First Time Mom at 41 with Heather Hennessey

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Heather Hennessy is a coach specializing in helping working women transform into working mothers. Welcoming a new baby can be fantastic, challenging, joyful, confusing and frustrating. For working women who are earning all or most of the family income. It is urgently important to figure out how to integrate motherhood into their existing career, Heather helps women become exactly the working mothers they most want to be without sacrificing themselves in the process. So welcome, Heather. I'm so excited to have you here.

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Thank you so much for having me, Rebecca. This is such a treat.

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It is. Yeah. And so one of the reasons I wanted to have you on First of all, I want to talk about how we met each other. Because that's

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a fun story. You know, you were the first person I ever attempted to coach. Truly.

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Remember that? No.

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I will never forget it. We were classmates in coach training. I went headfirst into coaching, like I found coaching, and just dove in which I now understand thanks to human design was actually totally in alignment for me, but at the time, my husband was like, What is happening? So anyway? Yeah, I signed up for the program that our coach training offers at the Life Coach School, and I signed up for self coaching scholars at the same time. So our first classes were the first time I had ever been exposed to coaching. And I coached you first. Oh,

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that's amazing.

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I remember it because I bombed and our teacher was like, okay, right. But it was such a great experience for me, because this is a theme of my coaching practice, right? I was pretty good at stuff in general, right? I just had a high level of competence and skill in my life. So to encounter something where my efficacy seemed low was an invitation to me to really take the course seriously.

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Yeah. And I found that too, right? That Life Coach School thing really showed me my flaws.

You're a highly trained professional,

right? We're both highly trained professionals, masterful at things that other people think are really complicated. Luckily, I can nail that, just just sit down and watch me go.

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There's so much self development, I think and self growth just in learning how to coach other people. Right, that for me was life changing in itself.

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And if I remember correctly, you had been in self coaching scholars. Yes. For a while.

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And I had been coaching clients already before I joined the Life Coach School. I mean, I had a lot of other training, but I had never gotten the coach certification. I had been in a lot of coaching programs. And so that's the difference. Actually going through a certification. A good certification because I have looked at a lot of certifications. You can just go online probably and say your life coach and get started.

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I wanted to learn it and try it out. Could I really be a coach? I don't know. I mean, I was a coach already. But I wanted to see Could I live up to Life Coach School standards, which are really high,

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and the acquisition of that skill set and getting to go through that skill set acquisition with people like you who had already been coaching.

That was also a really fantastic part of my experience. And that is also a theme for me. I had had a similar experience in law school, where I entered law school straight out of college. And I looked around, and it was a mixture of people like me who were straight out of college, graduated from college and started law school in August.

And then there were other people who had been working professionals. We had an anesthesiologist in my class. Well, we had a guy who had run, and was still running a variety of businesses, he was kind of an entrepreneurial spirit.

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He was 15 years older than me and had all these business interests that he was constantly talking about. And then we had a variety of other people who were parents, I had been doing this job, and I quit, so I could come to law school.

And I looked around and I recognize that those people had an advantage over me. I was coming out of college, kind of thought I was hot stuff. And I looked around and I thought, these people appreciate the value of what they're entering. Right. It was, in a way, as you described, right? That was good for me. You were one of the people who I was like, “Oh, she already has an existing coaching business” And you’re here in this room with me virtually. Yeah, we had it even just in our small cohort of 10 people. We had other classmates who were already working professional coaches who were in training. The fact that the universe has repeated that lesson for me a couple of times. I hope I've gotten it right. I hope I have a beginner's mind. Yes. There's always more to learn.

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I always and here's the funny thing for me now is I am in programs where my coach mentors are 30 years old. Literally, I turned 50. And last summer, I am getting taught and trained with 30 year olds. So funny to me. I love it.

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I just signed up for a program. I've been following her for a couple years. I absolutely love her and she's reissued her program. It's the manifestation babe.

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fro. Yes. I've been in that one. Yes.

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She just reissued. I said sign me up. I'm going through it again.7:41
I did. Yeah. Oh, yeah.

I'm at this point. Why am I learning from this generation of 30 year olds? That's so much younger than me. I've decided, What if we're just all souls, the age doesn't make a difference. I don't, I've really had to come to that agreement with myself. The age doesn't matter. Some people, yeah, they just take on this thing. And this is their gift, and they start in their 20s, Doesn't matter.

