As an entrepreneur you must listen to your audience and that is exactly what I did. After launching Mompowerment: Insights from Successful Professional Part-time Working Moms who Balance Career and Family, my first book, I heard from professional working moms that they wished I had a version of the book that shared tips, hacks, insights, and advice without specifically talking about the part-time option. So, I took that advice to heart and wrote The Mompowerment Guide to Work-life Balance: Insights from Working Moms on Balancing Career and Family. You can get links to either version of either book.
Some Background on my Work-life Balance Story
Before becoming a mom, I worked for more than 12 years at large marketing agencies. The agency world is generally a very fast-paced, competitive environment, with little work-life balance. It looks cool on TV and in movies and it is, but you work hard.
About 5 years into my career, I realized I wanted my life back and my journey for work-life balance began. I took two years away from Corporate America to get my MBA. This set me up nicely on the next stage of my career journey.
After grad school, I worked for a large engineering firm and then spent 5.5 years at a large marketing agency in Austin, TX in a full-time role. This time the ad agency was a lot more work-life balance friendly. My roles were also more internal and that changed things as well.
When I became a mom, I transitioned to a part time role for that same company because our son was born 10 weeks premature. I didn’t know what life would look like after 5.5 weeks in the NICU. I wanted to have flexibility to go to appointments with specialists and simply spend more time with my child, but I didn’t want to leave my job. We had the best-case scenario with a preemie and didn’t have to see many specialists or do much beyond the typical appointments that all infants have.
About a year after our older son was born, I became a mompreneur. I had done a side hustle as a marketing consultant for about 7 years at that point. I turned my attention to become 100% entrepreneur in my consulting business.
Why Write the Book?
I wrote the first Mompowerment book because I was approached on a regular basis by working moms wanting to understand how I transitioned to a professional part-time role. You can read more about the first book here.
I kept listening to what working moms were saying and realized I had a new opportunity. As I shared at the start of this blog, I got the feedback from professional working moms wanting more work-life balance ideas. Let’s face it, the whole being the mom you want to be while working can be tough. It’s even more challenging when you have a demanding career. That doesn’t mean that we can’t have work-life balance. When I realized that there were limited resources and most didn’t have a holistic approach to work-life balance, The Mompowerment Guide to Work-life Balance was born. I wanted to share ideas, tips, hacks, and advice on work-life balance for professional working moms from other professional working moms.
What it’s like to Write a Book
People compare writing a book to having a baby. I don’t agree on this one. Writing a book is so much about the creative process than having a baby. Honestly, before writing a book, I wouldn’t have considered myself creative. Sure, I worked in a highly creative field for more than a decade, but I didn’t create marketing campaigns. I’m more of an analytics, strategy, and relationship management/building kind of girl. So, for the past few years I’ve had to truly embrace my creative side and understand my own creative process so that I could write.
The first book I wrote took about 4 years between the research, writing, editing, etc. The second book took about a year. I had all the research and data I needed, so it was about looking at the data and information differently and allowing the creative process to happen.
And, yes, I did this all while being an entrepreneur and servicing clients in two balance businesses while being the primary caretaker of our two young boys. The truth is that you can accomplish a lot when you put your mind to it, manage your time, and have the right resources. If you’re a working mom, I know you can relate.
I’m really excited about how The Mompowerment Guide to Work-life Balance turned out. I hope this book helps working moms with their work-life balance challenges and keeps more moms in the workforce. I would love to see more working moms in senior leadership, which will only help other women and working moms along the way with their own work-life balance journeys. Ultimately, that is why I wrote the book. We need more women in senior leadership roles. It makes business sense and it’s the right thing to do as well.
Who Helped with this Book?
I didn’t write this book alone. More than 110 professional working moms shared their stories, tips, insights, and advice. Since the book is anonymous, I can’t name them all, but they know who they are. Each month on the blog I feature a Mompowerment mom (don’t worry, I get approval before I share her story.) You can get to know more about their individual stories, so check it out.
I had help from a core group. Three incredibly women, who are also working moms, were my beta readers for the second book: Robin Kegerise, Carrie Sharpe, and Danielle Tenconi. They gave detailed feedback and provided thoughts that helped me ultimately create the final version of the book. As with the first book, I again worked with my wonderful editor, Betsy Rhame-Minor, and my amazing publisher/publishing guru, Alexa Bigwarfe. I am also so thankful to the three women who reviewed this book and their thoughts are included on the back cover: Alissa Carpenter, Jenn Moore, and Winnie Sun. I cannot thank these women enough for taking time out of their busy schedules to read the book and share their thoughts.
My online and in-person friends have been incredibly supportive through this whole endeavor and I cannot say thank you enough. I’ve also made some amazing new friends.
Along this whole Mompowerment journey I’ve had three people in my corner giving me inspiration and cheering me on. Life is so much better with my husband, Robert, and our two young boys, A&E.
If you’re interested in buying a copy of the ebook or paperback, grab a copy on Amazon. (affiliate links)
