This episode is a personal one, it’s not business related and there aren’t any leadership tips for you to take away. Today we are talking about having BIG dreams and bringing them to life. I want to share a really, really exciting announcement that I’ve been working on for years. So, get out of your head, into your heart and let’s talk about making our big dreams come true.
INTRO:
Hey, it’s Julie and welcome to the Corporate Yogi podcast. Today’s episode is a personal one, it’s not business related there aren’t any leadership tips for you to take away. Today we are talking about having BIG dreams and bringing them to life. I want to share a really, exciting announcement with you of something that I’ve been working on for years, 3 years exactly. If you’ve been listening for a while this will be no doubt, be a very exciting episode and I think you’ll be really happy to share my announcement, but if this is your first time listening please know that this is not a typical episode for the show, we usually talk about leadership tips for being an extraordinary leader.
Last month, in the middle of February I welcomed a baby girl into my world and my life changed forever. It was a chance to fulfill one of my greatest dreams in life – to become a mom. Her name is Mary, named after her two great grandmothers, and she is absolute perfection, she has the sweetest temperament she is beautiful and she is a very calm and kind demeanor and I am completely and totally in love with her.
So, I want to do this episode because I’m currently on maternity leave, and as I told my clients about this journey and friends and others along the way there’s a lot of questions that people have because this isn’t a traditional pregnancy there’s a lot of factors that are very nontraditional that’s why I wanted to create this episode and share the details with you
So here’s a look at what you’re going to learn today:
1) First, I’ll talk about pregnancy at this age in life
2) In the 2nd segment I reflect on how my career impacted my decision to be a Mom
3) In the 3rd segment I share a whole lot of thank you messages
So get out of your head and into your heart and let’s talk about our big dreams.
SEGMENT 1:
Let’s start with perhaps the shocking question I’ve been asked. So why did you wait until 47 to have a baby. Now I know 100% that this person had no ill will by asking the question, they were just curious, and they only met me during the pregnancy, and therefore had no idea that this was something on the brain that I had been trying to make happen for about 10 years. It was an honest mistake, and I’m not sharing it because I want to shame anyone, I’m sharing it as a teachable moment, and it leads to myth #1: just bc someone doesn’t tell you that they are trying to have a baby, doesn’t mean that they aren’t trying to or that they don’t want to. As a society we have somehow decided that a woman’s fertility is everyone’s business, and that anyone has the right to ask questions and make assumptions about what she should or shouldn’t want and what her intentions are. The same frustration I hear all the time from women who are crystal clear that they don’t want to have children, get asked all the time, when are you going to have children. And pretty much from the time I moved back from London, at 36, this has been on the brain as something I have wanted to do, so you can imagine how hurtful and frustrating it was when people kept asking, why didn’t you have kids, why don’t you want to have kids. It’s like a dagger through the heart. And the honest answer is, I actually do, more than anything, but while I’ve dated and met many men over the years, they either haven’t been interested in kids, or weren’t responsible enough. And eventually 3 years ago I decided to move ahead and have a child on my own without a partner, that was just not something I wanted to do earlier. I was holding too tightly to the dream of doing it in the traditional order, meet someone, get married, move in together and then have a child together. But the better questions here is, why was I really clinging to this dream. We know that 60% of first marriages end in divorce, which means I was clinging to a dream with pretty bad odds, and although it works out for many, and I’m so happy for them, there are no guarantees
As I said earlier, I am on maternity leave and when you’re self-employed and you decide to go on maternity leave it’s kind of a tough decision taking time off, winding down with clients was hard but I also knew that this given the rarity of this pregnancy and the amount of time and energy I spent making it happen, I wanted to make sure that I really took the time off to spend with her and really develop some strong bonds and enjoy her first year. As a coach every day I see the impact of what happens with clients when they don’t have strong relationships with their parents, or don’t have secure attachment or positive beliefs and stories programmed in their OS, or Operating System, so I wanted to do things differently. So as I wound down with all clients to have time off and spend it with her. And as I found myself telling the story over and over again of my journey and my decisions it took to get here and I found that my clients had a lot of questions, were really curious and were gaining a lot of benefit by talking about it. I was and am still completely open to answering any question that people had about the journey and I realize that through the process of getting pregnant and having this baby on my own at 47 isn’t the typical story, I knew that. But I kind of viewed it as a personal story and didn’t think people would really be that curious about it. But, once again I was wrong, and clients bombarded me with questions. So I wanted to create this episode to share the details of the pregnancy, and my intentions to be a solo mom. Already just about a month and I can stay with complete and total confidence that this role of being a parent is absolutely a game changer. I’ve known over the years through friends through family members, that parenting is hard and a labour of love and I usually explain it as servant leadership because you are giving everything to this child and they’re taking and taking and taking and taking and then taking some more and sometimes it’s a thankless job and especially in the beginning they don’t really give anything back in return they don’t say thank you they don’t celebrate you in a way or appreciate all the new things that you do for them for when you run interference or all the times you protect them they just take and take and take. And I guess they the way that they do give is they give in terms of fulfilment and love and feeling this inextricable Bond and a sense of purpose but at the end of the day it is servant leadership you were here to care for and to give unconditionally what are you doing it right either they want it done or not it’s your job to just give and give and give.
