My journey to becoming a working mom

When time is unstructured, my being doesn't really know what to do. I don't feel like I contribute at a very high level. But I found after I went back with Ainsley that I felt like I was supposed to feel guilty. I felt like I was supposed to feel like half a person when I was at work because I wasn't with my kids. And I was like, man, when I'm really honest with myself, I actually feel like it pushes me into a gear that I actually like better. I enjoy it. I love the energy, actually, of that life and that choice. I'm a small town kid born with a big city spirit.

Tiffany Sauder [00:00:39]:

I choose to play a lot of awesome roles in life. Mom, wife, entrepreneur, CEO, board member, investor, and mentor. 17 years ago, I founded a marketing consultancy. And ever since, my husband, junior and I have been building our careers and our family on the exact same timeline. Yep, that means four kids, three businesses, two careers, all building towards one life we love. When I discovered I could purposefully embrace all of these ands in my life, it unlocked my world. And I want that for you, too. I'm Tiffany Sauder, and this is Scared Confident.

Tiffany Sauder [00:01:18]:

So a couple weeks ago, I sent an email out to my newsletter database and I asked for your questions. And no doubt you've started to hear me go through and, like, literally answer some of those very specifically, like, here's how they were worded. But overall, there was some major themes that came through in the questions that were asked. So I'm going to put together a couple of episodes that are going to speak to those major themes. And one of them is, like, really some curiosity and interest in, like, how did I decide even to become a working mom? And so I'm going to, in like, a biographical way, talk about my journey to becoming a working mom and our decision to be a two career family. So I'm, like, literally going to walk you through the timeline of events, what was going on in my head, and to the best that I can remember it, how that felt. So that's what this episode is going to be about. It's going to be that biographical, walkthrough younger Tiffany self, the pressures I felt, the expectations I had, what I thought I wanted, what I wanted, what I wanted, what I discovered I wanted, all those kinds of things.

Tiffany Sauder [00:02:25]:

So that's what this episode is going to be about. But over the next couple of weeks, I'm also going to drop some episodes. One is going to be titled why I decided to be a working mom. And this is not just the story of how, but, like, why. I actually feel like this is the right choice for our family. And I'm going to share three reasons. And then in the other question or episode, I'm gonna put together theme, I'm gonna talk about is this idea of guilt and working mom guilt. I've provided some definitions and how I think about that and do you really feel guilty and what are the different kinds of guilt? But this is what do I do with my working mom guilt? And I really don't hardly feel it ever anymore.

Tiffany Sauder [00:03:06]:

And I don't think it's just because I'm more flexible. I think it's because I've, like, really worked through a strong relationship with the choices that I've made in my life. And I have a very specific piece about the fact that literally every path we pick in life has things that are great about it and has things that are suck about it every single path. And so that gives me some comfort that when I run into things that are hard or uncomfortable or I dislike Orlando, or I wouldn't prefer about the life that I'm living in, I'm like, yep. Every single choice in life, every single path in life has pros and cons. And I'm just in some of the things that kind of suck. And I think we can wrongly sit in two places. One is indecision, where we just, like, literally spend our highest octane years sitting on the fence and living in indecision.

Tiffany Sauder [00:04:03]:

Like, I don't know. Should I? I don't know. Like, where would I start? What if I quit at night? Your brain is just firing on, what if I would, instead of solving for a new choice you actually made. I think that can happen. And I also think that we can just live in a place where we don't accept the choices we've made. I fell into this, like, over the last couple of weeks, I've been, like, so embarrassed with my vocabulary about my life. I was, like, complaining all the time about how I'm driving kids everywhere. Always.

Tiffany Sauder [00:04:32]:

It's like I am always backing my car out of my garage. And I was like, you know what? If I would have told my 34 year old self that I was going to have the time and flexibility and availability to be able to drive my kids somewhere at 323 in the afternoon? I would have wept being like, I have no idea how that's going to be possible. But I have worked really hard to get to a place where I have the flexibility that I wanted in my life. And now that I have it, and I'm doing the things actually that I have worked to do. I'm complaining about it. That's embarrassing, that's gross. I'm ashamed of myself and I'm using kind of heavy words, but I was like, honestly, tiffany, like, I'm disappointed in you. Like, you wanted this, you worked towards it.

