#137 — Broadway and Pregnant A friend of mine reached out a few weeks after the birth of her second baby girl and said, “I need to tell you my birth story.” “Absolutely,” I said, “What do you want to talk about?” “How I changed my birth plan and care providers for my second pregnancy—I was much more intentional about who I wanted around me, and the people I wanted to be in the room.” Today we get to hear Tanya-Birl Torres share her two birth stories on our show, and the marked difference between her first birth and her second birth, and why she decided to create such an intentional environment for her second pregnancy. Tanya is an actress, dancer, and choreographer who spent a decade in a career on Broadway, performing in shows like The Lion King, On The Town, West Side Story, and many more. With her first baby, she was on Broadway throughout her pregnancy and back in the show not long after giving birth. Today she has a creative practice as a yoga and meditation teacher (which is how I met her), works as a director, and is the founder of So Humanity, an organization dedicated to embodying, facilitating, and bringing out change in across individuals and organizations. In this interview, which we recorded with her 7-week old at home, she shares her background as a performer and a dancer, and what it was like to get started as a dancer and then, after performing for a while, to get pregnant and have a baby while working on Broadway. Today, six years later, she gave birth to another child and reached out so we could talk about what it’s like to advocate for yourself and what you need through the process. Every hospital, midwifery practice, and doula practice is different, and these institutions around us affect us. She shares how to listen in to what you need and why it’s important to find the right people to help support you in your birth, business, or life. She is a phenomenal storyteller. You’ll love this episode. FULL SHOW NOTES Get the complete show notes with episode quotes, photos, and time stamps at http://www.startuppregnant.com/137.

#136 — Not everyone has exactly nine months to plan ahead and prepare for motherhood — sometimes it can happen overnight, and other times it can take years. The process of adopting a child can be long, laborious and fraught with uncertainty. You never know when you’ll get the call or how long it will take, or when you might become a parent.  For Priti Krishtel, she got the call late one night that her kid was here, and she jumped on a plane to be at the hospital on the other side of the country just 24 hours later. On today’s episode, we talk to Priti about her journey to parenthood, and her thoughts about becoming a mother, and how she felt about parenthood in her twenties and thirties.  For a long time, she wondered if it was in the cards and whether or not motherhood was right for her. When she met her partner in her late 30s, she tells us how it was early on that he brought up adoption and kids. She was thrilled to find someone on the same page as her.  Priti is a human rights lawyer and the cofounder of a company called I-MAK. They are a company focused on changing the way that people have access to medicines. Today, over 2 billion people live without access to critical life-saving medicines that are often priced so high as to be unattainable. One of the root causes that they’ve identified behind this problem is the outdated patent system which enables drug companies to get hundreds of patents and set high prices for extended amounts of time. This can be crippling to people who live in poverty. Her work is all about how to medicines more accessible for everyone particularly vulnerable populations.  In today’s show, we hear the story about how she took a sudden, short leave from her company to welcome her child to her family, and how her company rallied behind her throughout the process. We’ll hear about her process of adoption, how becoming a parent influenced her work, and how her work changed in becoming a parent.  FULL SHOW NOTES Get the complete show notes with episode quotes, photos, and time stamps at http://www.startuppregnant.com/136.

#135 — Is minimalism and motherhood possible? Cary Fortin, who many of you have heard before on the podcast, is joining us again today to talk about minimalism, motherhood, and decluttering. Cary is a writer, a storyteller and a designer, and she is the co-founder of New Minimalism, a company focused on de-cluttering and design. She and her business partner, Kyle, help people regain meaningful relationships with their stuff and their things through organizational philosophy and design. They founded the company in 2011—before the Marie Kondo craze hit—and they started their business by going into people’s homes and helping them find a new way with their things. In 2018 they released their first book, New Minimalism: Decluttering and Design for Sustainable, Intentional Living. The beauty of this book is in its deeper philosophy, behind why we have things and what we surround ourselves with and what to do about them. Behind all of our stuff are a series of questions: What is the purpose and the joy of the space? Who is it serving, and why? What are the meanings behind the things you have, and what do you want the space to do for you? In this episode, we talk about rethinking your spaces and how to do so with intention, compassion, and understanding. Moreover, I ask her about minimalism, motherhood and staying sane in the chaos of kids: What do you do when you have the chaos of a toddler, or all those endless things it seems like babies need? How do you set boundaries and communicate a sense of simplicity amidst the madness, and is it even possible? Do you really need a baby shower, or a registry—and if so, what should you put on it? FULL SHOW NOTES Get the complete show notes with episode quotes, photos, and time stamps at http://www.startuppregnant.com/135.

