How Coaching Helped Me Find My Feet Again After Becoming a Mum
Becoming a mum completely recalibrated my priorities. Coaching has given me somewhere to untangle the mum guilt, work guilt, money worries and endless ideas – and work out what I actually want from this next phase of my life.
Sophie
8/21/20263 min read
After having my daughter, far more changed than just my day-to-day routine. It completely shifted how I felt about work, money, time, ambition and what I wanted my life to look like.
I had spent years building a career I was proud of, so I assumed I would simply go back to it. But once my daughter arrived, the answer stopped feeling quite so obvious. I wanted time with her, I still wanted to use my brain and build things, and I wanted to contribute financially — but I couldn't work out how all of those pieces were supposed to fit together.
Coaching has become somewhere I can untangle all of that. It has helped me separate what I actually want from what I think I should want, challenge some of the guilt that comes with motherhood and work, and turn the endless ideas in my head into something much clearer. This is a very personal account of what that process has looked like for me, and why having someone outside my everyday life ask the right questions has been so valuable.
MY COACH
Loïs Campbell Wolffe
Lupa Coaching
Qualified coach for midlife women who are thinking about what next, in life or at work. 1:1 and group coaching.
A quick note from me
This isn’t a sponsored post. Loïs is my coach, and I wanted to share her details because working with her has genuinely helped me.
Before I started coaching, my head was chaos.
Mum guilt. Work guilt. Wife guilt. Money guilt.
Whatever I focused on, there always seemed to be something else I should have been doing instead.
I thought I’d just go back to work
Before becoming a mum, I think I assumed I would eventually return to work in much the same way I always had.
I had spent years building my career and I genuinely enjoyed being good at what I did. I liked solving problems, making things better, helping teams and building new things.
But motherhood changed the equation completely.
I didn’t lose myself. My priorities changed.
I don’t think becoming a mum made me less ambitious. If anything, I probably have more ideas than I have ever had.
What changed was what I wanted that ambition to cost me.
Time suddenly felt different. Flexibility felt different. Being able to choose how I spend my day felt far more valuable than it had before.
The strange blessing and curse of being nap trapped
A lot of Walden Weekly was built while I was trapped under a sleeping baby, sitting quietly with my phone, thinking, planning and making notes.
It gave me a strange amount of thinking time.
The downside was that my brain rarely switched off. One idea became five ideas, which became another possible business, another article, another thing I should research or build.
Walden Weekly brought two parts of me together
Walden Weekly has become one of the first things I have worked on where the personal and professional parts of me feel like they belong in the same place.
It uses the things I already know how to do, like design, problem solving, research, organising information and building useful things. But it is rooted in the life I am actually living now.
I know what it feels like to be at home with a small child and desperately need to get out of the house, but not have the energy to spend half an hour digging through Facebook to work out where to go.
Coaching became some of the most valuable time I have to myself
Coaching gives me somewhere to put all of that noise.
Loïs doesn’t tell me what to do. Quite often she does something much more useful. She asks the question that makes me realise I already know what I think.
It has helped me slow down some of the huge leaps my brain makes. I can go from one small idea to imagining what it might look like in five years, so coaching helps me bring things back to the next useful step.
It has also made me think much more carefully about what success actually means to me now, rather than simply defaulting to the version of success I had before becoming a parent.
A bit more clarity, not a perfect answer
I definitely haven’t emerged from coaching with my entire life neatly mapped out.
I still change my mind. I still worry about money. I still wonder whether I should go back to a more traditional job at some point.
But I feel much clearer about the direction I am moving in, and much more comfortable giving myself permission to explore it.
And sometimes that is enough.
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