25. Reparenting: Find Joy as a Parent and Energy for Your Business with Crystal Haitsma
Have you ever felt like you're just going through the motions as a parent, struggling to find balance and make any progress in your business? What if there was a way to transform not only your parenting approach but also your entire mindset and sense of self as an entrepreneur? That’s where the practice of reparenting comes in.
For today’s episode, I sit down for an insightful conversation with Crystal Haitsma: The Parenting Coach. Crystal made the journey from overwhelmed stay-at-home mom to thriving entrepreneur, while homeschooling her four kids. The concept of reparenting changed her life and it has the potential to revolutionize the way you show up not only for your children, but also the energy you bring to your business too.
Tune in this week to dive deep into the world of reparenting, intuitive parenting, redefining success, and cultivating a daily grounding practice that will leave you feeling empowered and inspired. After reparenting herself, Crystal started having more fun at home, landed on a niche for her business, and started to create real success. The same is possible for you too.
If you're looking for the right environment to start your networking journey, look no further than my group, the Mom Entrepreneurs Circle. Sign up below for mutual support, advice sharing, and the tools you need for both you and your business to thrive. We meet on the 2nd Thursday of each month and participation is totally free!
What You’ll Learn from this Episode:
How reparenting can transform your approach to parenting and personal growth.
Why focusing on your own healing is essential for creating a calm, connected household.
The power of a daily grounding practice to regulate your nervous system and increase patience.
How to tap into your intuition and trust yourself in parenting and business decisions.
Strategies for navigating the transition from corporate income to entrepreneurship with a family.
Why redefining success on your own terms is crucial for creating a fulfilling life.
The importance of self-compassion and meeting your own needs as a parent and entrepreneur.
Listen to the Full Episode:
Featured on the Show:
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Hold on to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers by Gordon Neufeld and Gabor Maté
10. Use Your Menstrual Cycle To Create a Life & Business You Love
20. Money Mindset Shifts for Moms Leaving Corporate with Germaine Foley
Full Episode Transcript:
Welcome to How to Quit Your Job: A Mom’s Guide to Creating a Life and Business You Love. It’s a podcast that helps working moms just like you, optimize your time, manage your mind, and start a business that helps you create more freedom, flexibility, and, yes, fun. I’m business and mindset coach Jenna Rykiel. And I offer practical tips to help you ditch the nine-to-five. I have been exactly where you are and I know what it takes to make the transition without trading one form of burnout for another. So, let’s get started.
Jenna: Hi Crystal, thank you so much for being on the podcast. I’m really excited for our conversation. Do you mind just starting out and telling us a little bit about yourself, what you do, your family, all that good stuff?
Crystal: Yeah. So, I’m in Canada. I have four kids that I homeschool. We just came back from traveling around the world for the school year, which was wild. Years ago, I took a degree in psychology and I planned on becoming a therapist. And then I stumbled across life coaching and it was amazing and the rest is history. I’ve been doing this now for five years, which is wild and I love it. I mostly help parents, but I kind of coach on relationships of all types. And I love talking about intuition and reparenting and connection based parenting and we’ll probably get into some of those terms today if you don’t know what I’m talking about, but yeah, it’s been a fun journey.
Jenna: Yeah. And I really wanted to have you on the podcast because everybody I work with is a parent. And it’s a part of their identity and a part of their life that, of course, is a huge factor in starting a business and of course, being a mom. And so, I wanted to talk about your expertise in parenting and coaching. And really, I’d love for us to dive into what reparenting is and how you use intuition in your coaching.
Crystal: Yeah, okay. So that’s a lot of things. I will first talk about parenting. So, a couple of my kids are neurodiverse, high functioning autism and ADHD, anxiety. And as I was kind of struggling parenting that way and kind of navigating that, I read a lot of parenting books. I really aligned with attachment and connection right off the bat. There is a book called Hold Onto Your Kids by Dr. Gordon Neufeld, and I read it when my kids were toddlers. I should also say the ages of my kids. My youngest now is eight and the oldest is 17.
So back when they were in preschool, maybe kindergarten-ish age, then my oldest was in public school for kindergarten and then we home schooled the grade one. So, I’m reading this book and I loved it. I aligned with all the principles of attachment. And I was like, “Yeah, this is such a great way to parent, this is so beautiful.” But then just struggled to do it, I just would read about it. I would study about it. I did all the things. I went to some of the trainings that they did at the Neufeld Institute and I was like, “This is not working.”
