01 Why Being a Great Leader and a Great Mom Feels So Hard And What Actually Helps

Welcome to the Great Leader Great Mom podcast, where we trade in mom guilt and burnout for courage, calm, and a whole lot more joy. I'm your host, Liz Jolly, engineer turn life coach, mom of three, and founder of the School of Courage. Here we talk about leading at work and at home without losing your sanity, your sense of humor, or yourself. If you're ready to drop the mom guilt and grow your courage, you're in the right place. This is episode number one. I created this podcast because I saw something missing. honest conversations about the courage it takes to be both a great leader and a great mom. And if you've ever felt like you're failing at both, like you're too tired to be inspired at work or too ambitious to just slow down at home and be present. This podcast is for you. I've totally been there. Let me start with my story. I was a leader before I had kids and I thought leadership meant knowing all the answers, technically being the expert My first leadership role came when my manager said, you'd be great at this, you should apply. I was excited, ambitious, and terrified. I was very young. The team I inherited was full of engineers with decades more experience than me. They literally had children my age My technical skills were never gonna carry me to be better than them, to know more than them. I had to learn what it meant to be a leader, and I wanted to do it fast so I didn't fail What this looked like for me was spending late nights reading every leadership book I could find. I learned through failure, through uncomfortable conversations. missed connections and team feedback that really stung sometimes. I wanted to be a leader who led with courage and curiosity, but sometimes it really was hard. It was so uncomfortable in moments Leadership wasn't about getting people to agree with me. What I found was it was about showing up with empathy, with strength, and humility. And then I became a mom. When I became a mom, I thought, I know how to do hard things. I'm really good at this. I've read all the books. I can figure this all out, this whole motherhood thing. But no book prepared me for the exhaustion, the guilt, and the self-doubt that came with trying to do both. There was such a tension between work and home I don't even know if I could have articulated it at the time. I wanted to be a mom who was fully present and a leader who was fully engaged And I kept telling myself, if I'm so smart, why do I feel like I'm failing at everything now? After my third child, I hit a wall. I was literally so overwhelmed, so burned out, and felt so disconnected from myself I had everything I thought I wanted. Everything on paper looked good. I had a career. I was a leader. I had a family. I had a house. I had all those things you spend your life seeking the checklist to fulfill. And yet I felt so miserable. That was my wake-up call. I realized That courage wasn't about pushing harder or forcing myself to be different. It was about slowing down long enough to listen to myself and to my emotions and to truly understand what was going on in my brain and decide what mattered to me. That was the moment that I found coaching and it changed everything for me. I learned that leadership starts from within, from self-awareness, from emotional regulation, from compassion, and I began to feel joy again. Not all the time, of course, because I'm a human and I feel all the array of emotions. but consistently enough that life didn't feel so heavy. So if you're listening to this and you're tired of feeling stretched so thin Feeling like you're constantly choosing between your family and having a career, you're not alone. You're exactly who this podcast is built for. I think there's so much courage involved in being a leader and being a mother at the same time. Because there's such emotional endurance sports and women juggling all of it at the same time is worth like 10 gold medals for one If you think about leadership on its own, leadership isn't always about the title or being perfect or knowing all the answers. It's so much more about knowing who you are. and knowing what's going on in your brain so that you don't overreact or freak out, but that you can become the leader that everybody wants to follow The hardest part of leadership isn't coming up with a strategy, some brilliant idea. It's having difficult conversations, facing criticism, and leading yourself when things don't go as planned because that's what's gonna happen in life. If there's one thing I've learned. When it comes to motherhood and why this requires courage, if you think about the impossible standard out there around motherhood. It's hilarious. There's the perfect meals, the perfect kids, the perfect house, the perfect career, the perfect mom body after you've had children and all of that changes. It's looking perfect. It's always saying the perfect thing, and you know what? It's absolutely unsustainable. It's a joke. We're raising humans in the world full of judgment. And we internalize that. As women, we look around and it's everywhere. The judgment just comes at us. But it takes so much courage in motherhood. To embrace the imperfection of all of us, to model resilience for our children and to show them what growth and what being a human on this planet looks like. So now you combine motherhood and leadership and you think about the radical courage involved. We know we can't do it both perfectly, but a little part of us is like, yeah, but you should be able to. You've read all the books, right? But we can do both powerfully. Courage isn't about finding some magical balance formula. It's about being present, about understanding what is going on in your mind. And going from being unconscious in our day to really being conscious. Some days your career needs more, and some days your family needs more. Courage is learning to love yourself through both and to drop all the criticism from the people around you. We so often are stuck in the tension. We love our work. We love the independence of making money and bringing it home so we can provide for our family. We love our kids dearly and yet We feel like we're never doing enough for either. That we're disappointing our boss or our team. Or we're disappointing our family and our children Society has strong opinions about what mothers should be. And we absorb those messages until they drown out who we are and what our voice actually is saying. We often feel so guilty for working or dropping our kids off at daycare. We feel guilty for wanting more than motherhood alone. We feel visible at work, like our ambition is a selfish thing. We feel like we're doing everything and still falling short. We want to feel grounded, to feel proud of the life we are building, no matter what the critics and cynics are saying. We want to feel connected to our children, to our partners in life to our family around us, to our purpose and to ourselves. We need to lead with courage and authenticity without sacrificing ourselves and our joy. Being a great leader or a great mom isn't about being perfect. It's about being courageous enough to keep showing up, to pick ourselves up when things get hard. To look in the mirror and think, I will figure this out. We get it wrong. We are strong and courageous and we can learn every single moment and we can love ourselves anyway. Ask yourself, what does being great mean to you? As a mom, as a leader, maybe you're neither entitled, but just think about what does good look like? Not to society, not to your boss, not to your mother-in-law or your mom. What kind of leader and what kind of mom do you want to be? Those are the topics that we talk about on the Great Leader, Great Mom podcast. And here's what I want you to know. You're the exact mom your kids are meant to have It is imperfect. It is. Nobody has a perfect childhood. We are capable of leading in ways that inspire others, including our children. You don't need to choose between impact and intimacy. You need more courage. And that's what I am building with the School of Courage So if you're ready to grow your courage, your confidence, and your self-trust, go to lizjolly. com and connect with me. Let's redefine what it means to be both a great leader and a great mom, and let's definitely not do it alone. I will see you next time. Thanks for listening. Take care, everybody.