Were you able to join my last Clubhouse chat? Last Friday, Mallory Dawn Photography and I hosted a chat about navigating motherhood as creative business owners. Since Clubhouse is a live chat app, we unfortunately couldn’t record the conversation, but I wanted to give you a run down of what we discussed because it was truly amazing to get to connect with these mompreneurs.

How motherhood has shifted our businesses

Here I got to talk about my story of re-branding and the why behind my new brand. If you’d like to read more about it, you can see my last post: Introducing Jacqueline Benét.

And it was during this opening discussion that we started receiving a lot of questions about planning for motherhood. And to that we said, “you simply can’t plan!”. You can try your best, but in the end you have to surrender to the fact that pregnancy and motherhood is so unpredictable there is no way that we can truly plan our business activities around when we will get pregnant and have a baby. However if you are coming up on your due date, you can start planning ahead your social media posts for Instagram and Pinterest for example with the work that you do while you’re still pregnant. That way you can be fairly hands off with social media while still seemingly present for your business online.

Tips for how to excel in our roles as moms and business owners

While we didn’t quite make it to this next topic per se, we certainly covered these tips in answering questions:

1. Become more efficient: I am a perfectionist, and it takes me a lot of time to even just write an email. I will often re-read every sentence and overanalyze how it might read or sound. But it takes up so much time. And one of the things that I learned in becoming a mom, is that my time is limited and precious. I only have so many hours in the day and need to maximize my family time as much as I can. So putting aside trying to be perfect, and increasing how efficient I am with my precious hours is one of the biggest ways to do well for both our businesses and our families.
2. Carving out scheduled time throughout the day. Maybe you’re hustling during naps or after baby is down for the night. Finding consistent routines and pockets of time to carve out day after day will be the biggest benefit to maximizing your efficiency. Sometimes there are just days when all of that will be thrown out the window too. And acknowledge that frustration and then give yourself grace to understand that your first priority will always be your family. But if you can have predictability in your schedule then you can better plan how you will run your business.
3. Get help. I think women often take on way too much and we want to be able to “do it all” but it’s no secret that multi-tasking and juggling childcare with business life is just not going to work well. You end up feeling guilty that you’re not doing well in either aspects as you try to do both things at the same time. To me seeking childcare help is the only way to go. Right now Arthur is in a nanny share 4 days a week where he’s able to socialize with other kids and my mom comes 1 day a week. It has been such a benefit for all of us! When he was still nursing in his first year our nanny would come to us, and I still would be able to nurse him, and see him but had time to work and take care of what I needed to.
4. Level up your brand. Now more than ever it’s important that we aren’t taking low paying work in our creative businesses because our time is so precious. The more we are able to command higher price points, the less time we need to spend away from our family. So work on leveling up your brand for taking on ideal clients who will be happily paying top dollar for your work!

How we can give ourselves more grace

Mom guilt is such a real thing. You spend all day with your kids, and they catch you on your phone for one minute, and you feel an instant guilt that you’re a bad parent. As an introvert, my energy drains so quickly so for me to run around with a toddler and talk to him all day long is incredibly exhausting. I don’t think there’s any harm in saying you need to tap out for a few minutes to take a quick break from the energy and give yourself a mental break.

I’ve also started putting my phone in a different location so that I don’t have to worry about always checking it or feeling pressure to respond right away to texts or emails. It just gives me time to be present with my son and have peace even for just an hour or so at a time.

That being said, realize that it’s ok for kids to see us working or know that we have to leave to go to work. That’s part of teaching and leading them by example.

Mallory brought up a good point, too, about surrounding yourselves with likeminded women. And I think that’s what having this conversation was really amazing to feel like we’re in this community together and that we’re not going through it alone. Being a hardworking mom who wants to put their all into their family life and their creative business life can be really challenging to navigate. And we hope that by having these conversations we can connect with others who are going through the same things.

I hope that this was helpful to someone out there who is either just entering parenthood as a business owner or maybe about to start a family. And I’d love to hear from you about topics that you’d love to chat about over on Clubhouse. It’s such a great way to gain value from others and connect without having to put on makeup and while still wearing sweats, haha. Leave me a comment below to let me know what you want to chat about. Until next time, I’ll be over here soaking in all the cuddles with this little guy!