Anyway, so years and years and years later, I hit what I feel is kind of my parenting rock bottom. I probably have hit those a few times, but one of them definitely. And decided to hire a psycho educator that was certified through the Neufeld Institute because she kind of knew the paradigm that I was interested in. And I honestly only met with her one time and just talking to her and having her kind of open up my eyes a little bit, really helped. I think at that time I didn’t understand my role in it. I didn’t understand my influence in my child’s behavior.
So, they were having really big meltdowns and I didn’t realize that I was also just having a big meltdown back, which was making their meltdown more extreme. And so, as I started to turn inward and kind of just assess my role in things and started to calm myself down more, I realized over time that my son’s behavior changed dramatically. We’re talking hours a day meltdowns every day of the week to maybe once or twice a month for maybe 20 or 30 minutes, and way more easily consolable afterwards. And this is without him going to any individualized therapy, this is without medication, anything.
At this time, he was undiagnosed and a neurodivergent meltdown can be pretty huge. And so, this was significant for our family. And so, I realized, okay, wait, there’s more to this. And so, I started kind of doing a little bit of my own work, but that’s when I found The Life Coach School because things were going well enough that I felt I could go back to school. So, found The Life Coach School, became a coach, started doing all of this work kind of within parenting on myself. I wasn’t coaching on parenting yet. I was just like, “Let’s see what we can do here.”
And then I started learning a little bit more about the nervous system and emotions and trauma and connection and kind of dove into all of these things. And in the end, completely changed my parenting. I don’t have to stop myself from yelling. I just don’t yell anymore at all. And my kiddos are just doing great, they’re doing fantastic and we have a really great relationship. But I realized what I feel like was missing in all of the books that I’d read, not just that one.
I’ve read so many parenting books since then along the same kind of philosophy, is that if you were parented in a way that didn’t create a secure attachment, if you were in a childhood where your parents were really passive or permissive, or if they were very authoritarian and kind of controlling and coercive. You’ll likely have your own wounds from childhood, not likely, you’re going to, everyone’s going to. And so, then we’re trying to parent in this lovely, beautiful, healed space way when we haven’t done our own healing and it constantly would just get blocked for me.
There is nothing that anybody could say or do that would help me parent in that way. And when I came to kind of realize this, that the healing was within me and it didn’t have anything to do with my kids and then as I changed, my kids changed too. I was like, “Why is this not being taught? Why is this not in all those books, put an addendum, by the way, you won’t be able to do this unless you go find a therapist or a coach and do your own work.” So, for me the work now is what I call reparenting.
So reparenting is just really figuring out, what were those things that happened in my childhood that are affecting me now and how can I change as a parent now going forward in the future? And the reparenting process is uncovering what’s coming up for me. When I’m feeling emotionally activated, what’s coming up for me and why and how can I be my own best friend? How can I be my own parent? How can I be the kind of parent that I needed when I was younger to myself now?
And a lot of this healing is not so much on a conscious level, when I first certified through The Life Coach School, it’s very cerebral. It was very conscious. It was very much you talk through things. So, my journey was kind of a yearlong process, even after I became a coach to kind of uncover what worked for me, what tools worked for me, what modalities worked for me. Now that’s what I do for people. So, I call it reparenting and it’s really for people, even if you’re not a parent, it’s also for you.
I have clients that have not had kids yet, I work with couples, because anytime that we’re feeling emotionally activated, often people call that a trigger. Whenever we’re feeling triggered there’s always a reason for it. There’s always something going on under the surface, and that’s what reparenting can help with.
Jenna: Yeah, I love that. It reminds me of the concept, unlearning, kind of looking at your past honestly, your habits, the way that you move through the world and just being an observer and really trying to unlearn those things that for so many years have been so second nature. So, can you put me in a timeline of sorts, when did this start? And I’m curious about it because I’m also curious about when you started your own business. So, when you transitioned from being a stay at home mom to start your own business and when this parenting journey for yourself was going on.
Crystal: Yeah. So, in 2017, we moved across Canada to the other side of Canada for my husband to do his MBA. He was in corporate and he was hating it. And he was like, “We’ve got to do something else.” And an interesting side note is along this journey, I’m also trying to figure out home schooling. Nobody around me does home schooling. And I found this philosophy that I really loved, and it’s called leadership education or Thomas Jefferson Education. But the basis of it is that you mentor your kids through inspiring them through your own learning and all of that.