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And as I learned, being your student,

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I learned

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that for me, being a student, is something that is going to be in alignment with my human design, and is going to unlock my mojo, right. That's how I think about it. So for me to remain in the posture of being a student on a regular basis is me actually keeping myself in alignment in an important way. I always have something new to learn.

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You and I, we both have the line one, right, you're a five one. So both of us have line one in Human Design, even though your subconscious mind is conscious, doesn't matter. We're both researcher types. So we love the learning. We love the researching and learning. And that's actually part of our gift to the world as to why we're here so it's good to remember that sound.

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I used to kind of beat myself up about signing up for people's programs. Yeah getting into the shiny object of something. So to be able to give myself permission. Yeah, to lean into that right to sign up for the manifestation babe program. Let me in. To have that Conversation with myself internally. And to have the thought that this is absolutely an excellent thing for me to be a student in during February and March of 2021. Right? There's a yes. I feel like I'm fulfilling something there and it's a gift to myself.

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Anyway, part of our self care, your right. Part of our self care is to allow ourselves to learn, and to research and give ourselves time consistently to do that, which is something that I used to think why I'm reading 10 books about human design right now. I'm in the middle of all of them. It's all good. Do you know, but it's okay. I have released the judgment on that. But I used to judge myself about that. Why am I always right, always having to read and it can't just be one thing. It has to be several things at a time and right, and I

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learn and then I want to move on. And I would beat myself up about moving on? Yeah, no, that's part of being a student. Right? This Yes, letting my letting things pique my curiosity and sort of letting my intuition lead me, it's been very freeing to have that knowledge. Since going through your program.

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It is so freeing. So I want to tell you, yes, you are part of my initial bloom program, which will be coming again in 2021. But first of all, I want to go back to before we talk about human design more, because I love that part. I want to go back to the fact that how did you get from Coach school? Now they always tell us to pick a niche, right? So your niche ended up being working mothers, or first time mothers or

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first time mothers? Yeah, most of our working professional women. So that's who I was, when I started to take the steps that led me to coaching was I had a baby at age 41. And at the time, I happened to be our family breadwinner.

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Wow.

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Wow. So right, it was, yeah. 41 years old, brand new mother earning the bulk of the family income. And over those months, I struggled so hard. Talk about being bad at something.

Even the career at which I felt masterful, before the baby came along. baby arrived and it felt like I got terrible at my job. It felt like I got terrible at motherhood. Everything was just a disaster.

I was 100 pounds overweight. And I felt awful, right? I was anxious. 24 seven. And I had been raised by a working mother and I had an experience in childhood that I knew I wanted the experience to be different from my child. But I could feel myself gravitating toward unhappiness, gravitating toward kind of resentment, right? Everything was going really well until this baby came along. And I had a visceral reaction to that gravitational pole, in a direction that I knew I didn't want to go. Yeah. So I started in earnest to work in a different direction to take the love that I felt for my son and the joy of motherhood, and kind of self create a gravitational pull the other direction. And I did it. It took me a long time. And it was pretty messy. But I figured it out. And I started with my schedule. That was kind of step one. And then as soon as I got my schedule kind of managed, I started losing weight.

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Yeah, that

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was where I was on a weight loss journey. When I found coaching,

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so what what prompted you to want to lose the weight? I'm curious. I don't think so many women, yes. So many women struggle so I

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I had been struggling with my weight my entire life. Yeah, pregnancy was my high watermark. Yeah. And then I resettled after At you know, about a year after my son was born, I was around to 40 to 50. Yeah, which was where I had settled. You know, typically, I mean, this is decades, decades of, you know, up and down on my weight. And so I started, I just felt so bad physically, I did not. Now, as you know, with my clients, I don't recommend that people need to step back, to take the baby weight off. Right. It was where I started, because it was, you know, the place where I thought I could be successful initially. And, and kind of gain if I could describe it, like a rock climber, trying to find that next, finger hold on the Mountain.

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That's what I felt like I was grabbing. So anyway, I was working in that way, and then just kind of working on myself in other ways, continuing to work on my schedule, right, trying to improve my career. And I along that journey found Corrine Crabtree's podcast.

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And then through her work, I found the Life Coach School podcast. And I just went all in. And as we were going through coach training, and as I was learning the tools. It's just sitting on my heart, that I needed this as a new working mother, and that I didn't have it. Whatever it was I was looking for, I could not find it as a 41 year old breadwinning mother. So I just had been my clear path ever since we got certified that I want to take my, you know, body of knowledge and give it to the working mothers of the world.

