Ep.65/ How to Get Your Life & Business In Alignment With Growth + Performance Coach Lindsay Roselle
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Can you have your pricing right? Your business in order… but not really because you’re out of alignment? Growth and performance coach for high performing moms, Lindsay Roselle is on the podcast today to help you prioritize and get in alignment! She shares her journey from corporate job to entrepreneurship, and her mission now is to help ambitious mothers find harmony between their career ambitions and their desire to be present for their children.
Lindsay Roselle is a Growth + Performance Coach for high-performing mamas, host of the MotherLoad Podcast, and Founder + CEO of The MotherLoad Company. She is also the co-founder of mushroom microdosing education company Inner Alchemy. Lindsay has built multiple 6 and 7 figure businesses over 12+ years of entrepreneurship, and coached and consulted with hundreds of leaders, organizations, and brands. She has also produced and hosted over 100 live events for ambitious women.
She talks about the deep inner work of motherhood, the challenges of balancing business growth and parenting responsibilities, and the importance of prioritizing self-care. We also explore the concept of the mental load that we mothers carry. Lindsay is also the host of the podcast MotherLoad.
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In this episode you will learn:
Why alignment is important for business success
Doing a mental load audit and prioritizing what is important
Challenging motherhood stereotypes and putting yourself first
Quotes from our guest:
“I’ve seen people who had every strategy right and every product right, every pricing right in their business, and it still didn't succeed because they were out of alignment.”
“Why am I so conditioned to perform and so conditioned to just run myself into the ground?”
“We can't even get into high achieving mode when we're too scattered or too stressed or whatever.”
Do a ‘mental load audit’ of your buckets. Work, money, fun, health, love, parenting/kids & purpose/meaning. What feels really heavy? Where is imbalance?
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EPISODE LINKS:
-https://www.lindsayroselle.com/
-Listen to Motherload: Click here
FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
Kim (00:02):
Growth and performance coach for high performing moms, Lindsay Roselle is here. I've
Lindsay (00:06):
Seen people who had every strategy right and every product right, every pricing right in their business, and it still didn't succeed because they were out ofAlignment. She's going to tell you how to get your life and business in alignment.
(00:20):
Kim: This is Moms exit interview, the show for moms who want to craft the career and life they want. Each episode, you'll meet inspirational moms across various industries and levels who are working and living life on their own terms, and they'll bring you actionable tips from finance to business development to happiness, to crushing that imposter syndrome. I'm Kim Rittberg. I was a burnt out media executive at Netflix, US Weekly and in TV news. I wanted a career where I was fulfilled at work but present at home with my kids. So I started working for myself and I love it, but not every day was easy or is easy. I wanted to explore with all of you how other moms were creating careers on their own terms. They're carving out flex jobs, starting their own businesses, they're taking back control. Join me and make work, work for you instead of the other way around.
(01:23):
My guest today is Lindsay Roselle. She's a growth and performance coach for high performing mothers. She also hosts the podcast Mother Load. She shares her journey from corporate job to entrepreneurship, and her mission now is to help ambitious mothers find harmony between their career ambitions and their desire to be present for their children. She talks about the deep inner work of motherhood, the challenges of balancing business growth and parenting responsibilities, and the importance of prioritizing self-care. We also explore the concept of the mental load that we mothers carry. I'm so excited to have Lindsay here with me. Lindsay Rosell is a growth and performance coach for high performing mamas. She's host of the Mother Load podcast and founder and CEO of the Mother Load Company. She's the co-founder of a mushroom microdosing education company called Inner Alchemy. Lindsay's built multiple six and seven figure businesses over 12 plus years of entrepreneurship and coached and consulted with hundreds of leaders, organizations and brands. She's also produced and hosted over a hundred live events for ambitious women. Wow, Lindsay. I was like, that's a lot. That's cool. So talk to me a little bit about where you live, what's been your path to where you are now?
Lindsay (02:29):
Yeah, the professional bio, it's always sounds very
Kim (02:32):
Mostly tell me about yourself. And by that I mean a brief bio and some bragging.
