What’s up guys? I have had so many people ask me to do an episode on this. I’m really pumped to finally deliver it. So today we’re going to discuss building a business while having kids. This is not just for moms. This is also for dads. This is for people who have kids as well as people who think they might want kids in the future. Balancing business growth while raising tiny sticky humans is a layered discussion.

So I’m going to sit here and I’m going to read off questions that I’ve received about my own having four small children while building two successful companies, and the conclusion that I’ve come to about this sphere of life. This is episode number 18 of The Hell Yes Entrepreneur. I’m your host Becca Pike. It’s time for your weekly dose of Hell Yes Coaching. Let’s begin.

Hey, guys. I’m Becca Pike and welcome to The Hell Yes Entrepreneur podcast, the number one show for entrepreneurs looking to create their first six-figure year. If you’ve got the drive and you know how to hustle but you’re not sure where to channel your energy, we’ve got the answers. Let’s dive into today’s show.

Sexy celebration time. This is from one of my 30 More students. Most of you know about Three More. This is my eight week sales course which is enrolling right now. 30 More is my more advanced level room. So this is the room where you learn how to become a proper CEO with time freedom and money freedom and a community of high level thinkers. So many of you have reached out to me and are interested in becoming a part of the 30 More crew.

I just want to let you know real quick that you must go through Three More first as all of our 30 More members are graduates of Three More. So hop into the eight week Three More course, learn my infrastructure to what I teach, and then you can apply for the 30 More spot, okay. So this is from one of my 30 More students.

“Since joining 30 More, I have left my corporate job where I wasn’t happy. I’ve gained enough clients now that I’m learning how to sell out a wait list, and I’m time plotting when to raise my prices, and it’s only been three months. Becca and I are in discussion of the first few staff members I’m going to hire and what roles to fill. I’m so glad I took this leap.”

That’s so awesome. I’m so proud to call this group of students not only my clients, but they’re also my friends at this point. I’m in the process of planning our next in person meeting, which is in January, and I’m thinking Miami. It’s going to be a blast guys. Can’t wait.

So let’s get to our conversation about teeny tiny humans that we’re supposed to keep alive, not fuck up, while simultaneously keeping ourselves alive, running businesses, cooking daily dinner, packing lunches, keeping a tight ass. All the things that we balance on the daily.

Can I just say something about cooking dinner every night? Is anybody else in here surprised every day that you have to cook dinner again? I swear. Around 4:00 I’m winding down business. I’m starting to get into my home life, and it hits me. I’m like wait, I have to cook dinner again. Every day I have to feed these little humans. All the time. It sounds so silly, but it’s been years now and it still catches me off guard. We’re still cooking dinner every day. I see why people go out to eat all the time. I’m starting to understand it now.

All right, so let’s get started. Here’s what’s going to go down. I’m just going to read off questions that I received on this subject. I went into my free Facebook group Hell Yes: The Entrepreneur’s Circle. I just asked what they wanted to know about having kids and raising babies, okay. So I took these questions, and I’m going to answer them. I’m just going to free ball them just however I see fit. What could go wrong, right? It’s not like I say things with no filter and teeter the line of getting cancelled at all times. It’s going to be fine.

With that being said, please know everything in this episode as well as all episodes are just my own opinions. Take advice at your own risk. Don’t get weird. All right. So question number one. This is a very broad question, but I’m going to go in on it. It says, “How do you grow a business while having babies?

Again, this is broad. So I’m just going to kind of dive in and get messy with it. There was a joke in my family that every time I got pregnant, my business doubled. It is true that my sales significantly increased with each pregnancy. I think that my thoughts about pregnancy and kids and having a family is what set me apart in that. So like I never saw it as a problem. I never saw having kids as a setback, right. I think some parents think, “Oh, this is the death of my career.” Right?

If anything, I think becoming a mother took my wild spirit and it gave me roots in a home. It took my chaotic mind and it focused and zeroed in on something bigger than me. Anytime you tame a wild mind and give it a purpose and a focus and put roots down, it’s so much easier to grow things around you, right? You can’t grow a forest if you’re always on the move. Same for business.

So before kids I was all over the place. Not just physically like traveling and staying busy with friends. I was all over the place mentally, right? So with what I wanted to do for work and how to make money, all of that was scattered. Kids gave me more to lose, like a bigger responsibility. So I just had this feeling that I needed to get more serious. I needed to put roots down. I needed to hunker down and make cash, right. I think all the time that my view about having kids is what helped my business succeed.