I looked at this journey as a decision and part of my personal life that wouldn’t impact clients, their lives or anything that they were going through in life, but boy was I wrong. I realized that as I started to share the news with people it opened up a whole series of questions for people around their parenting choices around their path to parenting and how it has changed their lives inextricably and also for people who are considering having kids in the future or right now on the path to have any children there’s a lot of questions they came up and a lot of conversations that we had as a result. And this episode really is bigger than an episode about becoming a parent, it’s an episode about having a kick-ass big dream, a completely crazy dream that you’re willing to fight for, and do whatever it takes to make it happen and bring your vision to life.
So I wanted to create this episode to really share everything that happened on the journey and really be honest about some of the questions and decisions that I faced along the way. I realized more and more as I have these conversations that this is an important topic and no, it isn’t separate from our career or from business, because I’m the one that talks all the time about not having this clear solid line that divides between our business and our personal life whenever we make a decision in business it impacts our personal life and whenever we make a decision in our personal life it impacts our business. Our choice to parent or not to parent impacts our career, and vice versa. And along the way I want to address some of the common myths, and misconceptions about parenting, solo parenting and being a woman in business. This episode will be biased from the female experience, since that’s what I know best. However I do have a male client who chose to solo parent too, so that is another beautiful journey to parenting that I have witnessed.
SEGMENT 2:
When I think about this decision, it’s impossible to think back about all of the different jobs that I’ve had over the years that on reflection I can see now have had an impact on my decision to delay having a family. There are many times when it was frowned upon to have a child, because we are working so hard and such long hours and so much travel. There was also the time when I was hired and even though I know that this is illegal and highly inappropriate there was the time when my boss asked me whether I had children or is planning on having children in the future because it wouldn’t fit with the job that I was signing on for so probably wouldn’t be a great fit. So I know that he had good intentions of preparing me for the expectations of the role, however I think looking back now when we make statements like that we plan to see it in someone’s head that having children is going to limit you in your career and it’s going to hold you back and it’s not something that you were going to be able to do if you want to get ahead in life. And I think that this doesn’t serve as well because I think that there are so many different ways to have both and to find a way to navigate having both and I don’t think it needs to be a message that we tell women that you can either be career driven or you can be family oriented because quite frankly I think that there’s still a lot of people slogging that outdated message that you have to choose between one and the other and I think that’s BS and I want to call the ass and all the people that are still slogging that message because I don’t think it serves us as individuals I know it definitely hold us back as females and quite frankly looking back I’m pretty pissed about a lot of it a lot of the shitty messages that I received over the years that my career if it was important if I care about my career then plenty of family had to take a backseat because I don’t think that that is the truth I know that in fact I know that that’s not the truth. So I think whether you are considering having children or not whether there are people on your team that have children or they may be having children in the future I think that there is I’ll say this humbly something in this episode for everyone so whether you have baby on the brain or you have someone on your team who has kids or someone who might potentially have kids in the future then I think this is the perfect opportunity to take a break from business because we’ve been learning a lot lately in this podcast and just take pause and really reflect on some personal things in your life whether it’s having a baby or making a big life-changing decision that might impact business or whether it’s just taking a little bit of a time off because I know for me part of having this new little human tiny human in my life is also this opportunity to take a you know a year or 10 months to be honest or off of work and to really reflect and to think about what I want to do differently in the future going forward.
And in preparing this episode I started to realize that they were actually quite a few themes between business and having a child that were very similar or very aligned and I started to see a pattern of a lot of things like for example it doesn’t always go according to plan, it’s always harder than you think it’s going to be and it’s the most fulfilling thing that you can ever do to burst open your heart with pride and have a sense of accomplishment.
