Capacity and Chronic Illness with Liz Squires
Episode 6 of the Self-Made Mamas Podcast
Content Warning: Chronic illness, medical trauma, miscarriage
Today on the Self-Made Mamas podcast, I’m chatting with my friend and student Liz Squires. She’s a certified childbirth educator, entrepreneur, and chronic illness warrior and today, Liz is sharing her perspective on toxic hustle culture, inaccessible advice, and knowing your own limits, as well as learning to ask for help in a world that tells you that you should be able to do it all. Grab a cup of coffee and listen in for some eye-opening insights as we dig into the difficult but important topic of chronic illness.
Melissa: Hey Liz! Thank you so much for being on the podcast today. I’m so excited to have you here. For those who don’t know, Liz is a certified childbirth educator and founder of The Fearless Birth Project, and she has also been dealing with some not unusual, but definitely limiting circumstances when it comes to building her business. Today, I’ve invited her on the podcast to talk to us a little bit about that. To talk about the journey of building a business when you are limited by your body, or by your health. What that looks like and what advice she can offer to those of you that may be going through the same thing. Liz, I’m so happy to have you here. Could you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about who you are, what you’re doing right now and maybe a bit of your business story and how you got here.
Liz: Thank you so much for having me, Melissa. I’m really excited to be here. As you said, I am a certified childbirth educator. That’s different from a doula. It’s different from a midwife. There’s a lot of different people part of the care team in pregnancy and childbirth, but I have my own specialty as a childbirth educator. I am the founder of my own business, The Fearless Birth Project. I live in the area near Vancouver, Canada with my two kids, and I’m an only parent. I’m very passionate about maternal health. In my former life, I was a mom blogger, marketer, full-time traveller and I’m going to get into a bit of that, but I also have chronic illnesses. I’ve been dealing with chronic illness since I was five years old. I got a bad viral illness in kindergarten that triggered Chronic Fatigue Syndrome for me. I kind of like to joke that I was the kid who never grew out of afternoon naps…ever. For those who don’t know, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome is more than just feeling tired. That is kind of the biggest symptom, but it is extreme fatigue which is made worse by physical or mental activity and it doesn’t go away. It’s like your body uses up your energy faster than you can produce it. It’s a disorder at an actual cellular level in your body and it comes with a whole host of other symptoms. I was never that a really robust kid or teenager, I was kind of like an old cell phone that you plugged in overnight and in the morning, it’s still only at 50%. I missed a lot of school, which was really hard. Then, in my early 20s, two things happened within about a year and a half of each other that sort of threw a few more wrenches in my health. I got pregnant with my third baby and had a miscarriage at 13 weeks. That was the first outward sign that something was really wrong with my reproductive health. It took another seven years or so to get an official diagnosis of endometriosis, fibroids and ovarian cysts. Again, for anyone who doesn’t know. Endometriosis is when the uterine tissue that normally builds up each month inside your uterus and sheds during a period, doesn’t grow inside your uterus. It grows in other little pockets inside your pelvis. Then during the period, it tries to shed itself and it doesn’t have anywhere to go. It just gets really inflamed inside your pelvis. It’s really, really painful. It’s just a mess down there, honestly. A year and a half after that miscarriage, my husband was killed in a car accident. That left me a single mom of a toddler and a preschooler. The stress and trauma of that completely collapsed my adrenal system, and my period stopped. I gained 40 pounds in about three months. My hair started falling out. My whole body went into crisis mode. Ultimately, that came with a diagnosis of hypothyroidism, which is an underproduction of thyroid hormone by your endocrine system. There’s a whole massive list of symptoms that come with that. Of course, through all that, you have the usual suspects of depression, general anxiety disorder, you know, things like that. So, I was dealing with all that for decades and then fast forward to 2020, which was kind of the crucible year for me. Everyone had a terrible year with the pandemic, but that was nothing for me, honestly. I finally got my chronic fatigue to a manageable place. I’m not napping every day. I know my signs and my body. I’m on a solid medication regime for my thyroid and that’s doing well. I’m trying different treatments for endometriosis and talking about surgery options with a doctor, and basically, everything’s going okay. We’re getting there. Then, at the of beginning 2020, I go to the ER on January 3rd for a kidney infection, which sounds like a bigger deal than it is, but I just needed antibiotics. They run a standard blood panel which shows that my hemoglobin is dangerously low. About as low as when I hemorrhaged blood giving birth to my son. Seriously.
M: Oh my god.
