What My Pregnancy Taught Me About My Leadership

Today, I’m sharing more of a personal experience. In case you didn’t know, this is a pre-recorded video, since I’m taking parental leave to spend time with my brand-new, sweet little one. 

The process of going through my pregnancy taught me a lot about leadership - specifically, my leadership. I love the relevance of this topic, because when I work with clients, I always tell them that even if they hire me for x, we're also going to end up working on y together. In other words, even if someone hires me for one area of their life, we’re naturally going to end up coaching in other areas.

I’ve found over and over again that the way that we do one thing can really help inform, inspire, and have us reflect on the way that we do other things. 

The way this showed up for me on my pregnancy journey is that I learned that being pregnant for the first time came with its own needs, trials, and tribulations that actually positively impacted my growth and development as a leader. Specifically, it taught me about trust, about getting really clear on what it is that I need, about building the right team to make it happen, and about not being attached to the outcome. 

Lesson 1: Trusting the Process

Let me just tell you, becoming the vessel for another life for 40 weeks is inherently a trust-filled process. There's a lot that can go wrong, there's a lot that may not be understood, and there are a lot of changes that my mind and body went through. I won't go into all the gory details. 

I noticed that saying “yes” to getting pregnant and starting a family meant saying “yes” to trusting this process every step of the way. 

It might sound crazy to think that leadership is the same, but whatever you’re creating in life - a baby, an organization, a business, a mission, a product - you need to put trust in the process of going through what it takes to create that thing. 

So in the same way that I have needed trust in my pregnancy journey, having trust in my leadership journey has allowed me to be open, flexible, and responsive to these three other lessons.

Lesson 2: Getting Clear on What I Need

Something that I noticed for myself is that even though I've come a long way, in the five years that I've been in transformational work, I'm still a pretty self-sufficient person. Through my upbringing and my overachieving tendencies, I still lean on the mindset: “I can get it all done myself.”

While that's not wrong, per se, the wild thing about pregnancy is that just when you think you've figured out all your symptoms, and you can handle whatever gets thrown your way, something else happens. You gain more weight and get back pain, the baby moves higher up and you have constant acid reflux… funny things happen. 

This is true of anything that you work on. Such as writing a book - you think you've finished the chapter and then you decide to kill off a character and suddenly the whole draft is moot. 

When I was pregnant, the needs that I had, for the first time in my life, exceeded how quickly I could keep up with them. It taught me a lot of humility in this process because it required me to get clear on not only what the needs were, but who else could meet them, besides me. 

If you've read any of my content about being invaluable versus indispensable, it's the same concept. I think a lot of leaders have this notion that they need to be perfect and have it all figured out, and that they need to be needless. 

Part of the consequence is that when leaders don't vocalize their needs to their teams, they martyr themselves, they focus on perfectionism, and they get burnt out. And if they ever disappeared, whatever they're working on tends to fall apart, because they didn't train anyone else in what it would take to take on that responsibility for themselves. 

Lesson 3: Building the Right Team

As someone who already does a lot of coaching around building teams and leading teams, it taught me even more about the process. I noticed that I used to build teams based on everything that I already thought I knew. I knew about sales - so I built a process to handle it. I knew about social media marketing - so I built a process to handle it. Pregnancy is a wild journey, where you don't know what you don't know, until it hits you. 

Going back to this concept of being humble about it, I had to start building a team not based on who will always see me as the boss, and the one who knows the most, but really look at the people who know more than me, or they have different areas of genius than I have. They're going to make my process more comfortable and soothing. It's easier to lean into that trust, because they'll even know how to identify some of the needs that I have, before I do. 

Lesson 4: Not Being Attached to the Outcome

I talk about this a lot in coaching, but it’s one thing to talk about it and another thing to experience it for yourself. 

During my pregnancy journey, I've had the pleasure of working with a doula. One of the very first things she ever said to me was: “We could write the most perfect birth plan on the planet. And the day that your baby decides that they're ready to get here, it might not matter.” 

That's a crucial lesson to learn as a leader. I find that leaders are constantly putting pressure on themselves to be perfect. It has to go a certain way or it's a failure. The team has to run this way or it's not working.

It’s important to have a willingness to not be attached. It’s OK to still have a vision or an intention for how you want something to go, but to also understand that at the end of the day, as long as you have a positive outcome, nothing else matters. 

Having this sense of surrender, ease, and flow in my pregnancy journey translated to just bringing a lot more surrender and levity to my leadership - even when things weren't going the way that they were supposed to. It was no longer just this consequential, “What are we doing wrong? And how do we fix it?” but having an opportunity to lean back and say, “OK, this plan isn't working out the way that I thought I wanted it to work, so how do I still reach the end goal that ultimately matters to me?”

I hope you enjoyed this week’s topic. I know it’s a little different than usual. This has been a special time for me to learn more about myself and my patterns. I really hope that you got something out of these lessons - even if you never have any intention of being pregnant or having a partner who's pregnant. 

But the big takeaway is that you can have breakthroughs and learn lessons in one part of your life and also have immediate impact - for the better - on other parts of your life. Let me know which of these lessons resonated the most.