So, at the time I’m just this tired stay at home mom and I’m like, “What do you mean, my own learning? All I do is poopy diapers and late nights.” Anyway, so I started reading books again and remembered, well, I really love psychology. So, I started reading Brené Brown and I started kind of doing my own thing. And as I’m doing this, I’m trying to help my kids figure out, what is their passion, what do they love uniquely, this self-directed learning approach? My husband kept coming and having conversations with me like, “But I hate my job. Am I supposed to like it? Wait a second.”
And I was like, “Well, no, you make the money, just go.” I was like, “I don’t want to have this big rupture.” Anyways, it did end up rupturing because he was just like, “I really don’t want to do this for the rest of my life. I cannot imagine this.” And so, he left, and he decided to go do his MBA. So, we traveled across the world. At this time, I don’t think I realized how difficult it would be on my neurodiverse kiddos, and it was a huge shift for them. And even though they were excited about it consciously and they would be like, “Yeah, we’re happy to go.”
It really got worse, their behaviors really got worse, especially this one kiddo, he was nine at the time. So, this is in 2017, so we move across the country, we’re living in a place where not only do we not speak the language in the area that we were living in, but we don’t know anybody. We have no support. We’re so far away from our family. Canada’s really big. We’re on the opposite side. Anyways, that’s kind of when this whole process started happening for me when my kid was about nine.
So, between 2017 and 2019 is kind of when I was doing my own, what I call now inner work, I didn’t really know that it was inner work. All I knew was that my child would have this meltdown, and I would just kind of pause myself, and I would just go in my own room and I would do my own thing, usually it was crying or yelling into a pillow or something. There wasn’t anything big that I was doing at that time. I was just trying to interrupt that pattern that we had gotten into.
I have all the language and all the reasons why it’s working now, but at the time I really thought that my kid was the problem and that we needed support for him and that if he were to change that, I would be able to parent in the way that I wanted. So newsflash, that’s not how it works. It’s the opposite way. But at the time I didn’t know that and I was drastically shocked in 2018 when I looked back. And was like, “Wow, his behavior is so much better, what happened?” And the only thing I could pinpoint was me. And I was like, “Could that have been that big of a difference?”
And so, I started just trying to spend more time with him, to connect with him. I did what I could on my end and things started changing more and more and more. So, in 2019, we came back to Alberta, my husband has an internship out here. In the end, he decided to leave corporate forever and he started his own business. And now we’re both entrepreneurs and work online and it’s awesome. So, at the time he had an internship and things were starting to go better for us, I felt pretty good about where we were in life and how parenting was going. And that’s when I started looking for a master’s program.
So it was in August of 2019 that I found The Life Coach School, planning on starting my master’s in September, but found The Life Coach School instead, started that and certified at the beginning of 2020. And still was not really coaching on parenting. I was coaching moms, but I was kind of coaching anybody on anything. So, I had some business coaching going on and I was kind of just coaching on relationships. And in the back of my mind I was like, “But I can’t coach on parenting yet.”
I just knew that there was still some stuff that I needed to work through and so that became my focus. I got coached. I did my own work. I did my own learning. I started learning more and more even after The Life Coach School, I started taking other trainings. And through that whole process, started really shifting my parenting in even more drastic ways than I think that was possible. I would have never thought it was possible to stop yelling. If you had asked me to list my characteristics, I would have been like, “I’m a really impatient person.” And I don’t feel that way anymore.
And I don’t feel the need to even try to stop yelling. It just doesn’t come up. I’m just not as emotionally activated as I used to be. So that’s kind of timeline journey wise, started my business in 2020. I’ve been doing it now for four years. And now I homeschool, run a business online while my husband does also and I hang out with my kids a lot, which is also its own journey. We went traveling and I was thinking that things were going pretty well and I’m like, “Oh, this is the next level.” This is spending all my time with my kids and traveling was a whole another thing to tackle but yeah, so that’s kind of how I got to where I am now.
Jenna: Yeah. And I imagine that work that you did, I mean, of course it impacted your business because now you teach others this reparenting tool. And oftentimes I always say, “We’re client zero.” And it doesn’t mean that if your life is a mess, you can’t be a great coach. But it is really important to always be self-coaching and for us to be doing the work as well. And so, I think you being client zero in this case, of course had huge implications on what you’re able to do now with moms and people in general.
