The AND Life: Building a Business AND Being a Present Mom

In this solo episode of The Mompreneur Collective, your host and fellow mompreneur ; Life & Business Coach, Jamie Smith, is sharing her own story. The mindset shifts, beliefs she adopted, and lessons that shaped her journey.

From corporate burnout to building a business while raising her daughter, she opens up about the identity shift that comes with entrepreneurship and the pressure so many moms feel to choose between their dreams and their families. 

This episode dives deep into:

• The mindset shifts that will help you achieve your goals
• Why "Why not me?" changed everything
• The philosophy of "The AND Life"
• Letting go of perfectionism and overthinking
• Discovering your niche and evolving your brand
• The guilt so many working moms carry
• Redefining success for yourself in a way that feels good
• Balancing motherhood & ambition without losing yourself
• Creating a business and a life that feels aligned 

If you've ever felt torn between being present for your family and pursuing your purpose, this episode will remind you that you're not alone and that you were never meant to choose. 

Because you can raise humans AND build something meaningful. ✨

Thank you for listening. Your support means the world to me.

Here are all the ways to connect with me and follow what's going on in my world:

JamieSmithCoaching.com

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Jamie Smith Coaching on Facebook

Follow Jamie on Facebook @JamieSmithMompreneur

Connect with Jamie on LinkedIn

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:04

Welcome back to the Mompreneur Collective. I'm your host and certified life and business coach, Jamie Smith, and every two weeks here, I sit down with inspiring women who share their beautiful stories with you. All the highs and lows of balancing motherhood and entrepreneurship. But today's episode is gonna be a little bit different, y'all, and I hope you're okay with it. Today there will be no guest. It will be just me sharing my mompreneur story with y'all. I've avoided it, I think, for as long as I can. I've had some other moms asking me, when are you gonna share your story? When's your episode coming out? So here it is. I'm showing up to share my story with you. And what I hope you walk away with today is a sense of feeling a little less alone, which I hope you walk away from every episode of the Mompreneur Collective, feeling less alone in your mompreneur journey. But I also hope you walk away from today with some really powerful mindset shifts and some new beliefs that you can adopt in your life and in your business to help you achieve your version of success like I've achieved and am still achieving mine. I'm gonna talk to you guys about the importance of defining success for yourself. And I'm gonna talk to y'all about a really magical philosophy that I live by called the and life that changed everything for me. And I'm gonna talk about so many other mindset shifts that I learned and implemented in my life along the way throughout my career. And I want y'all to know, I gave this a lot of thought, what I wanted my, you know, big message to be for y'all, or what I wanted the takeaways to be from my story for y'all. And what I kept coming back to was just entrepreneur mindset and the identity shift that's necessary when you become an entrepreneur. It's it's challenging to shift from maybe working in the corporate world to becoming an entrepreneur or shifting from being a stay-at-home mom to being an entrepreneur. There's just a lot of unique challenges that come along with growing into and becoming an entrepreneur. So, yeah, I'm gonna share some of the most impactful mindset shifts and new beliefs that I've adopted as an entrepreneur that have supported me in achieving my goals. And I know that they can do the same thing for you. So get your pens and paper ready or open your notes in your phone if you can. And if you can't, because you're driving or multitasking, then make sure you save this episode because it's gonna be one that you're gonna want to come back to. I promise. And I'm just gonna start at the beginning. So when I first had the idea to start my coaching business, I was still working full time in corporate. And when I say full time, I mean it. For a long time, I was working really long days and then going home and sitting on my couch and cracking open the laptop and working until 11 p.m. or till midnight when I felt like my eyeballs were bleeding and I had forgotten to eat dinner. And then I would just wake up and do it all over again the next day. It was terrible. I, no surprise hear what I'm about to say, but I experienced burnout in my corporate career on a few different occasions that I vividly remember. And I was starting to just feel really unfulfilled because I was only prioritizing work above everything else. I was neglecting every other area of my life. Work-life balance was not a thing for me back then. It took a lot of work to get to where I am now. And a lot of priorities have shifted since those days of me being a workaholic. But anyway, I've always had the entrepreneurial itch, if you want to call it that. I always knew that I wanted to own my own business. I remember just jotting down notes in a notebook for different business ideas that I had. And one of them was to open a store called Three Wishes, and it was gonna sell wine, chocolate, and cheese. Good idea, right? But this was not my purpose, which I later learned. So anyway, as I started to feel really unfulfilled in my career, and I started to really crave more balance in my life and more freedom. And I was starting to think about wanting to build a family. So my priorities were shifting. I would just, I remember just daydreaming about what it would be like to own my own business and to work for myself and to be able to raise my future baby from home and work from home. And I would tell myself, that's that's just unrealistic for me, though. So here's the first mindset shift I want to offer you that helped me move forward and take action on my dreams of wanting to work from home in my own