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11 years ago, when I was pregnant with my daughter, I felt like I was in the middle of an identity crisis. I didn’t know who I was or what I wanted out of life, my career or motherhood. I was driven by success and achievement and I knew that wasn’t going to serve me as I started a family. I knew I needed to make some changes, but I had no idea what to do or how to do it.
I went on my own self-discovery journey, that eventually led me to become a coach. But it was an up and down journey that took getting comfortable with failure, uncertainty and required an increase in confidence.
In today’s episode, I share my personal working mom journey and how I went from confusion and unfulfillment to success and balance. It required several leaps of faith and I will tell you how I navigated each of them.
Topics in this episode:
I was the breadwinner of the family and it felt too irresponsible to make a change
I had to get comfortable with potential failure
Developing an internal compass to help guide my decisions was key
I never knew “for sure” if things would work out, but I did it anyway
It took risky investments of money and leaps of faith to get where I am at today
Show Notes & References:
If you want to hire a coach that has been where you are today, schedule a free breakthrough call and let’s discuss exactly how to get out of feeling stuck: www.rebeccaolsoncoaching.com
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Transcript
Intro
Working moms, I've been where you've been.
Eleven years ago, when I was pregnant with my daughter, I felt like I was in the middle of an identity crisis. I didn't know who I was or what I wanted out of life or out of my career or out of motherhood. I was driven by success and achievement, and I knew that wasn't going to serve me very well as I started a family.
Around the time I was pregnant, I went on my own self discovery journey that eventually led me to becoming a coach. But it took getting comfortable with failure, comfortable with uncertainty. It took getting comfortable with myself.
On today's episode, I'm sharing my personal working mom journey. My journey from confusion and unfulfillment to success and balance. It has been a wild ride. And although you've probably heard bits and pieces of this story throughout the podcast, I'm putting it all together for you right here today.
Are you ready? Let's get to it.
Welcome to the Ambitious and Balanced Working Moms podcast, the place for women who want to balance their ambitious career goals with their life as a mom. If you're looking to feel more confident, decisive and productive at both work and home, then this is the place for you. I'm your host, Rebecca Olson. Let's get to it.
Hello, working moms. This is going to be a bit of a special episode today. I'm going to share with you my story. Now, if you've listened to this podcast for a while, I'm sure you've heard bits and pieces of this story and probably resonate with some or most of it. But I want to share it today, sort of from start to finish, and then offer you the top four lessons that I have learned from my experience.
And I wanted to share it near Valentine's Day, because I want this episode to demonstrate my love for you. Yes, you, the hardworking, go getting, double shifting, ambitious, successful, ridiculously capable, and amazing working mom.
There's almost no better way that I can share my love for you, except to share my story. I mean, this is really up to you, but hopefully for you to feel seen. Isn't that what we all really want on some level? To be seen? For someone to recognize what we're doing, what we're going through, the effort we put in, like who we are and its impact? And I see you.
I know what it feels like to be an ambitious working mom. I have been through and continued to experience my own struggles in balancing work and life and parenting and self care and going after ambitious things. So you are not alone.
From my heart to yours. Here's my story.
My story doesn’t begin with motherhood.
Now, my story doesn't begin when I became a mom. No story really does. It starts before that. Long before that, really. I was one of those kids that every adult loved. I was adaptable, easy to get along with. I followed the rules. I did my homework without question. I was quick to help.
Ultimately, this created a sort of easy life for me. I was a good student. I had a good work ethic. I did well in school, and in many of my endeavors, really. I was into musical theater when I was a kid, and I was always in a show or I was on stage performing in some way, and I was good at it.
As I got older, lots of doors began to open for me. Getting into college wasn't all that hard. Getting roles in different shows or positions in a variety of shows came really easy to me. I just kept at it and doors kept opening. When a professor offered me an opportunity, I took it.
I decided to stop performing eventually in college, and I moved into working backstage as a stage manager. And I found I was really good at that, too. I ended up getting jobs at the San Diego Symphony. I stage managed for them. I got hired onto coveted shows where I lived in San Diego.
I always wanted to be toward the top and working for the best theaters on the best shows and kind of making the most that I could. And then, out of the blue, another door opened and I was offered a job in Seattle. It turned out to be my absolute dream job in theater and I moved up there.
