This week, Samantha talks with business owner and mother of 3, Julie Nicholson Burke.  Motherhood was much more difficult for Julie than she ever imagined it to be.  Her oldest son has been challenging to raise, and then she also has twins.  So, when it came to running a business, she had to have patience.  This wasn’t being carried over to her kids, though.  She didn’t have patience for them the way she did for her business.  Her daughter reminded her that “we’re just small,” which was a harsh reminder that she needed to rethink how she treated her kids.

There are parallels to parenting and consequences that Julie has been able to draw.  What was innate in her to parent her kids didn’t work.  She had to find different ways and different avenues to parents her children.  She had to press to get her son tested because she knew in her gut that something wasn’t right.  He was having difficulty in school socially and in most other situations.  Overall, it’s all been a long journey.  

What did life look like before making the personal connections in her business?  Life before was chaotic.  She didn’t like being a mom.  It felt like no matter what she did, it didn’t work.  She thought that there was joy that came with being a mom, but there was just a lot of yelling and misunderstanding.  The shift started in roughly year 2 of her business when she was attending lots of training sessions.  She kept hearing the same message over and over again.  Direct sales is simple, but not easy, so you have to have patience.  So, after understanding this message, she realized it could be applied to her kids, too, with having patience with them.  

Consistency with her business but not with her kids was a place where a big switch needed to happen.  She had to put up certain boundaries with her kids.  Through quarantine, the four of them would play a “catch me” game, but after a while, she was exhausted.  When she said that she needed a break, to her surprise, they were happy to go play by themselves in their rooms.  This boundary was well received and still gave the kids what they needed. 

With the addiction to technology that we all have today, as long as we can take some time to give our kids our undivided attention, even just a little bit of time, it goes a long way with connecting authentically with them.  

She had her kids through IVF, so there’s a huge investment they’ve already put into their kids.  This made her seriously wonder why she was so miserable after becoming a mom.  She felt like she was being ungrateful.  She didn’t know there would be so much anxiety associated with parenthood, especially with twins.  For a long time, she could talk to her good friends and her family about how much she wasn’t enjoying being a mom.  She was a really great aunt, so it made sense that she would be a great mom, but it just wasn’t the same.

The shift started by not caring what other moms thought.  In her business, she has to not care what the “haters” thought, but as a mom, it was hard for her to not care what other moms thought.  She has a very difficult son where she has had to just say, “we’re done!” and that's difficult for her because she’s the type of person that wants everybody to like her.  However, she had to parent her son very differently from other people, so it was really difficult.

It took a lot of time and trial and error; of seeing the looks from other moms to learn how to not care.  No kid comes with a manual.  They’re all different.  Nothing works for one that works exactly the same way for another.  

She believes that there should be a high level of compassion for children, but also for parents of children.  Nobody wants their child to be the ‘biter’ or the ‘hitter,’ nor do they want their children to be the one who gets bit or hit.  There has to be compassion for the child and the parents in any situation because there needs to be an understanding that the child is just learning and the parent is doing their best and that there’s no right or wrong way to raise a child because each one is different.

The lessons you can learn in business can be applied to personal life and vice versa.  Everybody is always looking for the “secret sauce” for their business, but it always comes back to you being your own secret sauce.  Customers come back to you because you are the “secret sauce.”  As a mom, she needs to be the “secret sauce” for her children, too.  She doesn’t want her children to look back at their childhood and think, “mom yelled a lot.”  

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Julie Nicholson Burke

J. Burke for J. Elizabeth