L: It was really scary. They were saying, “Have you had a massive bleed-out anytime recently?” It was really scary. This started me and many, many doctors down this very long path of finding internal bleeding which had been going on for who knows how long. Multiple colonoscopies, endoscopy, a CT and MRI, X-rays, ultrasounds, blood transfusions, monthly IV iron infusions to compensate for what I was bleeding out. It was very, very intense, this whole year honestly. Eventually, this diagnosis of severe advanced Crohn’s disease in my small intestine, which seems to have gone undiagnosed for several years. In that time it has just totally wreaked havoc on my system. Crohn’s disease is an autoimmune disease. My immune system has just been repeatedly attacking this whole section of my small intestine and shredding it apart, and my health has completely fallen apart this year. I was the sickest I’ve ever been, and I don’t say that lightly for someone who’s gone through the seasons that I have. Until we had this diagnosis, though, we couldn’t treat it. I was just getting progressively worse and worse and we didn’t know what to do about it. January of this year, 2021, I barely got out of bed for the entire month. I lost 13 pounds in three weeks because I couldn’t keep anything in. There were days when I was in the bathroom 25 times or more. You and I were joking I should just move my desk in there.
M: Yeah, but it’s not a joke.
L: Yeah.
M: We’re finding the humour in it because there’s no way around the situation but it’s not a joke. This is a very real thing that you’re dealing with.
L: Totally. Honestly, it completely changed my day-to-day ability to function and losing the ability to leave my house without crippling anxiety of where the nearest bathroom is at any moment is a very scary and disempowering feeling.
M: Absolutely.
L: It’s terrifying frankly, but finally getting a diagnosis meant being able to start on a treatment plan. I’m on immunosuppressants now which shut down my immune system so it can’t keep trying to destroy my body. Obviously, this has scary implications in the middle of a pandemic because I don’t have the ability to fight a common cold right now, let alone COVID. That’s scary, but it is what it is. I have hope now because I have some of my quality of life back as I’ve got on these medications. I can see as I’m kind of coming through that storm, there’s light on the other side. There’s wellness. Some season of wellness coming up, which is really encouraging coming through this past year of horrendous illness. Looking back, 2018 is when I started this journey of self-employment. For three years until 2018, I was working in a corporate marketing and operations job. There were a lot of things I really liked about that job, but it got to a point when I was struggling with the work-life balance part of it.
M: Yeah.
L: Where my illnesses were factored in, and my thyroid at that point was not in the manageable place that it is now. I was exhausting myself at work every day, and I’d come home after work and I would nap instead of spending time with my kids. I would sleep all weekend, and in the last six months that I worked there, I ended up going down to four days a week. I just needed one day every week for doctor’s appointments and just to know that I had a reliable time to sleep. As time went on I realized this job was never going to give me enough in return for what it was taking from me. We can have a different conversation about glass ceilings and gender wage and all that…
M: That’s a whole other episode!
L: That’s something else! Honestly, though, I was giving everything I had to someone or something else while my kids got nothing from me and my health suffered.
M: Yeah.
L: That’s not an okay trade.
M: No.
L: When you’re in your 20s and you’re looking at that, you’re thinking, “If I have another 40 years left in my career, and this is already what I’m giving up, how can I keep this up for the next 40 years? This is unsustainable,” so I quit my job and I basically took a sabbatical and my kids and I moved. We travelled through Europe for seven months and I did some freelance work. I looked into completely changing industries and finally pursuing a career in maternal health, which I’ve been really passionate about since I was first pregnant in 2007. I also made that jump and quit my job before I was completely financially stable as a self-employed person, and I recognize that I have a lot of privilege in doing that and I had savings to fall back on. This is not the case for everybody. It became a tipping point where something had to give, and I had to focus on my family and my health. It meant making that leap in faith and some instability.
M: Yeah.
L: It was killing me otherwise, honestly.
Ditching the Hustle
Melissa: Tell me about travelling. Were we in Europe at the same time? I feel like there was an overlap there.
Liz: I think a little bit.
M: On the tail end. Tell me about that, though. Obviously, at the time, you didn’t have your Crohn’s diagnosis. How was your health when you were travelling, without the pressure of your job and our typical North American hustle routine?