But I also imagine that you doing the work and you getting to a place in your household where you also just aren’t so emotionally triggered and exhausted all the time from that has a huge impact on being able to do everything that you do today. I wonder, what is your experience with the positive effects of reparenting and time and energy in general?
Crystal: Yeah. I think it’s made a difference in every area of my life, every relationship, everything. And I do think the coaching tools work to help anybody and everything can help for sure. But I also have seen this over and over again that you can’t take people to the depths that you haven’t been to. And it doesn’t matter if you’re a therapist, if you’re a coach or if you’re a counselor. I’ve coached a lot of therapists. I often get clients that are therapists and haven’t really done their own work yet. They feel called to get into mental health so they do, but they haven’t really been their own client zero yet. And so that’s the work that we do.
And I really think that the depth that I was able to get to in parenting allowed myself to be able to help people in the deep way that I am because it was hard. It was deep. It was really difficult. I have a client who has, I can’t remember if she has six or eight kids and four or five of them are neurodiverse and have been diagnosed with high functioning autism. And as we coached together she found out that she also had it. But just the difficulty, the parenting difficulty that they were going through was so intense.
And I just thought, I remember as I was working with her and I was like, “I would have never been able to relate to this. I would have never been able to help her in the way that I can.” So even though back then, I wished that I didn’t have to go through what I went through, like we all do. I do feel it really helped me in the future. So, as I kind of figured out parenting over in this sphere, there was a few things that I noticed. One is just overall calm, calm within my household. My household is just not as skitzy everywhere. I mean that still happens for sure, but it’s just not as disruptive in a way that’s negative.
There’s some happy disruptions and stuff, but I would say the number one thing probably that was a shock to me was sibling conflict. I had no idea that there was influence I had within that, energetically, that as my energy shifted, that it just diffused things. And so, it’s not that there’s no conflict at all, but the conflicts are very small, they just fizzle out within a couple of minutes. There’s never name calling, there’s never huge hours long arguments or people being mad at each other for days like it was in my childhood home. It was continuously all the time, just the most wild.
And I often look back on that because I’ll just get annoyed at some little thing that happens, and then I’m like, “Oh, wait a second, this is not even a big deal at all. This is the tiniest little thing.” So, I think that was a shock for me because it wasn’t something I worked on. I was working on myself and I was helping, trying to heal my relationship with myself and with my kids. So, I thought that was interesting, that that came about. But as far as not being exhausted anymore, I think that I just take care of myself better. I think that reparenting is understanding what I need and giving myself my needs.
And so, I just know daily I have this morning practice and it’s just like taking a morning pill. I have to do that every single day and I might be able to shorten a little bit on some days but that is just a necessity. And then I have to take even more of that morning pill practice if things are more difficult. And things got a lot more difficult when I was traveling and I realized, my nervous system is actually really dysregulated right now. So, then I was like, “Hey, what can I add to my morning practice to kind of help me during this time?” And that is really what helped shift things for me there too.
So, I think a lot of it is giving myself what I need so that I can be more full, starting with myself first. I can’t give other people compassion. Compassion is kind of the fuel of connection based parenting, compassion is where you want to be. But it’s really hard to get to when you’re in anger and you’re trying to get over to compassion. But to get there, we have to get to compassion for ourself first. We can’t give what we don’t have. And so that’s what reparenting for me is all about is coming to compassion for myself and allowing myself to feel empathy for myself first. All the things I want to give to my kids I give to myself first.
So that’s a daily practice, that’s a throughout the day practice. And as I do that, I’m not as physically tired because I’m not as emotionally tired. But I also think it changed how I showed up in my business as well. It changed everything in my business, I think, and just also how I live my life. I think that, I guess the lessons I learned in parenting, I realized, are just truth lessons. They’re lessons that are just across the board true, intuition, connection being important, connection to self being the most important.
Jenna: Yeah, I mean, I always just love the connection between our physical exhaustion and our emotional exhaustion because I don’t think that we naturally make that connection, if we are not emotionally exhausted. Or if we’re not angry and frustrated and all of these big emotions, all the time, we actually have more energy, and are able to find time to do things.
I also am curious what you would recommend for moms who feel like they can’t possibly have a morning routine for themselves because the morning is all about the kids waking up, the kids having to eat, get ready for school. And I know your youngest is a little bit more independent now. But I’m curious what you think about that because the morning does feel so hectic. It feels almost impossible to have this moment to ourselves where we are able to gear up for the day. So, what worked for you in that?