And I met and married my husband in Seattle, where we both worked at the same company. And then it was his turn to go back to school for his master's. And so we moved back to the San Francisco Bay Area in California, where in the middle of the 2008 financial crisis, when we moved, unemployment was at almost 12%. And I landed a job.
I landed a job that 450 other applicants applied for. And it just wasn't any job. Once again, it was my dream job. When I moved back to California, I had made a decision that I wanted to leave theater behind me. Instead, I decided I wanted to seek after event management work.
I sort of wanted to pivot in my career, and my new job was as an event manager at a theater. So over the next six years, I worked at Fort Mason Center in San Francisco, and I worked my way out of those theaters and into several other venues, where I became the lead event manager for events of 10,000, 20,000 people. I worked for Facebook and Google and many other top companies that used our venues. And again, doors just sort of opened for me, as they seemed to always do, and my hard work ethic just continued to pay off.
I was feeling stuck and restless.
After about five years at Fort Mason Center, I began to get a little restless. I was making more money than I had ever imagined myself making. Which, just to be clear, it wasn't a lot of money. But for someone that dreamed about being a performer in musical theater, which makes absolutely no money, where you are a broke artist, this job just felt like a dream to me.
I also loved going into work. Even though the commute was an hour, I didn't mind it. Out my window of my office every day, I stared at the Golden Gate Bridge and Alcatraz. I just loved what I did. And that day corresponded a lot with the moment I got pregnant with my first, my daughter, Lillian.
At this point that was almost eleven years ago, I had a moment where I realized I just really wasn't happy anymore, that what I was doing just wasn't satisfying. I just could not even imagine going back to that job after I returned from maternity leave. Now, I knew I didn't want to be a stay at home mom for sure. I did not want that, but I certainly did not want to return.
But up to this point, doors had opened for me, and I just simply walked through them. The next opportunity just continued to present itself and I would walk through it. That was sort of the story I had been living in. And the idea of sort of figuring out what I wanted to do with my career and go after it, that sort of felt like I was starting from scratch. And it felt daunting, and it felt super paralyzing.
And besides all of that, I was the breadwinner. I held the insurance. We were living in one of the most expensive places you could ever live, like on this planet, and making a change, at least circumstantially, it just felt like it was off the table. And yet I was miserable going into work. I could not keep doing what I was doing. My heart was telling me I couldn't do that. My time at work, away from my soon-to-be baby, had to feel worth it to me.
I had to get to know myself.
So slowly, I started to embark on my own self-actualization journey, if you will. My quest was to figure out who I was and what I wanted next in this sort of season of my life as an ambitious working mom.
And there was this crucial book that I read at the time, and I want to give credit to the authors. It was Mark and Lisa Scandrette and the book is called Free: Spending Your Time and Money on What Matters Most. And I went through this book with a group of close friends that I went to church with.
The book had all these amazing ideas around intentionality, and it gave all these exercises to help you sort of dig into things that matter most in your life. And there was one exercise in particular around your identity and putting words to your identity and creating identity statements. That really struck me the most. This was the exercise that sort of answered that fundamental question: Who am I?
It was such a crucial question at that moment to answer, because up ’til this moment, I was thinking about what I wanted to do next, not who I wanted to be and who I was naturally designed to be, which was the whole problem.
And so what stood out to me most in this book, as I went through this exercise around my identity, was that I am a people person. I'm a people-first person. And when I look back at all of the jobs and all of the things that I did in my life, particularly in my adult life up till that point, what I cared about the most were the people.
I didn't really care about the shows or working in theater or being an artist. I didn't care about the events and the big names at work. I cared about the people I was working with. I cared about the people I was mentoring. In fact, mentoring was my absolute favorite thing I did in every job that I had, even though it really wasn't in most of my job descriptions. I am a people-first person.
And I remember thinking to myself, “It almost doesn't really matter what job I get next, because it's about the people that I work with and the impact that I want to make on those people. So it doesn't really matter if I find another event job or whatever. It's all about the people.”
And it was also around that time -I was on maternity leave at this time- that I went out to lunch with my friend. Her name was Julie Jones, and Julie was a life coach. She knew I was seeking out my next great adventure in my career and she suggested that I'd make a really good coach.
