For most of my life, writing things down was a way for me to understand things better. But as I became more and more sleep-deprived, as my body changed, I found it harder and harder to write. The massive adventure ahead of me of pregnancy, giving birth, becoming a mother—it was daunting. It was no small fact that my identity, life, and known world would be subject to massive upheaval. I didn’t know how to make sense of it. I felt lost and insecure.

Pregnancy: I wanted to understand it. I wanted to catalog it. I wanted to explain it, tell the stories of pregnancy. Yet all I could write were the worst clichés, and then wincing, knowing that that wasn’t it. How could I go through something so deeply human and yet struggle for words to explain it?

I decided to use my friend’s Clarity Card process2 as a structured way to journal towards the end of my pregnancy. The method is simple and beautiful, and I ended up in tears just by having this as a guide. Below, I’ll walk you through the four-step process he outlines — and how I used it to chart out ideas, insights, and clear perspectives on being pregnant. Plus, I’ll include some of my original notes from when I wrote this out when I was eight months pregnant. It helped me.

A 4-Step Guided Framework for Journaling and Gaining Clarity

Much like Julia Cameron writes about in The Artist’s Way, just getting pen on paper and making a list can be an extraordinary way to dive into your mind. The mind, I’ve learned, is an incredible tool that can be cued with phrases and questions. All you have to do is let your mind respond to the questions you put forth.3

Here’s how I did it:

Read more

Read more

For too many years, one of the last things on my list was taking care of myself. If I even made the list. To be honest, it never crossed my mind to put myself on this list as a consideration — I jus…

Read more

Read more

To stop, right?

To stop. That’s one answer.

Is there another answer? I heard this on the radio recently, and I jotted it down in my mental notebook.

Here’s the real reason that cars have brakes:

Cars have brakes so they can go fast.

Without brakes, we’d all drive very, very slowly. We would need extended space to slow down, clever wa…

Read more

Consistency is often touted as the key to success for content creators and business owners. Consistency can be beautiful. Julia Cameron is a champion of the daily morning pages. Jerry Seinfeld writes material almost every day, never missing more than one day in a row.

But I keep wondering — does it always apply? Chappell Roan isn’t churning out a new song every week. works on projects at length, for years at a time, and shares her creative work blooms on her own timeline. Even network TV releases shows in bursts, not endless streams.

I want to argue that it depends. Are you an artist, a parent, or working a full-time day job? Do your children have special needs? Are you neurodivergent? Context matters. One-size-fits-all doesn’t work for everyone.

So let’s dig in and get a little closer to this idea of consistency:

• When and why consistency advice is useful.

• How consistency advice becomes dogma and/or falls short

• What you need to do to set up a project in a sustainable way.

• When it’s worth stepping away to create your own rhythm and path

• And what patterns, routines, or ideas you can use instead.

The essay below is free and public for the next six weeks to show folks what it’s like when you become a paying member of this community. Consider become a paid supporter today!

1. When consistency advice is useful:

Building a business or creating content can be a long game, and the payoff comes from consistently delivering value and fostering relationships. In my experience working with companies and founders, it’s often true that steady, predictable effort has been key to growing businesses, products, and audiences. Consistency can also help your audience know what to expect and builds trust over time.

But it’s important to notice and break down the specific goals that are deeper than setting up a specific routine. The point of the routine is so that you can:

• Deliver value

• Foster relationships

• Grow businesses, products, and audiences

• Tell people what to expect

• Build trust over time

TIP: A great way to test a goal or an idea is by adding the phrase, “SO THAT,” to the end of it. Mission statement or values seem vague? Add “So that…” and see what comes up.

Get very clear on what your outcome goals are and how you’ll measure it, and then you can build a structure or framework to begin testing. Being consistent is useful advice when:

1. You have a specific goal, and you want to work towards it — and you need a certain number of data points or repetitions to evaluate the effort.

2. The work you’re doing benefits from getting a large number of repetitions in, and this high volume of repetitions / consistency will lead to a desired outcome.

3. You’re setting up a structure or a schedule to stay organized, and having a schedule helps you deliver on a project.

4. You want to develop a regular habit or relationship with your audience, who is learning what to expect from you.

5. Consistenty advice is also very helpful if you want to build a personal habit or practice routine.

The problem, however, is when we take consistency too far, and it becomes rigid or inflexible, especially when it’s detrimental to the humans or the project.