L: There are two different ways of travelling. There is kind the travelling that I had done previously, which is when you get a week off work to go on vacation and try to take advantage of that pocket of freedom by cramming everything you can into the little bit of time you have. You come home and you don’t feel rested afterwards, right? That’s not what I wanted. I did not want to go and be a professional tourist for months at a time because that was the antithesis of what I wanted with this sabbatical. I knew that I had to rest. It had to be an intentional period of rest. It had to be time spent with my kids. We basically had to take the approach of becoming citizens of each place we visited, of slow mornings and conversations with the people at the grocery stores. That’s a very Canadian thing, but really getting to know the cities we stayed in and not seeing every tourist attraction. That’s okay. Instead, just get enough of the feel of the place that we’re in that we have a favourite cafe because we’ve been here enough times now in the three weeks that we stayed in Belfast. That kind of thing.
This episode of The Self-Made Mamas Podcast is brought to you by my FREE personal development manual, 8 Essential Habits for High-Achieving Moms. If you’re an ambitious mother, a mom-to-be, or just a busy woman with big goals, this instant-access PDF and email coaching series is going to be a game-changer for you. After going from debt, disorganization and self-doubt to running a six-figure business working only three days a week, I’ve learned a thing or two about personal growth—and after pulling data from all my most successful clients and connections, I’ve rolled it all into a comprehensive coaching series you can get delivered straight to your inbox for FREE. Head to momhabits.online to sign up now. I can’t wait to hear what you think!
L: It was a really slow approach. A slow living approach to travel, rather than this hustle and grind version of tourism, which is exhausting, frankly. It’s so tiring.
M: Oh, it is! You know Europe is where my heart is. That’s where we’re probably going to end up. We did the same thing. A few years ago, we went for eight days, I think. I was exhausted for the exact reasons you described. We saw so much and did so much and we didn’t have the kids with us. It was this whirlwind. It was obviously amazing to witness all these things but previously wherever I’ve travelled, I’ve taken the approach of staying for a long time. Living in and working there in my younger years, I’m all for that. I love that. I love the slow-living idea. I love that you used the word antithesis because it is the antithesis to this Western hustle. Not that Europe isn’t Western, but you know I mean. This sort of American Dream, Canadian Dream, whatever you want to call it. You get a big house and you finance a couple of fancy cars, and you work, work, work. You have this very predictable busy routine and that’s the norm. When you have the privilege to go and really spend time somewhere else, it turns that on its head a little bit and you realize there are so many other ways to spend your days.
L: Totally, and just ditching the FOMO.
M: Yes!
L: The fear of missing out is really drilled into travelling. Frankly, I think tourism as an industry is built on FOMO. Ditching that, getting rid of that and saying, “We’re not actually going to see everything.” We went to Paris for a while and it was my kids’ second time in Paris. We had gone to Notre Dame Cathedral the first time, so we didn’t see it the second time that we were there. About a week after we went to Paris it went up in flames, that big fire, and I felt guilt in me for a minute. On the day that it was burning, I’m thinking, “Oh my goodness! What if the whole thing burns down and we didn’t get to see it again?”
M: Yeah.
L: I did a whole check yourself moment, like, “You know what Liz. You’ve seen that cathedral three times, and your kids saw it last time you were here. Get over yourself. It actually really doesn’t matter.”
M: I have a confession. I’ve been to Paris multiple times and I have yet to go inside because the lineup is always enormous and I just cannot bring myself to do it. That’s not how I like to travel. I don’t like to do those things. I am going to see it one day, I know it’s important. I just can’t line up for that long. I can’t do it!
L: I don’t blame you.
M: This is a little bit off-topic, but we were visiting Malta when we were in Europe on our trip, not when we were living there. We only had a week and we went to France, Belgium and Malta within that time. Malta is actually a collection of islands, and Gozo is the second largest one. We were travelling back from Gozo on a bus and trying to get to Valletta, which is the capital of Malta. My husband desperately wanted to see the war museum that’s built into the rock. It’s like underground tunnels where there were military headquarters during the Second World War. He’s a soldier, so he was all about this. He’s a huge military history buff and he was so excited to go. They closed at five o’clock and we got off the bus at four and we’d been going nonstop for this whole week and I said, “I need a shower. I cannot see one more thing. I just need a shower.” I stomped my foot and forced him to come to the hotel with me so that I could shower. We got back to the war tunnels at 4:40, and I’m thinking, “It’s fine. It’s fine. We still have 20 minutes.” Unfortunately, they said that the last tour had already gone and we had missed it completely. We weren’t there the next day, so we couldn’t go back, and he was so upset.
L: Oh no!