business. I started telling myself, hold on, you've learned a thing or two about mindset and how mindset works. And one of the things I had learned to do was to question my thoughts, to question the truth of my thoughts. And so I asked myself the next time I heard myself saying that that life was unrealistic for me, I asked myself, is that really true though? Is that really unrealistic? And it it wasn't true because there's plenty of other moms and women out there that are doing what I wanted to do. So then I thought, why not me? And this shift that started with me questioning is that true, that that life's unrealistic for me, this shift to why not me is what helped me start taking the necessary first steps to build my business, like sitting down and doing the research and talking to mentors and making actual plans, putting pen to paper. So if there is any part of you that feels like, uh, that is just not even real for me. That that could never be real for me. Or maybe you're going, somebody else out there is already doing doing that. There's no room for me. I want you to ask yourself if that's really true. I want you to uncover what is true, and then I want you to shift to why, not me. Because you can have it too. That life that you want for yourself, that successful business you want for yourself, you can have it too. So after I started taking action on the vision that I had for my life, and I started to really go down the rabbit hole on, you know, how do I become a coach and how do I actually start an official business, get an LLC, all of that. One of my angel mentors is Marie Forlio. I love her so much. Look her up. And if you don't know what the term angel mentor means, it's like I've never met her in person, but I've read her books, I've listened to her podcast. She's a big part of my life, and I've learned a lot of things from her. And one of her books is called Everything Is Figure Outtable. And she lives by this philosophy, and it's one that I've adopted in my own life as well. That everything is figure outable. Because in order to get shit done as an entrepreneur, you have to be disciplined, you have to be resourceful, you need to have the attitude that you can handle hard things, and you gotta believe in yourself that no matter what obstacle you face, and Lord knows there will be obstacles, you gotta trust that you can figure it out because you can. You are capable of so much more than you know right now. So when you hear yourself saying, This is too hard, or I don't know how to do this, or I don't even know where to start, I want you to shift your thoughts to everything is figure out and see how this helps you move forward and take action like it's helped me. So I got certified, started my business, I hired a coach of my own to support me as I was getting started. I had lots and lots of questions, and it's okay to need support. And around this same time, I started my first podcast. And my business and my podcast, I decided to name all things leadership. At the time, all I really knew was that I was passionate about leadership. It's what I had extensive background in, you know, holding various management and training and people development positions. And I just knew that I wanted to help other women like myself, ambitious women, career-oriented women, lead lives and careers they could love. And I really didn't have a specific niche in the beginning. And I really wasn't even 100% certain that all things leadership is what I wanted my business name or my podcast to be called, but it felt like the most right thing at the time. And I learned that you can't let overthinking hold you back from taking action because you could literally stay stuck there forever. So the next mindset shift that I want to share with you that I learned in this area or at this time rather of my life is to just start. Start with where you are and what you know and what you have right now. Things are gonna change in the future, and that's okay. It's your business, and you can change whatever you want, whenever you want. But if uncertainty or perfectionism is keeping you from taking action right now, I want you to lean into this thought. Progress is better than perfection. Progress over perfection. And starting is better than staying stuck overthinking. So eventually I renamed my all things leadership podcast to Lead a Life You Can Love, because I felt like at the time it was more fitting and more aligned with what my mission for the show was. Then my business name itself that I'd felt like I'd grown out of and wanted to also have that feel more aligned, it changed to Jamie Smith Coaching LLC. And immediately it just felt so right. I am not gonna sit here and tell you that changing your podcast name or changing your LLC name or that rebranding in general isn't a tedious process and a bit of a headache, because it is. But the moral of the story is that it's okay to start not feeling 100% certain or confident in your decision. Sometimes it's just better to start with the knowing that you can change it down the road if you need to. You can. Had I let indecision over my LLC name or my podcast title hold me back, I would be stuck in 2021 somewhere hating life. So I'm glad that I chose to just start where I was with what I knew and what I had. Good decision, pat on back self. So around the same time I changed or I rebranded in my business, I started to really figure out my niche. I started to, you know, settle into my lane a little bit after having gained experience coaching people in the industry and having gotten to work with a lot of different types of people, with a lot of different personality types, looking for help with a lot of different things. In the beginning, y'all, trust me, I was just kind of working with anyone. My, you know, messaging wasn't clear. I was sort of just talking to everybody, and I'm not really sure how I got any clients at all to tell you the truth. But luckily I did. And I guess I'm sharing this to say that it's okay if you don't know your niche straight out the gate. It's okay to learn that as you go. And I promise you will, just through experience, through collecting data. So