Embracing Maternity Leave as an Entrepreneur: Navigating Work and Motherhood
May 13, 2024
Cynthia Johnson and Ashley Legg
In this empowering episode of the Get It Girl podcast, join hosts Ashley and Cynthia as they delve into the intricacies of managing maternity leave while running a business. Drawing from their personal experiences, they discuss the emotional and practical challenges of stepping away from work to embrace motherhood. The episode covers vital topics such as delegation, planning ahead, maintaining client relationships, and setting boundaries to ensure both personal well-being and business continuity. Whether you're an entrepreneur or an employee, this discussion offers valuable insights and strategies to help you balance professional ambitions with the transformative journey of motherhood. Tune in to learn how to maintain your identity and mental health while securing precious time with your newborn, all while leading by example in your professional and personal life. Join the Get It Girl community in celebrating achievement and empowering women to live the lives they dream of.
In this empowering episode of the Get It Girl podcast, join hosts Ashley and Cynthia as they delve into the intricacies of managing maternity leave while running a business. Drawing from their personal experiences, they discuss the emotional and practical challenges of stepping away from work to embrace motherhood. The episode covers vital topics such as delegation, planning ahead, maintaining client relationships, and setting boundaries to ensure both personal well-being and business continuity. Whether you're an entrepreneur or an employee, this discussion offers valuable insights and strategies to help you balance professional ambitions with the transformative journey of motherhood. Tune in to learn how to maintain your identity and mental health while securing precious time with your newborn, all while leading by example in your professional and personal life. Join the Get It Girl community in celebrating achievement and empowering women to live the lives they dream of.
Welcome to the Get it girl community where yes, you can have it all. We are redefining confidence and life, business health and happiness. If you are
Cynthia Johnson:
motivated, full of drive a go getter and looking for ways to achieve it all without losing yourself to the constant grind, this space is for you.
Ashley:
We're teaching you to take control of your life to boost confidence to feel good inside and out, which then spills into every aspect of your life. You show up better for yourself, your relationships, your career, your passions.
Cynthia Johnson:
We also focus a lot on bucket lists to help ignite that passion and adventure in you when it comes to different seasons in your life, to relationships, travel, food, and so much more.
Ashley:
So look in the mirror and say it loud and proud. Yes, you can have it all. Get
Cynthia Johnson:
it girl, we are changing the conversation around women and success from empowerment to celebration of achievement.
Ashley:
Welcome to another gedit girl Podcast. I'm one of your hosts Ashley leg joined by my lovely co host, Cynthia Johnson.
Cynthia Johnson:
Liu, welcome back.
Ashley:
And we're talking about a very timely and relevant topic to Cynthia right now we're talking about maternity leave, as an entrepreneur or as someone who works for a company in general, what can you do? How can you do it? How can you trust the process and believe that everything is going to be okay, so that you can spend that precious time with your baby. And it's such a huge life transition. I've been through it twice. And Cynthia is now going through it a second time currently 30 plus weeks pregnant. So Cynthia, let's talk about where you're at in your personal journey. And as an entrepreneur, how are you dealing with this right now?
Cynthia Johnson:
Yes, I feel like the moment we find out we're pregnant. And all of your short term and long term plans change immediately. And that also obviously includes work, especially if you're running your own business. Not especially it's different. It's it's a different kind of expectation because you are managing someone for sure. And you're managing client expectations or customer expectations. For many of us myself in that bucket, there's a little bit of a control element to running your own business, making sure everything's going straight. So the first thing for me is to face the fact that okay, I have to step away, I know this. So start planning, prepping and getting my mind right right now. So for me, it really did start the moment i Okay, I'm pregnant, what are due date, June. Okay, that gives me the summer I'm like, are delegating this check. So step one is start planning. This is possible, just take yourself out of your life for a second and say, Okay, what does this look like without me? Where are things going to fall down? And how can I fill those gaps as quickly as possible in for future me, so that I can spend that precious time with my baby.