Because, again, some mothers look at it as the death of their career. I looked at it as, I have kids. I’d better start getting more serious about making money. I want them to have healthy food in their fridge. I want them to have land to roam with trees and creeks, right. I want barefoot kids. I want them to be able to afford sports and educational trips where I can show them other cultures beside the American one. I want to open their horizons. There’s no more time to just piss away, right. Like my days of week-long music festival binges and coach surfing with friends and hopping from job to job or idea to idea, it’s over. I wanted it to be, right?

So from the jump I was assuming that having kids and starting a family would make me more successful, not less. When you assume you’re about to become more successful, you start acting in ways that make you more successful. You start investing in knowledge, in your business, in your time. You start thinking about ways to grow. When you assume your career is on its deathbed because you’re having kids, your brain doesn’t necessarily get creative, right. It starts shutting down. So the way that you think about having kids is a really important aspect to what follows after having kids.

Also sidebar. Thoughts about pregnancy, I want to pop in on this too because I think we live in a culture where we are taught that pregnant women are so fragile. Pregnant women need to act a very certain way, and it’s driven by western medicine and western culture. I think the way that you think about your body in pregnancy also will flow over into how your business grows. For any men that are listening, I know a lot of the audience that I have are men. So this is something to be thinking about as your wives are pregnant or as you’re watching your daughters become pregnant even.

So here’s my thoughts on this. My thought about my own health when I was pregnant helped me to focus on my work. So if you haven’t noticed, I’m a huge advocate for healthy eating and exercise and proper sleep hygiene and light exposure. I think wanting a healthy lifestyle while pregnant made my pregnancy so much easier to balance a career than if I hadn’t, right?

So when I was pregnant, I was definitely more tired, and I was hella sick in the first trimester. Like the first trimester doesn’t even count. I was puking all the time. The only thing I could keep down was crackers and cheese. It was complete survival mode. All hell breaks loose in the first trimester I feel like for a lot of women. Outside of that, I did everything in my control to give myself the most energy when I was finally feeling better. I took really good care of my body, and I was very intentional about what went into my mouth and my sleep and all of that.

I think having a super healthy pregnancy is the reason I was more successful in my pregnancies, right. So like I’ve never subscribed to the “I’m pregnant. I can eat whatever I want. I can stop moving my body. I’m allowed to just like sit on the couch. I’m not capable of lifting over 10 pounds bullshit.”

I subscribed to the “my ancestors and all of the women in my lineage before me have given birth in much harder situations bent over in fields, laboring in the sun, carrying buckets of water and supplies. Not having food just consistently plentiful and just in arms reach.” Just the thought that my body is very capable, right. My body isn’t fragile. My body is stronger now that I’m with child. I have instinctual understanding of what my body can and can’t do, right.

So I’m lucky that I live such an easy American westernized life. So I should take advantage of this privilege. But with all the resources that I have because I live this American life, I am going to choose to eat organic vegetables and grass-fed meat. I’m going to continue to exercise. Guys, I crossfitted up until I gave birth. I just felt like I wanted to clean up my act, and I didn’t want to live on Cheetos when my kids were in utero.

Because I took care of my body this way, I had a lot of energy. I felt really good when I was pregnant. I slept more than non-pregnant, but I exercised, and I ate healthy, and I was so much more creative and so much more disciplined in my business. My focus was better. I got rid of brain fog, right? So that allowed my business to grow. I didn’t just allow my whole life and my health and my business to just come to a crashing halt because I was with baby, right?

So maybe ask yourself what am I thinking about being pregnant? Am I assuming that my career is dying? Am I assuming I shouldn’t work? Am I assuming that I’m going to spend the next 10 months. They always say 9 months. Everyone talks about pregnancy being a 9 month thing, but it’s 40 weeks. If you’re like me, it’s like 43 weeks. That is like 10 months, right? So I would highly suggest not putting your entire life on hold while being pregnant, right? So just think about that. Think about your thoughts about being pregnant and how it’s affecting your business.

Alright. Next question. Someone is asking, “How do you structure your days? What was your rhythm of newborn and toddler phase?” So when it comes to toddlerhood, I will say this. We were very specific about the allotted time that we received for work. So I am extremely lucky and grateful to have a spouse that finds my work just as important as his. So we always have respected each other’s work time. So when I’m at work, he was watching the kids, right. For a long time, up until our youngest was two.

So right now we have a 12 year old, 8 year old, 6 year old, and a 2 year old. No, our youngest is three. Sorry. When you have four kids, birthdays are just coming all year long. Four times a year believe it or not. It’s like birthdays are constantly changing. So if I get the ages of my kids wrong, just bear with me okay. So 12, 8, 6, and 3.