Lindsay (02:37):
Yeah, yeah, the bragging. I know when you hear it like that, it's like, oh, I've done a lot. I came out of college with so much debt that I felt my ambition at the time was like onto the next thing. What's the next big thing? And the next thing at that time was corporate job. Get a corporate job, get a high salary. And I didn't really have what was my passion. I didn't have an answer to that question at that time. So I took a corporate job and ended up really liking it for the most part, and spent nine years working in the energy industry. I sold software. I was on a sales team selling software that helps run utility companies. So I had no knowledge of that industry at all. I was a poli-sci major in college, but what happened was I got on the international sales team and I was able to travel over the world.
(03:22):
So I got to experience a little bit of my wanting to know about the world and wanting to know about people. And it also fed this entrepreneurial ambition. I had to understand how businesses grow because my job was to nurture relationships with all these small businesses in countries all over the world that were resellers of our software product. So I really was immersed in both big corporate and climbing the ladder and all of the lean in movement and the mid two thousands and all of that. And I was looking at this entrepreneurial world going, it's so interesting to me how these people like family businesses and small companies and having more control over your own schedule and your own life. And I got to a point in late 2013 where I was in my early thirties and I kind of woke up to this fact that this isn't what I wanted.
(04:14):
I wasn't a mom yet or anything at that point, but I could feel that this type of career and this type of a company was not going to result in what I wanted, even though I didn't really know what I wanted. I just knew it wasn't that anymore. I came home from that last trip and I quit. I took Christmas off and then I came back early January and quit. And that was the beginning of 2014. And ever since then, it's been a million different forays into entrepreneurship. I've had brick and mortar businesses, I've had e-comm businesses, consulting, coaching, you name it, product-based businesses, you name it, we've done it. Either me or me and a business partner or me and my partner. And all of that really felt good for me in my ambition to just work and have so many businesses and constantly be on this hustle mode until I had kids.
(05:03):
And then even then, it was a couple years of trying to just fit the kids into the business model until of course pandemic happened. And I lost both in-person businesses that I still owned at that time in just flames of glory and hundreds of thousands of dollars of cost to go out of business in two different businesses. And it all just brought everything to a head for me in late 2020 around how did I get here? How did at this point in my life with two little kids and my businesses have all failed somewhat because of the pandemic, somewhat because I got out of alignment on them. My relationship was suffering at that time. I felt terrible in my body at that time and it was this awakening for me to go, man, there's something here around my conditioning of my whole life to be so ambitious and so more, more.
(05:55):
And my relationship with motherhood, which I really hadn't spent much time, even though I was already a mother, hadn't spent much time at all thinking about how I felt about motherhood. And as I woke up to that in 2021 and 2022, I was like, wow, there's something here around doing both things well. And I still love to work. I still have tons of ambition. I still want to have a huge impact in the world. I also want to be a devoted mother. My mother was not, she bless her heart, she listens to my podcasts and stuff, but she was a ghost in my memory. She was so in her head and in her work and worked two jobs and all this stuff that I don't really remember her around much as a child. And I don't want to be that way for my kids. And so late last year, I started Mother Load my podcast, and this whole movement kind of brought everything I do together to go, how do I help ambitious mothers like me figure out this harmonization between their desire to succeed and to go follow the ambition so potent for most of us and also still be devoted mothers in the way in the rhythm that we want.
(07:02):
And I'm sure we'll talk more about it, but that still feels really hard to me, even though I'm very aware of it and I coach on it and I educate on it. It feels like we live in a time and in a culture where the ability to do both things well feels really hard and is constantly in opposition for lots of different reasons. So yeah, that's how I got here.
Kim (07:23):
Welcome. When you talk about your relationship with motherhood or your thoughts on motherhood, do you mean being a mother, parenting your children or do you mean life balancing all the things? Which of those things was more top of mind for you?
Lindsay (07:43):
Both. But to me, motherhood and parenting are two different things. So there's motherhood in my understanding now as I've done work on this and really brought these ideas out of my jumbled head and into form. To me, motherhood is an identity and you can be in the identity of motherhood, whether or not you biologically had the child, whether or not the child is still with you. There's so many ways that motherhood shows up in the identity of someone, whereas parenting is a task to minimize it down to its true thing. It's a series of decisions and it's a behavior and an action that you have to be taking every day. It's not necessarily an identity. Once I started to separate those two things, I was like, okay, I have some concerns in both ways. Parenting the task, parenting the role, fitting that into my life and understanding all the decisions I have to make and what's best and how to share that load with my partner who also is a parent and needs to be a parent and all the resentment and everything that can kind of ebb and flow through the parenting relationship is one thing.