I think that's how I had first come to my coaching to write, you're looking for something, and you can't find the exact program you're looking for. I guess I'll create it. I wish somebody had created it for me, though. Right. Exactly. Exactly. It's what you try to come to.

We graduated from Coach training, and I had an urge to start a podcast. But I had not done it. I'm here right now, you know, at my goal, weight and all this other stuff, because I found a podcast that I needed in the moment that I needed it. So I always had this sort of urge to start a podcast, but I had not done it.

And this was another moment where human design and where your program sort of made something very clear to me. You've got me. I think it was in our first session, where you explained to me that I had the sacral authority and that I was going to be successful if I were responding to things. And so, you know, the sort of the coaching tool that we use in our coaching of the model.

Using my Human Design roadmap, and I had a podcast within a day or two, literally is

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the best. and I love when you sent that message that hey, I started my podcast because of what I learned From you. I'm like, why? Okay, I've never heard that before. But Wow.

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It was amazing.

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It was a mismatch of my thought process.

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Prior to your course, the notion that I don't know that I was going to one day get a certified letter from the universe that it was time to start my podcast. What I needed was to put myself in the mindset of responding to a need that I know exists. Yeah. And that nobody else is meeting. Yeah,

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yeah, was the kicker. And as we're talking about human design, and I know that you're a 5/1, it's that line 5 mentor person that really does need to externalize their message right. This is your job. You need to go stand on the stage. Externalize your message and you know the podcast is a great platform. For that, so absolutely. You

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know, and it's been, I did not know this, I had to kind of do it for a while to realize this. Podcasting is a flow state activity for me. I've always had just from my day job, and everything. I always had a thought that I love a captive audience. Yeah, funny thing to think about myself, but I do. And so the podcasts, it turns out that I just get into a flow state while I'm doing it. I did not have a distinct awareness of this. But there's a book that has come out recently, I think it was late 2020. That's about there's a guy who, excuse me has been doing a bunch of research about this. His name is Steven Kotler. k m t. l er is the author's name. And so I've been listening to him on some podcasts. This is what's happening to me when I'm podcasting is I am entering a flow state right. He talks about there's an actual neurochemical state that we enter into when we get into flow.

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Yes

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as you know, Human Design. In part, that's where it

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was sort of the energy. Yeah, that energetic

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changing.

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That's awesome. So before we talk more about Human Design, What are you helping clients with now? What are you helping them through?

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Having a baby, I think of it as, whatever, isn't really working in your life, but that you've been managing around, maybe for decades, it just becomes the thing that screams for your attention. We have a baby. The baby is the new thing. My weight had been a problem for me my entire adult life, but it was having a baby. That sort of got me to the point where I was thinking I have to figure this out.

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And I

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say this as a preface to, I help my clients with whatever in their life feels like it has broken down the most. It's not the baby's fault. But the baby's arrival causes the crisis. It's the thing that pushes them over the precipice. So that could be I hate my job, right? I've hated my job, maybe for a long, long time. But now that my baby has arrived, whatever coping mechanisms I was using to stay in my job or whatever I was doing to buffer

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It stopped working, right? My coping mechanisms, my buffers, they all are failing me. So now I'm, you know, for me the breadwinner, with a brand new baby who we love beyond reason. Yeah. And I hate my job. So anyway, that could be a financial crisis, because of the cost of childcare, or the lack of availability of childcare, here during COVID.

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Yeah, you know, there's been lots of stuff. And, you know, childcare centers are closing now, so people come to me for any number of reasons. But that, so, in some ways, right, in sort of coaching terms, I am a general life coach, for people who are living through that very specific time of their lives. And I really think that the, that that first 18 months before our children can

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talk to us.

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I no longer have a tiny kid, right? I've gotten a little bit older, have a kid, but there's a phase before your baby can talk or really cogitate or error, or interact with you. That's the phase where I help people. It's like a skill set. And the, you know, what is the crisis that seems to have presented itself for you during this phase? And let's go to work on that. So that's how that's how I help people.

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Awesome. I think That's great because new mothers, I think no matter what age you are, as a new mother, oh, I could have used so much support. No, I know my new motherhood. I know. Oh, yeah. And you know, there is some support when you have family or friends and you know, a few times but if you're a working mother, who's at a high, I was a stay at home mom. So that's different. I was a stay at home mom when I had my kids most that's my

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That's my theory, right is that you may have family, you may have friends, you may have people on the internet. Yeah, but are you actually getting the specific support that you need as a career professional woman who is adjusting to new motherhood?