Up until our youngest was 2, we didn’t have a babysitter or a nanny or any help at all, right? So when I was working, he was watching the kids and he was very respectful of my time. Like you do not talk to mommy. Don’t mess with mommy. Vice versa. So when he was at work, I was on call with the kids. It was like don’t talk to daddy. He is working. We were very respectful of each other’s boundaries.

So for years it was only us, no family help. No babysitter. He would work all day, and I would watch the kids all day. Then basically he would come home at 6:00 and we would high five at the door as I left for work, and he was with the kids all night. I look back at those days as so challenging and exhausting because for years it was like not only did we work at separate times. But it caused us to do this shift thing where yes, we were working all the time, but we didn’t see each other that much. It was so hard.

We were growing quickly, and we were sacrificing a lot. Eventually when Cedar was two, we could afford help. So we hired someone to come into our house. She comes in at 8:00 until 1:30 p.m. and she hangs with our kiddos. Now for a lot of the time, the kids were in school. Last year she was a godsend because our kids were home because of COVID for the whole year. She was able to do all of the online schoolwork with them and keep them accountable while we worked, right.

So not only does she help us with the kids so that we can focus on work, but what has also happened is that we no longer have to take shifts. So we work together at the same time, which means by the end of the day we’re both done with work. We actually get to sit and be together. So I wish that I could go back in time and get a nanny sooner or get a babysitter sooner. I always thought I couldn’t afford it.

I’m here to tell you even if you borderline can’t afford it or think you can’t afford it, it’s one of the best ways to spend your money in order to make more money. Because the moment that we finally hired help and we were able to work in the morning hours and not be so exhausted, we were capable of building our business so much faster. So, again. If you’re like, “I don’t know. I don’t think I can afford it.” But it’s really hard to balance raising kids and growing businesses, jump on the nanny train. Jump on the babysitter train and just see what happens. Because our businesses exploded when we finally got help. Who would have thought?

Also just as a reminder, I have really strong boundaries for myself between work and home. When I’m at work, I do everything I can to not do any home tasks or even think about home tasks. When I’m at home, it’s vice versa. When I’m able to shut my home life off at work, I’m so much more productive. My brain isn’t thinking about soccer practices and dinner and laundry and errands. I allow myself to remove all of that because I trust that I’ll get it done in the hours that I’m off work, right. Because when I’m off work, I don’t allow myself to think about deadlines and marketing teams and budgets and work. You get what I’m laying down?

When our focus is zeroed in and not interrupted, we are so much more productive and therefore free. If you want to hear more details about the schedules and lives and raising kids and all of that you want to listen to the episode I did with Mark, my husband, about business growth and marriage. It was episode number seven. You can go to hellyescoachingonline.com/7.

 

So this is the next question. It says, “Emotionally, how did you feel about having kids? Was it something you always wanted? You seem so career driven. What’s your main focus in parent teachings?” All right. So this is a loaded question.

First and foremost, yes. I always wanted to have kids. I also understand that people don’t. I can easily see either side of the coin. For me, I did. I always pictured I’d have a big family. Yeah, we delivered on that front. Here’s what I want to say. I want to bring this up, and I want to normalize it.

So I was very surprised when I had my first baby because media paints this picture that they hand you your swaddled baby and all of a sudden, you’re so in love. You would just take a bullet for this human. Like you’ve never felt love like this before. I didn’t feel that way, okay? Like when they handed me the baby, I was sobbing in happiness that she was out of my vagina, and I could stop having labor pains. That’s what I was happy about.

Like I think that I thought something was wrong with me that I wasn’t instantly connected and obsessed with her. Like I felt like she was a stranger. I’m going to be completely honest guys. Because when I have had this conversation with other women, they have been very thankful that someone was willing to say it because they felt the same way.

Now as any stranger, as you get connection and as you start bonding and as time passes, you can start forming a deeper bond and relationship and love. That’s exactly how it went down with having my babies. At first, they were strangers, and then they weren’t. By the time my babies were six months/a year old, it was all the things I was told. It was I would take a bullet for this baby. I was so intuitively connected to her and to the kids. Like becoming a parent was by far the best thing I’ve ever done in my entire life, but it didn’t feel that way at first. I just want to normalize that. Okay?