Tiffany Sauder [00:05:20]:

And now you're here and you're complaining about it. That is not, I think that can be a place where we end up as well, where we actually picked the thing we're in. We've worked towards the thing that we're in, the life we've chosen, whatever it is, and somehow we're still complaining about it. So anyways, okay, my rant is nearing its end, but those were just some macro themes that I saw in the questions. And so these are some episodes I'm going to put together that will build on each other. We'll link them in show notes. So if you're catching them, you know, afterwards that you can kind of listen to them in a grouping. But this is a really, really, really big topic on your minds that came through so clearly in the questions.

Tiffany Sauder [00:05:55]:

And so I'm going to do my best to share my story, do my best to kind of tell you what I've learned in that and then share with you. What do I do with this like kind of working mom guilt thing or the fact that I don't really have it anymore and why I think that is. So here we go. This is like fireside chat. Tiffany walking you through her life. I will try to do it in a way that is fast but also sits in some of the key moments with enough detail that you can learn from it. So this is where sometimes it would be very helpful if you were actually in my office asking me questions. But here we go.

Tiffany Sauder [00:06:29]:

So, you know, I'm a small town kid. I grew up in a town that was like less than 2000 people. There's only a flashing light. I grew up around a lot of family. We went to grandma's house a lot. We played outside a lot. My dad started his business when I was in third grade. I'm the oldest of four kids, so I grew up around a lot of risk.

Tiffany Sauder [00:06:50]:

I grew up in an environment that was like very entrepreneurial. And I grew up in an environment that was very different from what other people were doing in their families. Their dads worked for somebody else or their dads farmed. But people were not starting businesses where I grew up. So I think thats a backdrop a little bit to my own maverick spirit at times. And it was just built in culturally that like, we were not doing things other people were doing. So go to high school. Im a pretty natural student.

Tiffany Sauder [00:07:20]:

I did well. I felt like that season of my life is amazing. Went to college, went to purdue and really thought I would meet my husband at Purdue. I thought I would probably get married before I graduated from college because that was what people in small towns did. You get married super early and I thought I would get a degree and then stay home and have kids young. That's what I thought I would do. If you would have asked me, I'm quite certain that is what I thought I would do. I graduated college and I had, I wasn't dating anyone.

Tiffany Sauder [00:07:52]:

I had no like immediate prospect of who I was going to marry. And that was very unsettling. I grew up in a, we still go to church. That's a big part of our lives. But growing up, I think especially in like christian household and in that environment, generally speaking, in my church, if you looked across, you would see very few working women. And if they were like helping out on the farm or helping with like what their husband was doing, they did not have their own thing that they were doing. And they had a bunch of kids and they had them young. My mom was done having kids by the age of 29.

Tiffany Sauder [00:08:28]:

She had all four of us. And that was when I had my first one. So that was kind of the first like just disruption of where my life was actually going compared to where I thought it was going to go. And I thought it was going to go that way because that's how my mom's went. That was how my mom was. She got married at, I think she was like 20 and a half or something crazy. And she had me just before her 22nd birthday. So I graduate college.

Tiffany Sauder [00:08:53]:

I have no prospect of who I'm going to marry. My friends are certainly starting to get married. I'm feeling kind of behind for sure as it relates to like my life in the midwest. And so anyways, I remember feeling that way. I felt behind. I felt like, what's wrong with me? I felt, boy, I kind of thought I'd be in a different place as it related to my personal life. So I got a job at Lilly, which is a big pharmaceutical company. They're actually the largest by market cap right now because of all that's going on with weight loss drugs.

Tiffany Sauder [00:09:22]:

But anyway, it was a big company then, it's an even bigger company now. And that was really important to my confidence of like small town kid being able to compete in more of a big pond. And getting hired by a company that I knew only hired really smart people and that there was like a really rigid interview process. And that was like a big step forward in my own confidence, in my competence, I would say of like, oh, okay, interesting. I got in. Let's see how this goes. So I've spent the first three ish years of my career at Lilly as a financial analyst. And in that three years, it was 25, 24 when I met my husband, 24 when I met Junior.