And I didn't really want to offend her at that lunch. I thanked her very kindly and told her I would think about it. But inside, I was like, “No, thank you. I mean, like, what the heck is a life coach anyway? It sounds very like woo-woo and out there and weird.” And to be fair to myself, this is 2014, and life coaching as an industry has really, up to this point, only been around for, like, 20 years. Even now, after 30 years, even though it's close to a $1 billion industry, less than 20% of coaches even make a living at it.
So when my friend suggested I become a life coach, not only did it sound weird, but statistically speaking, it was not going to be the best industry for me to get into. And to be honest, I had no desire to be an entrepreneur. But I valued my friend's thoughts, and I told her I would think about it, and I did.
I followed my internal compass.
And a few months later, I actually reached out to her for some suggestions of next steps to explore life coaching as a profession. And she directed me to both the International Coaching Federation, which sets a standard for the coaching industry. She also sent me some names of schools where I could get certified, which was really important to me. And then she sent me the name of a really good friend of hers that was also a coach so I could experience some coaching for myself.
Now, remember, I'm a people-first person. Mentoring was, like, my absolute favorite thing that I did in any of my jobs. And even though that really wasn't in my job description in any of those jobs up to that point, I just loved it. So coaching didn't seem so far off from something that would be interesting for me. And if you remember, I had a moment where I told myself it almost didn't matter what job I took as long as I liked the people and I could have an impact on the people that I worked with.
And I had had a moment while I was praying and reflecting and thinking about what I wanted next. And it felt like this divine moment, like, literally God spoke to me. I don't know if you have ever had this experience within your own kind of set of beliefs or your belief systems where God or Allah or the Universe speaks to you. It really felt like one of those moments.
And God said, “Hey, how about you just find a job that focuses on people, since that's what you're all about? That's who you are. You're a people-first person, and it's the most life giving part of what you do.”
So life coaching sort of made sense at this moment, but I was super skeptical about it, being a business owner and having to market myself and still being the breadwinner of the family. I mean, I really did not know if I really wanted to do this. So I ended up hiring my friend's coach and getting that experience.
And then I remember a very specific conversation with my husband, who knew I was super unhappy and did not want to return this job. By the way, I'm on maternity leave at this point with my first, my daughter, Lillian. And I remember this conversation, and I said, “Look, I think I want to get certified as a coach.” And I said, “I'm not sure if this is really where I want to take my career and what I want to do, but I do know that it's going to give me more skills to be a better version of me. It's going to help me expand upon my mentoring skills and my people-first skills. And if that is all that comes from getting certified, is being a better version of me, I think it's going to be worth it.”
And I remember it was an $8,000 investment to be certified at that time. My husband, being the most amazing, wonderful, trusting, generous man that he is, said yes, of course I should do it, without much hesitation. And then I sold some stock in order to pay for coaching.
And I remember this was in May of 2015, and I had to go to my boss and ask him if I could take 2 hours out of my workday to attend a class a couple of days a week, virtually. And let me tell you, this was a very scary conversation. I had to adjust my schedule to make up for that time, which just meant more time away from my daughter in a job that I didn't want to be in, making my commute exponentially more worse.
But I did it because going to get my coaching certification, having no idea what the end result would be, it just felt right. It felt in alignment with who I was, and it made sense with where my internal compass was pointing me. And so I just had to trust it.
And I remember, oh, I remember this moment. I was on the floor of one of our venues at Fort Mason Center in San Francisco, where I worked. And I was sitting in this little gatehouse at my first class. There was no furniture in the room, so I was just sitting on the floor, and I was sobbing. I was happy crying. I remember hanging up on that call and thinking, “Oh, my gosh, this is exactly what I am meant to do. This feels so right.”
Now one thing I want you to notice here is how confirmation came after I made the leap. Because, remember, up ‘til this point, I didn't know what I was doing and why I was going to get my coaching certification. I didn't know if spending this money and engaging in this coaching process was actually going to get me anywhere in my career.
All I did was follow a hunch that was based on my internal compass, my internal guidance, and on that very first day of class, there was no question in my mind I was exactly where I needed to be.
Making my bridge plan…
Now my next big hurdle was to get out of my job. It was an excruciating commute, an hour each way, and to do a job that I really didn't want to do. I'm just simply amazed at people that have values like loyalty, that tend to help them through the mundane tasks or the repetitive tasks in a job or even a commute. But that is not a part of my particular personal values. Intentionality and fulfillment are so high in my value system that it was like death going to work every day doing something that was so unfulfilling to me.