SEGMENT 3:
And there’s so many people that I really want to give a shout out to you and think who helped me along the way and I want to go through the list and it’s not in order of importance it’s really in chronological to coal based on where I met people along the journey so. The first shout out I want to say thank you to Dr. Dre and Dr. Emilie to naturopath who are also dear friends of mine and helped me out along the journey in the very beginning and helped me to do some testing and giving me some details about hormones and all that good stuff and they’re both so absolutely brilliant and these two as well as everyone who I wanna shout out a name will be linked in the show notes so specifically these these two and what their practices are right now and their specialties and I’ll post that information in the show notes as well. The next person I want to do a shout out is Odessa Dr. O at Aspire Health who was the naturopath that specializes in fertility and she helped me along my entire journey just to regulate cycles and help me with acupuncture and preparing my body for pregnancy after we did the transfer making sure the pregnancy stuck in there just there’s such a long list of everything that I needed to know that I didn’t know you know that thing you don’t know the things that you need to know you don’t know what you don’t know while she was the magical fairy that filled in everything that I need to know and what I truly love about her is that she has his perfect blend between spirituality and science she really has a gift when it comes to honouring both the spiritual side and the science side her wisdom in the world of fertility is just off the charts and she is absolutely a gem I highly recommend her as well as all of my referrals are in the GTA so in the track Toronto area approximately in Ontario so for some practitioners it’s going to be necessary to see them in person so I know that will only apply to some of you if that something that you want to take away but you know there’s always something here that you can dig around into even if it’s just getting a list of good practitioners so Dr. O at Aspire Health the next person I want to help which was a referral and I feel like the journey was kind of this whole path of steppingstones I would meet one person and I believe I do believe it was Dr. Dre that referred me to meet Odessa and so when I met with her then she referred me onto Fertility Clinic and because of my age starting this in my 40s I knew that that would be the path and I need to go especially also not having a partner in needing a sperm donor so that would be some thing that I absolutely had to do. She referred me to Dr. D at ReproMed Dr. DelVaille who is an absolute genius and he is one of the most seasoned people doing IVF in the Toronto area I don’t know if he’s the one who has been doing it the longest or he’s one of the people who’s been doing it the longest but he is absolutely so knowledgable and most importantly he truly cares where is I feel like with so many clinics popping up there really can be as you can imagine it’s an expensive journey that some people can really go through a Money grab and start to see dollars and sense in terms of opportunity but he really really really cares and he’s really authentic and you know obviously he brought me my miracle and that’s that’s something I’m truly grateful for so Dr. D and also all the nurses and staff and the admin staff and the front desk staff and everybody who works their tail off to help us at the clinic so I want to see a shout out to everybody at Repro Med. And when I first had my appointment there and started going through the process years before I got pregnant Dr. Dee said to me he said you know at your age at that point I was 44 so at that point he said I really think that you should go through and do you her eggs because if you don’t have eggs already retrieved and frozen then it’s going to be very very difficult for you and so he was a big proponent of using frozen or embryos or donor eggs from the very beginning but it was my choice to actually try a few cycles with my own eggs even though I knew I was older and the odds were really low kind of like you know that style I talk about sometimes when if you’re an entrepreneur you hear that there’s a 1% chance or 1% chance that something will be successful and any normal same person will say that’s a 99% chance of failure there’s a really bad odds but if you’re an entrepreneur all you hear is 1% of fit of chance of success I could be that 1% yeah let’s do it those are great odds so I think that my propensity in tolerance for risk really serve me well because it is an expensive journey and you can’t go into it with a faint heart you just have to be prepared to spend a lot of money. The next group of people I want to think is everyone at Lincoln midwives, in Canada we have the option of choosing to go down the path of working with midwives OR an OB, and so on very good advice from my family numbers I opted to go with a midwife for the birth and that was one of the best decisions that I could’ve made I’m so grateful that I did and saw a huge shout out to team blue and also the admin team at Lincoln midwives. I would highly suggest going through and going to midwife now bc there’s so much extra care that happens along the way they come out to visit you at home after the birth because the last thing you want to do after you’ve just given birth is to drag yourself and a New infant into a car seat to go into see your doctor, and so the midwives come and see you at home for the first four weeks which is so lovely. I’d also like to give a shout out to my therapist Nicole, who guided me through countless conversations and worries, is it selfish to have a child without a father? Will she resent me if she doesn’t have a dad, and on and on. I really needed to have these conversations to be able to get through to the other side.