M: The whole time you were talking about FOMO, I was thinking about having this very grumpy husband for that entire evening in Valletta and how I made him miss out. The reality is that we will probably end up back in Europe to live and he will have all the time in the world to go and visit those tunnels. We have since transformed our lives into this place where we do have that flexibility and that freedom. We will be able to go to Malta for a weekend whenever we want. At the time it felt like the end of the world to have missed out on this thing that he wanted to see so badly. The reality is that we do have time because we’re intentionally building our lives that way.
L: You’re absolutely right. It’s a whole different culture there of just relaxed and slow living and it did take me a bit of time to disconnect from life here, dealing with people’s questions and doubts. “What are you doing? Why are you doing that with your kids?” I was worldschooling them, which is similar to homeschooling, so questions like, “As a single mom, really? Are you sure you can do that?”
M: Other people’s fears.
L: Exactly. When I knew deep down this was the right thing to do and I could do it. It was amazing honestly. My kids and I still talk about it all the time. Just at breakfast this morning, we were reminiscing about memories and talking about, “Remember that place that we stayed in Wales that had a really big spider in the bedroom?”
M: Every place in Wales, then.
L: I know, right?
Finding Support
Melissa: Obviously you’re not in Europe right now and you made the decision to come back. You obviously had these ongoing chronic health issues and in the time since you have received what is honestly a pretty devastating diagnosis. Crohn’s is a big deal. Let’s talk about that in the context of being someone who’s decided to be an entrepreneur. What do you want people to know about entrepreneurship while dealing with this?
Liz: This whole past year I was begging for answers because the search for answers is exhausting. Then when the answer came and it was Crohn’s, I was like, “Oh no, Lord! Please. Any answer but this!”
M: Yeah.
L: That felt like a devastating answer. I’m getting over it, though. I’m getting over myself and my ego. Honestly, being chronically ill means figuring out how to craft a life that fits around your illness. Self-employment gave me that freedom in a way that working for somebody else was not possible for me. There have been other adjustments I had to make in my mind, but that is the life of anybody who deals with chronic illness. I have faced a huge loss of self-confidence with my various illnesses, and especially with this recent battle with Crohn’s. Never knowing, day after day, if your body’s going to do what it’s supposed to do. If you’ll wake up being able to shower, to eat, to get dressed, to drive somewhere or if you will essentially be bedridden for any number of days to come. If I wake up and I feel terrible, and I’m like, “Oh no, my body’s going into a flare.” Is this a one-day flare or is this a two-week flare? There’s this fear of the unknown. The indefinite sense of instability is really scary. It can start to chip away at all your sense of self competency and self-worth and the value that you bring to areas of your life. That’s really, really heavy. The one thing I knew when I finished my program to be a certified childbirth educator, and I was starting to look at starting my prenatal business, was that I was hugely lacking in self-confidence. I knew I needed somebody to believe in me from the outside and to guide me through the shaky beginnings of my business because I knew it was going to be rough. Anytime you start a business, you’re like a little rowboat in the storm, right?
M: Yeah.
L: I knew that if I were to do it alone, I would be so tempted to give up over and over again and let my chronic illness become the self-fulfilling prophecy for my life. “My illness makes me sick and unable to do things. Therefore I won’t do things because I’m sick.” I could not afford that. I signed up for business coaching with you before I was even ready to launch my business because I knew that’s how badly I needed someone outside my own head to believe this business could exist. That’s the part of like “the village” that we don’t talk about enough. It doesn’t just apply to people with chronic illness because I think there are other women struggling with that crisis of self-confidence, too. I’m just going to talk about women specifically. I think women who’ve come to the end of maternity leave or any extended time home with children and are looking to re-enter the workforce, that often comes with a huge crisis of self-confidence. Anyone who’s looking to make a significant shift in industries or careers, major self-doubt and imposter syndrome. Additionally, I’ve had to get used to asking for help because I’m sick. I’m a single mom and I have this feeling of extreme independence. I have to do everything on my own. Being intensely sick this past year has forced me into vulnerability and forced me to have to ask for help sometimes. I need someone to drive me to the emergency room because I can’t drive myself. Other times, I need my mom to come and wash my dishes and make food for my kids. That’s very humbling. I’ve had to get used to asking for help because I’m sick, and so it came very naturally to ask for help in my business, too. We need to release the shame and stigma around that because being a chronically ill business owner means asking for help anywhere and everywhere I can afford to.