Tiffany Sauder [00:10:09]:

I think actually it was just before my 24th birthday, I was like 23 and three quarters I met junior. And when I met him, I knew that weekend that I was going to marry him. And in a sort of only a God thing, he also knew. He's very rational and a very slow decision maker and the least impulsive person on the planet. And so for him to say he met me and knew he was going to marry me is like banana pants for me to say I'm a little bit more impulsive, so a little less shocking. But I just knew. I just knew I was going to marry him. And so he was living in San Francisco at the time.

Tiffany Sauder [00:10:47]:

And so we did long distance for like five whole months. I mean, hilarious. Got engaged, and then we were married like nine months later. So just before my 25th birthday, I got married. So in that season, I was still working at Lilly. I had this big corporate job, and I was beginning to see just different things than were on the vista of my childhood. In a small town, a working woman is somebody who largely has to work because it's an important for the family income. And so they're like, working in the school, they're working at the post office, they're working at a switchboard operator.

Tiffany Sauder [00:11:28]:

I remember one of my friends moms with that, they're working hourly jobs, but they are not in a place where they're building a career, where they're building wealth or they're taking on risk, where they have power and influence. That was not what it looked like in my childhood. When I looked at working women, it's hard for me to imagine it today, but I didn't know what that really looked like, actually, because where I grew up, that wasn't really a thing. That wasn't the vocabulary of our culture, and it wasn't like on purpose to keep women down. It just was not how it worked. It was not how it played, played out. There were not those kinds of opportunities there. That was not what it looked like.

Tiffany Sauder [00:12:08]:

And so as I started to get into this big corporate environment. I remember this one vp in particular, and she was so chic, I don't even remember her name, but I remember she was probably in her mid fifties, and she was, like, fit as could be. Like, so fit. And she was so fashionable. And I knew that, like, I knew enough to know everything she was wearing, like, every single outfit was at least $2,000. And it was like, holy crap. Like, this lady is. She is the thing to me.

Tiffany Sauder [00:12:39]:

She had a big job. She walked fast. She had somewhere to go. She had kids. She looked amazing. She was rocking this super fashion forward stuff, and I was like, oh, my word, you are magnetic to me. I just remember feeling that. I thought she was so cool.

Tiffany Sauder [00:12:57]:

I wish I remembered her name, and I could reach out and feel like, you were so cool. She's probably still cool, but I remember her, and I remember beginning to, like, see a different, just view of what it could look like for me. And I didn't necessarily sit there and be like, oh, wow. Like, compare the two. It was just, I think, beginning to create, like, these new vignettes that suddenly my, like, imagination could begin to build from. I think that's more what it was. It wasn't, like, replacing this stuff from my childhood that I didn't like. I think it was just a new vignette of, wow, this is cool.

Tiffany Sauder [00:13:34]:

And actually, as I think about it now, I think most of my adult life have been trying to build a hallway between these two vignettes of there is still very much this small town girl in me who likes the sounds of cicadas at night and sleeping on a trampoline and catching lightning bugs. There is still very much a small town girl in me who loves that. And there's, like, this high energy. Give me the most, the biggest stage, the most complex room, and let me see how I can navigate that. Like, I think I've been trying to build a hallway between those two vignettes most of my adult life. Anyway, interesting. I discovered by talking. So here we are.

Tiffany Sauder [00:14:14]:

So anyways, where are we in the story? We get married. I leave my big corporate job. Really? Because I was like, wow, it's going to be a really, really, really long time before I make a decision that matters at all, and for lots of good reason. You don't want 25 year olds making decisions inside of big corporations. I get the reason why, but I just started to realize the way I learn is by doing, and I need a very small amount of information to feel like I have a lot of courage to start something which is a kind of the ingredients of the entrepreneurial spirit. And so when I was in this big corporate environment, I was just feeling like that part of me was being, I say, stepped on or, like, just made really small again, for lots of good reasons. You don't want 25 year olds on a whim making important medicine in the world, but it was just. Was not a good fit for me.

Tiffany Sauder [00:15:03]:

So I decided to leave and start to do something entrepreneurial. I worked for a small business that my dad had for a while, and in that journey, bought element three. What today is element three? We don't need to talk about how we came to that. But I was 20, probably, like, 27 ish. Like, I would have been, like, 25 or 26 in that range when we bought what was. What. Today is element three. So my dad was the financial partner, me, the sweat equity partner, and got to work on building this agency.

