I have some questions for all the women I serve with who happen to be mothers.
Were you ready? Were you prepared? How did it change you? Did it change your leadership style?
Before you scroll away, this is not an award-winning story of “girl is stubborn, girl has life-changing experience, girl is reformed”. It’s more like a headline of “Stubborn girl meets self for first time; outcome unclear, however big lessons learnt”.
I’ll caveat this piece by saying that this was my personal experience. When I wrote this piece initially, I was 7 months pregnant. I’d be the first to put my hand up and say the experience was challenging for me. Not because it has been a particularly difficult pregnancy. Rather, it forced me to do something I was wholly unprepared for. It forced me to meet myself properly for the very first time. To re-define how I was approaching both my impending motherhood and my leadership style.
The journey
Another question for you. How do you define personal success?
Because of my firm (some might say unreasonable) belief that service is unconditional, I had always previously equated personal success with unremitting personal sacrifice. According to my rigid personal framework at the time (since softened and well reviewed), personal success drove professional success.
To my mind at the time, this has meant putting in the long hard hours, continuous study, learning as much as possible as broadly as possible, and chipping away to complete as many tasks as I could.
Physical self-care was for weekends, along with socialising and housework. PT was a daily ritual to be completed outside of working hours, so that I could crack on with projects, tasks, etc. I reasoned that I was used to working 12-hour night shifts in hospitals, and so this was kind of the same thing… yes?
Rightly or wrongly, nursing teaches you that when you are on shift, patient care comes first, and there are always so many more tasks to finish on a night shift in ED. So, I put my colleagues, my team, and my trainees into the same category as I would my patients. Being tired was just an expected side-effect. Without even realising it, I had been able to classify myself as a ‘secondary consideration’ to meet my own metric of success. Until recently that is.
The reckoning
Discovering I was pregnant stopped me dead in my tracks.
It was the tiredness that got me first. Suddenly I couldn’t concentrate on the long hours and the study I had set for myself. Remaining task-focused became a battle of wills. Remember, in my mind at the time, work came first. So, I cut away physical self-care. Hair-washing was relegated to Sundays, and all other forms of physical maintenance ended up as scheduled (but highly cancellable) calendar entries. Socialising was next to go, as I assured myself that this would be temporary; I just needed to get through the next task, and I would make time to see people. Housework went into the too-hard basket, and I negotiated with my husband that we would hire a cleaner soon.
It was the week I made the conscious decision to shelve my daily PT that I truly felt the impact of my own standards. Now I was tired, nauseated, and cranky, with absolutely no physical outlet and left with an unrelenting panic that I was not ‘setting myself up for success postpartum’ because I couldn’t meet my own metric. Chuck in all the standard pregnancy symptoms on top of that, and I can assure you chaos ensued.
With panic setting in, I set off to validate my sense of self by working over Christmas stand-down. 3 months pregnant, and in denial about my own limitations, I threw myself into trainee-welfare.
For those of you who have not worked a Christmas shift in an Emergency department, I can tell you that Christmas (as well as New Years and Easter) are the times when people have the biggest accidents and situational crises. Usually because they are away/dislocated/out of touch with their families and engage in higher levels of risk-taking behaviour than usual. Again, I applied the same logic to trainee management as I do to patients in ED. I was determined to be there for them, no matter the personal cost. I was poised and ready to respond, no matter the accident or crisis. I pre-emptively rescheduled my Christmas engagements and had plans for my plans.
Here I am blurry, but pregnant and teaching trainees!
But if tiredness got to me first, it was the trainees who got to me second. They saved their spoons.
I should explain here that I am a big believer in the Spoon Theory, which (grossly paraphrased) centres around the idea of rationing your energy for things that matter. You only have so many ‘spoons’ each day to complete all the tasks that need doing and consider your own needs.
When I say I am a big believer, what I mean is that I had insisted that all the trainees in my Platoon applied this theory to their day-to-day lives. This analogy had carried the Platoon well through 7 consecutive live-in lockdowns and multiple short notice tasks. When it finally came to the Christmas period, they were so relieved that they had used all their spoons wisely.
Shockingly, despite being well over 60 strong, there was not an accident or crisis in sight. I was at a loss. Suddenly I had far more time than I had planned to have, and no busy work to fill it. Once again, I was not meeting my own metric of success.
The realisation
Maybe it was the tiredness or the quiet. Maybe it was discussions around the situation (or lack thereof) at work. Whatever it was, I finally realised several things at once.
Firstly, I was a hypocrite. I insisted that people cared for themselves, or I would do it for them; I unconsciously refused to apply that to myself. Impending motherhood, much like leadership, requires you to care for yourself. You cannot fill someone’s cup if you have nothing to pour from yourself.
Secondly, my definition of personal success sucked – I was expecting ‘success’ 24/7/365. It’s bad advice and even worse leadership…and it burns through all your spoons. It leaves you no room for home, friends, relationships or yourself.
Thirdly, I didn’t know myself. Not properly in any case. I had been, up until then, defining myself by the roles that I had occupied and the projects that I completed. I had forgotten who I was outside of this. I was so scared of losing my professional identity that I forgot about my personal one.
The lesson
Remember how I promised you that this is not an award-winning ‘girl-reformed’ story? I stand by this. Hair-washing still ends up being a Sunday activity. Housework and I have an on-again-off-again relationship. I still flirt with my old work habits occasionally.
But my priorities have definitely, wonderfully shifted.
I have learnt to carve out time for myself in my working day. I have since seen first-hand the positive impact this has on the people around me, and my perceived stress-levels, no matter how busy or high-tempo we are.
Learning to rethink what self-care means took a little longer, but it was worth it. I have come to value the idea that good leaders look after themselves in the hope that when they do, their team emulates it.
Good leadership, much like impending motherhood, is taking your own advice and saving your spoons. I have started to have honest conversations with myself to get to know myself better. There is power in being gentle with yourself; you create the space to learn the lessons you need to learn.
Above all, I have realised that I enjoyed the process of discovery. I now know what that impending motherhood (and motherhood itself) comes hand in hand with some significant leadership lessons.