When female foundership has you pouring from an empty cup

I am energised by the process of creation. It manifests as a kind of restlessness.

The sense of passion and purpose that has fuelled my desire to found initiatives has always been the motivation, though (with hindsight) I see that the arc of growth and sustainability often exposed the less helpful tendencies in my conditioning.

While I'm reticent to cavalierly use sweeping gender statements, I do feel there is a sense of inherited, ancestral conditioning that is often carried unconsciously in my cells which urges me to take A LOT on - and sometimes erode boundaries in the process. The phrase 'ask a busy person' used to be something I'd trot out as a badge of honour.

I mean, who co-founds a charity in the first year of motherhood (albeit to support fellow parents through perinatal mental health challenges)? And what better time than seven months' pregnant with my second child to become a PR consultant...while growing said charity?

When I write it down I can see the chaos in the words. Yet there was an inevitability to both of those experiences, and they changed the trajectory of my career (and life). 

With the benefit of hindsight, and a body that has sometimes set off sirens when I constantly overrode its gentle warnings, I can see how being a female founder sometimes exacerbated my capacity for self-abandonment, though it's not to say there wasn't great fulfilment in many other ways.

What I noticed, through therapy, self exploration and in the process of training to become a coach - which was a happy and slightly unexpected by-product of a deep inner exploration - was that external growth and sustainability often pulled hard at pervasive beliefs around meeting others' needs before my own. 

Perhaps it was also a hangover from an early career stint in PR, which seemed to perpetuate an obligation to surpass clients' expectations and over-perform to retain contracts. This absolutely played into my desire to 'do a good job' and accept senior titles and heavy responsibilities without considering the emotional toll. It was a fertile learning ground and a confronting mirror for my tendencies to abandon myself in the name of playing the game.

This showed up in consultancy as poor boundaries, where home life was often spent ruminating about cash flow or responding to crisis PR issues while on play dates with my young daughter, which took multi-tasking to the edge and back. In the charity context I would gently remind new parents that you cannot pour from an empty cup, while running on empty myself. 

The irony was staggering at times.

I can see now that founding, growing and sustaining ventures of local and national scale taught me some (often confronting) lessons about respecting my own needs. I've been fortunate too to have the opportunity to co-create workplace cultures to support the flexibility required by working mums that means we don't have to feel guilty about attending school sports days and performances in the working day (as if these are somehow an inconvenience) and that we can respectfully be there for each other while also understanding what we need in the process. 

This capacity for self-exploration has been vital for me to soften and be gentle with myself when I notice tendencies of self criticism, or when I under value my skills and over-perform to prove myself (it's a well-worn groove of the psyche). Creating space to explore the emotional toll of female foundership has been essential for myself and others in the coaching process. 

Experiential learning is potent, which is why Ruth Jackson and I are crafting the Grow Together group coaching programme for female founders, business owners or those with fledgling ideas of a purposeful initiative or venture they'd like to bring into the world. It's a trusted space to share our experiences, explore our inner worlds and look at the practical ways we can collaborate and draw on shared resources, so that we can fill up our cups and flourish in the process.

For more information on the Grow Together coaching programme or 1-1 wellbeing coaching opportunities, do pop me a message.