Tiffany Sauder [00:15:32]:

So four years into that journey is when we had our first daughter, Aubrey, and we had her in 2009, which, if you recall, was the height of the financial crisis. There was tons of uncertainty. My husband was in a job at the time that was in the market, and it was like white knuckle, full on terrifying. You can't taste food. You cry a lot sometimes just on the inside. But there was so much uncertainty. Our revenue had gone from, like, a run rate of a million dollars to a run rate of $250,000. In element three over the course of 45 days, it was a total cliff for us.

Tiffany Sauder [00:16:13]:

I had these people on staff. I didn't have the right instincts to know that I needed to really make some changes there pretty quickly. And so we amassed a couple hundred thousand dollars in debt. My husband was in the market, was taking a beating. He was going through, I'd say, one of the biggest professional challenges of his life, just feeling, oh, just like, it was hard. They were losing money. I think we brought home, like, $30,000, maybe that year, from his job. Like, it just was.

Tiffany Sauder [00:16:42]:

It was really hard. We'd taken on a lot of risk, and we knew that, and we were young, and we had the space to do that. But, dang, we felt, like, kind of dumb. Like, man, we look kind of silly for not having the, like, illusion of more secure jobs. It was really hard. I remember thinking, there's a chance that we lose our house. We never practically missed a mortgage payment, but it was so tight that I remember walking myself through the process of what would be the worst thing that would happen financially. And it was like, well, it would be that we lost our home.

Tiffany Sauder [00:17:18]:

That would be super embarrassing. But probably we would just move with one of our parents, which, again, is, like, not a bad place to be, just mostly an embarrassing place to be. And so just kind of walking through that. So the reason this is important is because once we had our first daughter, it's 2009. My business is struggling, which is probably putting it lightly. My husband is not earning enough at the time to be able to support us again, not because he's not smart and capable and could have gone and gotten a job. He totally could have. But we had made the decision for him to leave working at a big accounting firm and take a chance on this idea that he and a business partner had.

Tiffany Sauder [00:17:57]:

So, like, we understood that, and he could have reverse course and gone and gotten a job, but we knew the choice that we'd made. And so, in that season, I owed the bank money. I had employees that were counting on me. I had a lease that had been signed for my company. And it was so hard. And every single day, I bet for 18 months, I wanted to quit. And I knew that I would have a very socially acceptable reason for folding the whole place up, and meaning I had just had a baby. I had Aubrey in January of 2009.

Tiffany Sauder [00:18:32]:

It was kind of in the height of when everything was going crazy, Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns and the mortgage crisis, and it was just a mess. And nobody's spending money on marketing in that environment, or at least I couldn't find them. It's maybe the truer story. So to say, I chose to go back to work. It was a choice, but it really also. I had to. But I also knew I could tell a story that said, you know what? I want to quit. I want to quit.

Tiffany Sauder [00:19:00]:

We're going to go ahead and default on the mortgage. We're going to go ahead and figure out how I take some type of a personal note, I don't know, on what we owed other creditors. My dad had signed a personal guarantee on some things, and so I was like, well, if he ends up having to pay that, how many years would I need to work to pay him back so that I just feel good about the risk that he took on us? I was like, there is a rip cord I could pull. That is to say, I want to be a stay at home mom. And nobody really would have told me that was a bad choice. But I knew in my heart that I had to stay in the fight until I was 110% certain there was no daylight left for this business to be able to become something. There's like this fight inside of me that as much as I felt defeated, as much as I was exhausted, as much as I wanted to cry, like, all the time, and it actually makes me cry again, thinking about how vulnerable I felt in that season of my life. Oh, it was so vulnerable.

Tiffany Sauder [00:20:07]:

I felt physically vulnerable because I just had a baby. I felt financially vulnerable in ways that are probably more imagined than real. I felt professionally so vulnerable because I didn't know. I didn't know what I was doing. And the only place to practice was in, like, the actual marketplace. And it's scary when you're practicing in the marketplace in a city that you know you're going to have to live in, and for clients that you know you're going to have to see all of those kinds of things, it's just so hard. And I was leaving my baby and all of that. Like, no matter how sure you are about your choice, it's always hard to say it's not.