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Usually not? Probably not.

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I had friends and family that said motherhood kind of sucks. You gotta be kidding me. That has has not been helpful,

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We’re so used to doing everything ourselves. Even I can imagine as a career woman, and you have a high powered career, you're used to being able to solve all the problems and do all the things

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we don't try to fix our own cars, right. That's one of my favorite analogies. If a career professional woman's car breaks down, she does not go out and try to teach herself. She doesn't go get a GM certification in auto repair. She doesn't enroll at the technical school. No, she hires a professional. Yeah, and get her what she needs when she needs it.

Exactly. That's me. That's the other fascinating piece about it, Rebecca, that is direct knowledge that I got from you, is that it can be especially for really high achieving professional women like a neurosurgeon, right? Somebody who is used to being under pressure, known working in, in places where the career demands high precision.

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Yeah,

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that person has a baby, and her life goes upside down. And she thinks she ought to be able to fix it by herself. And she's so confused. What I learned in part from you, was that the introduction of the baby and the baby's Human Design

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into our lives

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can be part of why we're experiencing this upheaval. It was mystifying to me. All I knew is that I had this emotional, you know, response to motherhood, that I didn't know what to do with. And I didn't have any skills for how to cope with it.

And then, you know, because of that surge of emotion that was sustained, right? It’s not like it peaked and then dissipated. I was urgent, pay attention to me. And I have a baby who was an emotional generator. I'm a pure generator. My husband's an emotional manifesting generator. And then our son is an emotional generator.

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Yeah. So he brought in extra emotion to

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your life, energy. When you ran charts for all of us in our families, I was like, Oh, okay. Right. It was a piece of the puzzle. Yeah, that mystified me.

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that neurosurgeon who's like, I operate on people's brains. How hard can it be to be a mom? Yeah, you might have a new presence in your life who, right if you have a baby, you're spending a lot of time with that baby.

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Yeah, that

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affecting you? Mm hmm. On an energetic level. Right. And your ability to operate on people's brains. It doesn't translate into being a working mother. It just, it just doesn't as much as we think it should. It just doesn't.

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It's funny that you mentioned that because I just learned about this in the past several months. The penta is a term that comes to being when three people come together three to five people forms a penta, right. So you and your husband are a relationship. So your energies, combine and you're used to that.

A third person like a baby comes in .Now you have a penta and a penta forms. It's whole new self energy between the three of you, it’s bigger. Yes, this is so fascinating.

Well, of course, you know, you bring a third person into a two people thing. And there's like a whole new energy forms. Oh, that is so fascinating. And, you know, being able to give people the practical toolset that they need to cope with that energy, right? Yeah, that was, that was what I was missing.

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What do I do? And in whatever form that takes. I gave the examples of our, you know, families. Human Design types. Yeah. But that could happen over dozens and dozens of different permutations, right, depending on people's design. So anyway, so interesting. So tell me, um,

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I mean, before we wrap up, I love to have these final conversations about human design. So we know you're a five, one cycle generator. And so what were some of the major because I remember when we'd gone through Bloom, it was the first time I did the Bloom program, and you kept having all these amazing insights. And, and you would come to the calls, “Oh, my gosh, this is what happened this week.” So if you look overall, at that experience, what has been so fabulous for you about human design? What are a couple things?

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So that the permission set? I am a pure generator, When I get going, I go. And I had some shame about that. Right? Then maybe, that I was, too much in that regard? No, I am a five one, your generator sacral authority.

And when I get going, I need to just go and that is that professionally. Yeah. And that is like, I'm gonna fold all the laundry right now. Like, it doesn't matter, the setting? Yeah, energy is the same. And that then, you know, to sort of have that and then take a rest and recharge,

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yeah, like that,

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viewing it as a part of my design. And, and that there are ways to balance it that are very healthy, right? You also talk to us a lot about sort of integration. And so pulling in a set of beliefs and thoughts for myself, right, that I just sort of cloning myself into about how I integrate those aspects of myself into my life on purpose.

Before, I would just have this like agitation, and I wouldn't really know what to do with it. So now with approaching it from a more place of integration. I can sort of feel that coming and just start acting, just start to respond to whatever's in front of me.

And then it dissipates on its own right. I never get that sort of spike of agitation. Like I'm failing to answer my own drives. Instead, I kind of meet it. And it's kind of leveled off some of the ups and downs. So, yeah, it has been in that regard, right. It's just achingly practical like that. It is, and, and even on days where I'm going to have a couple of hours, where I am just going for it, right? It’s just all work. And then when those couple of hours, I'm going to check in with myself, see how I feel and make a decision about whether or not to keep going, right? That’s kind of the very practical reason, I feel like I'm not working at cross purposes to myself any longer in some really profound ways.