I think media paints a really strong picture of motherhood being a certain way, especially Pinterest and Instagram. I believe that the goal of parenting—If you just strip everything away and you’re looking at the most basic goal. Like what is the purpose of parenting? It is to raise humans who are equipped emotionally and mentally to enter the world without their parents, right? They’re like little birds learning how to fly the nest. If this is the actual goal, then why do we get caught up obsessing over how many crafts we do and what our kids are wearing and what school they go to? All of the other bullshit that is so image driven, right?

So to get back to the original question, I feel really content in my parenting because our main focus is teaching our children how to be thankful and happy capable humans through consistent giving back and thankfulness and chores and understanding relationships and understanding their place in the world, etcetera. I’m not saying I’m 100% the best parent. I’m not saying people who do it differently are wrong. I am saying that as a parent it’s helpful to continue to remember and remind yourself of the main goal of parenting, whatever it is that you think that is. What is your main goal, right?

So if your main goal is for your kid to look cool then you’re going to parent way different than me. If your goal is for your teen girl to be thin, then you’re going to fuck your kids up. Just facts. If your goal is to raise capable humans, then remind yourself of this and don’t get caught up in what Pinterest says is a good mom. Your kids are not going to care how many crafts you did when they were two. Yes, motor skills are important. They’re going to gain motor skills no matter which way you cut it, okay. So take a load off of yourself. Remember what’s important when it comes to parenting and focus on those things.

All right. Next question. “I was guilted for getting back to work so fast. What do you think a proper timeline is?” Okay. So what I want to say here is just as a reminder, there’s no right or wrong way to do basically anything in your entire life. When you think about the American maternity leave, it’s 12 weeks for most people. Some people elongate it to 16 weeks.

I just want you to remember that that number is made up. So a lot of times we are very specific about taking 12 weeks off. If it’s a week later or a week sooner, it means something. It doesn’t mean anything. You can take off a year. You can never go back to work. You can be a stay at home mom. That’s fantastic. You can go back into the corporate world or into the entrepreneur world after a few weeks if you want.

Here’s what I want to say though. You’ve got to ask yourself why. What’s the real reason behind it? Okay. When I gave birth to my very first child, I would say I went back to work too soon for the wrong reasons. It was like survival mode, coming from a place of lack. Thinking that we didn’t have enough money. Thinking that we weren’t going to be okay. Stress was the reason I went back to work. I don’t think that that’s a good reason to go back to work unless you’re literally in survival and it’s life or death between your baby not having enough food. That wasn’t the case for me. I just got too stressed out and went back to work too soon.

By the time I had my fourth kid, I went back to work pretty early but it was from a totally different place. It was from a place of like I feel really passionate about my work. I love it. I want to see it grow. I’m having fun with it. I can’t imagine not being around it for 14 weeks. I didn’t push myself. I didn’t do anything that was unhealthy. I think all the times I went back to work I was only working maybe two to three hours a day, and a lot of times it was from home.

So you have to just ask yourself. Like I don’t know what works for you. No one knows what’s going to work for you. Only you know what is too soon and what’s not too soon. Checking in with the reasons why you’re going back to work soon or why you’re going back to work late. As long as they’re feeling good and comfortable to you then who cares. Right?

All right. This is such a funny question to me. This is all the question says. “You’re a stepmom.” So first we’ve got to work on your question asking skills. Yes, I am a stepmom. I’m just going to run with this because I think that there’s some good material here, and I’m just going to kind of put a twist on it however I see fit. So here’s what I will say.

No one ever pictures that their Mr. Right is going to gallop into their life with an ex-wife and kids. It never, ever occurred to me that it was even possible I would become a stepmom, especially because we were young, right. Like I literally had never thought about it. None of my friends were marrying men that had former wives or kids. We were too young for that. We were like 26, right?

To be honest with you, I massively rejected Mark Pike when he entered my life because of the circumstances. I wasn’t mature enough to realize the possibilities of love for his kids that I now see. The kids that I now literally call my own. I met my stepchildren, London, and Camden when they were very young. I can truthfully say that I can’t even imagine them not being in our family now. I didn’t know that step relationships could be like this. I didn’t have stepparents, and I didn’t have many friends that had stepparents. I didn’t have any chalkboard for reference, right? When I say I never thought about it, I literally never thought about it. Right?

So sometimes I wish I could go back and talk to myself then through the knowledge that I have now. Navigating the whole situation was beyond challenging. No one teaches you how to walk into children’s lives and become a guardian to them while also balancing a relationship or lack thereof with their biological mom and her whole side of the family. Not preparing yourself for like their opinions of you or what they think, right. How to navigate what they’re saying to the kids and raising those children through opinions that are given to them elsewhere.