Tiffany Sauder [00:20:48]:

At least for me, it's not true. So, okay, she needs to get herself back together. So I did choose in that season to be a working mom, but I think it really was also, I felt called to the fight. I think I didn't feel peaceful about laying down the responsibility to the commitments that I had made. And that was such a hard season. But I'm so grateful for it because it taught me what I was really made of. I think it taught me how much grit I have. I think it taught me that I can be tired and I can still perform.

Tiffany Sauder [00:21:22]:

I think it taught me that. I think knowing you can do hard things and solve hard problems puts you in a really powerful place and powerful posture against the natural difficulty of life. Like, it just does. And I think I had to go through that to really learn that that was inside of me. My voice is still, like, cry. I wanted to stop. Let me get a drink. So, okay.

Tiffany Sauder [00:21:48]:

We got through that season. Things get slightly less hard. We start to look smart for making the choice that we did. For my husband to go out on his own with his business partner, it starts to perform. We have a second child into much more peaceful waters. I mean, it wasn't perfect. It was still hard. We were 31 years old, and we both were in pretty early stage entrepreneurial journeys.

Tiffany Sauder [00:22:11]:

But I would say they weren't bleeding. They were beginning to pay us. It was becoming a little bit more certain about what we were doing. There was much less volatility. I wasn't a mom for the first time, all those kinds of things. So two and a half years later, we have our second daughter into certainly calmer waters. And again, I went through this season of being like, wow, you know, you can kind of be like, well, one kid, there's not that much to do. The business really needed me.

Tiffany Sauder [00:22:38]:

I really couldn't step aside. I really would have been walking away from a lot of responsibility and financial obligations. The second one, it was, like, a little bit different. And what I remember about coming back with Ainsley is I remember coming back and feeling like. I feel like I'm not supposed to enjoy this anymore. Like, I feel like going back to work is supposed to be something that I'm supposed to say, man, I hate it when I have to go to work. I hate it when I have to leave the girls. I hate it.

Tiffany Sauder [00:23:08]:

And actually, I found that I loved it. I felt alive. I felt reminded that I was a whole person on my own when I was working. I liked the separation of being able to, like, have lunch and eat the whole thing by myself and not be interrupted 50 times. Like, it's super silly, but I remember being like, there's parts of this I actually really like. I like the structure that it forced in my life of, like, needing to get up at five in the morning and work out and be ready to leave the house by 08:00 and put on real clothes and the forcing function to, like, get ready fast and put on makeup and get organized on the weekends so that there was food prepared and coming home and having intentional time with the girls. And I liked the pace and the structure that working put into my life. I am not good with three open days, I will get, like, very little done.

Tiffany Sauder [00:24:05]:

I won't really watch tv, but I also really won't do anything. I don't know what I do. But when time is unstructured, my being doesn't really know what to do. I don't feel like I contribute at a very high level. Maybe it's some screwed up way that I view my value in the world. I don't know actually what it's about. But I found after I went back with Ainsley that I felt like I was supposed to feel guilty. I felt like I was supposed to feel like half a person when I was at work because I wasn't with my kids.

Tiffany Sauder [00:24:34]:

I felt like I was supposed to resent some percentage of my job for taking me away from my girls and being a mom. And I was like, man, when I'm really honest with myself, I actually feel like it pushes me into a gear that I actually like better. I enjoy it. I like growing. I like having my own stuff. I like being able to be efficient and get stuff done quickly and those kinds of things. I was like, I love the energy, actually, of that life and that choice, but I needed to reconcile. I feel like that was really when I had to reconcile with myself and my own head of, I thought my life would be just like my mom's.

Tiffany Sauder [00:25:16]:

And it's not. It's very different. Does that mean I'm doing it wrong? And that is not because my mom ever said one time to me, honey, the best version of being a mom is being a stay at home mom. She never said those words to me. She never made me feel that way. If anything, she over indexed on supporting my choice to be a working mom. Like, that was never a thing. But there was friction in my own head of the expectations I think I had placed on myself simply because it was the environment that I had grown up in.