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That's it. Yeah. So I feel human design is such an amazing energy management tool,

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and energy management.

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Yeah. If people could really take to heart what their type is, what their authority, their strategy is. It's just amazing to manage your energy. You know, because many of us are off on the wrong track, trying to be like other people, without knowing exactly who we truly are. And that's What I love about it, so yes, I can teach layers and layers of human design stuff. But if you can't integrate the top things, right, right, the energy type and the strategy and authority, then there isn't a point really to learning all the underneath stuff, really.

So that's my main goal to using human design with my clients is to really teach them how to integrate these things without going layers and layers deep. Right? And then yeah,

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earning that. So I have really defined centers at the top and bottom. And then I'm open in my throat center, my heart center, my identity center, all those ones in the middle are open. Yeah, so sort of understanding what those open centers mean for me, and how to manage my energy around that.

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that my open emotional center and my open identity center, especially are places where, you know, as you were teaching us, you were teaching us about the, the healthy, you know, aspects of these centers, and then the aspects that might be in shadow or in some sort of lack of health. Yeah. So just on a day to day moment to moment basis, to be able to evaluate if I am having an emotion, is it actually my emotion? Or am I picking up an emotion from somewhere else? And what do I want? Especially,

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especially because your kid and your husband both have that emotional wave? You're gonna pick that up?

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So fascinating, and managing a small child and knowing that that's what's happening that this little emotional generator on my hands. Today has been like, he is on a whatever I I hate to assign like judgments to a high.

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Yeah, but we know, right? Emotions are emotions, and they're part of the human experience. But some days, we definitely like to borrow the expression, we wake up on the correct side of the bed versus the wrong side of the bed. Right? So on those days where he is on the wrong side of the bed. Yeah, just to let him sort of be in that space. And to, to recognize that that's very different from how I'm going to be approaching the day whatever's happening. And to be able to meet him where he is in his little kid brain to be able to meet him in that emotional space, which I'm teaching myself to do.

My instinct is we just need to go, we just need to go. Go. Yeah. So to kind of stop myself, ratchet back my energy, you know, check in with him on an emotional level, maybe we can reset the morning a little bit, right? If our morning is going. any parent can identify with that, right?

Some mornings where we put on our shoes, and we're ready to go. And we're very happy. There are other mornings where we're crying on the floor, right? Sort of normal little kid. But having that tool in my toolkit as a parent, yeah, has been really valuable.

38:36
That is valuable. And I mean, I wish I would have known all my children's charts, when I was raising them as little kids, would that have been amazing. I'm so happy to be able to pass this on to parents who have kids at home.

This is the most amazing tool, understand your child's energy type. Just like that would be amazing to understand that right? And are they emotional or non emotional? That's a good thing to know. Just because you don't have an emotional center that's defined that doesn't mean you don't have emotions, but it does mean you take on other people's emotion, you know that? That's really helpful to know. So, yes, yes. And I just think that's such an important part of my teaching. Emotional authorities are here to teach emotions. So I am an emotional authority.
I always used to think that's a bad thing. No, it's just part of who I am. That's fine. It's okay. We get to be who we are. Right. That's what's so great about human design.

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All of these things are parts of our gifts.

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Yeah, exactly. I could talk to you for hours about your Human Design because it is so good. In fact, maybe we'll have a part two with you just talking about your human design stuff because I feel like you have learned so much in such a short time and done so much integration. I love that. And I think it really helps other people to see, what did you learn?

Not me being the teacher about it, but my students, telling people, this is what has helped me. So I love that part. But before we go, can you tell people where can they see more? Is there a specific place they should go? If they want to find out more about your services?

40:36
Absolutely. So for all the new working mothers out there, my website is www.heatherhennessy.com.

40:49
That is the place to find out a little bit more about me and to sign up for my newsletter and all kinds of stuff on there. I started work on my schedule. So right now, for people who sign up for my email list, you get my scheduling program for new working mothers. And then I also am the host of the mother of success podcast.

41:15
Awesome.

41:15
Find me on your favorite podcast platform. And, it is great stuff.

41:23
Yes. Thank you so much, Heather. This was really fun. I enjoyed having you here.

41:28
Thank you, Rebecca. It's been my pleasure.