#134 — Careers Twists and Turns When Brea Starmer was seven months pregnant while working at a startup, she was laid off. In her third trimester, she started a consulting practice and interviewed for jobs—quickly starting her own consulting practice and then launching her company. Between having her first kid and then getting pregnant with her second, she decided to focus on building her own consulting agency to create flexible jobs for working parents. She hired her first person at the end of 2018 and has since grown her company to 50 people today. Tara Zimmerman had a similar career pickle, but of a different nature. When Tara Zimmerman first became a parent, she didn’t have a master plan to be a stay-at-home mom. But then, four kids and eight and a half years later, she was running a household and juggling a massive schedule with six humans at the core. But where was she, and did she want to get back into the work world? Turns out, the answer was yes. She signed up to join the Wise Women’s Council to support her while she transitioned back into the work world and back into a finance and operations role at the company she used to run with her husband. Today’s careers are no longer linear, and they don’t follow a map. Most of us have unconventional career paths, because we’re living through a time when the world of work is rapidly changing. Not only that—our lives are unfolding and changing, too! From children to parents to unexpected bumps along the way, we’re navigating a new world of work that hasn’t existed before. If you feel like you’re entering the world of parenting and it’s madness, because your job is changing, your dreams are changing, or the company you thought you’d be with completely folds one day, trust us—you’re not alone. Whatever it is that happens in our stories as it unfolds, we all eventually arrive at a place where we look around and say, “Wait a second, where am I? What happened? And what do I do next?” That question—what do I do next—is at the heart of the work that comes up time and time again with the women in our community here at Startup Pregnant. It turns out, it’s not always an easy question to answer, and it’s through conversations and connections with other people that we can see who we are and wake up to the changes we want to make in our lives. If you’ve been through a career pivot, or you’re wondering what you’d do during a layoff, or a work break, or you’ve even left the world of work for a while—today’s episode is for you.  Today's conversation is between me and two of the women who just finished our year-long Wise Women's Council, our annual program for parents navigating entrepreneurship and parenting. If you listened to last week's episode, we talked to three women in the program about navigating your career path when you have kids, and the many ways entrepreneurship can show up in your life. This week, we get to meet two more women who have been in this community mastermind all year. What I learned over and over again from each of these women is how many of us are figuring it out as we go and doing what we can with what we have, even as the world continues to change around us.  Whether you are reentering the work world after a break or you're facing a huge amount of uncertainty after a layoff or you're starting to build a new company from scratch, or maybe you're even creating a new role for yourself within an existing company. The challenges that face us as we level up in leadership while becoming parents are not easy. I'm so thankful to both Tara and Brea for coming on the show and sharing their stories with you today. FULL SHOW NOTES Get the complete show notes with episode quotes, photos, and time stamps at 