M: Yeah. Not that it needs to be graceful, but you do it with such grace, too. Liz is part of my group coaching accelerator, and Liz does not just show up and ask, ask, ask. Liz shows up and she is everybody’s biggest cheerleader. She is the most active participant in the program, I think it’s probably safe to say. We joke that she’s the die-hard. I think in a group container, you get out what you put in, and you know the value of what you’re going to get out so you like to show up. For me, it’s been really touching and amazing to watch you persevere through all of this.
Accessibility in Business
Melissa: As a program creator, I’m not chronically ill. For me, I can try my hardest to make my programming inclusive and to make my curriculum accessible. I’m never gonna have that lens, unless I have somebody that is saying directly to me, “Hey, this is how I’m able to apply this and how I’m not able to apply this.” Maybe we could talk about that a little bit. Obviously, I know there are going to be gaps in my programming as well, just as much as anybody else’s because I’m creating it through the lens of someone who’s not ill. What are the big issues that you see in terms of business support out there when it comes to you, as someone with multiple chronic illnesses, accessing the support and then trying to implement it? What are the issues that come up for you and what would you like to see change?
Liz: I think there can sometimes be a one size fits all approach or methodology to businesses and teachings and coaching. “That always worked for me and therefore it’s going to work for everybody else.” That kind of thing, which is really problematic when I have to plan my business around my illness and body in ways that other people just don’t think about. Lunch dates with clients, for example, would be a no-go for me because of dietary concerns and the embarrassing potential for possibly running to the bathroom in the middle of lunch. I don’t book a lot of commitments during the week of my period because endometriosis can be really debilitating. My treatments don’t always work. On a larger scale, I have surgery coming up later this year. I won’t know until I wake up from the surgery whether it’s a two-week or six-week recovery, which is actually really hard and scary in its level of unpredictability. Imagine you’re a business owner finally taking a two-week vacation to Italy, and you get off a plane in Rome and they’re like, “Surprise! You can’t fly home for six weeks!” Hello, panic mode! Did you pack enough underwear? I have to plan ahead for this like I actually might be out of commission for six weeks in my business, but hopefully just two. Every monthly IV appointment for the last year, that’s a whole afternoon of no work. It requires a ton of grace for yourself to say, I’m operating on a different level than what I see in the Instagram feeds and these perfect aesthetic women with spotless kitchens and hot husbands, #BossBabe. That’s okay. I just need to narrow the voices of influence around me and my business. If you have a chronic illness, and you are a woman, chances are statistically high that you had to fight a long time for a diagnosis, while probably being gaslit, written off, and treated like a hypochondriac by medical professionals. That is a very cruel reality. You don’t need voices around you and your business doing the same thing and telling you, “If you just tried harder, you’d make more money. If you want it bad enough, you get it. The only thing standing between you and success is your mindset.” This kind of messaging may work for certain kinds of people, I don’t know. For chronically ill people or anyone who’s experienced emotional abuse, or faces systemic barriers, it can be really triggering. There’s a lot of buzz around trauma-informed coaching and stuff like that, but for the most part, that’s all it is. It’s just a buzzword. A lot of these people have no idea what they’re talking about or dealing with. If you actually come from a background of trauma, including medical trauma, the last thing you need is more professionals, even business professionals, telling you that you’re not doing enough.
M: Yup.
L: There’s this Brené Brown quote that I love and I tell it to myself all the time, “If you are not in the arena getting your ass kicked on occasion, I am not interested in or open to your feedback.”
M: I think that is so powerful. It really is. It’s very, I don’t know what the right word is here, but it’s very humbling for me to work with clients with all different backgrounds. You know that inside The Society we have single moms. We have widows, yourself included. We have people dealing with chronic illnesses. We have women in all different stages and phases of life, bringing so many different unique life experiences, many of which have been traumatic, to the table. I would be remiss to not include myself in that description.
L: For sure!
M: As a coach or a teacher of any kind, you could create the best curriculum in the world, but people are people with their unique fabric that they’re bringing into the equation. A unique experience, a unique perspective, and unique limitations. Pretending those limitations don’t exist is not serving anybody. As course creators, as coaches, as educators in any field, what can we do to make sure our programming is accessible and adaptable? I think maybe adaptable is even the better word there. You and I have had many conversations about adjusting KPIs and even adjusting the perspective of what constitutes a win. For example, in January, you were incapacitated. There was really no way for you to execute the things that you had hoped to execute when you made your plan in December. We have to be fluid and we have to adjust to that and create lots of white space for you in your planning so we know that even if something comes up, you can still at least make progress towards the goal that you’ve set. That’s a massive win.