2. Consistency advice is too often wrapped up in culture of “productivity propaganda”

The problem with a lot of ‘consistency’ advice, however, is that it’s wrapped up with a more toxic brand of hustle culture, which focuses on productivity in excess, and finding ways to maximize every square inch of your time.

, a futurist and strategist who writes about technology and digital culture, calls this brand of advice “productivity propaganda,” and explains it as “social media posts that continue to promote a toxic narrative that tells people they are constantly not doing enough.” Propaganda is generaly defined as the spreading of ideas, information, or rumor for the purpose of helping or injuring an institution, a cause, or a person.

When the idea of consistency is interpreted as rigid all-or-nothing thinking, it can become exhaustive. It pushes people and organizations to produce as much as you possibly can at max capacity. There’s a lacing of shame in all of it, which is often weaponized to tell people to work harder, produce more, and to be dedicated in a way that may be unsustainable. It also impies that it’s the individual’s fault if they can’t keep up.

Pushing consistency above rest, life, and health is when consistency advice turns into productivity propaganda.

This hyper-drive for productivity at all costs has shadow sides. It can minimize people’s very real sense of overwhelm and exhaustion, and it insults people and blames them for not being organized enough. Rather than be honest about the challenge, it diminishes people’s experiences, leading to failure rather than creative problem-solving.

When advice to stay consistent and celebrates pursuit over and above life, health, and wellness, then it’s gone too far. Implicit in this version of “consistency” is the idea that if you miss once, then you’re hosed. It sets people up for burnout when they take on too much too fast. Then, life happens — life always happens — and you miss a day and you don’t have a plan for how to return.

“If you’re feeling overwhelmed, that’s an indication of a need to pause, rest, and recharge,” Harfoush says. I’d also add that it’s a sign that the system you signed up for is too much, and redesigning the system to fit your life is more important than trying to chase someone else’s brand of productivity.

3. Where consistency advice breaks down:

A lot of mainstream productivity advice comes with the baked-in assumption that you, the individual, have agency and control of your time. The underbelly is a set of assumptions about what you ‘should’ be capable of.

Perfect consistency assumes that:

• You have complete control over your time and energy,

• If you don’t meet rigorous deadlines, it’s a personal failure—there’s something wrong with you for not being organized or dedicated enough,

• It doesn’t address or acknowledge the necessity of rest,

• It promotes the culture of overwork that is relentless in pushing people to consume more, create more, and maximize value at every opportunity.

• You can behave and operate like a robot!

In addition, this version of productivity advice is often only accessible to a small fraction of people — it doesn’t apply as readily to folks with caretaking responsibilities, with neurodivergent minds, with different ways of thinking or being, or without agency and control over their schedule and time.

SOME COMMON EXAMPLES

Let’s look at a few examples where rigidity has surpassed consistency:

The Content Treadmill — Publishing new content every week without any scheduled breaks, ever, year over year.

Social Media Domination — Being on social media every single day, multiple times per day, as a single operator or small business.

Pushing Beyond Limits — Pushing yourself to create new creative work every week, even when you’re feeling burned out, exhausted, or when your support structures are absent.

Not Acknowledging Life — Insisting on creating and producing at the same level throughout major life events, like pregnancy and childbirth, because of the toxic messaging that you can have it all, do it all, and that pregnancy and children shouldn’t affect you or change you. (What!? Why do we think like this? It’s absurd.)

SO WHAT SHOULD YOU DO INSTEAD?

Redesigning your productivity system to fit your life is more important than trying to chase perfection, or someone else’s brand of productivity. If you’ve ever started a new routine or habit just to get waylaid or backlogged and quit in frustration, you’re not alone.

Perhaps the system you set up was too rigid and inflexible and needs to be thoughtfully re-designed. It might not be that you failed, but that the structure failed you.

The key here is to look at your goals and review whether or not consistency is helping you, or if it’s become harmful or restrictive to you in any way. This might seem obvious to say, but if it pushes you beyond your capacity, it’s too much.

4. Redesign consistency goals to have more flexibility and space — and so they work for you.

The key is to be creative and flexible in designing a structure that works for you and your capacity. Consistency goals that allow room for failure, flexibility, and regular breaks work far better than rigid, inflexible structures. Here’s how:

CONSISTENCY DOESN’T HAVE TO MEAN RIGIDITY.

You are allowed to ebb and flow, and to take multiple breaks within a project’s scope.

James Clear writes a limited number of new research articles per year. During the years he was writing a book, he wrote far fewer new articles. He had a consistent writing practice, but didn’t publish the same amount every year.