#133 — What does it mean to be an entrepreneur? One of the things I keep learning from gathering groups of working women together is how broad and diverse the realm of entrepreneurship is. Common culture would have you believe that entrepreneurship looks like a single white dude building a company out of his garage with a bunch of coding co-founders. Eating ramen. Dropping out of Harvard. Sure, Silicon Valley has that. But there is so much more to entrepreneurship than this. I've met women who are building so many different businesses, in many different forms. What I’ve learned in interviewing and working with hundreds of you is that building businesses is a huge, broad landscape—and that women are building businesses faster than almost any other demographic group. (Black women are starting businesses at unprecedented rates.) From private practices to PR firms to new companies serving women and families, to big tech companies to investment companies to research-based practices—women’s entrepreneurship is diverse, phenomenal, and important. There is no one path to entrepreneurship For some people, they became entrepreneurial by accident—stumbling into entrepreneurship when a career path reached a dead-end, or wasn't fulfilling anymore. Others, like the story Tara McMullin shared on our podcast, found themselves jobless and pregnant and with a choice: start a new adventure or try to find another gig? Still some people start down the path because of a product idea they can't get out of their head, or a market segment and a population that needs to be served. Some people become entrepreneurs because it’s their calling. Some people don’t even know they’re building a business until long after they’ve been serving clients and realize that they’re in the thick of it as a full-fledged business owner. People are creative. We like building things. Here's a secret: most of us scroll Facebook and Twitter and Instagram because we are bored out of our minds, lonely, or craving more stimulation. The "news" is a stand-in for the type of deep satisfaction that comes from making things with our bodies and minds, and truly connecting with other human beings. Humans naturally crave learning, growth, and being with other people. Entrepreneurship—the art of making new things, of creating a new business in the world, and serving other people with your gifts and talents—can be deeply challenging and immensely satisfying. I've met and interviewed entrepreneurs of all types and what I've learned is that it's not about how you look, whether the media covers your type of business, or the “hustle” you’re supposed to have. Entrepreneurship is about listening to your own inner wisdom, it’s about knowing yourself and deeply understanding people around you, and it’s about making things that change other people’s lives while also changing yours. It’s about the call to leadership, business, and growth. Last year, in The Wise Women's Council, we had 18 women join us for a nine-month journey following the ups and downs of building businesses, careers, and lives. Some of the folks we had joining us on the journey included: A tech employee who used the courage of the group to quit a lucrative leadership position and venture out onto her own to test two of her ideas for upcoming companies. A service-based entrepreneur who helps other business owners build maternity leave policies and stay sane while taking parental leave. A marketing consultant who was fired from her job while pregnant and vowed to build a better business, launching a marketing consultancy from a small studio shed in her backyard in Seattle. (You’ll hear her story on the latest podcast roundtable.) Today, I bring three of these women onto the pod

#132 — How To Streamline Your Business: New Minibook Last time we talked, I was in the middle of a midstream flop. Sometimes forward progress doesn’t look like progress at all—because other things take a spot on the front burner. It’s hard to acknowledge all that’s happened here at Startup Pregnant without still feeling like I have twelve burners cooking and I’m constantly burning something. Maybe, actually, the more accurate metaphor is that I forgot to start the boiling water in the first place. That’s what it feels like, at least. Getting things done is not linear, and it’s not easy—especially not with kids. Despite the best laid plans, trying to show up in a consistent, regular fashion and maintain focus and momentum can be hard. For me, especially when it comes to writing and entrepreneurship, it feels like some days are a scramble of fixing the things that broke, and it’s hard to measure forward progress. What I’ve learned, and what I continue to learn, is that I need to focus on as few things as possible in order to make real moves forward. I have to make hard decisions about what to cut from my plate in order to bring the next project to life. Today I’m excited to share the latest minibook with you, brand-new and out in the world: How to Streamline Your Business. It’s the process I use to painstakingly cut back on initiatives in order to find focus and actually ship things in the world. It’s the process I used to focus primarily on the podcast in the first year of building Startup Pregnant, and the process I used again to stay focused on building only the next branch—The Wise Women’s Council—for the year following. FULL SHOW NOTES Get the complete show notes with episode quotes, photos, and time stamps at http://www.startuppregnant.com/132.

#131 — What happens to the dud weeks? Weeks can go by where it feels like no progress is being made. I’m back for a short and sweet update, and I’m a little nervous to share that I haven’t really made any forward progress over the last few weeks. In fact, I’ve been avoiding recording an update episode because I want to be able to come back and show off a shiny new project—like, voila! Here ya go! But my writing and building progress isn’t like that. The last few weeks have been full of work and deadlines, but I haven’t had space—or made space—for writing. Instead, I shipped important work and I still have a goal that’s on the back burner. Here’s a short update from the writing cave, and what I’ve learned even though it’s been a lull for a moment when it comes to writing. FULL SHOW NOTES Get the complete show notes with episode quotes, photos, and time stamps at http://www.startuppregnant.com/131.

