control over their time. A parent has so many unpredictable things, whether it’s, you know, your baby is teething, or your kid gets sick, or your daycare is closed, whatever that is.

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Gillian Bennett: you need flexibility, and you need to be able to come back to, how do I want to use this time in an intentional way? And so I want to leave you with this. I want you to consider, how am I thinking about

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Gillian Bennett: Time?

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Gillian Bennett: And how does the feeling of busyness show up in my day-to-day?

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Gillian Bennett: How does anxiety around not having enough time prevent you from using time that you do have? So, do you end up in, like, decision paralysis? Do you end up falling into scrolling or other quote-unquote, like, busy work because there’s a little bit of underlying anxiety about time and how you’re using it?

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Gillian Bennett: How are you able to think in a flexible way? So, for example, if you have less time than expected, something is cut short, or something changes, do you actually know what you need to do to move your business forward?

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Gillian Bennett: And then the last question I want you to consider is, are you doing things in a way that fits your current capacity, or is there still a part of you that is trying to follow advice or strategies that fit for a previous version of my life?

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Gillian Bennett: And it… it is just me trying to claw my way back to that, rather than letting myself adapt and move into the season of life I am in now.

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Gillian Bennett: Few things to consider.

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Gillian Bennett: I will end with this. If you are enjoying these episodes, share them with a mother in your life that you think could use this advice, whether it is

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Gillian Bennett: a coaching colleague, whether it is someone that is just trying to build a business. I know often

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Gillian Bennett: Especially when you are a mom, and you are a coach, and you are a solo business owner, sometimes we don’t have other people in our real lives that we can talk about this stuff with, so hopefully this can become that space for you. So share this episode if you can think of anyone that might enjoy it. If you want further support, you can find those details in the show notes.

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Gillian Bennett: And thank you for being here, thank you for listening. I am so excited to see the listens.

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Gillian Bennett: slowly increase for this podcast, and if you ever have a request for an episode, if you have a question, please, please, please shoot me a DM on Instagram. The info is in the show notes to do that. I would love to connect with you.