Vanessa Van Edwards runs aYouTube channel and publishes around three new YouTube videos each month, reserving the fourth and fifth weeks for rest and re-runs. She has over a million subscribers.

I hosted a weekly podcast for entrepreneurial parents for five years, while also taking multiple months-long breaks. Each time I took a break to focus on a separate creative project, I told my audience what to expect, regularly taking 2-3 months to deep dive into writing or other building work.

WORD FROM THE WISE: Never start a project that has an indefinite promise! It rarely works, and often peters out. Create an ideal outcome or ending, and plan for how you’ll stop the project.

ADD HEALTHY STRUCTURE TO PROJECTS

If you’re starting a new project, instead of signing up for an unlimited number of runs, set parameters for how many episodes, articles, or creative pieces you’ll produce, and do a limited number of runs and see how it goes. This is very similar to television, which will scope a pilot episode, record a limited series, and then see how the audience response is before renewing for a second season.

Do this when structuring a project:

• Your project or process must have an end date.

• Define what makes the project complete.

• It must have an allowance for breaks.

• It needs to have a path for re-starting after a stall.

• Get clear on when and how you will celebrate success.

TIP: It’s far better to create smaller projects with a higher chance of success, because then you’ll be building momentum with each iteration. Keep whittling down the scope and breaking projects down into smaller parts.

THINK IN SEASONS AND BATCHES

• Seasons instead of treadmills. Many folks can’t sustain a podcast, newsletter, blog, client outreach, and other parts of business all at the same time. Consider allocating specific seasons to projects. Many podcasts, for example, are seasonal. They are still “consistent” even with a long break in between seasons.

• Think in batches or sprints. Perhaps consistency doesn’t even feel right to you as a creator, artist, or worker. Some neurodivergent people I know find a daily word count to be an absolute boredom. So some writers use long weekends to churn out huge waves of content in sprints, and then return to daily life and produce very little in between.

• Plan for seasonal variation to respond to life and business. Got a business that works overdrive around the holidays? Plan ahead to take a break from other non-necessary projects during that season.

ALLOW ROOM FOR ADAPTATION + CHANGE

I work with so many parents who try to sustain the breakneck pace they had before they added kids to their lives. “I can’t keep up,” they tell me. Y’all. Of course we can’t keep up. We’re keeping people alive. Our lives have changed.

• Find the right rhythm for your business in this season. It’s okay to change the way you work when everything in your life has changed.

• Reduce the quantity or frequency of your project. Go to 1x a month if that’s what you can sustain right now. Don’t do daily or weekly; do the rate that really works. If you’re missing lots of days, you might be pushing too hard.

• Instead of quitting altogether, try a slower pace. Update your schedule to reflect the realities of what you can sustain.

MAKE TAKING BREAKS PART OF THE DESIGN

Consistency doesn’t mean staying on the content treadmill forever until you die, although that’s often how people start a project, by signing up for an indefinite amount of time. Instead, put more structure into your breaks and time away — the same way you do for the project.

• Build in “skip” weeks as part of the process. Plan floating “skip” weeks every month, or a set period at a regular cadence when you will stop working.

• Build in recurring, habitual breaks. Some creators I know skip full months in July and February. Other folks take two weeks in August and two weeks in December off. Some take the summer off.

• Lean on reruns and repurposing. Recycle material. I work with a writing team that takes my past podcasts and turns them into new blog posts for me. I also frequently re-use snippets of my best stuff, or re-broadcast past content that didn’t get seen much in the early days. Go back to your earliest social media posts, guest essays, or email blasts and see what you can re-use.

5. TL/DR — You can be consistent [AND] consistently take breaks.

Design a structure that works for you and your goals.

Sprints can be useful.

Repetitions can be key for growth and evolution.

But jumping onto a never-ending content treadmill, pursuing relentless churn above all other life demands? This is not sustainable. Don’t let the productivity propaganda machine convince you to drown. If you’re setting a project scope that includes unlimited publishing with a rigid, inflexible time table, warning lights should start flashing.

The alternative: Bring more creativity, flexibility, and recovery periods into the structure of your goals. When you design for rest and resilience from the outset, you’re more likely to stay the course and hit your goals.

— Sarah Peck
CEO & Founder
Startup Parent

This piece was repurposed from a guest post I did for the team over at Productive Flourishing. Charlie Gilkey asked me if I’d write pen a piece about hustle culture and flexibility, and I deeply believe that you can be consistent AND consistently take breaks. I wrote about five different ways to creatively re-think consistency and how to show up in your business when life is chaotic or unpredictable. →

But life is more than achievements and output. It’s also abou…

Read more

Crickets.