(08:48):
But the bigger thing, the place I started was with motherhood and looking at what does it mean to me a lifelong high performer, a lifelong Enneagram three who just wants to get shit done and doesn't really care about anything else? What does it mean to now be a mother where this part of me lives outside of my body, my children that I love so much are present around me and I didn't even know how to access my own emotional depth. Now I have this deep love for these little kids that can't even speak yet. I'm like, wow, this is, I don't know how to manage the emotion of this. So it caused this weird dissonance in me to go, I feel so much about my kids. I'm not conditioned to really feel very much in my life. I'm such a performer, I'm such an achiever.
(09:35):
I'm conditioned to work. And so a lot of my initial inner work and healing journey was around a lot of cultivation of self-love and I call it excavating the basement of the soul to go into this area of my inner world where I had just buried stuff my whole life and try to dig that space out and go, where's the warmth in my life? Why am I so conditioned to perform and so conditioned to just run myself into the ground and now I have these two little beings sitting here that I love so much, and everything about behaving in that way feels completely wrong. And it just opened up this whole huge questioning around what don't I love about motherhood? What do I love about motherhood? How much of that is actually authentic to me? And how much of that is generational stuff that I'm pulling through? How much of that is social media conditioning? It's a lot. To me, the identity work of motherhood is the deep, deep work. And then parenting. I'm not a parenting expert and believe me, my children would tell you that, but parenting to me is several levels up in the intimacy department, whereas your relationship with the identity of motherhood is very, very deep work.
Kim (10:46):
Lindsay and I just spoke on her podcast and we had a conversation that I wanted to bring to mom's exit interview is very much related to this. One of the things I struggle with is being in go-go ambition mode and being on calls and I'm right now in a zone of intense work and then shifting to pick up my children and be in that totally giving mode is hard because when you're at your computer, you're working on calls, you're in hyper efficiency mode and no feeling all doing, and then you have to get out of that mode and you have to be all giving and not annoyed and not feel annoyed at your children when they're whining for snack or about a play date or that they spilled on themselves. And I think that, I like what you're saying, Lindsay, it's really things that we might not think about so much, but we feel it.
(11:29):
I was like, oh my God, it took me a while to realize when I'm in a super go mode, super ambition mode, it's hard for me to just pause, turn it off, go be with the kids and be totally present. And so I like the idea of finding that buffering time in between. But I loved your point about motherhood. Talk to me about you work with a lot of moms and you obviously face these things in your own life, and then you also have all of your clients, you work with it, people who are struggling with that. How do I balance how I want to grow my business but also be a parent? What advice would you give them based on your own experience and the people you coach?
Lindsay (12:06):
So the main thing that I start with everyone is a mental load audit. And we look at in these buckets of the mother load, which is what my brand's called in my podcast, the buckets are work, money, fun, health love, parenting, kids, and purpose and meaning. So those last two Parenting kids is one bucket purpose and meaning is one bucket. So there's seven buckets, and I like to take everybody through this mental load audit to go what's really in each bucket for you? How much of everything that's good in that bucket, everything that's stressful in that bucket, what feels really heavy? What's your true capacity across all of these different things? And it starts to become, when you start to look at it broken down like that, you can immediately see where there's imbalance. If you're like the fun bucket, well, I don't have any hobbies, I don't have any friends, I don't do anything for myself that feels fun.
(13:00):
It's like, well, okay, that's an important thing that we need to look at or the money bucket. Everything is scarce right now. We're in a lot of debt, we can't make our bills. Well, it's like if that is on five, if that bucket's on fire, everything else is a problem. So initially that answers a lot of questions. And then once we have that inventory done and can really look at objectively everything that's on somebody's plate, everything they're carrying, the mother load is these seven buckets that you're literally farmer carrying seven buckets through life. And if they're too heavy for you, you are not going to be able to function or you're going to burn out. You're in overload. So then what we look at is capacity management and how do we one lighten the load? And I'll mention more about that in a second, but lightning the load is what it sounds like.