#130 — Goal Setting, Making Progress, and Minibook Updates It's almost the midpoint of the quarter and I want to check in with progress notes. My goal this Fall has been to step back from the weekly recording to gain enough space and clarity to do some of the writing projects that have been on the back burner. It turns out “doing all the things” isn’t a useful plan or viable option when you’re a parent and a business owner. If you want to hear more about how I made the decision to take a temporary break, check out Episode #127: Pivot or Pause, and Episode #129 where I share the first update on my writing progress. What’s the big-picture goal? I want to write, publish, and ship the first draft of some of our minibooks in our collection. I’ve had ideas burning a hole in my pocket for ages and it’s time to take them out of my head and put them onto the page. The good news? We shipped the next MiniBook! Over the last three weeks I’ve been focused on creating a MiniBook called The Pregnancy Reading List: Short, Sweet Summaries of All The Books So You Can Take All The Naps. I've read probably at least 100 books on motherhood, parenting, pregnancy, fertility, women's health, wellness, and postpartum care. And I get this question a ton from all over—'Hey, what's the best pregnancy book for my friend?'—or "Do you have any favorite parenting books?"—I mean, gosh do I have a few favorites. But I also know how overwhelming it is. Many of these books can be massive—900 pages!—and it can seem like a second college degree just to read all of these books. The book is now available on our website. If you go to startuppregnant.com/minibooks, you'll see the books we're working on, and you'll see that The Pregnancy Reading List is available right now. It comes in PDF, mobi, epub, and web format, so you can read it on your e-reader, Kindle, on any website, or download it as a PDF. Also, when you buy a copy of the book, you also get free access to all of the future versions of the book—every time I update the book, add more summaries or notes, or edit it, you get a free download of the latest version. FULL SHOW NOTES Get the complete show notes with episode quotes, photos, and time stamps at http://www.startuppregnant.com/130.

#129 — If you feel like you don't have enough time for it all, you might be right. I’m tired of all the advice to hustle harder and put better productivity systems in place. I’m great at systems and great at productivity and I’m really good at working harder.  Sometimes you don’t have more bandwidth to give, or more strategy to apply. For me, realizing that I have to shift things around and really focus—and prioritize—has been painful yet key in building my business.  I cannot claim to be able to podcast, write books, run a business, be a parent, get enough sleep, and stay well-connected in all of my friendships. That would be a lie. I’m tired of being sold this lie. If you’ve been following along on the podcast, I’m sharing my real-time decision to ‘pause’ the podcast while I bring something else into focus: the writing and publishing work I want to do both for myself and for Startup Pregnant. I’m taking you behind-the-scenes of my other projects, and giving you a glimpse into how it’s working. Why? Because these shorter mini-episodes take me significantly less time than the longer-form interview podcasts, and I’m publishing them only as frequently as I can manage.  Join me this Fall as I share how it’s going, and we’ll be back with longer episodes when the time is right. PS: If you’re hankering to join us for the next 90 days and you want to focus on getting one thing done in the next year, take a listen to the previous episode, The Next 90 Days, and join us in our Facebook Group and tell us what you’re working on for the rest of 2019. FULL SHOW NOTES Get the complete show notes with episode quotes, photos, and time stamps at http://www.startuppregnant.com/129.

#128 — What's it going to take? As business owners—and parents!—we’ve got limited time. SUCH LIMITED TIME. It’s crazy how fast the days fly by and how maddening it is to slot in all of the family logistics across work time and still get anything done. As we approach the end of the year, and think about the last quarter of 2019, it’s a great time to focus on one final project or sprint. What would make 2019 great for you? What project, if you made some major headway on it, would really move the needle for you?  In today’s episode, I share what I’m focused on for the next 90 days, and how I’m changing the podcast format for the rest of the quarter to help me get even more focused on what I want to ship. If you want to join me and take the next 90 days to focus on a specific goal, share with us in our Startup Pregnant Facebook Group and stay accountable over the next 13 weeks to finishing the year strong. FULL SHOW NOTES Get the complete show notes with episode quotes, photos, and time stamps at http://www.startuppregnant.com/128.