Tiffany Sauder [00:25:46]:

And I loved my life. I loved my childhood for the most part. I loved who I had become. And so if I want to make kids that I love and who love their childhood and who love who they become, the only template I really knew how to do that through was what I had lived, and that was my mom, who had stayed home with us, and my grandma stayed home, like that kind of thing. So she also has sort of helped color this. And it's true, while my mom did not leave the house to go to a job, she did a lot of entrepreneurial things inside of our household. And she's right. That's true.

Tiffany Sauder [00:26:18]:

She sold nutrition and vitamins for about a decade and made over a million dollars with that, which sounds like a, I mean, it's a really big number when I say it out loud. So, like, she didn't work, but she made a million dollars. Okay, so it's not really true, but you get the idea. Like, she did stay at home mom motions from my childhood. There was certainly, like, calls and things that she did outside of our, like, from our home, but it wasn't, like, traditionally leaving us with childcare, going to work, and coming home at dinner time. Like, that motion was very disruptive for what my life looked like compared to how I thought it would look. So that was what I would say after my second one, because I really hadn't had a choice with my first. I feel like the second one was when I was like, man, am I really choosing this? Is this really what I want? How do I pay attention to my energy and what I'm seeing and what that feels like, how do I do that? Well, in a way that feels congruent with the goals I want in our lives and our family, the way I want our family to feel what I want for me and my own life.

Tiffany Sauder [00:27:23]:

The thing that I want my kids to say about their childhood. How do I reconcile all that stuff? So I think that really came forward for me after we had our second. And so I started to get peaceful about the fact that this, I think, is what I'm called to do. I was good at it. There were things I've learned, and, yes, you can go listen to our story at element three. And I was not perfect at it, but I think I'm a good leader. I think I'm a natural leader. I think I'm a good learner.

Tiffany Sauder [00:27:47]:

I think I'm a natural learner. I think I'm a lover of people. I just was like, I think this is where God is calling me to practice my talents in a way that they can be of greater service to the world. That is really what my job and my vocation is really about. And I also think that Jer and I both working. I'll talk about this in a future episode. I think it allowed us to take more risks along the way because we had. We could kind of teeter totter back and forth about who was going to be.

Tiffany Sauder [00:28:16]:

I don't know that we've ever been safe, but I would say in the realm of our own risk profile, I think there's been a teeter totter where we've gone back and forth a little bit. I would say that was kind of my journey with my second one is, how do I get clear about this choice? And people will say things to you that they think are helpful, but they are very hurtful, and they will stick with you for a long time. And I would say, free yourself from the advice you receive that is not serving who you're becoming and where you're going. There is one piece of advice in particular. I will share it. Maybe it's nothing valuable to share it, but I'll share it as an example of, like, I know people say dumb stuff sometimes, and they're trying to be helpful about their perspective on whether you should stay home, whether you should be part time, whether you should be full time, whether it's okay that you have a nanny, whether it's okay that you do your own laundry, whether it's okay, like, whatever your choice is. People say stuff that sometimes is just not helpful, and you need to be able to release that, because I think sometimes we live under the governance of this advice that did not serve where we were going. So I remember there was a mom who was like a half a stage ahead of me.

Tiffany Sauder [00:29:27]:

She had kids that were maybe like in elementary school at the time, and I had just had one of the girls. It was one of the first two. And she said, you know, the most formative years of a kid's life for the first three years, and if you are not present for those, the implication was that, like, they are going to be screwed up and lonely and there will be, like, no bond for the rest of your life. Was like, what I heard, whether that's what she said or not, we will never really know. But that's what I heard, was that the first three years, the most important years of their life, and that if you are not really invested in that early stage, that you are not going to have a good relationship with your kid, you will be generally unbonded to them for the rest of your life. And my greatest fear as a working mom was that I wouldn't know my kids, that I wouldn't be there for the most important things. That was my biggest fear. If I could have summarized it to myself, it would have been that.

Tiffany Sauder [00:30:24]:

That I didn't know them. But I have found that not to be true. And I think I'm crying under the memory of it more than the reality. Cause it's like, I wish I could go back and tell myself, Tiffany, that won't be true. You'll know them. You will know your kids. You will know their souls. You will know their motivations.

