Rethink Work & Parenthood

Speaker 1: [Music] hi I'm Melanie bar welcome to the she builted experience with Melanie you're here because you want to experience the life and business that you crave join me as I talk to women who have successfully built it a career and business that they love we dive into the topic of how they built it and talk about everything from Having the courage to make career leaps to the details of how to lead effectively create successful teams Implement strategies for growth and Infuse Tech innovation magic happens when we focus on the part of ourselves and our business that brings us joy so let's dive in Sarah peek is the founder and CEO of startup parent and the host of the startup parent podcast an award-winning podcast featuring women in entrepreneurship business and parenting she runs the wise women's Council an annual leadership program for women to come together honestly while navigating the challenges of working and parenting thank you for joining us Sarah tell us about startup parent and why you decided to create it I got pregnant while I was working at a tech company in downtown Manhattan Venture back they went through y combinator I was the sixth person to join by the time I got pregnant I think there's 12 people but no one else looked like me nobody else was having kids nobody else was doing what I was doing I think there was one guy who had kids but he didn't work in the office and I just had no idea how to do parenting and working at a startup and when you look out at the broader world you look at these pregnant women on the cover of Inc magazine and they looked perfect right it's like how I built this million-dollar company while pregnant and then I couldn't figure out uh day-to-day life it felt like I was totally drowning I was struggling with shock at getting pregnant I didn't even know this lifelong dream I was like wait do I want to be pregnant what am I doing what am I getting myself into and that loss of my own identity and the slipping away of my freedom I just needed a resource so I started documenting my own Journey which involved a lot of like this food worked to combat nausea and I had this side blog for a while and the blog turned into a book proposal the book proposal turned into a podcast I had a six-month-old on the podcast launched and I don't know about anyone else out there but taking on more free work when you have a six-month-old is not that great so I asked for sponsors we got $30,000 in sponsorships to launch the podcast and that is the evolution of the business as it started it was not as light bu moment I knew exactly what I was going to do it was more of an evolution and we're five years in now and we have a community for women to support them and we're launching founders with kids later the summer good for you and I love that you you bring up such a good point about seeing the women on the covers of the magazines and how perfect they look but it's so perfectly imperfect when you look at the real day-to-day life and when your kids are younger you're just struggling to keep up I'm a mom of 8-year-old Twins and I supported myself in La since I was 19 until I got married I love to work I find so much joy in work and I found myself sitting in a nursery which I love I love the twins so much I've loved every moment of being a mom but you lose a certain side of yourself that you always had and you think how do I find that and how do I maintain it and the struggle to do that looks different now for me I just felt so confused and overwhelmed because I felt like everything I thought I knew about motherhood was a lie and I know that no one does it on purpose but it's like oh pregnancy is so great you're glowing you know no it's it's really rough on your body you know it's morning sickness no it's all day sickness you're going to be able to have a natural pregnancy or birth there's no such thing like you don't have a natural root canal you get drugs for that I so discouraged and disappointed that no one told me about this and no one was saying like it's okay not to like motherhood all the time and it's okay to feel like you're totally overwhelmed and by the way that whole myth of doing it all and having it all is total BS I wish someone had said and I recorded a video about this the other day you're not going to have it all you're not going to be able to do it all and you probably won't get your body back after a baby and those things are totally fine of course you bring a life into the world you create this whole new life it affects all of you your relationships it changes how you think about work maybe it magnifies it maybe it makes you more passionate about it maybe you quit your job maybe it makes you desperate to get the things that you used to have but to expect that it won't change you is so weird when you think about it it's so true because no one tells you no one really tells you because if you say certain things you might be looked at as not appreciating what it is you have or the kids and so we love our kids so we want to make sure that we convey that but we're not always honest about what's going I went through IVF I remember sitting through a meeting and my daughter Parker who's eight now her head was sticking in my rib and for two hours I was in pain trying to have a good meeting and convey myself and what I was introducing in the right way and no one really talks about that I mean I went home and have maybe even never mentioned it again to anyone else but it's painful and going through IVF I was a vice president in a company and I said to my husband I'm going to be putting drugs into my system so I might not act the way I normally act and just know that that's because I'm putting something different into my body every day but we don't always talk about that we don't talk about miscarriage we don't talk about fertility now that I've lived through it and I've interviewed 200 parents on my podcast and then another hundred through the wise women's Council I just love talking about it because fertility one in six people are going to struggle with fertility and not just women the guys also struggle with fertility and one in four