Having a baby made me successful

There is a story that society tells about women who have babies.
That they need to “get off the ride” of their career, business, or professional trajectory.

That they must step back from ambition and veer towards their children.

But what if for some of us, instead of disembarking, we’re simply recalibrating and what we really need isn’t support to give up what we love, but support to keep it. What if we are allowed to redefine our definitions of success, rather than giving up on it.

In studies of tribal communities a mother would spend, on average 7 hours of the day caring for her child. The rest of the time? That child is handled by up to 13 other caregivers including matriarchs, and other older children, with each caregiver naturally having their own influence & expertise on the upbringing of that child, while always ensuring the child was loved and cared for.

We don’t live in that world anymore. But maybe the reason you cannot juggle it all, is because we never ever did.

I realised I was successful after the birth of Darcy. But I feel like its important to define that, because success is relative. Success isn’t hit when your bank account reaches a magical number (unless thats how you personally define it). When I think about success, I think about a lifestyle of freedom & service. Where I can help people but not be tied down to a way of living, a place, or even a business. Running yoga studios isn’t about the money and NEVER has been. However if I can make good money to grow and move to a larger location to fit more people in, pay my staff sick leave (even though I don’t legally have to), and pay staff to run our free community events, or add more offerings to the timetable, and donate chunks of our takings to charity… that’s success. If I can make enough money to not even need to teach a class, while paying myself a living wage, and to travel with my family while the business runs itself… that’s success.

But I had been waiting for some sort of sign that THIS was it.

Before Darcy arrived, I’d been pushing through my pregnancy in a number of ways;

1. It wasn’t the pregnancy I’d hoped for and infinitely harder than my first. All the “time” I thought I had to prepare my new business location for my maternity leave was sucked up in pain, perinatal depression, and bed-ridden nausea.

2. I was absent from the business for weeks and weeks on end. It was surviving, but not thriving, so I felt like I was always chasing my tail.

Darcy arrived with a huge amount of turbulence in November 2019 and the giant hand of the universe smacked me down. Oh boy I remember, after I came out of the ICU, how long it would take me to walk just from my front door to the mailbox (a mere 20 metres). How could I possibly run two studios and manage 18 staff while drugged up to the eyeballs and unable to shower myself properly and feed a tiny human who needed me so?

As it turned out, I didn’t need to.

It was in the process of healing my way out of this hole, navigating newborn life again for the first time in 6 years, that I began to look objectively at my livelihood, how I operated, worked, lived, and what it meant for me to “thrive”. And as Darcy grew I was delighted with what grew in me too.

When you have a baby, alot of shit ceases to matter. You save your cares only for the most important things and either delegate or ignore the rest. Are they warm? Are they safe? Are they fed? Are all the basic needs met? Good… ok. Then that’ll do for today.

The same applies to business. When you start to prioritise things in your business out of absolute necessity & survival, it becomes part of your real world, your modus operandi. When I had no time and even less energy, when I was chronically sleep deprived, I focussed on the tasks or projects that either a) generated direct revenue or b) reduced our overheads. Everything else could bloody well wait. It forced me to streamline so many of our processes that my business literally thrives on processes now. It forced me to critically assess my financials month apon month to see where we could trim the wastage and thus correct hundreds of dollars of wasted funds a month. It forced me to delegate & hire to fill my gaps in time so that now I have a cracking team under me.

I realised, that I could work just 10 hours a week and still draw a wage.

I realised I didn’t have to work IN the business anymore, but ON the business. I could stop teaching yoga classes completely and the studios would carry on fine without me.

Like, what?!

How was it possible that I was working less yet achieving more.

I had been working so hard for so long, marinating in the “growth phase” of my business and get wholly used to that life that I didn’t realise that I’d tenderly moved into maturation phase. That I no longer need to push the cart, I can ride in it, and that was all thanks to a challenging pregnancy, birth trauma, and a newborn. Sometimes we don’t know what our life can look or feel like until we’re challenged to reassess it. Sometimes our children don’t highlight our shortcomings, sometimes they highlight our strength.

x Kaye
Imagery by Belle Verdiglione

On Reframing Failure

I spoke to this in my yoga classes recently, on this idea of reframing failure for what it really is: an opportunity for growth.

If you’re a parent in the WA school system, you’d be familiar with EduDance, a dance education program that runs at primary schools. Elodie was especially excited about this year, and wouldn’t even show us some of the routine, in anticipation of this grand reveal.

The morning arrived and a very nervous, shrinking Elodie walked into my room with tears in her eyes.

‘What’s wrong babe?’

‘I’m really really nervous about today’. She promptly burst into tears. 

After some digging, we ascertained that she was terrified of getting the dance wrong. The teacher had put her front and centre and Elodie was worried that everyone would see her make a mistake.

Her words, ‘I don’t want to be a failure’.

