Startup Parent

In the first few years of having kids, it can seem like the snotty, runny noses are never ending. In a way, that’s true. Young children are building their immune systems, and in doing so, they are dealing with all the colds and viruses going around. They get sick a lot.

Whether it’s in the younger years because they are at daycare, or the older years when they hit kindergarten, almost every parent I know says there is just a long season—about a year and a half—where their kids get cold after cold and seem to be a giant germ factory.

On this episode, I dive into my best strategies for keeping colds at bay, and the tools we use to manage the bugs when they do inevitably hit our household.

My favorite tip? If you have older kids, have them change their clothes (or at least just their shirt) and wash their hands thoroughly when they get home from daycare. That toddler shirt is filled with grime, snot, and boogers and other kids’ sneezes. We adopted this trick when we had our second child, and it helped cut the spread of toddler germs down a ton.

Listen in for my time-tested ways to keep the germs away, why we’re “super boring” in the winter and sleep a ton, and what we do when the colds do catch hold (because they do)—our portable steam inhaler and neti-pot are two of our favorite winter friends.

Good luck, parents. It’s germ season, and winter can be rough. If you have extra sick days at your work with young kids, or you can slow down your work pace through winter, do it. No need to be a superhero with a tiny one at home. You already are a superhero as a working parent, and it’s okay to just do a “good enough” job right now.

Want to simplify your business—or your life? After the birth of my first kid, I was exhausted and overwhelmed, and my current systems weren’t working. So I got out my pen and paper, wrote down everything I was doing, and cut half of it off my list. How’d I do this? By identifying the things that are the most important for business revenue, and deferring the non-essential items until later. Now I’ve got a short book walking you through the process, with key questions that help you get clarity and find a way to breathe again. Download the book at startuppregnant.com/minibooks. Here’s to small moments of sanity. We all need it!

Want to be part of the magic that is gathering together with smart, talented, wise business women? The 2020 Wise Women’s Council is now open for enrollment. Early bird applications are open through January 20th, and the program kicks off in March. Yes, we want you—all of you in your messy, imperfect, parenting-business-what-am-I-doing-madness. Apply here.

FULL SHOW NOTES

Get the complete show notes with episode quotes, photos, and time stamps at http://www.startuppregnant.com/138.

#137 — Broadway and Pregnant

A friend of mine reached out a few weeks after the birth of her second baby girl and said, “I need to tell you my birth story.”

“Absolutely,” I said, “What do you want to talk about?”

“How I changed my birth plan and care providers for my second pregnancy—I was much more intentional about who I wanted around me, and the people I wanted to be in the room.”

Today we get to hear Tanya-Birl Torres share her two birth stories on our show, and the marked difference between her first birth and her second birth, and why she decided to create such an intentional environment for her second pregnancy.

Tanya is an actress, dancer, and choreographer who spent a decade in a career on Broadway, performing in shows like The Lion King, On The Town, West Side Story, and many more. With her first baby, she was on Broadway throughout her pregnancy and back in the show not long after giving birth.

Today she has a creative practice as a yoga and meditation teacher (which is how I met her), works as a director, and is the founder of So Humanity, an organization dedicated to embodying, facilitating, and bringing out change in across individuals and organizations.

In this interview, which we recorded with her 7-week old at home, she shares her background as a performer and a dancer, and what it was like to get started as a dancer and then, after performing for a while, to get pregnant and have a baby while working on Broadway. Today, six years later, she gave birth to another child and reached out so we could talk about what it’s like to advocate for yourself and what you need through the process. Every hospital, midwifery practice, and doula practice is different, and these institutions around us affect us. She shares how to listen in to what you need and why it’s important to find the right people to help support you in your birth, business, or life. She is a phenomenal storyteller. You’ll love this episode.

Get the complete show notes with episode quotes, photos, and time stamps at http://www.startuppregnant.com/137.

#136 — Not everyone has exactly nine months to plan ahead and prepare for motherhood — sometimes it can happen overnight, and other times it can take years. The process of adopting a child can be long, laborious and fraught with uncertainty. You never know when you’ll get the call or how long it will take, or when you might become a parent. 

For Priti Krishtel, she got the call late one night that her kid was here, and she jumped on a plane to be at the hospital on the other side of the country just 24 hours later. On today’s episode, we talk to Priti about her journey to parenthood, and her thoughts about becoming a mother, and how she felt about parenthood in her twenties and thirties. 

For a long time, she wondered if it was in the cards and whether or not motherhood was right for her. When she met her partner in her late 30s, she tells us how it was early on that he brought up adoption and kids. She was thrilled to find someone on the same page as her. 

