The Problem Isn’t You - It’s Career Advice That Ignores Motherhood

0:02Hi, I'm Zoe. Welcome back to Motherkind. We are proudly sponsored by Wild Nutrition's Women's Supplements and this is the show about you, the woman behind the mother. Okay, I am going to start by making a confession to you. Last year I started listening to some bro business podcasts. Right, let me explain. I am so ambitious for the impact that I want to make with Motherkind. And I got drawn in from those Instagram reels telling me if I did these five steps, then, you know, I could 10X the podcast. And I was drawn in and I started listening to these podcasts. And for a few dark months, I was kind of in it.

0:44I was listening to them quite a lot. But let me tell you what quickly happened. I started to feel like I was failing. I started to question myself and everything that I'd built. I even started telling my friends I failed. I haven't grown this podcast quick enough. I don't know what I've been doing. And everyone, my friends were looking at me like, are you mad? But I really started to believe it. The reason I was feeling like this is because I was consuming advice not built for me, right? Because even though often this advice, it's kind of wrapped up as motivation or empowerment. What is really under it is hustle harder, sleep when you're dead, want it more, just push through.

1:27There was one and it was like, sod how you feel, just keep working. Everyone has the same 24 hours. And today I'm just going to call it because it doesn't work for us and it didn't work for me. And I want to share the career and business advice that does work for us. So this sort of bro career advice, I'm calling it, it's normally child-free men or men who have very little responsibilities or sometimes women outside work. They have a few core assumptions, even if they don't say them out loud. The implicit assumption is that you have full control of your time, that you can prioritise work above everything else, that you can take big risks without consequences, that you can just say yes to every opportunity, that you can grind really hard for a few years and rest, and that you want to go all in your career and that financial success is the only metric.

2:27So it kind of assumes, right, that you have no caregiving responsibilities, no invisible labor and mental load, no childcare care costs, no school pickups, no ill children, no sleep deprivation, no emotional load, no matricence where you're trying to figure out what is going on. Problem is us millennial women, we were told you can have it all. And if you work hard enough, then you can. And most mothers I know already work harder than any human should on paid and unpaid work. And we all know that having it all is just doing it all right so I think that's when we can start to feel like we're failing and why we're so sort of um why we're so vulnerable to these messages because this career advice actually reinforces it it says if you're not succeeding it's because you're not trying hard enough and that is what started to get to me I started to believe that right it's brutal for us And it was brutal for me because when you can't follow it, when you can't hustle endlessly and take every opportunity and be constantly available, I was internalising that as personal failure.

3:43And that's why I feel so passionate about making this video today, this podcast episode, because instead of seeing quicker, this advice just doesn't fit my life. I thought I failed. And it's kind of just a complete mismatch. It is so important, the advice and the perspectives that we take on board as mothers, as women, as parents, because it's so easy to consume stuff and business and advice and career advice and life advice and even parenting that just doesn't match our reality. because this type of advice, it takes these very real constraints that we face in our time, in our energy, in our nervous systems, in our finances, and it calls them excuses, but they're not excuses at all.

4:39They are very real constraints. We do not all have the same 24 hours, okay? So I just really wanna be a bit vulnerable and say, I got sucked into this world, please don't. and if you have or if you've ever felt this way I need you to know that there is career advice that works and I'm going to share it with you now because I've learned this the hard way okay so let's start what actually works for us the first thing is that you have to know what season you are in okay when you know what season of your business or your career you are in then you can start to just own it instead of feeling like well I wish I was here or why am I not there you can say no that's not the season that you're in so I call this stay shift start or step back right these four seasons stay is are you in a season where you're staying in your current career maybe you're early in your matrescence and you're just sort of you know keeping your head down you're familiar where you're with the work maybe you're familiar with the company and you're learning how to manage working and motherhood.