Crystal: I will say if you really feel like you can’t. I think there’s always a way to do it, but if you’re at the beginning and you’re just feeling like there’s no way, start doing it in the evening and see what shifts for you energetically. And then see if you can also do something in the morning. But I think it’s just adding in really little things. I think when we think of meditation, we’re like, “Okay, I have to go sit and be quiet and still for 20 minutes. Who has 20 minutes?” I meditate for sometimes it’s 30 seconds, in the morning I probably never meditate for more than two minutes.
Every once in a while I’ll do a longer meditation but that is uncommon. And so, my meditative practice is usually just breathing in through my nose, exhaling twice as long out through my mouth, focusing on my breath, releasing my thoughts, they’re going to come in and I just let them release. And they’re going to come in and I just let them release. Sometimes I’ll think of an intention for that day. So maybe I’ll think about I want to feel full, or I want to feel connected. I want to feel expansive. What would that feel like in my body?
And then in my breath, I focus on expanding that feeling in my body and just kind of spreading it out and imagining what that would feel like so that I can bring that energy into the day. So that literally takes two minutes. So, you can lock yourself in the bathroom and you can be like, “I’m going to take five minutes for myself here and I’m going to do this.” I think that journaling is an essential practice. So, whether you’re doing that at night or whether you’re doing that in the morning, journaling.
And not journaling as in, this is what happened in my day or I’m going to pass this down on to my grandkids. But journaling for your own mental and emotional health. So, I think of it as mindful journaling or intuitive journal. Just writing down whatever comes and then asking yourself questions and then writing down more, just to kind of dig into what’s happening. A great way to start, if you’re listening to this episode is, on your triggers, so whatever triggered you recently. And then you’re just going to ask yourself, why, what’s underneath that? What’s bothering me about that? What am I making this mean about me?
Why does this feel like such a big deal? How does this feel in my body? So, journaling, while asking yourself really great questions is a really powerful tool. So, I have a daily spiritual practice as well, so that includes prayer and scripture. But whatever your daily spiritual practice is, I would have something, a daily spiritual practice and then a thought journaling, some kind of journaling and then some kind of stillness. So, whether that’s prayer or meditation, breath, whatever, to add to that.
So, I would start really small though, the smallest you want to start. If you want to write down one sentence a day, if you want to take 30 seconds of breath a day. Because oftentimes we tell ourselves that we can’t, and so then we don’t because morning is too hectic. But I think there’s pretty much always a way. .Even when my kids were little and they were pretty wild and things were crazy, I really think taking five minutes in the bathroom where I lock the door and have my journal in there with me can be possible.
And I would also offer creating a physical space for yourself will help be that little reminder. So, I often start with my clients right off the bat, “Do you have a physical space for yourself? Can you carve out room in your bedroom or in a closet?” Or maybe it is your bathroom, wherever it’s going to be for you. And get things in there that will help remind you of that, that feel good to you so you want to go to that space. Is it like a comfortable blanket or a pillow? Is it a cute journal? Is it a scented candle? Whatever you want to put in there that makes you feel peaceful, makes you feel supported.
And then that also ends up being your space where you go when you need it, you go back there because you’re like, “I’m having a hard time,” throughout the day and you can head back there. So, I would say just start in the evenings if you need to or start really, really small, the smallest that you can imagine. I was amazed at how one minute a day of meditation over the weeks changed my nervous system so that I was just naturally feeling more patient and more calm and more relaxed. And I only noticed when I stopped doing it and I was like, “Why am I so grumpy today?”
And then I was like, “Okay, wait a second, there’s that.” Then I’ll also mention because moms are your audience here is, cycle tracking. So, you’re going to feel differently at different times in your cycle and that’s going to be a huge thing. So just noticing what emotions are coming up for me at different times of the month and what do I need. Because for me about five days before my period, I just want to burn the whole world down and quit everything in my life. And so now I just know, okay, I’m going to feel that way.
I also get insomnia on the dot, five days before. And so, knowing yourself can be a really helpful tool also so that you’re not like, “Why am I feeling so bad?” You’re like, “Oh, wait a second, I know, I know what’s going on here.” Yeah, so, there’s a couple of little tips.