Tiffany Sauder [00:30:44]:

You will know them. And I do feel like I know my girls so well today. I know their subtleties. I know their eyes. I know they're. I just know them so well. And I think I needed to know that that would be true. I think I needed to know that my choice to pursue what I felt called to do and who that would help me become.

Tiffany Sauder [00:31:11]:

And I don't mean become in the sense of, like, my title. I mean become in the sense of allowing my talents to, like, bloom and to, like, feel some level of competency in life and self worth. And that I know my life is important and impactful. I think that's what I wanted to know. And today I know that for sure. And I think that's why I can walk out the door with such freedom. Not in a flippant way. You know, we have really intentional things and plays in our life to keep us close as a family.

Tiffany Sauder [00:31:47]:

I would have guessed at the beginning of this episode that there was a 0% chance that I cry, and I'm, like, a bawling mess. This is where we are today. I don't know. There we are. I decided to really commit to this episode in a way that was. I have no notes, and so it felt kind of scary, but I'm, like, definitely just in it. So I think that's why I'm kind of emotional. So, that season was about choosing it, and I think getting past that great big fear bubble of will, I know my kids.

Tiffany Sauder [00:32:15]:

So, anyway, I had ivy. That was a hard season of our life. We had her in 2015. That was a very simple season for us financially. She was born into a time where things were working financially, we had a lot of freedom, and we were beginning to put more financial resources towards help, like getting our laundry done and our lawn mowed, and so we had more time. And so she was born into an easier season of our life in that regard. But I would say a difficult season of our life as it related to junior and I's relationship. We had individually started to have a lot of success in our lives, but had a hard time reconciling the outside energy that was needed for us to be successful with the boundaries that we needed in our marriage so that we could be successful together.

Tiffany Sauder [00:33:10]:

And so that was, I would say, the season of our lives and our marriage and our jobs that Ivy was born into. And I think for me to choose being a working mom in that season, man, it's like bombs went off every time we had a kid. It was really this solving for, can I have both? Can I have the time to invest in a marriage that I'm proud of? Can I have the time to invest in being a mom that I'm proud of? Do I have the space to invest, the time to be the leader that I'm proud of? And I think that last major soul for us as a family was where my understanding and love for this language of the life of. And I think Brian Kovicki's on the podcast with some level of frequency right now, too. And, you know, he always said to me, well, what if you could have both? How would you do it? And I remember asking myself that question so many times in that season. If I could have all of them, how would I do it? If I could have all of them, how would I do it? If I could have a marriage that I was so passionate and excited about, if I could have relationships with, my kids were so rich and present and available, and if I could have a professional imprint on the world that I just knew mattered. How would I do all of those things? And so I think my first solve is always to be like, well, and I see this in a lot of women where what you bring home, if it is not 100% vital to the family budget, we can so quickly say, well, I guess if other areas of my life isn't working, I guess I need to stay home. I guess it's no longer worth it.

Tiffany Sauder [00:34:54]:

It's not worth the expense of my marriage to build this business. It's not worth the expensive relationship with my kids to have this job. And so we're too quickly, I think, say, I guess I'll say no to it so that I can invest in these kids, invest in my marriage, and those are noble causes. I'm not saying that that is a bad trade off, but I don't think we stop and ask ourselves, if you were to do all of it, how could you not in a way that is additive internally, eternally of like, oh, it's just less sleep and no working out and eating fast food and giving up the things that are serving our vitality and health. But I think that is where I really began this journey of saying, how do I get rid of all the things that are not serving the mom I'm becoming the wife I want to be and the professional imprint I want to have in the world. How do I get rid of everything in my health? How do I not get rid of everything that is not serving one of those things? I don't care if I've never seen it before. I don't care if I don't know how. I don't care if I'm afraid that my friends are going to kind of make fun of me for not doing anything inside of my house.

Tiffany Sauder [00:36:01]:

Like, I don't care. I don't care. It's what I want. I'm not even going to turn this into a lesson for you. I'm just going to share my story. So I think that's really, once Ivy was born, that was where we had to put a lot of work into our marriage. That was where we had to figure out. Is saying yes to less in the outside world going to slow down our success? I can tell you it has not.