So my next hurdle was to really figure out how to leave that job while getting certified as a coach and taking on clients. And then an opportunity came. An event company that puts on many of Facebook’s developer events came to Fort Mason Center and poached me to work for them as a contractor.
It took me six months to leave the stability and what felt like the responsibility of my full time job to become what was then a part time contractor with no official contract. The opportunity was there. I just felt paralyzed by it. It felt so irresponsible to me to leave my full time job with a not even one year old at home and being the breadwinner of the family. But once again, following my internal compass, that was telling me that moving forward with coaching, training, and moving towards something that was more fulfilling to me and my everyday life was the right choice.
And so I took another leap of faith. I left my full-time job for part-time contracting. This was what I like to call with my clients, a bridge plan. It's getting me out of where I was, out of the unhappiness, so that I can make strides towards where I want to be in the future.
It turns out, as many of these things often do in life, that I made a lot more money working half the hours contracting than I did working full time. I made more money. Isn't that crazy? It's amazing how leaps of faith like this not only turn out, but end up blowing your mind.
It was time to go all in.
Coaching certification took me almost a year and a half to complete, and I started to take on clients while I was in the middle of being certified. And I was also working part-time contracting as an event manager. And then I got pregnant with my second, and I coached basically up until the time he was born, which was May of 2017. And then I took a three month maternity leave. I didn't have any contracting jobs lined up for when I returned. I didn't have any clients. And I got very, very nervous.
We were eating away at our savings. I didn't know where my next gig would come from. I had no idea how to grow a business. I didn't even know if I wanted to be an entrepreneur still. it was like another leap of faith moment, a moment where I had to trust my internal guidance system, my compass, to really help me make some decisions.
And after relentless networking, I ended up landing another contracting job, while at the same time discovering a coach that taught coaches how to create webinar funnels through Facebook ads. I know, super specific, right?
So this Facebook ad program, it was really intense. It was like a four month long program with a lot of content, daily, weekly coaching. And I knew that if I took this other contracting gig as an event manager, that it would take away from my focus on this program and really starting a business and making sure that this was what I really wanted to do. And so I did another very difficult thing. I actually burned a bridge and I pulled out of my contract as an event manager with this company.
To be fair, we actually really hadn't started on the event yet, but she was super relying on me and things were already in motion. But I pulled out and it was sort of this declaration moment to myself where I said I was no longer going to start looking for events work. I was no longer going to do that. I was going to go all in to my business.
And this Facebook ad webinar funnel coaching program -there’s a lot of words in there- it was another $8,000. And so I sold more stock. I dipped further into our cushion and I joined. And after those four months, it took about another four months or so before I landed my first client using that funnel system. But then the next client came soon after that, and then the next client after that.
And then one of my marketing coaches from that program, she told me, she was like, “Look, Rebecca, this is just a math equation. You're starting to get clients now from marketing on Facebook. So if it costs you $500 in marketing money to get a client, what that means is if you want five clients next month, then you need to put in $2,500 into your marketing.” And so I took more money out of our cushion and I put $2,500 into Facebook ad marketing, and I got six clients out of it.
And I remember this moment so specifically where I looked at my husband and I said, “I'm going to make it. I have a business. I see how this works.” And at this point, my daughter is almost three and my son is one. I'm almost $20,000 into this investment of starting my coaching business, and I'm two and a half years into it from the time I really started considering becoming a coach.
Fast forward to today…
Jump ahead six years. I'm a multi six figure coach. Less than a few percent of coaches ever reach that status. This podcast is listened to globally and it's in the top 2% in the world. I'm back to being the breadwinner of the family. We just bought our first house as a family, a dream that my husband and I have had for many years living in very expensive California.
I not only love what I do as a coach and as a business owner and as a podcast host, -I mean, I just love what I do. I look forward to it every single day.- but I also love who I am. I feel more in alignment with who God created me to be and my internal compass that's inside of me.
That took so many leaps of faith for me to get here. So much investment of money and sacrifice and discomfort in just a hope that something was going to come from it without super clear direction on even how, or if, it would ever become something.
Are you feeling stuck too?