just be intentional about paying attention to what you like and what you don't like about working certain types of jobs or doing certain activities within your job, or pay attention to just the type of people that you're working with. Pay attention to what you feel confident doing and what you feel good doing and what you don't. All of these things are indicators of what your niche should be. It should be something you're good at and something you're passionate about. So to circle back around, after 100 episodes and four years of that lead a life you can love podcast, I stopped actively recording on that. All those episodes are still available, though, for your listening. So definitely go subscribe to that one too. It's good stuff. But as I gained more clarity of who my ideal client was as I grew as a person and as I grew in my business, I realized that it made sense for me to start a new podcast too. And that's the podcast that you're listening to right now, the Mom Preneur Collective. So what inspired this podcast was the fact that I sort of felt alone in my entrepreneurship journey as a solo preneur, you know, not having anyone that works with me, no longer having a team working around me like I was used to for so long. So it can get lonely at times. And then in 2024, I had my baby girl. So I started to feel even more isolated. And I was really just wanting to find my tribe, you know, and have community and to start surrounding myself with more like-minded women, women that truly understood the same things that I was struggling with, the struggle of balancing being a business owner and trying to grow your business and wanting to be a present mom. So I created a local community of mompreneurs. And that's what really inspired this podcast. This podcast is now I feel like it's an extension of me and my desire to connect with other mompreneurs, learn from them and lift them up however I can. I've always believed that we rise by lifting others. And that's been sort of this underlying goal of mine, just in everything I do, to be, you know, helping other people to rise up as well. And so I love that I get to share other mom stories. And to be quite honest with you, I much prefer being the one asking the questions and listening to the other inspiring women on this show share their stories than me being in the hot seat right now. But I digress. So in becoming a mom and a first-time mom and really wanting to make it my mission to not lose myself to motherhood like I'd heard so many other moms struggle with. And I'm a coach, right? So I wanted to sort of prove that balancing entrepreneurship and motherhood and it feeling good was possible. So that's what I've been doing. I've been just doing my best to be the present mama at home for my girl and to still be myself, the ambitious woman who has big dreams to fulfill and who wants to continue to pursue those dreams no matter what. And I wanted to help other moms and entrepreneurs or aspiring entrepreneurs do the same thing, create balance in their lives and help them build sustainable, purpose-driven businesses without feeling overwhelmed and without feeling like they had to sacrifice who they were in the process. So I really started to lean into my niche. My messaging started to become more clear. My confidence in my business has grown so much. And I feel like I'm just finally getting to the stage in my business where I feel like I have really good clarity around who I'm most passionate about serving and who I know I'm most capable of serving. And I mean, you know, even down to the personality type, y'all, it gets that granular. And I want to just throw in here right now, because I am proud of myself for this recently, y'all. I had a potential client reach out to me and we had a consult. And at the end of the consult, I was very firm and clear and kind in letting this person know that I didn't feel like it was the right fit and that I didn't feel like I was best fit to serve them. And I encouraged them to seek out another coach that, and that I believed they would find the perfect coach for them, and that I really enjoyed talking to them and helping to inform them about what coaching even is, because they'd never had a conversation with a coach before. So what I'm trying to share is that I turned away a client. And this wasn't the first time I've done this. I've done this a few other times in my business, but this time around, it felt really good. It felt really aligned. It felt just like I did it in the right way. I communicated it in the right way. And just that kind of clarity and that kind of confidence in your business is not something you're gonna wake up with. It's something that took me, you know, years essentially to get to. I'm, I think, four and a half-ish, almost five years into my business as I'm recording this episode. And so yeah, it took me a while to get to the point where I felt confident telling a client, hey, you're you're not the right client for me in the kindest way possible. And that's only serving them better, right? Because if I don't feel like I'm the right coach for them, then that means that I don't feel confident in being able to create the results that they're after. So anyway, if there's any business owners out there listening right now that are currently in that season of just working with anyone and everyone because you need that income and you can't afford to turn away someone just because, you know, they're not maybe the perfect fit for you. I've been there, I see you, and please know that it will get better and you will get to a point where you have the ability to say, thank you so much, but no thank you. And it's gonna feel so good. But now I want to take you back to some some tough moments I've had as a mom preneur. Working from home is tough, y'all. The pull is real. And if you're a work from home mom, you know exactly what I'm talking about. My baby girl is right there all day. And I just want to be with her all the time. And there are so many days that I feel like just this extreme pull, like I have to choose between my business and her, my two babies, my business and her. And for a while, I