Tiffany Sauder [00:36:25]:

We have said less yes to the outside world and it has not slowed down our success. I think that can be a fake lie. All lies are fake. But you know what I mean, a fake narrative. So then I guess we go. We go about our married life. I mean, really, if you go look at my pictures. And Ivy was born in 2015.

Tiffany Sauder [00:36:45]:

We did a lot of work in our lives. In 20 16, 20 17, 20 18. If you go look at my camera reel. Six to nine months before COVID hit, we had the very best of life. We traveled a ton. Our kids were not babies. Jarrah and I had done a lot of work on us professionally. Things are beginning to come together, and, you know, all of those things have continued to be true.

Tiffany Sauder [00:37:11]:

And then Covid hits, and we have Quincy in the middle of COVID So, like, literally every time we have a kid, a bomb goes off. And I've been telling junior, we need another kid in our life. I am being 100% sarcastic. I'm not having another kid. That's not possible. But Quincy's four, and I'm like, oh, my word. We're going to not have signs of little kids in our house anymore. What's going to happen? It'll be fun.

Tiffany Sauder [00:37:30]:

We'll love it. Quincy, we had her in 2020, like, 60 days after my 40th birthday and in the middle of the pandemic. So, you know, that was hard for different reasons. It wasn't for reasons of our own making. It wasn't for reasons inside of our environment. And I'm grateful that we had, I would say, a full tank. To be able to lead through a really difficult external environment. And actually, looking back, that's probably why we were able to navigate it so well, is because internally, we had a full tank.

Tiffany Sauder [00:38:01]:

I was clear in my choices professionally, we had some financial footing. To be able to go into that and take some risks as a family. And our kids were healthy, and we had, I think we were really certain in our choices. And so we were able to be very available to the pressures of the outside world in that season. So, you know, here we are four years later, and by no stretch of the imagination is our life perfect. But I don't think that is the goal is to have a perfect life. I think the goal of life is to live inside, is to live perfectly inside of your choices and to accept the good and the challenges that come naturally in the choices that we've made and to not freak out when something hard comes as a result of a choice you've made. I remember one specifically is I had decided to work outside of the home at that season of element three.

Tiffany Sauder [00:38:57]:

We had a really close relationship to this big software company called HubSpot, and I had an opportunity to speak at their conference, which was going to be a really big deal for us, for my personal brand, a great stretch for me personally. Kind of put us on the map a little bit as an agency more nationally, and I said yes to that before I knew that that speech was on the first day of kindergarten. I think it was for Ivy. I forget which one. One of them. It was their first day in kindergarten, and I remember being like. My first reaction was, oh, no, I'm gonna cancel it. And I was like, does it really matter? I'm certain she doesn't remember me not being there.

Tiffany Sauder [00:39:37]:

I was willing to make that choice. I'm not saying that's a choice you have to make, but I was like, what can I put energy into instead of being there on that exact day? And we, like, picked out her outfit, made sure her backpack was ready. I was at meet the teacher night. You know, she went and walked on the school bus, set the back to school night. She was ready for everything. If I needed to be there, it would have been more for me than for her. Her dad was, you know, like my husband. Her dad was there.

Tiffany Sauder [00:40:07]:

I could facetime her that morning. We could make sure her favorite breakfast was in the fridge. There were all kinds of ways that I could prepare for her, that she could feel my presence, that she could feel me as part of that moment in her life without me having to be in that exact hour. And so for me, again, I'm telling you my story, my choices. I'm not saying you have to do the same thing. I started to have freedom in saying I can be there for my kids in ways that are creative. Now there are times that my kids tell me, mom, it is 100% important for me for you to be there. And when they say that, I listen and I respect that, because nothing in the outside world is more important than them.

Tiffany Sauder [00:40:50]:

But they are not the only thing that we have going on. And that's okay if sometimes we can't be there for 100% of it, for all of it. It doesn't mean I don't care. That doesn't mean they don't feel my love. It doesn't feel that mean they don't feel my presence. There are a lot of creative ways to do that. So, anyways, this episode is getting long. Thank you for sticking with it this long if you have, but this is my journey of becoming a working mom in a two career home.

Tiffany Sauder [00:41:17]:

Thanks for listening. Thank you for joining me on another episode of Scared Confident. Until next time, keep telling fear. You will not decide what happens in my life. I will.