Finding Your Entrepreneurial Self Again After Having Kids With Adrienne Dorison

I felt so lost after I had my kids all of a sudden there was something in my life that was so much more significant and important and it kind of made me feel like the business was so insignificant this is so inauthentic now I don't know what I'm saying anymore I don't know what to say I gave myself such a hard time about it [Music] all hello hello I am so excited that you're joining me for this episode of the shimi business show because I am joined by someone amazing someone I'm so excited to have here Adrien Doris like oh my gosh thank you for being here I am so excited to have this conversation with you and um like talk talk about all things um having kids and losing our way and lumon all that stuff but thank you thank you so much for being here I'm so excited to be here I haven't seen you in so long we were just talking about like needing a catchup so we'll just do it here I love it we were we were talking about it was 2018 we went to NECA Island together for the Mastermind um which was amazing and at the time I had my son Casey who was like seven months old and Kell my husband came with me as well because otherwise it would just been crazy and um I was breastfeeding like exclusively like breast I suppose it would have been weaned a bit by then but um yeah I remember it being so like I was in such a crazy place in my head and then um I I want to kick off this podcast as well um that links into this point about where I was at in my head back then last year you posted out something on Instagram and I actually want to read what you wrote Because when I read it I was like oh my gosh this is me like it hit me so hard and I really want to talk about this because I think that um let me stop waffling let me read what you wrote okay so this is what you posted you said I was creatively drained for years after I gave birth to Kit I literally felt like when I birthed her the process took my creativity and business motivation out of my body at the same time I like to think of life through the lens of seasons and there was a season for being much more unplugged from the business basically the past three and a half years as I had two babies I wasn't ready to pour new ideas into the business never mind execute on them I worried I'd never have the same ambition again three and a half years later I'm just starting to find it and that's okay I have changed I'm a different person now than I was prior to having my children my perspective and priorities completely changed and I had to be okay with just going a little slower while my babies were very young I had to be okay with doing enough to pay the bills and the team and not needing to 10x everything and exponentially scale I feel like everyone in the entrepreneurial space is screaming this at at us all the time and it's exhausting I had to give myself a lot of Grace I felt ashamed for a while that I wasn't doing more being more creating more and then I realized that this was the point of it all the whole point of it was that I could just be with my family and give myself what I needed during that season so I honored the season I went slow I didn't create anything new I was complacent because I needed to be I had nothing left in the tank for creativity in the business I needed to just do the better minimum in the business and give my girls the best home I think you continued it in the comments but like I remember reading that and thinking oh my gosh somebody literally just wrote down everything that's in my head and everything that I have felt and for such a long time I felt so alone with those feelings and um and and and like to be really really honest like this isn't really I've talked about it a bit but I really want to talk about it more because like I felt so lost after I had my kids it was like before having kids I was really inspired I was so motivated I was so driven I had all these ideas all this creativity and then I had the kids and it was literally like my motivation and inspiration for the business went all of a sudden there was something in my life that was so much more significant and important and it kind of made me feel like the business was so insignificant and I just so silly like yeah like and I just thought and the hard part was I just I didn't know especially because I was like making videos and I was showing up and teaching stuff and I thought this is so inauthentic now I don't know what I'm saying anymore I don't know what to say I don't have anything in me to say um and um yeah I wish I had obviously I wish I'd have been able able to read something like what you wrote at the time because I gave myself such a hard time about it all um so I just would love to talk about this and what you shared in that post and your experiences um of this and kind of also talking about this kind you know in the online space there are a lot of amazing mostly men who say this stuff but they talk a lot about like kind of go go go work hard you got to work hard you got to put in the effort and like I know before we start started recording I was telling you about when I was mentored by a guy back um I just had Marley my daughter so she was like literally a tiny baby I was breastfeeding and he was it was such masculine like alpha male energy and I was like I can't do this I it got so annoyed and this is not the energy I need right now yeah but there's pressure to feel like we have to keep doing more being more working harder and it is exhausting like you wrote so yeah let's talk I mean even you like rereading like my post you know like sometimes when you write things in the past and then even you go back and read them you're like wow I wrote that like that's like I was so wise in a different you know lifetime like I think about that even when I go back and I read posts from years ago whether they pop up on my feed and I'm like oh like what's it like to be mentored by like past Adrian you know like do you do that to yourself I feel like I do that often I'm like oh she was like it has a different version of me but she's still mentoring me now like we can mentor ourselves sometimes in different seasons and um I I was like feeling the emotion of that Adrian when she wrote that post you know like when she was feeling that but it's a conversation that I think is not had enough and that's why I wanted to share it it's why I like talking about it it's also like with the work we do at run light Clockwork a big passion of mine in terms of helping small business owners like remove themselves from the daytoday of the operation is fueled by my maternity leaves and like knowing that there's a lot of entrepreneur women specifically who don't get to take that time because we're entrepreneurs and either you know we're externally feeling forced to just keep going by Society or cultural standards or you know mentors or whoever it is or uh from a financial perspective or from an internal business perspective potentially we don't have the runway or the te