The mental duress of sharing something you're working on and wondering if people will buy—ugh, it's not easy. Somehow, over the past fifteen years, I've now done more launches than I can keep track of. After hundreds of courses, products, programs, offerings, books, mini-books, and more, I am comfortable with one thing:

You never fully know how it's going to go. 

No matter how many launches I’ve done, products I’ve offered, courses I’ve tried—there are so many variables that can shift all the time. Launching new things is not easy. (Predicting the future is also not easy.)

It’s important, however, to know that there is so much more to a launch than the number of people who buy from you. Sometimes when you launch, it’s the first time people are paying attention to you.

They’re watching and learning and listening and waiting. Putting into the calendar for next time to join when you do it again. Listening, reading, learning. Finding out about you for the first time. Deciding and debating, hesitating.

One data point—your first launch—is not enough data to make a decision. It’s only the start of an exploration.

Your next steps?

Email your group, your list, your friends. Ask them for feedback.

Write to them:

“Hey! If you didn’t sign up, but you were interested, hit reply. I’m curious if folks want me to run another program later this year—and I need to hear from you if so!” 

Get on the phone with your customers. Ask them if the product is for them. Talk to them about what they would change. Use the phrase, “If you’re being honest…” because it opens up people’s responses and allows them to shift into saying things that maybe they were hesitating to say.

“If you’re being completely honest, what held you back from buying this program?”

Adjust, readjust. Launch again, softly. Give yourself more space to ramp up into the program, more time to talk about it. People need to hear about things 4-7 times before they’re even aware that it exists and comfortable taking action. Most people don’t buy something the first time they hear about it.

In all likelihood, your launch was a great first step: you told the world what you have to offer. People are listening and watching, but they aren't ready to take action yet.

Quitting after your first launch is quitting way too soon.

It's okay to tell people about what you do multiple times. Use stories to share how it works; share case studies of what it's helped people do; describe the story of you making the project; share the failures of launching it; share your hopes and dreams; describe the change you seek to make in the people you want to serve.

Use the first launch as the first teaching point, not the end point. You told people about your THING. Now keep telling them about it!

Prepare for a launch with this key insight: never launch once.

If you pin all of your hopes and dreams on one single launch, the risk is insanely high. You need to plan ahead to launch a product or a program multiple times. Launch in beta if you need to, then launch an early bird program, and then prepare to run it several times. With this mindset of multiple launches, you'll release some of the pressure of needing to launch perfectly, and instead you'll tap into the world of iteration and experimentation.

That's where you need to live as a business owner.

Use each launch as a chance to learn. Use each iteration as a chance to experiment.

Plus, how often do we get anything right on the first try?

The first launch is to learn.

You can test which channels seem to bring in the most interest. You’ll see exactly how many people buy, and when they buy. You’ll get feedback from customers. You might get a lot of questions.

This is all valuable information.

When you view all of this as a larger collection of insight and see a launch as work in progress, you’ll maintain more sanity (and energy) for the long haul.

Don’t drop out because the first try didn’t work. Learn from it. You might be a few tweaks away from a brilliant product, you just don’t know it yet.

Keep going.

— Sarah Peck
CEO & Founder
Startup Parent

A few years ago, I was talking to a senior leader at an aerospace engineering firm. Much of his work involved calculating advanced risk and probability at the highest levels of math.

At one point, an adjacent team asked him to compute all the possible likelihoods and outcomes. W…

Read more

The clip art comes with a note that says some version of, “We are grateful for the opportunity to serve our clients. Happy Thanksgiving from everyone at Reese Holdings, LLC.”

We’ve created a culture that finds these kinds of insincere messages quaint and well-meaning. And if you don’t believe me check your mailbox soon for holiday cards from people who haven’t called you once this year.

Each time I bring this up in polite company, I get the same cultural gaslighting I get with every holiday season: “You’ve overthinking this.” “It’s just a card.” “They mean well.”

And my all-time favorite:

“Margo. Sometimes you just do things because that’s how it’s always been done.”

Grab your Thanksgiving adult beverage of choice and buckle up. Let’s dive into “how it’s always been done.”

What in the history of “how it’s always been done” didn’t improve with more information, better science, and new traditions?

TRICK QUESTION because the answer is nearly everything.

We don’t actually do anything the way it’s always been done. Most of human history, the “way it’s always been done” was really really really bad, like arranged marriage, bloodletting, monarchy, duels, and stoning people.