Ashley:
Delegating responsibilities is huge, too, as well as just like automating certain processes so that you are set up ahead of time. For example, for me, because my services are one on one in the sense that my clients are working with me face to face every day doing personal training sessions, I didn't have someone to delegate that position for because I'm a one man band. So what I did do is I planned ahead and was open and honest with my clients, I'm planning to take off two months, I would love for you to go to this workout style class. And it's very similar to mine. It's an in group environment, it's a little bit different. And let supplement your workouts that way. Now, for me, there was a risk there, the longer that I stepped away, the more opportunity my clients had to decide to go a different route. At the end of the day, it's a risk that I was willing to take because I wanted that precious time with my newborn. I truly did believe in my value that my clients would miss me and I just banked on that. And I kept in touch with them. I didn't just fall off for two months. I kept asking them how their journey was going week to week. How are they like in their workouts? What do they miss, and allowed me like I had more confidence in that process that as I followed up with them week to week, we were still communicating. We were on the same page. I knew what they were liking what they needed, so that I could come back hitting the ground running and it did work. If you truly do believe in the value of your work and you're offering amazing services or products to your customers or your clients. They will be loyal and support you but of course, there's always going to be the chance the off chance that you might lose a certain business relationship. But what's more important, working really hard or not having time with your baby or just chasing the client and the constant grind. It's a very tough balance for sure.
Cynthia Johnson:
It is It's a constant reminder that we were to live a certain life. We don't live to work. That is the reminder, if you can't take this time for yourself and your family, then what's the point of all of this? Yeah, you know, and we're both running businesses that encourage people to step into their power and be the person and have the life that they want. And if we're not doing that, so this is also a little bit of like, lead by example, yeah, others see us doing it, then they're going, okay, I can do this too. And I was lucky to have you to go first.
Ashley:
Learn from some of my mistakes, which I will share.
Cynthia Johnson:
Like, I'll just see what she does. And then
Ashley:
really what comes down to like you just said, we were not meant to live to work, everything is temporary, the time that you're going to get with your child is temporary or temporary, the time that you're stepping away from your business is temporary. Can things change, yes, but you just shift and adapt. And I truly believe that if you are in touch with yourself, which is what geta girl is all about. And you are being your authentic self, and you are genuine and you love what you do, you are going to attract your current clients back. Or if some of them do find an alternative way of business, you're going to attract more people, there are so many people out there and this world, when you really think about it, like we are a tiny speck in this massive monstrosity of a world to end. So there's going to always be so many people to connect with and so many opportunities that will come your way. So this time away, maternity leave is so precious, so short. If you're only having one baby, you'll never get it again. And if you're having only two babies, you'll never get it back again. So you might as well just savor every moment. Yes,
Cynthia Johnson:
100%. And to kind of To recap, my journey, 30 plus weeks can barely breathe. First, like find out you're pregnant. And maybe it's a surprise, maybe it's not for me this time around was a little bit of a shock. But a welcomed welcomed blessing at the same time, versus the start planning finding the holes, then finding people to fill those holes, the delegating, giving them a little bit of grace, they're not you, they're gonna do it differently. And they need time to train. So don't wait till you're 30 weeks pregnant, to bring them in, automate your processes to Ashley's point, make sure that that you're moving and operating in a way where you're able to touch base without disconnecting from your day because you don't know what your day is going to look like. And then you know, communicate ahead of time. You know, you don't have to tell people right away, obviously, there's, there's time for that. But you never know with pregnancy is not a straight line. You really don't want that added stress on yourself if a stressful situation physically comes up for you, the part of starting early but also plan for that unexpected thing who knows what that could be? We hope it doesn't happen. But if it does, you should not be thinking about work. And then you know talking about you only get once or twice. Set setting boundaries. You know, ever since I had my daughter, like okay, you want to interrupt my Christmas like I get 18 Christmases with her at calls with you this year, like Yeah.
Ashley:
I'm like, Oh, my gun. When
Cynthia Johnson:
you think about it, it's true. Yeah, the boundary isn't just for you. It's for your daughter. It's also again, it's for the people who are watching you, and your kids, your clients. And it's important to make sure that you're living the same thing you're speaking, because we're saying it because it's true.