Priti is a human rights lawyer and the cofounder of a company called I-MAK. They are a company focused on changing the way that people have access to medicines. Today, over 2 billion people live without access to critical life-saving medicines that are often priced so high as to be unattainable. One of the root causes that they’ve identified behind this problem is the outdated patent system which enables drug companies to get hundreds of patents and set high prices for extended amounts of time. This can be crippling to people who live in poverty. Her work is all about how to medicines more accessible for everyone particularly vulnerable populations. 

In today’s show, we hear the story about how she took a sudden, short leave from her company to welcome her child to her family, and how her company rallied behind her throughout the process. We’ll hear about her process of adoption, how becoming a parent influenced her work, and how her work changed in becoming a parent. 

FULL SHOW NOTES

Get the complete show notes with episode quotes, photos, and time stamps at http://www.startuppregnant.com/136.

How do you respond when someone asks you if you’re having more children? You asked me a really personal question on today’s episode: Does your family feel complete now that you’ve had two kids? Do you know how many children you want to have? How did you decide? This is a really hard question to answer. I don’t mind talking about or sharing these things, but this one isn’t an easy one for me (you’ll hear me get close to tears on this episode). I don’t have an easy answer for this one, but I do have an answer that we’re holding in our family.

Did you know we have a brand-new bonus podcast? Ask Sarah: The Podcast is a place for you to ask anything you'd like—about your life, my life, business, parenting, or whatever is on your mind. This is a teaser of our brand new show.

To listen to this episode and all episodes of Ask Sarah: The Podcast, become a backer on Patreon to get exclusive access to this listener-backed bonus episode. To get access to this episode and every episode of the bonus podcast, go to https://www.patreon.com/sarahkpeck to become a backer. You'll get every episode we've ever made, plus a brand-new episode every month. You'll also be able to ask me any question you'd like to know more about. This is a teaser of what we talk about and why we have a bonus podcast series.

FOR THE FULL EPISODE, BECOME A BACKER ON PATREON AND GET ACCESS TO EVERY EPISODE: https://www.patreon.com/sarahkpeck

This is a private bonus podcast for podcast supporters that we record every month. Your support helps us keep this show and all of our work going, and we deeply appreciate the listeners who take the time to back our show. By becoming a listener-backed show, we can keep the quality of the show high and the sponsorship segments to a minimum and continue to bring you great stories, guests, and episodes to come. Find all the past episodes at https://startupparent.com/ask-sarah-podcast/

Got a question you want me to take a look at, or just want to know my opinion on something? Go to startupparent.com/question and record a question and I'll answer it on an upcoming episode of Ask Sarah: The Podcast

Cary Fortin, who many of you have heard before on the podcast, is joining us again today to talk about minimalism, motherhood, and decluttering. Cary is a writer, a storyteller and a designer, and she is the co-founder of New Minimalism, a company focused on de-cluttering and design. She and her business partner, Kyle, help people regain meaningful relationships with their stuff and their things through organizational philosophy and design.

They founded the company in 2011—before the Marie Kondo craze hit—and they started their business by going into people’s homes and helping them find a new way with their things. In 2018 they released their first book, New Minimalism: Decluttering and Design for Sustainable, Intentional Living. The beauty of this book is in its deeper philosophy, behind why we have things and what we surround ourselves with and what to do about them.

Behind all of our stuff are a series of questions: What is the purpose and the joy of the space? Who is it serving, and why? What are the meanings behind the things you have, and what do you want the space to do for you?

In this episode, we talk about rethinking your spaces and how to do so with intention, compassion, and understanding. Moreover, I ask her about minimalism, motherhood and staying sane in the chaos of kids:

Get the complete show notes with episode quotes, photos, and time stamps at http://www.startuppregnant.com/135.

#134 — Careers Twists and Turns

When Brea Starmer was seven months pregnant while working at a startup, she was laid off. In her third trimester, she started a consulting practice and interviewed for jobs—quickly starting her own consulting practice and then launching her company. Between having her first kid and then getting pregnant with her second, she decided to focus on building her own consulting agency to create flexible jobs for working parents. She hired her first person at the end of 2018 and has since grown her company to 50 people today.

Tara Zimmerman had a similar career pickle, but of a different nature. When Tara Zimmerman first became a parent, she didn’t have a master plan to be a stay-at-home mom. But then, four kids and eight and a half years later, she was running a household and juggling a massive schedule with six humans at the core. But where was she, and did she want to get back into the work world? Turns out, the answer was yes. She signed up to join the Wise Women’s Council to support her while she transitioned back into the work world and back into a finance and operations role at the company she used to run with her husband.