Jenna: I love that. And actually, I did a whole episode, episode 10 on cycle syncing and how that can impact your business and what to do and what to work on when because it changed my life. I talk about this in the episode, but I was firmly angry at the world that I was in my mid-30s learning about the other phases of the cycle, which are huge.
Crystal: I’m right there with you. I feel like it changed the business for sure. So go listen to that episode and you can hear more about it. It really will help you.
Jenna: Yes. I want to go back to the transitioning your family from the steady corporate paycheck and stay at home mom to two entrepreneurs because I think that’s fascinating. o, talk to me about that transition for you and your husband and your family. I mean, I’m supporting moms to be the ones leaving corporate, of course. And husbands or partners are doing different things, of course. But there’s always this leaning towards the safety or perceived safety of that steady paycheck. A
And I just had a guest on recently, Germaine Foley, who talked about one of the mindset shifts of entrepreneurs being that you kind of have to be ready for inconsistent income. That doesn’t mean it’s going to be less than corporate, but it is generally cyclical and inconsistent at times, so talk to me about that experience.
Crystal: Oh, my goodness, it’s so hard. If your husband can stay in corporate while you leave, you’ll feel better. So, when this was first happening, I first went to school, his internship hadn’t even started, so we were both like, “Is this a good idea? I don’t know.” And the only reason I even was able to do it is because he had a student line of credit left that he hadn’t used for his MBA, that was almost exactly the amount that I needed to go to school. And so, we decided to bite the bullet and do it even though I was super nervous about it. And at the time, I wasn’t super intuitive, yet.
I think I have always been, but didn’t really know what intuition was. But I just felt this deep knowing that it was for me, but I was still so scared that I was like, “I can’t do this.” But my husband basically was like, “You can get paid to do something that you already essentially do. No, you have to do this, it’s so up your alley.” So, I did and then he is in his internship program. So, for that whole year I was not taking money out of my business, so I was working and I was putting money back in. I was investing in coaching programs. I was investing in software, things that I would need.
And I just didn’t really care that much, I’m like, “Okay, whatever, I don’t need this money. This is just something that I’m going to slowly build.” Because I’ve always wanted to travel the world and home school. It’s a weird thing to probably want to do, but I’ve always wanted to do it. And I’ve never known how that would work because he had a corporate nine to five job and was like, “No.” And I was like, “But I want to do this.” And he’s like, “It’s impossible.” Anyways, so I kept it in the back of my mind as always this one day, one day we will do this.
So, he comes to me and throughout that year, friends had been coming to me to ask who had been doing all of my tech stuff. So, I had a really beautiful website. I created a whole bunch of digital courses with everything, videos and PDFs and all the things but people keep asking me who’s doing my stuff and I’m like, “My husband’s doing it.” So, he works with a platform called Kajabi and he only does it with them. And so, anybody who is friends with me was reaching out to him to get his help doing their stuff. So, over the course of the year, he has this kind of thriving side business.
He’s interning from nine to five, he’s coming home. He’s waking up in the morning at six to work on these client projects. He’s doing it in the evenings. And by the end of the year, he’s kind of getting burnt out because he’s so busy. But he’s also, like, “I have a lot of clients over here. This might actually be a feasible thing.” I was more nervous, I think, than he was. He was like, “This is really the only way that we could travel and home school, if we’re both working online.” And I was like, “Yeah, but what about our steady income?” And up until that point, I hadn’t had to really worry about it.
So even though it was low, we still knew how much we were going to make every month and I still hadn’t had to dip into the money that was coming in from my business. And so, he said, “Essentially all of our money is going to have to be from you for the first while until we figure this out.” And I immediately just felt so much heaviness and I was like, “Whoa.” I’ve never felt this way before. It didn’t occur to me that somebody who’s the main breadwinner in the family would have so much pressure on them. I’m sure you feel this in corporate also, but I felt this way, how am I going to afford to pay our bills, our mortgage, all the things?
Anyways, so we did it even though it was really scary. And we asked my parents if we could come and stay with them for the summer. This was just at the end of COVID kind of, was it in 2021? Anyways maybe it was still during COVID and we hadn’t really seen my parents at all. And so, we were just like, “We’ll move into the basement, we’ll live there for the summer. If by the end of the summer, it’s going well then we’ll go travel.” By the end of the summer, he had enough clients and I was working and things were going pretty well, but that transition was really tough for me.