(13:45):
How do you get rid of things, like take things out of those buckets or how do we grow your capacity? How do we make you stronger so that you can carry seven buckets better? There's a lot of coaching and mindset tools and strategy, everything that is either about lightning, the load or growing capacity is typically either is mindset work or it's strategy work. But the biggest thing that this kind of funnels down into is this question of prioritization. And where I find similar to what you and I talked about on your podcast, when you don't show up confidently on camera, it's very rarely something about what you want to say on camera. It's usually some deeply rooted insecurity that you have. What I find in this situation is what's at the root of a lot of the reason the buckets feel really heavy or you don't have the skills to lighten the load or grow the capacity is because ultimately the prioritization in your life is off.
(14:41):
And when I really, really get into it with people, and I realized this about myself in 2020 when I was really at rock bottom and had to confront this work was that my at that time was businesses first, then my kids, then my partner, and then me. When I really evaluated the version of me that showed up in that order, no wonder everything was wrong Over those months of healing and reworking my life and rebuilding, I committed to both internally first and then with my therapist and with my partner and in all of the structures of my businesses to completely flip that on its head. And I said, I have to be first priority. I have to take care of myself. And for me that looks like this. And that is a question I ask people now is if you were had full permission to take care of yourself first, what would you need?
(15:31):
What are those things on a day-to-day basis? Okay, let's start looking at how we integrate that into your life. Then we can look at capacity and strategy and then we can look at buckets and mental load. But until you're taking care of yourself, it doesn't matter. How do you take care of yourself? Oh, let's look at your primary partnership, whether that is the co-parent of your children or that is a new partner that's not your children's parent, whatever, but your primary relationship that is in your day-to-day life is the next thing that's got to be the priority because when that's off, I at least feel this way. And I know most people that I work with feel this way where if that primary partnership is dysfunctional, everything else doesn't matter. The third thing is the kids. And I put the kids after the partnership and the primary relationship because in my experience, and I have seen this over and over again with clients where if they put the kids above the partner, it changes their role with their partner from equal to mom, and then you start to parent your partner.
(16:30):
And that is a whole, I'm not a therapist, but I've had enough therapy, couples therapy to know that you don't want to be your partner's parent. No. So it's me, then him, then our kids, and then the businesses. Businesses come last not because they're not important and not because I don't devote quite a few hours of my time to them, but because they have to be agile and responsive enough that when something up the chain from them happens and takes over for the day's priority, I have a sick kid or I'm sick or my partner needs me. Like last week, one of his businesses had kind of an implosion and I had to step in and help him. He's also an entrepreneur and I had to step in and say, how can I support you this week? This is a massive change for you in this business.
(17:13):
What can I do to help? And that did derail my stuff. But we are a system, and so ultimately that's how I work with people is to drill down and drill down and drill down all the way to look at what's the real priority for you, and if it's not you and then the primary relationship and then your kids and then your business or your work, how do we get it more in that order? I have seen over and over again when that's prioritization is adopted by someone, it feels so uncomfortable at first, but over time it really does unlock more capacity. It unlocks more space, it unlocks more softness and warmth in people because they go, oh, I'm taken care of. I feel good in my own body. I feel good with myself. I love myself. I can give more love to my partner. I can give more love to my kids. I can show up more effective and efficient in my business. That's the formula I think is so powerful. And I know, I mean, I've gotten feedback that people are like you putting yourself first. That's not motherly, that's not, mothers shouldn't put themselves first, and I will just ardently disagree with that
Kim (18:18):
For all the time. It's so funny. I think that whole put your gas mask, gas mask, air mask, whatever on first before also I hate that phrase then I'm like, you only need the mask when the plane is going down. So I don't really want to think about that, but you do need to take care of yourself and all that makes sense is that we can't even get into high achieving mode when we're too scattered or too stressed or whatever. And I guess my question to you would be, I feel like something that a lot of parents struggle with is again, that mental load that basically it doesn't matter how many zeros are in your income, you are still the c o o of the house and you're still the schedule keeper, the permission slip signer. What are you experiencing in your life and what do you recommend how when you work with your clients, what do you think about the mental load?