Or even like the side of it of watching your husband go through the trauma of a failed marriage inside of your own marriage, right. It takes serious maturity and vulnerability, and it’s not for the faint of heart. I think that step parenthood is underappreciated. It’s under talked about. It’s one of the most challenging and one of the most beautiful and one of the most selfless things a person can do. I just want to say shoutout to all the stepparents in here. I see you guys.

Sometimes I wonder if Mark and my relationship is so strong because of everything we had to persevere in the beginning of our relationship together, right. Like when we first got together, all of that stuff was laid out on the table. We built an infrastructure and a foundation and a communication style that was above and beyond, right.

So I think that becoming a stepmom and all that it entails was the most rewarding and challenging and scary and happy time in my entire life. It was also a very pivotal moment of growth. I’m still navigating it. It’s just more like now I’m navigating it on a raft with oars whereas two years ago I was just drowning.

Jim Gaffigan makes this super funny joke. He’s talking about having a fifth child. He said, “You know what it’s like having a fifth kid? It’s like you’re drowning, and then someone hands you baby.” It was like the same two years that I was navigating stepmom life, I was getting married, I was building a business, and I was getting pregnant and raising my own biological kids all within this two to three year period. It was enough to make anyone just re-question everything about life, right.

Now my step kids are my kids. Honestly, I don’t even think of them as step kids. Like the word step feels really foreign. Like I’m using it in this podcast, but I don’t even know that I use the word step in daily life. I just call them my kids. They’re part of my family. There is no separation between these two and those two. They’re all four our kiddos. They’re all running around our house. They’re all eating food. They’re all living their best lives.

I have to be reminded that they’re not necessarily my biological kids, right. Even when I do remember that they didn’t come from me, from my stomach, I have no thoughts about that. I am their mom. Their bio mom is their mom. Mark is their dad. Their stepdad is their dad. We have some lucky kids who get lots of love, right?

Listen y’all. Having kids is a humbling experience. You have never been humbled like you have when you get pooped on or peed on or until your kid has puked on a stranger’s shoes. My kids bring me back down to earth all the time. The other day I was walking around in my underwear, and my three year old asked me why I have so many dimples on my legs. When she said it, I gave her up for adoption.

But for real, kids will humble you. They will make you so happy and so crazy and so in love and so worried and so careful and inspired and broken and fierce. Being a parent is every emotion known to man. It’s a rollercoaster. Many people lose themselves in that rollercoaster. It’s easy to get busy and to focus on school pickup and drop off and lunches and games and sleepovers. All of a sudden, we wake up and our kids are grown and who are we, right?

I know this drill. Parents sacrifice for their children, and they have since the dawn of time. I think that sacrificing has sped up though in our generation due to social media. I just want to remind you to not lose yourself to the image or to the process. Your kids will grow up. They will eventually fly the coop. I want you to remember who you are and what you like and what makes you happy. It is so sad to me to think about my kids growing up.

Sometimes I honestly get lost in my thoughts thinking about how weird life is and how weird time is and the passing of time. I can easily muster up tears when thinking about my kids growing up and leaving. Ultimately, I have to remind myself that that is the goal. My goal here is to raise capable humans that are going to go out and find happiness in life through gratitude and through contribution, right?

I’m doing everything in my power to keep my own life intact too because my life is as important as theirs. Make sure that I’m not just existing for my kids. That I’m existing for everything that I’ve existed for before my kids. That I’m existing for myself. I’m allowed to exist as my own human with my own thoughts and my own hobbies alongside of being the best mother that I can. That mother is a role that I play every day and to the best of my ability, but it’s not my only role.

My hope for you guys is to continue to bring yourself back to yourself every day. It’s okay to get lost in the hustle. It’s okay to forget as long as the awareness is there that we can bring ourselves back, right. My hope is that you know that your business is never at the detriment of any role that you play or vice versa.

The power is always in your hands to have and to be and to do whatever it is that you want. There is no either or. There is no be a good parent or have a business, right. We live in a world of ‘and’ and ‘both’ no matter what the media tells you. This is it for me today. I will see you boss ass bitches here next week. Bye.

Hey there. Three More, my eight week organic sales class, is enrolling right now. If you’d like three more clients in eight weeks no matter what your industry is, head over to threemoreclients.com and sign up now.

Hey, thanks for taking the time to listen to today’s episode. If you’re looking to get more clarity and momentum for your business, visit hellyescoachingonline.com. See you next week here on The Hell Yes Entrepreneur podcast.