L: Absolutely, yeah.
M: What advice would you give to somebody going through this? I know that you are still in the earlier stages of building your brand and your business, but I see big things in the future for it. You’re going to be doing that at your own pace. Not on anybody else’s schedule and not on the schedule that, as you said, somebody on Instagram is sharing or telling you that you need to be doing it. What would you say to people that are going through this themselves and thinking about starting a business or trying to run a business? Many people are entrepreneurs already and they receive a diagnosis, or something happens that incapacitates them in some way. Things get turned upside down. What would you say to those people?
L: I touched on this a bit earlier, but asking for help anywhere and everywhere that you can afford to. I pay my kids to clean my house. We live in a small house where they can clean the entire thing. If we were in a bigger house, I’d pay to get some housekeeping help. I buy pre-made meals so that I don’t have to spend time and energy cooking. That’s time I can channel into time with my kids, time on my business. There are things I’m going to look at outsourcing in my business as soon as I’m financially able to. Being able to step out of the role of martyr, to yourself, your body, whatever, and have some vulnerability and say, “Yup, I need help and that’s okay.” That’s not a bad thing. It’s alright to accept help. Also, adjusting your goals to fit your life, which doesn’t have to be discouraging. It doesn’t have to be a bad thing. Around the inclusivity piece, I have to tune out a lot of the online noise around girl bosses and hustle and whatever because it’s just not realistic for my life and my circumstances. Partly I think a lot of it is deeply steeped in privilege. Racial, financial, you name it. Also, so much of the time, these are completely healthy people talking. Not people who’ve had their lives sidelined by illnesses with no cure. I just have to shut out the chatter that makes me feel less than simply for existing in the body that I do. I have to adjust my vision board according to my reality. My financial goals are not seven-figure goals because my body and my mind can’t work the workweek that requires.
M: Yeah.
L: There is autonomy in my goals, though. The amount of money that I make is completely within my control to change. I don’t mean that in a woo-woo, manifesting kind of way. I just mean that I can take on less in the seasons that I’m really sick, and I can take on more when I’m well, and I’m the only boss the answer to. I don’t have to seek approval from someone else for my sick days.
M: That, in my opinion, is the Boss Babe definition. That’s what it means to be a Boss Babe or a Boss Girl or whatever hashtag you want to use. That autonomy is what it’s all about. That’s the root of why I do it. I think everybody that’s in The Society feels the same way. Everybody wants that autonomy. That’s their number one priority for whatever reason.
L: Totally!
M: I love that. Amazing. Thank you so much for your time and for being so candid with us. You’re so insightful and I really appreciate everything you shared with us today.
L: Thank you, I really appreciate you having me and being able to chat about this.
Liz Squires is a Certified Childbirth Educator and founder of the Fearless Birth Project.
Check her out at fearlessbirthproject.com and give her a follow at @fearlessbirthproject.
Connect with her on her personal account at @theloud.introvert to chat about chronic illness or whatever else is on your mind.
Action Items
A. Whether it’s actually packing up and leaving or working on this purely in your mindset, it’s time to ditch the hustle culture and embrace living more slowly. You can’t do everything and that’s okay. Say No to FOMO.
B. If you’re facing a lack of self-confidence right now, get the support around you to speak confidence into your life and work.
- Hire a business coach if you need one on one support.
- Join a program if you’d benefit from the support of a group.
- Look for programs online or in your area that match your needs (working moms, chronic illness, entrepreneurs, whatever it is).
C. Narrow your voices of influence.
- Work with people in the business space that understand and make room for your needs.
- Unfollow people online who make you feel like you’re not measuring up.
- Ask for recommendations for service providers that cater to your accessibility requirements.
D. Be vulnerable and ask for help anywhere and everywhere you can afford to.
- Housework, meal prep, or childcare.
- Business tasks that don’t require your zone of genius and can be outsourced.
- Coaching or personal development.
E. Adjust your goals to fit your life. Whether it’s how many hours you’re going to work in a day or week, how much money you’re going to bring in this quarter, or what services or products you’re offering, ensure that your goals realistically match what you can achieve. Don’t set yourself up to constantly fall short because you’re setting goals based on other people’s capacity.
Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of the Self-Made Mamas Podcast. You can find more information about working with us at theselfmademama.com or connect with us on Instagram at @selfmademama_. I can’t wait to chat.