pregnancies end in a miscarriage which means if you're in a room with three other women one of you is going to have a miscarriage and we just need to talk about it more so we can say like yeah that was hard what was it like for you how did you get through it what do I need to know instead of this Hush Hush never talk about this because remember when we were teenagers they're like don't get pregnant don't get pregnant pregnanc it happens like this you get to be 35 and you're like that didn't happen the way that I thought it was right and on the flip side of that how do we maintain work if that is something we want to do and if that is part of our identity it's messy and you just have to get up every day and keep going and I can see how having that support around you can really help I am so passionate about women being able to make decisions for themselves same with dads right same with all parents binary non-binary you being able to make your own decisions and have agency in your life is really important and especially for career moms people that want to work people that um love what they do I work with business owners and Founders and entrepreneurs 30% of women this is before the pandemic 30% of women that wanted to work dropped out of the workforce because there's no daycare options for them there's no paid leave or uh parental leave options for them they suffer from pregnancy discrimination and the motherhood discrimination and this is a whole bunch of people that they just want to work right like it's not like they're dropping out because they don't want to as women we have these moments where that necessarily men don't always have I worked for the Los Angeles Dodgers and I remember standing there looking around going if I had kids how would I maintain going to 80 games a year and working the 9 to 11 hour days during the season that I was working how do I keep working in sports and have a family and not everyone has the ask themselves that question and you know when you're in these certain work environments when I got pregnant with the twins I was the only woman in a team of men and I remember thinking I can't tell them I'm pregnant and I was lucky because we were all across the country I think I was 3 months pregnant and I think they thought I just gained weight but I thought I cannot tell them till the very last minute and then they wanted me to fly to a meeting and I I had to tell them then I said uh I can't fly I'm on the no fly list you know they said what are you talking about I said well I'm pregnant I did not tell them I was having twins though because I thought if I tell them they're going to think I want to step back from this project and that I'm not going to be as invested and so after I had the babies they said oh how was your pregnancy what did you decide to name him or her and I said well babies and they said babies and I said yes I had to the story that you told the thing that stands out to me is that other people think that they can do the thinking for you and this happens so much in workplaces where you're like well I'm not going to tell them because then they're going to think that I don't want to work and that idea that they can take my ambition and drive and make choices for me is I have all the swear words for that I'm not going to say them right now because I enjoy working when I was six weeks postpartum you can't do everything I just want to be totally clear to people listening but I would skip showers so that I could write and I loved my writing and I didn't want to miss it I had all these ideas and all this Creative Energy but I was able to do a little bit because I wanted to and I think taking that away from people and you shouldn't work at all or you should be back and you should be perfect and you should look like nothing has changed those are so extreme and I wish that we move towards a world where you're able to say hey I've got a kid in here stabbing my ribs and actually I'd be way more comfortable if I could just walk in circles around this conference room and I may just need to stretch but that doesn't affect my thinking that doesn't affect my capacity all it means is that I have to stretch stretch because I'm a human and a body wild right and it's not going to affect your ability to work or your future want to work and maybe what we do ends up shifting a bit and that's okay we have to look at it that way my background was incorporate for Marriott and AT&T and the Los Angeles Dodgers and after having the twins for a while your identity you think who am I now and I think we have to be okay with having that change a little bit love that we live in a culture that doesn't want people to change oh you said this on Twitter 20 years ago like no I'm a different person now like who you met in high school my body has regenerated itself eight times since then I wish we had more generosity with each other and Grace around that being like oh you know what flying might be really hard for you because I understand what feeding a baby looks like during the first year going to 80 games might be really hard what job could be really well suited to keep you plugged in here how can we you know we move people around on baseball teams all the time we move people around on the football field like why can't we do that in our offices hey this job doesn't work for you but like right now you do this and then maybe later on once your kids are not needing you and interrupting you every two and a half minutes there's there's a chance for you to have full thoughts again I I actually said that during Co I said to a friend set your timer for every 15 minutes and pretend someone's coming to ask you a question and you actually have to physically get up and respond to it that's what it was like homeschooling twins during Co so that again I had to take a mindset of this is where life is right now you know I have to give to my family but I'm not going to stop my dreams my goals for the business what I want to accomplish they just might not happen at the pace I want them to right now because this is the life we're living at this moment and at times that can be hard to do you believe in fixing a