Heck, we’d have to get rid of engagement rings, Christmas trees, dreidels, turkey, cranberry, and gelt if we wanted to do things “the way it’s always been done” because those are super recent traditions that were most certainly not how it has always been done.

“How it’s always been done” is coded language for “how I want to do it,” or “how I wished it was,” or “because I miss my dad.”

And THOSE are conversations worth having.

Because if we started there we could have a reasonable chance at having the genuine gratitude, connection, intimacy, and love we crave—instead of this performance we put on each year for the holidays.

If a tradition doesn’t serve you, you can change it. In fact, you already have.

If you exist in the world today, you are engaging in traditions that your great-grandparents would never recognize.

Can you imagine Thanksgiving without Pumpkin Pie and Pecan Pie? It wasn’t until the early 19th century that Pumpkin Pie became common at an American Thanksgiving dinner. (Southerners resisted pumpkin pie, and made sweet potato pies with bourbon instead, which is a story about cultural resistance if you want to go down that rabbit hole.) Pecan pie wasn’t around until a hundred years later.

Think of all the pies we wouldn’t get to eat today if we didn’t keep trying to make pie even better.

But we cannot change what we don’t acknowledge. And when we hide behind tropes like, “How it’s always been done,” we refuse to engage with the truth: it has not always been done like this. We are choosing to do it this way. And each year we should decide for ourselves what we choose to opt-into and what we choose to let go of, now that we know better or more — or because we’re human and sometimes what worked last year, doesn’t work for us this year. Because life.

I see no value in performance traditions for the sake of tradition.

Humans have been evolving traditions for millennia—that’s what makes us adaptable. We are capable of change. I don’t know why change continues to get branded as “bad” but speaking as someone with some experience in branding I suggest we rebrand it.

New traditions are beautiful.

They can honor the past while making room for the future, instead of acting as an anchor for oppressive nostalgia. We get to decide what has meaning and what doesn’t. That’s our power as humans. We invent meaning, we’re are the keepers and bestowers of what we decide matters to us.

So let’s please stop lying about our motivations.

We’re not doing things “the way they’ve always been done.” We’re doing things because we miss our mom, we want to impress our friends, it connects us to the past, we love the drama of feeling needed or in control, we sincerely love cooking, our love language is hosting, or we feel systemic and cultural pressure to be something we’re not.

Whether these are good or bad reasons is not for me to judge. What’s important is they’re honest. We cannot get anywhere if we don’t start by being honest about what we are doing and why we are choosing to opt-into traditions we’ve inherited.

Opting out of what no longer serves us (and perhaps never did) is difficult. But identifying self-deception is harder. Identifying the places where we lie to ourselves about who we are, what we value, and why we do what we do demands courage and self-awareness. And the willingness to brave disapproval.

Here’s wishing you the courage to invent traditions that honor who you are and what you value.

You have a choice. You absolutely do not need to do things the way they’ve always been done. In fact, I hope you don’t. I hope you find a way to make things yours—to improve upon what you inherited and create new traditions that work for your specific circumstances and cause less harm in the process.

This Thanksgiving if there is anything to feel grateful for it is our capacity to change, evolve, and tell the truth. To choose to opt-out of what doesn’t serve us and create new traditions that do.

I’m keeping pecan pie. You can have pumpkin.

You do you.

More soon,

xo

— come find me at

LEARN MORE ABOUT BRAINSTORM ROAD

Brainstorm Road is a creative community for everyday people with dream projects. If you have day jobs, kids, adult responsibilities, and all the things life throws at you — but you also have dreams, Brainstorm Road is where you carve out a little space to work on them.

Our flagship program is a 6-month membership where you’ll join community of people taking weekly action on their Dream Projects. It includes group coaching, a daily scratchpad, weekly ship and shares, monthly huddles, and more. Click here to join.

Picture your ideal morning routine. What does it look like?

Ask anyone on the Internet, and the collective blog-o-sphere will tell you the list of ways you should wake up and care for your self and your soul. If you search the hashtag #morningroutine, you’ll come away with the conclusion that there’s somehow a “right” way to approach your morning routine.

Yet most morning routines have a perspective missing that, when you see it, you can’t unsee it. I first heard this idea when I listened to Tara Sophia Mohr's Sunday Session from January 9th, 2022. She’d stumbled across someone posting about their productive personal growth morning and their spiritual routine.

What was on the list was a lot of what you’d expect, including many of the latest fads: reading, bullet journaling, a set number of minutes of yoga, meditation, prayer, specific supplements, fasting routines, and even clothing routines to make decision making easier and simpler.

