Staying between the flags
Kristi is a wife and mom of 3 who writes for JugglingNormal and Medium. This article first appeared here, and is republished in whole.
This is for the moms who want to be entrepreneurs.
Full disclosure: I’ve lived my entire life in a land-locked state, so when we visited Bondi Beach, I had to google what “between the flags” meant.
The red and yellow flags — you can see a tiny one near the bottom of the above photo — mark the area patrolled by lifeguards. They are the safest place to swim at the beach.
We, as moms and entrepreneurs, often build our businesses between school drop-offs and school pick-ups.
Thinking of that, I flashed on Bondi Beach, to our 2018 trip. I imagined myself swimming outside of the safety zone, gigantic waves crashing on me and pulling me under the water. There’s probably something Freudian in that.
I’m not that strong of a swimmer in the first place. The waves — and sharks! — are intimidating. It’s no problem to comply.
Between the flags, it is! And when building a business, between pick-up and drop-off seems like a perfectly reasonable amount of time, right?
You drop-off, you work on your biz, you pick-up, effortlessly shifting gears from mom mode to CEO and back again.
If only it were that simple.
Unless all your kids are at the same school, and all are in full-day programs, multiple pick-ups and drop-offs limit your business building time. You also likely have a myriad of other home management tasks and real-life mom constraints, like grocery shopping, appointments, laundry, errands, and workouts, to squeeze in between the flags.
That’s not to say it can’t be done, but you need a game plan, intentional focused work, proven strategies, prioritization, a dose of grace, discipline, and a lot of patience.
You may have to be realistic about how long it’s going to take to build your empire or accept that some growth may happen at the expense of family time.
If you are a mom who is considering entrepreneurship, who wants to learn from a mom who gets it and gets you, who understands what you are up against, and why it matters, sign up for more right here.
If you’re already swimming and stuck in a riptide, I can help with that too.
Stay safe out there Mamas, and don’t forget sunscreen!