was doing some sacrificing of my goals in my business, not being as productive as I wanted to be in my business, not achieving certain goals within the timeline I wanted to achieve them in in my business because I was choosing her. I was choosing to be the present mom. But I learned that you don't have to choose. And I learned better boundaries and I learned better ways of managing my time. And I learned that I needed to redefine my expectations of myself so that they were actually realistic. And I learned to compromise in a way that felt aligned. But I just want y'all to know that while I've been, like I shared with you, on this mission to prove that balancing it all is possible, I too have my days, okay, where I feel completely defeated and I feel unproductive. Or I'm with my daughter and all I can think about is all the work stuff that I need to do. And then I feel guilty that I'm not fully present with her because my mind is off somewhere else. But here's the powerful mindset shift that's helped me deal with this constant pull between the two, this constant feeling of needing to choose one or the other. And this is big. So get your pins ready. Here it is. You can have both a thriving business and be a present mama at home. And this is that and life philosophy that I mentioned earlier. And it's my personal belief now, one that I wholeheartedly hope that you adopt in your life. I think so many moms are silently grieving parts of themselves because they believe that becoming a mom means they have to stop being themselves or that they have to sacrifice something of themselves. But I believe you can be deeply present with your children and deeply committed to your dreams. Now I'm getting all excited, y'all. I really want to explain this and life philosophy. Okay. Here's what the and means or what it could mean for you. Okay. So I'm going to give you some different examples here. Motherhood and ambition, success and peace, discipline and rest, structure and flexibility, career growth and intentional family time. Did any of those resonate with you? Society loves to push the whole the whole hustle culture thing on us. And it almost encourages self-sacrifice during motherhood. But healthy fulfillment usually lives somewhere in the middle. Now I want to talk to you about the guilt for a second. If you work, you feel guilty you're not home enough. If you stay home, you feel guilty for wanting more, maybe more purpose outside of the home. If you rest, you feel like it's like you're being lazy. If you pursue your goals, go after your dreams, you feel selfish. Listen to me. These are lies. Stop believing that your ambition makes you a bad mom. What I want you to do is come up with your own and statement that really hits for you. And I want to give you some examples. I jotted some down, so I'm going to be reading them to you. But I want to give you some examples, and maybe one of them feels really right for you. Here they are. I can grow a successful business and not burn out. I can love motherhood and admit that it's exhausting sometimes. I can be grateful for my children and still want time for myself. I can be fully committed to my career and still prioritize my mental health. I can rest and be productive. And listen, I want to make sure I'm clear on something here. This and life doesn't mean that everything is perfect. So here's what the and life isn't. Okay. It's not a perfectly balanced life. It's not never making sacrifices. It's certainly not having it all together and never being stressed out. I already shared with y'all, I live by the and life philosophy. And I'm here to tell you, I still get stressed out. I still make sacrifices that don't always feel good. But I do make sure to stay intentional. And this is what counts. It is all about intentional alignment. Some seasons for us are just going to lean heavier towards business, and some are going to lean heavier towards family, but neither part of you has to die. I think why this and life philosophy is so important and why it can be so impactful for you is because a lot of moms lose their connection to their creativity, their confidence, feeling like they have purpose in life, their individuality. They feel disconnected from their dreams. All this happens after they become a mom. And over time, resentment can start to build up when moms feel like they've had to abandon themselves completely to be a mom. But here's what I want to offer you: your children don't only benefit from you being fully present with them, they also benefit from watching you chase your dreams and become the woman that you want to be. You're modeling purpose, courage, boundaries, fulfillment, self-worth. And my guess is those things are important for you, are important for you to model for your kid. It's just a whole lot easier said than done, right? I want to get into now some ways that you can start living the and life philosophy. Try your best to stop speaking in extremes. So when you hear yourself say things like, I can't, or there's no way, or I could never do that. Or if you hear yourself saying, here we are again, I have to choose between this and this. I want you to just pause and ask yourself, what would this look like if both were possible? So just that pause when you hear those extremes, just ask, what would this look like if both were possible? Then I want you to redefine your version of success. Not hustle culture's version, not social media's version, not your parents' version, but your version. Because success needs to feel good for you. And what I mean by that is when you think about achieving success, that should be something that you are excited and willing to chase after because you know that when you get there, it's going to feel really good. So if any part of you right now is currently avoiding taking action on your dreams, sometimes this is because however you're thinking about or defining success for yourself currently, it may be out of alignment with the vision that you really have for your life or for your business. So take some time to get really clear on what success looks like for you and make sure that that feels good. Because