31st January 2025 - Not Mutually Exclusive

IMPORTANT NOTE: Due to tech gremlins, half of this episode disappeared into the ethos. However the core points I was driving home are within these 6 minutes so I assume it was the universe's way of telling me the mission was complete!

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Hello, beautiful souls and welcome to today's takeaway coming to you in the beautiful sunshine in the middle of a gorgeous park. I can hear the birds all around me. It's such a glorious morning. So I was just creating some content as I walked, and one of the pieces of content that I'm looking at creating for my social media was about the beliefs that I have let go of as an entrepreneurial mom in order to continue my business journey and in order to have the success in my business that I've had. And one of the beliefs that came up was that there was this belief around my business results directly being a reflection of how good of a parent I was, how good of a mom I was. So what this looked like was in the early days, on the months where I didn't make as many sales as I wanted, or if I had a month where income was really low, I'd think about all of the things that meant that I couldn't give to my children.

(01:08)
So I would think about how we might miss out on certain trips or parties. We might not go on as many holidays as other people. They might have wanted to, I don't know, eat out one night and I didn't have the funds to be able to do it and maintain the house holding the bills and all of the other things. And I'd feel really fricking guilty like I'm such a terrible mom. Not just because I couldn't do the things that they wanted to do and I wanted to do with them, but also because I'd invested so many hours at that early stage of my business and sometimes it felt like I didn't have anything to show for it. And so it felt like I'd sacrificed in a way time with the children where I had been busy working, trying to make things work, to then still not be able to provide for them and feel like I'd let them down.

(02:01)
So it became this very vicious cycle because it would then lead me to question, should I give this up? Am I neglecting their needs? I'm not being a good mom. All of those thoughts and beliefs that came up that were attached to my business success and the results in my business could have led to me giving up my business. And I realized that this was such an unhealthy pattern to attach these two things together because ultimately it didn't make me any less of a mom. We were able to, even on those low income months, create quality memories together, spend quality time together. And I don't believe for a moment that you need to have a lot of money to be able to be a good mom. And having a lot of money essentially doesn't reflect how good of a parent you truly are. And so attaching these two together or detaching them, should I say, detaching them from one another became really important for my resilience and my ability to continue building my business.

(03:12)
And so I started to build new beliefs instead. And these beliefs have actually become part of my ethos and ethics and values for my business and for the Limitless Mom Academy. And you'll have heard me repeat this one over and over again. The first belief is that the quality of the time I spend with my family is far more important than the quantity. The quality of the time that we spend with our children matters. The quality of the time that we get together matters. And actually there are research papers and studies that show that for a child to create healthy attachment to their parents, to feel loved and seen and heard, and to create that bond, the needed minimum amount of time for that to happen is an hour of one-on-one time. So it's not distracted or with other children an hour of one-on-one time a week.

(04:12)
Some people have said that 10 minutes a day, one-to-one time is enough. But a good solid hour of one-to-one time a week, I think is poignant. That's far less than I ever thought it was or believed it to be. Now, I'm not saying you should spend less time with your children, but what I'm saying is, is that you are doing a really fucking good job because I know that you are all spending beautiful time with your children and with this new awareness, you can focus your energy on the quality of the interactions you are having and the way that you interact with them and leave behind the guilt about the amount of time that you're spending on your business. Other beliefs that I started to adopt that were helping me to shift the way I was feeling about the results in my business were that having more money doesn't make me a better mum. So having more money doesn't make me a better mum, and that just helped me to separate, to find separation in these two areas of my life.

(05:24)

The other beliefs that I kind of picked up were around time and care. So it's safe for me to spend time on my business now so that we will have more time in the future, but I had to be very careful with this one because it also meant that it was safe for me to spend as much quality time on my business as I did quality time with my family, not as a sacrifice of quality time with my family to build the business so that I might have quality time with my family in the future. So this is where this belief gets. You have to be very, very clear on what you mean and how you word this one, because for me, it wasn't about being okay with spending time my business and sacrificing the kids. It was the belief that I got to have both. I could be a really good mom and I could spend time building my dreams and building my business. And the two didn't have to be mutually exclusive. I could be both. I could have both, either or wasn't dependent on the other