If you saw my Instagram stories, you’ll know that she absolutely KILLED it, but this dialogue of “failing” has been coming up a lot lately for Elodie. She’s going to be 7 in January, and through her schooling there are a lot more things like assessments & tests, sports carnivals, and performances - plenty of opportunities for a self-aware little girl to fail. She’s also worried about picking the wrong thing (like what after-school activity to do) or wearing the wrong thing (like to a birthday party). 

This pains me greatly because there are many things I didn’t start, do, or become, because I once thought I’d fail at it. There’s a finality in failure that belongs only to the word and how we use it in our language. Over the years, rather than trying to change the meaning of the word, I got rid of it altogether. I’ve been doing the work, unpacking this fear of failure and engaging in a practice of self-enquiry, so much to a point that this concept of failure is no longer in my vocabulary. I don’t entertain it, thereby being incapable of failure in its traditional sense.

And because I’ve been on this journey myself, I’ve been working hard on reframing this rhetoric with Elodie because, well we don’t fail in our family. I don’t fail, my husband doesn’t fail, and my children don’t fail. And this is the lesson we’re trying to impart on Elodie; 

1. It’s impossible for you to fail and 

2. You are never - even if you thought you failed at something - a failure.

Let me be absolutely clear… I’ve definitely fucked up. We’ve certainly made our fair share of mistakes in this family, but what might be called a failure, for me, is an important lesson or an opportunity for growth. We’re reframing failure through the lens of knowledge, of wisdom, of growth. To be on a path of learning is one of our familys’ values – to always be open to knowing something better, or differently. To read the books, take the leaps, listen to new perspectives – not because we’re perpetually changing our opinions (some things we feel very strongly rooted in and wont change) but because life shouldn’t exist in an echo chamber of familiarity, nodding heads, and mediocrity. 

“There’s a finality in failure that belongs only to the word”

My husband Jimmy recently left his cushy job. But that’s the thing about “cushy” ….when does it change from soft and yielding to beige and uninspired? Jimmy wanted to move on to a new role because he had stopped learning in his previous role and there wasn’t any real opportunity to progress. He could have stayed in that role for many years to come, making good money for very little input or brain power. Instead he moved to a role that has him busy every hour of the working day. He’s challenged, but he’s also motivated to learn something new and expand his skillset.

And his new role has MANY more opportunities to mess that shit up.

The last 5 years of teaching yoga (and running a business around it) has taught me many important lessons, primarily about HOW to run a business, but also, how to be a leader, how to navigate risk, how to pivot, how to recalibrate, and how to stop from going under. None of those things would have been possible without a number of *failures*. 

My very first one of these (of many) was when Vital Beat was 12 months old. We were in a prime growth phase – it felt like we could only go onwards and upwards. Only, I knew very little about my business financials or how to manage them, and when I finally caught up with my tax obligations (my quarterly BAS) the ATO then caught up with ME. Shortcut to 6 months of overdue GST plus a number of late lodgement fines and it was a painful financial hit. I took it on the chin and quickly moved on, I also

• learned that I had an unhealthy relationship with money and my “right to earn” and that I had stuff to work through around money as energy.

• learned that there were systems, software, and training, that would elevate me to the level I needed to be at, and quickly.

• learned the importance of making regular financial dates with myself to go over my numbers (something I now quite enjoy), and 

• learned that ATO fines are actually quite easy to get around/out of, if you have a good bookkeeper or accountant (and I found a new Accountant quick smart!)

It’s easy to step back from a $9000 lesson and say “that’s it, I’m not cut out for this. This was a failure / I’m a failure / who am I to attempt this”. It’s easy to use these experiences as defining moments, a “feather in our fuckup cap” so to speak.

‘I learned that I had an unhealthy relationship with money and my “right to earn”’

Without these experiences however, our life lacks colour. It’s a stretched canvas of straight edges and perfect circles and shading inside the lines. How mundane would our careers and relationships be if we hadn’t experienced the transformative qualities of knowing what we DON’T want? We need the bad boyfriend to appreciate the good one. We need the shitty boss to know what leadership SHOULD look like. We need the bunky first car, tiny first rental, and hey, maybe even get fired once, to know what’s not right for us. These aren’t failed careers, or failed relationships, they’re guideposts with lit signs pointing the way to say “Over here! This way to the lessons!”. And only then, when you follow those signs, can you see the person you’re becoming. 

The knowledge and wisdom that forms part of our family values, don’t come from formal education. We can only know firsthand from a lived experience – learning things about ourselves, and learning things FOR ourselves. So as Elodie sat on the end of my bed, willing the Earth to swallow her up, I made sure she knew what lessons were on the other side of the EduDance performance and we talked about both scenarios - if she got the dance wrong, AND if she got the dance perfect. 

“What would you have learned afterwards, Elodie?” And I let her write that story.