broken work culture and we talked about this a little bit how do you believe that we do that part of it is there has been a shift even over the last 30 years where workplaces have gotten more and more intense and more and more demanding and the way that shift has happened looks like now you have two jobs instead of one years ago you might have only been a journalist at the New York Times only I say because that's a really tough job and now you have to be a journalist at the New York Times and run your entire Twitter feed on The Daily there that's two jobs plus maybe you're doing six more jobs as well maybe you've added the number of articles that you're writing I'm just using that as an example but in most jobs you have the McKenzie's you have the deits you have the ban and companies coming in and looking for efficiencies efficiencies look like removing labor most of the time how can we streamline jobs and cut them back you see it in retail services where you know you'll have a service worker or a retail worker like a gap employee and they come in for a shift from 6:00 to 10: a.m. and then they're scheduled for another shift from 2: to 4 pm and another one at closing at 10 p.m. and the computer algorithm thinks that's fine because it's efficient because we've gotten those eight hours and we've covered the peak demand but there's no Humanity in it you can't open and close and then have it something in the middle of the day and maintain any sort of freedom of your own life when do you even sleep so I think that we're really at a at an inflection point where workplaces have become quite toxic and luckily because of the pandemic and I say luckily carefully because the pandemic's not great but labor has more power now and it might not be for a long time but having advocating for yourself in workplaces is going to be the first step and I have lots of thoughts on the future of work but that's one of them and there's such a shift in the culture of work today how we're buying and selling products I think it's exciting but it's all shifting so fast and because of Technology because we took that time away but we also increased our amount of time we're using technology because we had to just sped everything up so much faster yeah we have instantaneous expectations like I'm going to buy a package and it should be here by tomorrow so if you're a small business owner you're expected to now do overnight shipping for everyone that that's really challenging the consumer expectations are extremely high it's also to your point on technology we're up at 6:00 am answering emails and then we go to the workplace and then we check in while we're at the soccer and then we you know do some quick emails at 10 p.m.

Speaker 1: and then we're working all day Saturday and Sunday so now we're giving twice as much for a job that wants us to work twice as much I want to step back and be like is it worth it like are we able to step back and and look at it and evaluate yeah this is exactly what I want to be doing with my life it gets so hard because we're trapped in Hustle culture so everyone else is doing it around us and we think it's normal but it's not people burn out consistently repeatedly and this is a perfect transition to my next question you're an advocate for setting boundaries and saying no what are the five phrases that we can use to set better boundaries I think this is one of the superpowers of motherhood and parenting like you're under a baby and somebody calls you for something that in your previous life you might have like really hustled to do you're like yes I can get there and you race out the door whatever it is a lot of people are scared to say no women in particular have trouble saying no because we're cultured to look good to not complain to help other people to be generous but in that way that's serving everyone else and to make sure that everyone else gets what they need before we do in setting boundaries it's a long conversation but it starts with getting really clear with who you are and that takes work over time in actually listening to those subtle signals in your body for me there's that story of like it's a hell yes or a hell no I was always confused because I never had that I would start to talk myself into things and be like yeah this would make sense yeah I could totally you know fly around the world and like stay up all night and do a talk and this would be great for my career I realized that my hell no is actually when I try to talk myself into something when I try to rationalize it when I use that exact sound which is well that's my No and so you as an individual have to learn where is it in my body that says no if you're new to this you won't know right away so you experiment and you say oh that's a weird feeling I'm having my stomach is doing these flip-flop things and then go ahead and do whatever it is you said yes to and ask yourself afterwards did I like that and then you start to pattern map between you could start to get the clues of of your own body and history I really like WR writing scripts for other people so my friends will text me and they'll be like Sarah I got asked to this thing what do I do how do I say no and I'll be like o how would I say no and I think about it and I write it out so I'm collecting those I think I should make it into a book but my favorite one is thanks for thinking of me that's not the right fit good luck and that's it and the key word that's not the right fit right the trouble we get into is when we say things like oh oh yeah Saturday doesn't work for me what do you think the person's going to say how about Sunday and you're right that phrase you really have nothing to say back to it because it answers every question when people ask me to do something I've learned to because I'm the kind of person who will write back immediately I've learned to put my phone down for five minutes and walk around because so often I respond and then I think oh why did I do that yes why did I agree to that it's because I didn't think it through long enough and I just responded instinctively too quickly what is your approach to management and leading your teams and what