And maybe you're not too dissimilar from me. Maybe you don't really want to be a coach. Although, for sure, I've had a number of clients that have actually turned into becoming coaches after I work with them. But maybe that's not you. Maybe you don't even want to be an entrepreneur. But maybe you're like me eleven years ago, feeling stuck.
You don't know what you're doing. You just know that you don't want to be doing what you're doing right now in life, or how it's all working just isn't working for you. You wake up every day feeling dissatisfied and like life should just be more than this. You want to be more present with your kids. You want to be more successful in your career. But you either don't have a clear vision of what's next for you or you just have no idea how to tap into that internal compass that will guide you.
So you feel just completely immobilized and irresponsible or even selfish for making the changes that you want in life. If you're like me eleven years ago, I see you. To be honest, I wish I had hired more coaches back then. It would have been a whole heck of a lot easier.
I wish I would have had a coach to help me discover who I was and feel the sufficiency of who I was and the enoughness of who I was and helped me believe in myself. Help me find this clear vision of where I was headed so things felt a whole lot less scary and irresponsible. I wish I had had that.
And so I have become the life coach I wish I had back then. Helping ambitious working moms that want to work have fulfilling careers where they feel successful and can't wait to do their work, but they don't feel like they're sacrificing their family to have it. Ambitious working moms who are the breadwinners of the family, that have lots of responsibilities in their family and yet feel free. Free to have fun, free to have adventures, free to take time for themselves, feel like they don't have to always be working. Ambitious working moms who are willing to take risks in order to have the life that they want because on some fundamental level, they know that they're worth it. That's who I coach.
4 lessons from my journey…
So I get what it means to have ambition and to be driven towards success in your work life, and, at the same time, learn how to cultivate a sense of inner worth and value where you believe that you matter and are enough no matter what.
Believing in your enoughness and your value and your worth and your goodness, it doesn't come after your success and your hard work. It comes before. It is what fuels your success and your hard work. That is the number one thing that I learned over the course of my journey.
Number two is that certainty never happens first. We crave that feeling of certainty. We want to know that whatever risk or endeavor or changes that we set out to make, they will, in fact, turn out the way we want.
But unfortunately, we don't get to read the future and we don't get the luxury of knowing all of that. So all you could ever do is follow your best guess. Certainty never happens first.
The third thing that was instrumental in my journey was having an internal compass that feels clear and understandable to your conscious mind. Meaning you actually have words that make sense to you to describe who you are and what you're all about and what's most important to you and what you value and why you're here. That's all a part of your compass.
At least that's how I walk through it with my own clients. That tool is like your best friend as you're seeking out your next steps in your career, as you're learning to create new work life habits, so that work is just no longer the number one thing that just takes and sucks all of your energy.
The fourth lesson I want to offer to you, it's the last one here, is that you need to get cozy with the idea of failure. Going after a big, ambitious life without sacrificing time for yourself and your family, you're not going to get that right just out of the gate. There is going to be times of trial and error. There will be times of questioning. There will be times when people are going to be disappointed and feel let down.
Your next job move may not be the perfect one for you. You may have to pivot multiple times in order to get to that ambitious and balanced life that you want. And every time you pivot -which is just a friendlier way of saying “I didn't get it right the last time. So I failed.”- you're going to learn and you're going to grow and you're going to get better. It's all a part of the process.
I hope that you feel inspired by my story. I really hope you feel seen. And most importantly, through all of this, I hope you feel my love.
Working moms, you were made for so much more. There is so much more potential in you that you can tap into. If you need help and you want a guide that has been where you've been, please take me up on my offer for a free breakthrough call where you can share your story with me and we'll talk about exactly how we'll get you where you want to go in 2024.
All right, working moms, I am sending you all of my love. Until next week. Let's get to it.
Do you want to take your commitment to yourself a step further?
Schedule a free breakthrough call today!
Hey, before you go, I want to take a moment and tell you about an opportunity to speak with me directly. If you've been listening to this podcast and still feel like you need help balancing a fulfilling career with motherhood, then I encourage you to schedule a free breakthrough call.
On this call, we will get crystal clear on exactly what it is you want out of your career and how you want to balance that with motherhood. And then we'll craft next steps for you to start moving toward a more calm and fulfilling working mom life.
Head over to www.rebeccaolsencoaching.com/book to apply for this free call. ‘Til next week. Working moms, let's get to it.