I had to do a lot of my own coaching, a lot of my own work, because again, I feel for me it was dysregulating on my nervous system. It was more than just I had to do thought work. I was feeling really dysregulated knowing that, what if I don’t make enough next month or is there enough now? And we started a corporation so that helped because then we were like, “Well, we’ll just pay ourselves the same amount every month.” And it was a pretty low amount that we started with but then it at least felt stable. So even if I had a big month, I didn’t take out more money that month.
And we have consistently done that so that helped a little bit. But I think a lot of it was just kind of regulating my nervous system and just trusting that if I was called to do this, if this felt the right thing for me and it felt so strongly the right thing for him, then there was going to be a way to figure it out. We would figure it out. Even if we had to live in our parents’ basement, we would figure it out, which is a totally new ball game when you have four kids and they’re not little. But yeah, we moved out by the end of that summer and started traveling, and we’ve been doing it since then.
I think it’s one of the biggest exercises in trust, in trusting that if there’s an inner knowing that’s telling me that this is the path for me, that there will be a way. And I also was totally fine with if we need to go get a part-time job to figure this out at the same time or whatever. I’m not against that either. Whatever we need to do to make this work but that we will figure it out.
Jenna: Yeah, I love that. It’s so important and so hard to have that trust when it feels impossible so many times. I know I had that same knowing of this is what I should be doing. And should kind of we use against ourselves sometimes, but it was a good should. It’s, no, Jenna, you need to leave corporate.
Crystal: You felt called to do it.
Jenna: Absolutely. And there’s just a feeling of assurance and then your brain kicks in and is like, “Oh, no, this isn’t going to work. What if you fail? What if you have to sell your house? What if you have to do all these things?” I love the honesty there of just, yeah, it was really scary and we did it anyway. And now here we are just returned from that trip around the world that you had been dreaming about and thinking that’s impossible just a few years ago. And now you’re sitting pretty and like, “Oh, we did that, that thing that was on the list.”
Crystal: That I’ve always wanted to do.
Jenna: Always wanted to do, yeah, it’s amazing how that happens. And I just talked to someone the other day too, we were talking about worst case scenarios. And I loved what she said about, the worst case scenario isn’t necessarily failing and going back to corporate, at least for my moms. The worst case scenario is not trying and potentially not having this really amazing life that you envision. If you never left corporate and you guys never got this chance to do the thing that’s been on your mind. That actually is the worst case scenario.
Crystal: It is and I think it all came sooner. In my mind I was like, yeah, one day we’ll do this. But then as we were talking about it, so we’ve done some travel over the last few years, but then last summer, we were kind of chatting about that. And we were like, “If we don’t do it now, our kid is going into grade 12, he’ll be gone.” And I was like, “How sad would it be for him and for us to not have him with us as he’s doing this.” And so, we just decided we’re like, “Even though we don’t feel we have enough time, enough money, enough planning, enough whatever, this feels like the right year and we’re going to do it.”
And in so many ways, miracles happened that made it happen, but it was because we felt it was the right thing and the right timing for us. And so, I think part of this reparenting is also unlearning that we have to know everything, we have to have it all planned out. We have these two kinds of parts of ourselves and this one is this ego part that seeks control, it wants to know everything, it wants to know the future. It’s impossible, by the way. Nobody knows the future. You could get fired tomorrow from your corporate gig and not even know. But it wants to, it seeks this safety and security in control.
But then there is this other true self of us and the true self is very trusting and it’s very intuitive. And I had realized that intuition is something that I really learned in parenting over these years of changing things and that it was something that really served me and that I wasn’t doing in my business life. And so, as I started doing that within every area of my life and every decision I was making, I did lean more into that trust. That trust piece of, if I’m feeling it inside, if my intuition is telling me this is the thing then I will figure it out.
And also, the unlearning piece of success. We tie self-worth to productivity, I think, especially as women we’re like check these boxes, get your to-do list done, do the things and then I can feel good about me. And so, unlearning that, being able to make that separation, any time we feel we’re seeking external validation for something, any time we notice that attachment to, I need this to work out. There’s a reason for that. There’s something within our own self-worth bubble that needs looking at.
And so, the more that we can separate and make that distinction, we get to decide what success really is. We’ve been told what success is. We’re like, “It’s money, it’s followers, it’s promotions, it’s all these things.” And then we meet hugely successful people that really aren’t. I work with them all the time. They don’t enjoy their life. They don’t have healthy relationships. They’re not healthy within themselves. They don’t treat themselves well. And I saw this over and over and over again and I’m like, “That’s not success.”