do you think is the most crucial element of leadership this relates to what we were talking about a lot of managers defer decisions and they push them onto their team the role of a manager is to really protect your team's time to help them find out what are we going to focus on what are we not going to do what's the strategy and to make sure all the players are on the same page and if you say to your person I there's so many bosses that do this and it's just bad leadership you've given them an assignment you've given them a project we're working on this content initiative and we're trying to get it done and then they're like oh we're going to do this other thing here do it right and they toss it on your plate and people are like wait I just what uh and they don't know how to say no and manage upwards because the boss has failed the leader has failed in that regards so one of the scripts and I will say I have a book with these five scripts startup parent.com half I will send you the link so you can send it to people but I write these all down so people can get them but this one when you're managing up to a boss you say oh I love it right I'm always positive in the first part like I love this project oh this is so cool you gave me Project A and B this is Project C which one should we stop to do project C so you you push back with the decision they're going to say do them all and you say I'd love to do them all but I have to choose which one is first which one do you want me to work on First and this managing up you communicate great I'm going to work on that first that's good advice I mean setting setting boundaries and protecting our time is really important that way the team memb is also putting out the best work because they're not trying to juggle so many things on their plate you believe that parenting can make someone be a better leader and facilitator as a mom of twins I completely agree with you why do you think that is through parenting you learn a tremendous number of skills that are really important for leadership if you've ever negotiated with a 2-year-old you now have negotiation strategies and we've probably tried them all bribery Brute Force counting down but you can increase your negotiation skills you also increase your patience and your tolerance to deal with other people's feelings right my little three-year-old that's a really big feeling it sounds like you really frustrated how did that make you feel and he's like I was really sad when you took that away from me I'm like okay bud like what can we do about this and he problem solves with me which honestly is more skilled than a lot of grown-ups that I know learning how to listen learning how to be flexible learning how to be present learning how to negotiate all of these are the quote unquote soft skills that we want out of business schools and parenting honestly I wish that parents got an honorary MBA because what you go through is that instrumental so true I always tell people that having the twins took my multitasking skills to an entirely new level that I thought they were pretty good until I had the twins because life is pretty predictable but with twins they'll go in two different directions you never know what they're going to say or do you have to be ready for every situation and that goes into my business life every day and you mention the counting down it's funny I can just say three and my kids no and I had a parent say to me wow I go to five I don't even start with one I just go straight to three and they know they think oh something's going to be taken away from me I'm going to lose iPad time you're so so right in that becoming a parent teaches you so many different things about leadership think breaks you to a little bit and it's not fun to go through but for many ambitious driven talented type a perfectionist women out there of which I will raise my hand I've been in that category me too I'm with you you learn at some point that actually you can't push through and do it all like that skill set will fail you at some point and it's I think that's one of the toughest lessons I had to go through because you I want to be able to do everything I want to be able like so much that I want to do in this world it is infuriating not to be able to and that's when you have to start making those hard choices and say uh I'm not doing that I'm not doing that and that is a superpower but it can be in my experience pretty painful to learn pushes you to the point where you have to take time for yourself I ask this question at the end of every podcast episode magic happens when we focus on the part of ourselves and our business that brings us joy what is one tip you can leave with us today about how you find and live your joy I love this question I have been learning very slowly over time that you can't selectively feel some feelings and ignore others and the more I let myself feel pain or sorrow or sadness anger the more that I understand what it is where it's coming from how to to express it the more I'm able to experience Joy those words are so important because so often we push the feelings away and that doesn't really help us this is the work of leaders is in the future it's to understand what am I feeling why am I feeling it how do I connect with another human being Parenthood is such a good incubator for this but so are so many other professions so many other projects caring for any living and what are our teams going through and how are they feeling and how can we best support them in their day so that they provide the best work totally agree thank you so much for joining me I feel like I could talk to you all afternoon please share with our listeners how and where they can find you find me over at startup parent.com and we've got a newsletter startup parent.com newsletter we're on Instagram and Tik Tok as startup parent thank you for joining us today I'd love to hear from you reach out to me at hello Sheil it.com on our Sheil it website or at Sheed on social thank you to my editor Rich draino who always makes us sound good until next time let nothing stop you from experiencing the life and business that you crave [Music]