Lindsay (19:06):
Yeah, the mental load. I think I have kind a nuance depending on it. So much well-known research out there around the hidden aspect of the mental load and people don't understand it and dads or co-parents should step up and not require us to do the labor of teaching them about the mental load and all that stuff is valid. Absolutely. And I think that there's always work to be done in our American culture at least around helping co-parents and dads understand how much we think about as moms that we just don't ever say because it's just easier to get it done ourselves or because we're the ones that intuitively know that I don't know how I have this superpower, but when my kid's stuffy is lost in the house and I'm like, Hey, can you go find panda?
Kim (19:52):
I have that for everyone in my house. My husband's like, where did I put my hat? I'm like, it's on the couch hidden under the pillow.
Lindsay (19:59):
These are the little things that every mom is like, yeah, I just know where something is because I can trace back. The last time I saw it in my mind and I was like, oh, it's right before he went to the basement. So he was probably playing with it in the basement. I bet it's in the basement. And my husband's like, huh, how did you know that? I'm like, I just traced back the last time I saw him with it. Why didn't you know that? And he's like, I didn't even notice it all day. I'm like, okay. So there's just realities like that. But I think that the mental load, as much as we can delegate and I'm a big fan of delegation and asking for help and all these things, I have a decent amount of privilege. I have a lot of help. I know women who have lots more money and more help and privilege than I do in terms of having more staff around the house and all of that, regardless of how much you literally can delegate because you have the money to delegate or you create delegation in a relationship with a co-parent or something.
(20:50):
There are aspects of the mental load that we don't want to delegate or that we don't feel safe to delegate. And I think that's where this conversation becomes deeper and more important is why don't you feel safe to let some of these things go? Why are you so hypervigilant about certain aspects of the mental load? And when you start to get into the conversation around safety and vigilance, that's where the meat of this conversation starts to come through, at least in my experience with people is that's where we start to find the habits and patterns and the mindset that's coming from conditioning of how they were raised or the generational trauma that their lineage has experienced or perceptions that they are responding to from external pressures where they literally don't feel safe to let go of that load. So they carry it willingly and intentionally, and I think that's where there's more work to do in our culture, and that's why I have mother load is I'm not trying to solve that problem because it's, I don't even know how to solve it for myself, but I do like to talk about it more.
(21:53):
I like to normalize it and demystify it for people because I can't tell you how many times I'm on these conversations on podcasts where in the work that I do in mother load where someone will wake up to it and go, oh my God, you're right. I like to be the schedule keeper because I want to know where my child is at all times and I want to know who's picking them up and I want to know that they got there on time and I don't ever want to delegate that. You could give a million dollars to have a house manager and a nanny, and I would never delegate that. And you're like, okay, wow. That's something that is not a question of let's just make everything equal in America. That is a question of how are we helping support mothers who want to be the one that does the pickup want to be the one who knows where the kid is at all times?
(22:36):
Because I believe biologically we're wired for a lot of that by nature. A mother wants to know where her young is. So anyway, I could go on and on about that, but to me, the mental load is partially some of this stuff that's very in our pop culture around needing to delegate more and have more equality and relationship. But a lot of the mental load is a much deeper thing where we have chosen to take on that load because it makes us feel safe to have it to own things. It makes us feel safe to know where everything is and what's happening at all times, and we don't actually want to delegate it. That's where there's more work to
Kim (23:15):
Be done. That's interesting. I feel like I'm on the side of, there are certain things I like, not necessarily I love having the calendar, but I want to be the first call. I like to take them to the doctor. I have no problem with that stuff actually doesn't even bother me. But then there are certain things around the house I actually hate doing and I make my husband do. He orders when we need to order food or order paper towels and doing travel, he does that. I'm like, I don't want to do that. I'm drowning. You do it. I have enough on my plate. So I think it's also of the things you want to own and control, which of them do you really want to own and control, which really matter and which are just tasks on your to-do list and extra three things that you don't need. So I think some of it is in your mind, you have to sort it.