Ashley:
It is, you know, maternity leave is so individualized. And with my first child, I definitely took the full time when you're forced into the newborn bubble. It's so beautiful, but it is so hard. And for me as an extrovert being forced to be an introvert is very mentally, like hard. I miss passions, like my work is my passion. So I miss things that that made me feel like me. So when I was ready, around four to six weeks, I knew I had to do something to help my mental health. I wasn't going to dive fully in. But I started dabbling a little bit just to see if I could handle and if it was too much, then I would pull back think about you know it's an individualized process really tried to relieve the pressure but also protect your mental space and you just have to focus on you know spending the quality time being there for your baby but also really, really taking care of yourself because postpartum is very hard and scary. So I'm not saying you have to dive back into your work but like do things that are going to make you feel good like one non negotiable for me is I needed to shower every single day. If you are nursing and you are not sleeping and you have postpartum body odor, you're sweating. You are have milk on you. You have throw up on you you're changing poopy diapers and I know I'm sorry. I'm giving you a into your life. I had to shower every day, I don't care how tired I was, that was the one thing that I told my husband, I don't care how tired you are, I am showering. So like, make sure that you are allowing yourself to do something as little and basic as that. As well as like nourishing yourself too. It's so easy to not eat. But it's so crucial that you still need to be getting very good nutrition, postpartum, and lots of water. That is like the biggest point out of all of this is like on that maternity leave, you need to be taking care of yourself. Yeah, and
Cynthia Johnson:
you're keeping someone alive, who I mean, you're during a pregnancy, but now they're like they're in your life, the problems that you're facing at work, they will move on without you. And when you go back, you may face some insecurities. For me, there was even there was a good and bad, I noticed that I wasn't needed in places I thought it was. So I had a little bit of identity crisis of like, wait, but what, and then at the same time, it opened up space for me to look at new things to do. If I was one foot in the whole time, that would have never happened. Because the same people that are there trying to support you and take over while you're gone are the same like processes that are there to in order to give you that space. You're sort of undermining them a little bit. If you're constantly following up and then people are going to come back to you, you're gonna go why are they bugging me? Well, you're basically telling them that they should
Ashley:
micromanaging which is
Cynthia Johnson:
it's a crime, and I've committed it many times.
Ashley:
I have to and obviously, everything what we're talking about to you want to make sure you're financially planning ahead. Especially if you're an entrepreneur. I know personally, for me, I did have a pretty big dip in my revenue, which I plan to head for snowing. And so one big thing I did was reduce my spending since I was not doing anything anyway. Okay, I'm going to challenge myself when I'm back and feeling good to make up that revenue somewhere. I felt like that actually helped me because it motivated me to figure out new and innovative ways, like you said, to make up the finances, rather than just putting myself to work like crazy to make it up. While on my one on one time, I was finding more creative ways, ways that didn't fully need me face to face. Like I would sell programs, for example online, that were already preset, that sort of thing. I also pre recorded workouts where people could go on to an online membership. So I was making passive income, even though I wasn't face to face with my clients. So those little things really did help make a difference. And so that's that goes back to point number one plan ahead because you could start that now to prepare for when you're gone. Yes,
Cynthia Johnson:
in depending on where you live, and where you're stager, if you're planning to advocate like Get, get short term disability insurance for your business, if I live in California, there's a program for basically everything programs in place to help you if especially for those who have to hire someone in your place, you know, a lot of what you're doing is you're just able to like prep these things. For some people like there is no prep, a lot of times you're selling time and like they want to see someone's face, you're gonna lose the cost when you're both working for sure that you have to train this person, you cannot expect them to do what you do. But if you have to bring someone on, there's suddenly programs or insurance that can can also help at least during those the first few weeks. Plan for perfect, basically, because the more you plan ahead, the better off you're going to be, you're not going to want to be thinking about this. Once the baby's born.
Ashley:
You're just getting by and doing the best that you can. And
Cynthia Johnson:
you might drag a business into the ground because you're not sleeping especially right and you stink.
Ashley:
Take the time to plan ahead, delegate, communicate with your team or clients and just really take care of yourself. I know that it's going to be all about the baby. But it's a well known saying that you have to fill your cup first before you can fill others and that really does apply to when you have a newborn too because you have to be healthy and functioning for that child to take care of yourself and make sure you give yourself self love and patience and not be so hard on yourself. Let yourself cry and feel it all because there's going to be overwhelming moments when you think that you are failing as a parent or how are you going to do this but you will get through it and just lean on your loved ones. Talk about your feelings, take deep breaths and do things that make you feel good 100%
Cynthia Johnson:
And I will look for this. I'm looking to this advice over the next year because I plan my own my own time off.
Ashley:
I did it for you. I do miss it already. And you just you know I blinked in my daughter's now over one and I'm just like how How does this happen? And I think about the time that we did have as a family that was intimate with a toddler and a newborn and you know, finding our groove and it was so special. I'm just so thankful we have so many pictures and video to look back on because I still do and it's just so special. I miss it. Well,
Cynthia Johnson:
I'm excited that makes me excited, you know?
Ashley:
Thank you guys so much for joining. I hope that you found this podcast episode if you are in you know this process too and it resonates with you because we like to say this as well. We are strong alone, but we are stronger together. So know that you have the Get it girl tribe behind you to just inspire you and push you to keep on going and doing your best. Absolutely. We'll see you guys in the next one. Bye. Thank you for listening to the gadget girl podcast. If you're not already, make sure you subscribe so you don't miss a new episode.
Cynthia Johnson:
Our number one goal is to connect, inspire and to build a movement where you never feel alone. See you in the next episode.
