JENN:

I know you have this moment in time when your husband got laid off and everything needs to hit the fan. Can you share that with us a little bit, definitely?

KAREN:

My husband was laid off and luckily he was able to find a job really quickly but it was in another state, and it was kind of a contractor position, so we didn't want to move.

I ended up being at home with my two little kids, and I had just started my own business, and at first things were fine. I had a couple of clients and I was able to manage it all, but as my business grew, and I got more successful. I couldn't do it anymore.

There was a moment I remember so I had the flu, I was laying on my couch, trying to type email to a client as my two kids have their lightsabers were chasing each other screaming around the couch. Thinking to myself, this cannot be life. My life is supposed to be like this. It is not what I dreamed when I thought of starting my own business, and having the freedom and flexibility was like This cannot be right. This is not the way it's supposed to be.

I realized that I was so out of alignment. I was trying to do everything for my kids and then I had all these new clients that I was trying to serve to make sure that they wanted to stay with me and hire me more, but I totally left myself out of the picture. It really started me on the kind of self-discovery of figuring out how am I going make this work by myself with my two kids and then this business.

 

I took a lot of productivity classes I took courses, but I realized that nobody really understood my life as a mom entrepreneur. I took a lot of courses from really well-known productivity experts but they were men and they didn't have the responsibility of taking care of their kids and so I remember one time my son got hit in the head and gym class, and I had to take him to Urgent Care.

 

And we had this whole thing we were supposed to do for this class I was in and I came back and I said, "I'm sorry, but this happened. So now what do I do?

 

He's like, "I don't know and I'm like, "Well what do you mean like we...

 

How do I do next, how do I get back on is like I've never had anything like that happen. He's said, "I just go to work every day, and that's what I do and I realized that people don't understand this unpredictable life as kind of a mom entrepreneur, and that's really how I got started figuring out how I'm going make this work to make sure that I had time for me, 'cause I was a lunch in right, if something happened to me, I realized everything fell apart.

 

That's a scary place to be in, too. It was very scary. But I think a lot of women get to that point at first, I think. Oh, I got this right. Everything's working fine. But then as you start to get more clients or maybe for more services or whatever that looks like, for you, you realize, "Wow this is not working or I can't do this. And what was First is time for yourself, right? So I think that's the place that so many women get lost, they're still serving their clients, they're still trying to be the best mom, but then they don't have the time for themselves.

 

When I was sick and I realized that was a starting point, but I just kept realizing there I didn't find solutions for my problem and my specific problem. But there has to be a way, I just kept realizing there's a different path.

 

There must be a solution, that I can really have this business and my kids, but then have a little time, you just a little time for myself. And so hearing those responses, I realized that, Okay, I think I'm going have to figure out the solution by myself. So, this was over 10 years ago and there weren't kind of some of the social media wasn't as big, it wasn't the self-love movement.

 

I don't think as much. So I really didn't have those same resources and so it r