Lindsay (23:56):
Yeah, and which ones feel really big and annoying and that are only that because something else is completely out of alignment and that's where you're channeling the energy into. For me, stuff around the house, managing the nannies or managing the babysitter schedule used to be, I used to resent that so much. I'm like, what You think people just magically show up to take care of our kids and there's nobody that's managing this schedule and everything like that. But I actually didn't really mind that when I looked at it, what I didn't appreciate what it ended up being was in my work bucket. I was also the primary breadwinner and I had three businesses that I was running in order to be the primary breadwinner. And when I really looked at, Hey, where's the resentment coming from that I'm viewing out at you about how you don't get involved with any of the babysitter schedules.
(24:44):
It's really that we have to have this much childcare because I have three freaking businesses I have to run and I don't actually want to do that. And so when everything fell apart and all the businesses went away, and I looked at all this and I was like, wow. I was really angry about having to be the breadwinner and having to be the breadwinner by having three businesses when it had nothing to do with resentment over needing a babysitter or running that schedule. And that clicked for me around God, how much of what we're projecting on a partner about stuff around the house or kid related things is really from one of the other buckets and it's just spilling over into that bucket.
Kim (25:20):
Absolutely. And I shared with you on your show, I didn't even share it yet, but basically I was recently speaking at a big keynote and I was in Las Vegas and I got a call that someone forgot to pick my son up at camp, and I was just like, seriously, I left so many notes. I did the whole schedule. I made sure everything was airtight. Seriously and honestly, we have the best support. My mom lives nearby. We have a great babysitter, my husband's great. But it was just one of those things, I'm just like enough of this, but generally the things that I do are the things I want to do, the things that I don't want to do, I give to my husband, and then occasionally when I'm really busy with work, I get really annoyed and that's like straw. The brook breaks the camel's back, but that's how it goes. Lindsay, I love your point of view on everything. I feel like it's sort of both sides of the brain. It's like what's happening under the surface, and then also how do you be more efficient and be more ambitious. I like that you sort of merge both sides. I think sometimes some of us are either more one end or the other not soft enough or not hard enough. So tell our listeners how they can connect with you, find out more about you, listen to your podcast.
Lindsay (26:27):
On that last point, I always say you'll never out strategy a lack of inner alignment. So I start with inner alignment on everybody, even though mostly I'm a coach business consultant and that's my background over and over and over again. I've seen people who had every strategy and every product, every pricing right in their business, and it still didn't succeed because they were out of alignment. That's why for me, it's like you've got to tend to some of this inner world stuff before you go apply business strategy. But yeah, you can come to me and I'll teach you about both because I've done it, I've done both, but I will always be an advocate for inner alignment first and then kind of pushing outward with that to say, how do I now show up in my business? How do I show up as a leader? How do I show up as the salesperson or everything else? But yeah, you can find me. I talk about all these things a lot because obviously I care a lot about this. My podcast is called MotherLoad, l o a d, so if you just search MotherLoad all one Word podcast, it'll pop up. And the best place to find me is Instagram just at Lindsay Roselle. All the other profiles are linked from there. And I love dms. I love to talk about this. So reach out. Yeah, happy to have a conversation.
Kim (27:34):
Lindsay, this is such a great chat. Thank you so much.
Lindsay (27:37):
You're welcome. Thanks for having me.
Kim (27:38):
You can listen to Lindsay's podcast, Motherload and Learn More at her website, lindsayroselle.com, L I N D S A Y R O S E L L E.com.
(27:52):
Thank you so much for listening. Make sure to drop a review, and if you want to send in a real mom moment that we'll share on the air, check out moms exit interview.com. And if you're a professional or small business owner looking to grow your brand through amazing content with no silly dances and with no burnout, check out my website, kim rit bird.com, and you can hit contact to chat with me. And thanks for listening. Like this is the most amazing community. You guys send in the best feedback, so share it with your friends. Let anyone know who you think would appreciate it. And this is Mom's Exit interview. I'm your host and executive producer, Kim Rittberg. The show is produced by Henry Street Media. Jillian Grover edited this episode, and Elisa Freelander is our editorial producer and publicist. I'll see you next time.