Today’s careers are no longer linear, and they don’t follow a map. Most of us have unconventional career paths, because we’re living through a time when the world of work is rapidly changing. Not only that—our lives are unfolding and changing, too! From children to parents to unexpected bumps along the way, we’re navigating a new world of work that hasn’t existed before.

If you feel like you’re entering the world of parenting and it’s madness, because your job is changing, your dreams are changing, or the company you thought you’d be with completely folds one day, trust us—you’re not alone. Whatever it is that happens in our stories as it unfolds, we all eventually arrive at a place where we look around and say, “Wait a second, where am I? What happened? And what do I do next?”

That question—what do I do next—is at the heart of the work that comes up time and time again with the women in our community here at Startup Pregnant. It turns out, it’s not always an easy question to answer, and it’s through conversations and connections with other people that we can see who we are and wake up to the changes we want to make in our lives. If you’ve been through a career pivot, or you’re wondering what you’d do during a layoff, or a work break, or you’ve even left the world of work for a while—today’s episode is for you. 

Today's conversation is between me and two of the women who just finished our year-long Wise Women's Council, our annual program for parents navigating entrepreneurship and parenting. If you listened to last week's episode, we talked to three women in the program about navigating your career path when you have kids, and the many ways entrepreneurship can show up in your life. This week, we get to meet two more women who have been in this community mastermind all year.

What I learned over and over again from each of these women is how many of us are figuring it out as we go and doing what we can with what we have, even as the world continues to change around us.

 Whether you are reentering the work world after a break or you're facing a huge amount of uncertainty after a layoff or you're starting to build a new company from scratch, or maybe you're even creating a new role for yourself within an existing company. The challenges that face us as we level up in leadership while becoming parents are not easy. I'm so thankful to both Tara and Brea for coming on the show and sharing their stories with you today.

FULL SHOW NOTES

Get the complete show notes with episode quotes, photos, and time stamps at 

One of the things I keep learning from gathering groups of working women together is how broad and diverse the realm of entrepreneurship is. Common culture would have you believe that entrepreneurship looks like a single white dude building a company out of his garage with a bunch of coding co-founders. Eating ramen. Dropping out of Harvard.

Sure, Silicon Valley has that.

But there is so much more to entrepreneurship than this.

I've met women who are building so many different businesses, in many different forms. What I’ve learned in interviewing and working with hundreds of you is that building businesses is a huge, broad landscape—and that women are building businesses faster than almost any other demographic group. (Black women are starting businesses at unprecedented rates.)

From private practices to PR firms to new companies serving women and families, to big tech companies to investment companies to research-based practices—women’s entrepreneurship is diverse, phenomenal, and important.

For some people, they became entrepreneurial by accident—stumbling into entrepreneurship when a career path reached a dead-end, or wasn't fulfilling anymore. Others, like the story Tara McMullin shared on our podcast, found themselves jobless and pregnant and with a choice: start a new adventure or try to find another gig? Still some people start down the path because of a product idea they can't get out of their head, or a market segment and a population that needs to be served. Some people become entrepreneurs because it’s their calling. Some people don’t even know they’re building a business until long after they’ve been serving clients and realize that they’re in the thick of it as a full-fledged business owner.

Here's a secret: most of us scroll Facebook and Twitter and Instagram because we are bored out of our minds, lonely, or craving more stimulation. The "news" is a stand-in for the type of deep satisfaction that comes from making things with our bodies and minds, and truly connecting with other human beings. Humans naturally crave learning, growth, and being with other people.

Entrepreneurship—the art of making new things, of creating a new business in the world, and serving other people with your gifts and talents—can be deeply challenging and immensely satisfying. I've met and interviewed entrepreneurs of all types and what I've learned is that it's not about how you look, whether the media covers your type of business, or the “hustle” you’re supposed to have.

Entrepreneurship is about listening to your own inner wisdom, it’s about knowing yourself and deeply understanding people around you, and it’s about making things that change other people’s lives while also changing yours. It’s about the call to leadership, business, and growth.

Last year, in The Wise Women's Council, we had 18 women join us for a nine-month journey following the ups and downs of building businesses, careers, and lives. Some of the folks we had joining us on the journey included:

• A tech employee who used the courage of the group to quit a lucrative leadership position and venture out onto her own to test two of her ideas for upcoming companies.
• A service-based entrepreneur who helps other business owners build maternity leave policies and stay sane while taking parental leave.
• A marketing consultant who was fired from her job while pregnant and vowed to build a better business, launching a marketing consultancy from a small studio shed in her backyard in Seattle. (You’ll hear her story on the latest podcast roundtable.)