"My first thought was, who is this person who has this kind of time?” She said. But something else was bothering her. She noticed that the entire list had something in common. Everything on the list was an individual endeavor. Not one thing involved building, maintaining, or growing a relationship with another human being.

"In this long list of things—there were probably 20 things on this daily todo list—there was not one thing that involved another human being." — Tara Mohr

On this list, “There was not ‘I apologized when needed,’ or ‘I gave something to someone else,’ or ‘I asked someone how their day is going,’ or ‘I listened carefully to another person,’” Tara reflected.

Many spiritual and soul undertakings involve individual practice, of course. But life is not about everything being done in isolation. What these lists routinely miss are our collective intersection, and our capacity for inter-relationship. Relationships—friendships specifically—are one of the biggest factors in lifelong happiness and satisfaction, but the majority of adults report having very few friends at all.

When it comes to personal productivity, today’s pop culture focuses on a quantifiable, check-off-able "to-do" list, and the things that make the list are largely self-centered. These lists have very little to do with our ability to be in relationship to other people.

“We have set the conversation up in such a way that this person could feel like they had checked every box,” Mohr said, “without anything having to do [with] giving, [or] enhancing their capacity to love and be loved.”

She goes on to explain that thinking about love, interconnectedness, and relationship is not about taking the idea of productivity in some strange direction, however. The whole intent of morning lists, the deeper aim of creating one in the first place, is to help us feel better. We make these lists as a way towards feeling more secure, alive and fulfilled. The work of interpersonal connection and relationship building is essential to our own wellbeing. “It’s core because it is what helps us feel better in our lives, and it is what helps us stand stronger, and it is what helps us heal,” she said.

Does your morning routine include anyone else?

Being in relationship, learning about emotions, connecting and supporting other people—these are some of the components of a full, well-lived, well-loved life.

So often these productivity lists are about LIVING YOUR BEST LIFE, yet one of the deepest most meaningful things you can do with your life is find and explore feelings, emotions, connection, and love.

Instead of looking at a new year or season and striving for things about ourselves that we can “polish up and whip into shape,” Mohr says, think about the upcoming season in terms of how you want to invest in, extend towards, and be in relationship to other people and other expressions of life.

A productivity list that includes relationships could involve:

• I cared for someone else.

• I got deeply in touch with an emotion and felt it rise and fall and release.

• I spent time learning to be in relationship.

• I set a boundary that needed to be set.

• I went to therapy / worked on my mental health.

• I connected with someone I care deeply about.

Perhaps what we need more of—in the apps and lists that help us build our morning routine—are notes to spend time with your friends, your family, and to cultivate new relationships, mess and all.

Our morning routines are for a purpose, often for greater connection and love. For those with young children, aging parents, or other loved ones we take care of, our routines can often be chaotic or at the discretion of the day.

To that end, it’s okay if you wake up and spend time with the ones you love, grounded in the present. You don’t have to jump out of bed and fulfill a list of extra tasks to do a “good” job in the morning. Being flexible about being woken up, feeding children, taking care of parents, and responding to the day in relationship to others is a beautiful thing. Parents, especially of young kids, rarely have time to execute an organized, linear, personal-facing todo list. Parents are often meeting the needs of other people around them, and that is quite a todo list. Especially when it comes to giving, sharing, and receiving love and support.

Make sure you account for all that you already do. Put all that relationship work on your todo list if you haven’t already. I know it will be on my list, right next to “shower,” and “make coffee,” because I’m going to need to cross things off to get the ball rolling.

— Sarah Peck
CEO & Founder
Startup Parent

Shower, coffee, hug the children, kiss the loved ones, text the friends. Write my joys, make the lunches and breakfasts, leave comments of support for people I’m proud of.

A FUTURE OF WORK TO BELIEVE IN

• At Startup Parent, we believe that parenting shouldn’t be at odds with work—and the insights from your parenting journey propels you as a leader that this world needs. We disrupt the myths of parenting to tell true stories of motherhood, fatherhood, and parenting today.

• The Startup Parent Podcast is an award-winning podcast ranked in the top 1% of podcasts globally. Join us as we interview parents about what the future of work, life, and leadership look like. Click here to add the show to your player.

• If you're a working mom looking for a community that understands you, apply to join The Wise Women's Council, our leadership incubator for entrepreneurs, executives, and managers who are also moms. The program runs annually and we open for applications twice per year. Click here to apply.