The next group of people I really need to thank is my family who has supported me unconditionally from the very beginning. when I told everybody what the plan was, they didn’t question my vision, and that was amazing – so big thankyou to my Mom who is my superhero and offered to let me stay with her with a newborn and be an extra set of hands to help out and play the role of chief cuddle officer, to my brothers who stepped in to do all the guy stuff, like the car seat and putting the stroller together, to my sisters who have spoiled this little girl from even before she was born, and provided me with endless wisdom and especially to my sister Jenn, who very generously played the role of my birth partner, took me to and from the hospital and stayed with me every step of the way and walked me through the first 24 hours with the right combination of wisdom and advice, because she’s gone through this with her kids and knew how everything would go, she is literally an expert with all things birth and newborns, and it was so awesome to have her there through every step of the way – thank you Jenn – you are truly an angel. I’d also like to thank all my friends who supported me through this big hairy audacious goal, I didn’t let everyone know, but I shared it with my inner circle, so thank you to Rebecca, Tania, Ashley, Deb, Rayissa and Lois who held the vision, didn’t tell me I was crazy and supported me along the way. Since baby Mary was breech around 37 weeks, we had to enlist the support of an OB to do a c-section, thanks to Dr. Baker who has to the coolest OB around and her 2nd question to me was what theme song we wanted to add to the playlist, she was truly amazing and as soon as she retrieved the baby, she Lion Kinged her up and over the sheet so I could see my new little tiny human. To everyone at St. Catharines general, and what felt like 30 people in that Operating room, for such an intense procedure that went by so fast.
Then two other obvious people that I need to thank, who made this all possible, but I never even met were the sperm donor, and the egg donor. I am very grateful that both these individuals generously offered their donations to make my dreams come true. I had considered freezing eggs at 36, and at the time it was too expensive and experimental, so I opted against it. But for anyone in that situation who is considering it, I would highly recommend it, especially for those of you listening in Ontario, because your first round of IVF is covered under our health care system, and so you really only need to cover the cost of medication. If you even think there’s a chance you want to have kids in the future, definitely do it. I was lucky that my double donor cycle worked out and my first transfer was successful. But I know many stories of women who did not have that kind of success and after years of trying, have just tapped out of the journey. Let’s face it, it’s expensive and hard physically and exhausting mentally, so anything you can do to lessen the challenge, the better.
OK as you can see there are a lot of people who helped along the way, and gave me amazing support and I am truly grateful. The last piece of advice I’ll share is that all the mindset tools that we use, that you have learned from me over the years, these all applied to this journey as well. I had a vision board for years, with a baby and her name on it. I had a baby alter with some tiny little pink shoes, I bought kids books and listened to kids music and really did everything I could to manifest this little one into my life. It all works, and you have to go into it believing 100% that it will happen. This is a time where we can’t lead with rationality, if you try to find a way to rationalize the odds, or the cost or the effort of the emotion strain, trust me – you will never find a way to justify going down the path
WRAP UP:
So as far as announcements, I am currently on maternity leave to the end of 2022. I will be back taking on clients for January 2023. If you’re interested in working together, please reach out in the fall this year, I will be onboarding and booking clients in October, and so if you’re finally ready to work together or you have your heart set on a slot, please reach out sooner than later. For this podcast, I had hoped to continue publishing this through the year, but I see now that that was a naive idea, I have been trying to 5 weeks to get this episode out, and it’s been a struggle. So I need to take my own advice and be present with baby Mary and the miracle that she is, she is my greatest teacher right now and this is an immersion in parenting. I have a couple more episodes that were prerecorded before giving birth, and I will defo share those, then the podcast will be on hiatus until January of 2023.
OK it’s time to wrap up this episode on my big dream that came true. I hope you enjoyed this episode and that you’re taking away something that applies to your life or to someone that you know or work with. Please remember not to make an asumption about what a person does or doesn’t want. Remember, we never know what kind of baggage people are carrying on the inside.
So whatever your big dream is, if it’s going down the path to become a parent, or if it’s something completely different, please be true to your dream, hold it close to your heart, tell those who you know will support it, believe in the dream unconditionally, know that you deserve it and that you can truly have, do or be anything you want and then go out there and make it happen. We don’t rationalize miracles, we don’t weigh out pros and cons, we believe in them with unwavering faith, and sometimes that means not having all the answers and not knowing exactly how things are going to happen, and that’s ok, bc that’s truly how the best miracles are made.
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