5:48Maybe you're in a season where you're shifting, right? Which is where you're sticking to your current career, your current role, but maybe you're doing it differently. So you might be doing it with a new company or maybe you've gone part-time. So you might be dropping down to term time or part-time or trying to find work within your existing role and skill set that is more flexible. Maybe you're in the season of starting, right? This is where I was when I had my first matrescence, when I started this podcast and this platform. I worked in my old career two days a week just to keep the money coming in.

6:26And then I worked on Motherkind one day a week. That is how I started my business. And this sort of bro advice, this will tell you to go all in to play big if you want to make it big and I don't like that at all no for the reality of most of us if we want to start a new career we're going to use the skills that we've already got it's called paralleling and then we're going to in some other time start to build up our new career or our new business and actually that makes it more successful so when we do that our businesses are 30 % more likely to be successful and that was definitely my experience when I was able to do both alongside you wouldn't believe the businesses that have started in our mother kind community I think there are so many incredible ideas that come from experiencing motherhood and matrescence and I feel so passionately about us starting businesses in a way that works for us I'm so passionate about this.

7:29I'm going to do a separate episode on it. So you might also be in the fourth season, which is stepping back or power pause as my past guest Nihar Rushe calls it, which I just love. So if you're in this season of stepping back, pausing paid work to care for your family, then I want you to definitely listen into that episode. It's called power pause. We know that one in three women plan to pause their careers with 90 % intending to return to the workforce. So this isn't an ending of your career, this is a pausing of it. This traditional career advice doesn't talk about this at all. It assumes that you are just going to go at it and work for, you know, your whole kind of working life and that is not, that's not true for us.

8:18Think about the season that you're in and how you can match what you want to do and what you're focusing on based on that season. Okay, the second piece of advice that actually works for us is to define your version of success. We've been taught that success is your income, your title, your level of responsibility, and honestly pre-kids that's how I defined it too, that's kind of the bro version. That feels completely out of touch for me now. We need to redefine success, right? success in terms of the impact that you want to make how you want to feel how you want your days to look how much flexibility you want so much of my success these days is defined on flexibility i'm kind of successful by my own definition and when i got some distance from this kind of noise telling me that i wasn't successful because i hadn't hit eight figures yet boring um i am realized I am successful because I pick my girls up from school every day.

9:20I have impact on millions of mothers every month. I do work that really matters to me. And yes, it also pays me, but I am relaxed and regulated most of the time. And that is success to me. Yes, I could have bigger downloads, more reach, more turnover, but that would just mean more stress and less time in my family is that success to me right now no might that be success to me in five years when my children are at secondary school maybe I don't know our success is meant to change as our children change and grow as our families change and grow so you have to define your version of success maybe it is financial for you that's great maybe it is title maybe it's time freezing it doesn't matter what it is.

10:08It matters that you know what it is. So I've got four questions. If you're like, this sounds great Zoe, but how on earth do I figure out what it is for me? I've got four questions you can ask yourself. The first one is if no one else could see or judge my choices, what would success look like then? If you had a magic wand, how would you want your life and your working life to look and I want you to close your eyes and envision your perfect day what does it consist of and how are you spending your time and then the last question is if you step five years into the future and you look back on you now what is going to make this period feel amazing for you so once you've got this it gives you a north star something you can move towards and this is you getting empowered.

11:00This is you quieting that noise and thinking, I know what success means to me and then having the courage to go from it. Okay, so the third piece of advice that actually works for us is to extend your timeline. Most of us have kind of 30, 40, maybe 50 years left to work. We do not need to do everything in the next two years, even in the next five years even in the next 10 years there's an incredible piece of research that i was reading the other day that the most likely age for a woman to start a business is in her 50s we have time and this is what so much of this career advice that ignores our caregiving responsibilities just doesn't think about we need to extend our timelines okay so i want you to think about your career and take this advice from me do not take your advice from men who have no idea what it is like to have the time pressures the constraint pressures the kind of nervous system dysregulation of trying to work and raise a family so i hope that helped and i will see you next time