if your definition of success is authentic to you and it feels good for you, you're going to be way more motivated to go after it and get it. And if it's if it's muddied and unclear and that version of success doesn't really feel that good for you, or the current definition of success you're living by right now doesn't really feel all that good, that's demotivating and could be a big part of the reason why you're not taking action. I've seen this be true for clients that I've worked with in the past. So this is really important. Define success for yourself. Maybe for you, success is more freedom, a more flexible schedule. Maybe it's more peace in your house. Maybe it's making more money without burning out. Maybe it's just being able to look at yourself in the mirror at the end of the day, saying, you know, self, I did my best job today. And I did the best that I could, and that is success for me. So take some time. Define success for yourself. Then I want you to work on building some support systems because the and life does require some support. And that might mean that maybe there are some things in your business that you need to start delegating so that you can start actively creating this life for yourself. Maybe you need more child care help. Maybe you need better systems in your business so that there's more ease and flow and you can be more efficient and productive and stop wasting time in certain areas. Maybe it's you having better boundaries in your business because we all know how important boundaries are. And if we don't have them, it can be detrimental to the success of your business. Maybe it's learning to say no more. That's a type of boundary. All these support systems that I just mentioned, these are all things that I help my clients with in my business on a daily basis. And I say that to be sure that you know that there is help that exists for you if you need it. You do not have to go it alone. And if you'd ever like, ever feel called to book a complimentary discovery call with me, you can do that by using the link in the episode's show notes. It's always there. Or you can go to jamiesmithcoaching.com. And I want to share something I'm actually really excited about and proud of in my business right now. So as I'm recording this in May of 2026, I'm very, very close to being awarded my second credential with the International Coaching Federation. So at this point in my career, just to give you guys a little background info, I've invested right around $12,000 in my coaching education to be sure that I'm coaching you at the highest level possible. There are a lot of coaches out there that didn't get any sort of certification to do what they do. And I just I like sharing that I take pride in how seriously I do take my education and how seriously I take wanting to create real results for my clients. So cheers to myself on that. And cheers to whatever win you have to celebrate in your life right now, mama, because no matter if it's a big win or a small win, it matters and it's worth celebrating always. Okay, so back to the and life. And I am gonna start to wrap up the episode here soon. I know this one's a little bit longer than the others, but I think this is important. So in order to fully embrace the and life, I believe you've got to let go of the idea of perfection. You don't need to perform perfectly, not anywhere in your life. And you certainly don't need to perform perfectly in motherhood to be a good mother. I don't remember where I read this or who said this, but I heard once that if you can say that you're doing a good job most of the time, that that needs to be good enough. If you're showing up as the mom that you want to be most of the time, that's wonderful. Because guess what? No one can be perfect all the time. And you got to start giving yourself some grace, mama. The goal should not be to prove you can do everything. We know you can. We all walk around with that invisible cape on. I know it, you know it. The goal should be to create a life that feels aligned with who you are authentically. You do not have to choose between being a good mom and being the woman you were created to be. And I just want to say that, you know, in sharing my story today and in reflecting on my journey as I prepared for this podcast episode, it really got me thinking about just how much of my story is still unwritten. And that really excites me. And so I want to leave you with that. There is so much of your story that is unwritten, and you are the author. You are holding the pen. You get to write your story. So, what do you want that to be? And whatever that is, I'm sure it's amazing. And you can achieve it if you implement all these mindset shifts and you work towards instilling these new beliefs, you can create that life you want for yourself. Well, I hope you enjoyed today's episode and found something in my story inspirational, motivational, helpful in some way. If you did enjoy it, please share it with a friend and know that your support means the world to me. And may I just say that while today was super fun, I cannot wait to be the one asking the questions again, sharing another mom's story on the next one. So cheers to raising humans and building something meaningful. Until next time, y'all. If you're still listening, you lucked up. It's blooper time. This mama tried to record this episode, or at least a portion of it, with my daughter on my lap. I thought it would be really cool for her to be a part of the episode somehow, since she's such a big part of my story. But a toddler's gonna be a toddler, y'all. And that didn't really work out, but I still caught some really cute giggles and had a really special moment with her anyway. So here's a little bit of that audio from her being on my lap. And to any other moms out there working from home trying to do all the things while you're holding your baby or while they're pulling on your leg or sitting in your lap, I see you. We got this, mama. Take your little hands off the microphone from mama. You take your hands off okay, okay, thank you. So do you think we can let mama talk now? A painting? Mm-hmm. The picture, yeah.