Today, I bring three of these women onto the pod

Did you know we have a brand-new podcast? Ask Sarah: The Podcast  is a place for you to ask anything you'd like—about your life, my life, business, parenting, or whatever is on your mind. This is a teaser of our brand new show.

In this episode, you asked: What did I do to get my kids to sleep? How do I take care of myself? What do I need to rest and recharge? I also talk about how I've added specific restorative practices to my life, and share a glimpse inside my partnership and how my partner and I try to make time for each other with two kids—not an easy feat.

To listen to these full-length Q/A episodes and get your own access to this private, listener-backed podcast, head to patreon to become a backer of our show. This is a private bonus podcast for podcast supporters that we record every month. Your support helps us keep this show and all of our work going, and we deeply appreciate the listeners who take the time to back our show. By becoming a listener-backed show, we can keep the quality of the show high and the sponsorship segments to a minimum and continue to bring you great stories, guests, and episodes to come.

Ask Sarah: The Podcast is a place for you to ask anything you'd like—about your life, my life, business, parenting, or whatever is on your mind. This is a teaser of our brand new show.

FOR THE FULL EPISODE, BECOME A BACKER ON PATREON AND GET ACCESS TO EVERY EPISODE: https://www.patreon.com/sarahkpeck

This is a private bonus podcast for podcast supporters that we record every month. Your support helps us keep this show and all of our work going, and we deeply appreciate the listeners who take the time to back our show. By becoming a listener-backed show, we can keep the quality of the show high and the sponsorship segments to a minimum and continue to bring you great stories, guests, and episodes to come. Find all the past episodes at https://startupparent.com/ask-sarah-podcast/

To listen to this episode and all episodes of Ask Sarah: The Podcast, become a backer on Patreon to get exclusive access to this listener-backed bonus episode. To get access to this episode and every episode of the bonus podcast, go to https://www.patreon.com/sarahkpeck to become a backer. You'll get exclusive access to every episode we've ever made, plus a brand-new episode every month. You'll also be able to ask me any question you'd like to know more about. This is a teaser of what we talk about and why we have a bonus podcast series. Got a question you want me to take a look at, or just want to know my opinion on something? Go to startupparent.com/question and record a question and I'll answer it on an upcoming episode of Ask Sarah: The Podcast.

#132 — How To Streamline Your Business: New Minibook

Last time we talked, I was in the middle of a midstream flop.

Sometimes forward progress doesn’t look like progress at all—because other things take a spot on the front burner. It’s hard to acknowledge all that’s happened here at Startup Pregnant without still feeling like I have twelve burners cooking and I’m constantly burning something. Maybe, actually, the more accurate metaphor is that I forgot to start the boiling water in the first place. That’s what it feels like, at least.

Getting things done is not linear, and it’s not easy—especially not with kids. Despite the best laid plans, trying to show up in a consistent, regular fashion and maintain focus and momentum can be hard. For me, especially when it comes to writing and entrepreneurship, it feels like some days are a scramble of fixing the things that broke, and it’s hard to measure forward progress.

What I’ve learned, and what I continue to learn, is that I need to focus on as few things as possible in order to make real moves forward. I have to make hard decisions about what to cut from my plate in order to bring the next project to life.

Today I’m excited to share the latest minibook with you, brand-new and out in the world: How to Streamline Your Business. It’s the process I use to painstakingly cut back on initiatives in order to find focus and actually ship things in the world. It’s the process I used to focus primarily on the podcast in the first year of building Startup Pregnant, and the process I used again to stay focused on building only the next branch—The Wise Women’s Council—for the year following.

FULL SHOW NOTES

Get the complete show notes with episode quotes, photos, and time stamps at http://www.startuppregnant.com/132.

I’m back for a short and sweet update, and I’m a little nervous to share that I haven’t really made any forward progress over the last few weeks. In fact, I’ve been avoiding recording an update episode because I want to be able to come back and show off a shiny new project—like, voila! Here ya go!

But my writing and building progress isn’t like that. The last few weeks have been full of work and deadlines, but I haven’t had space—or made space—for writing. Instead, I shipped important work and I still have a goal that’s on the back burner.

Here’s a short update from the writing cave, and what I’ve learned even though it’s been a lull for a moment when it comes to writing.

FULL SHOW NOTES

Get the complete show notes with episode quotes, photos, and time stamps at http://www.startuppregnant.com/131.