And so, then I got to decide, what is success for me? And for me it was spending copious amounts of time with the people that I love. That was it for me. And that might not be it for you but for me, that’s all that I wanted. I wanted to spend so much time with them doing the most fun things. And so, do I make a ton of money? No. I’m sure I will in the future when I have a little more time and I’m not doing a million things, but I do think that my life is successful. I’m wealthy in the ways that feel really important to me. And I just continuously remind myself that when my brain is just like, “But we should scale to 10 times this year,” or something and I’m like, “But should we though?”
I wanted to work a bunch more this year because I was like, “I really want this year to be the year that I scale more.” But then I was like, “But I don’t want to give up this home school club that I’m running and actually, I want to spend this day with my kids and not work on it. And I want to spend this day just home schooling.” And anyways, in the end, I’m working two days a week this year. So that’s the way that it landed and I feel so good about it.
And I also feel like it’s kind of magical and that the possibilities of I have no idea what will come in, what ideas will come intuitively, what magical opportunities will come in. I might scale 10 times in an entire year without increasing my hours. That’s how intuition can work sometimes. So anyways, there’s been a lot of unlearning about what success is and also about, do I follow other people, do I listen to other experts or do I listen to myself?
Jenna: Yeah. And I’d love for you to maybe talk a little bit more about that piece because we were talking the other day and I shared with you, I am out of touch with my intuition for sure. I am all brain and I know that I did share, I felt when I was starting my coaching business that this has to work because I felt so strongly about it. And that’s probably the only time that I’ve felt like that in making a big life transition. But what about the little things, the little decisions we have every day? And I was talking to you about the decisions I have with my upcoming birth.
So, how can you if you’re starting from a place of all cerebral, where you just make decisions with pros and cons lists. How would you recommend somebody get in touch with their intuition and maybe have that as part of their daily practice or at least an awareness that they can bring into their life?
Crystal: Yeah. So, you’re speaking my language, pros and cons lists were my whole entire life. I remember doing this since I was little. I remember being 12, maybe even 10 and being like, “Should I do this or no?” And I would write down and I would talk to people about it. I was very much, I didn’t feel I had the answer. I would have used to say that I was very indecisive. I don’t feel that way anymore, I’m really decisive now, but it’s something that I built and grew. I think it’s like a muscle.
So, I think this is actually a really great question to end on because I feel intuition is its own thing and it’s just such a beautiful space to go. So, one thing is that intuition comes through self-trust. So, the best thing that you can do to work on intuition is to work on trusting yourself and is to work on being okay with failure. Another thing is that it’s very connected to our self-worth. If I don’t believe in myself, if I don’t love myself, if I don’t feel I’m enough and not consciously, but also unconsciously, then I’m not going to trust myself as much. So all of that is kind of its own piece to work through.
Secondly, is creation, so creative solutions come to us when we’re not looking for them. So, if you can do something to go just create, maybe I paint a picture, maybe I go for a walk and just spend some time in nature, do something to get yourself out of your cerebral head. That’s usually when the coolest ideas pop in, when you’re not looking for them.
And I would say lastly, this one’s really cool is that intuition comes to your body, so it doesn’t come to your cerebral brain, it just won’t. It comes through a different spot and everybody kind of feels it a little bit differently, but it’s fairly similar. And so, one way to really tap into this is to figure out, what did it feel like for me when it was a yes? So back at the time when you felt, I really knew that that was for me, how did that feel in your body? Do you remember?
Jenna: Yeah. It felt very like my chest was opening and also, sort of sinking at the same time. It was almost, it wasn’t a heaviness, but it was an opening that I could feel my chest moving down.
Crystal: Okay, I love that. So, I describe mine to people as kind of a grounded-ness into the earth, almost like a strong tree. But then also an opening also like a tree, the leaves kind of growing up, that’s how it felt for me. What about a time where you knew something wasn’t for you, where it was, this is a no, I don’t agree with this?
Jenna: Complete tension and tightness in my back and in my shoulders, everything tightens up.
Crystal: Yeah. And can you feel the difference between those two feelings?
Jenna: Yeah, absolutely.
Crystal: So that’s the compass that you start with. That’s your yes/no intuitive compass. And things will always feel pulling towards one way or pulling towards the other way. So, I think about my upcoming birth and I’m like, “Okay, wait a second. What’s happening? What am I feeling? These are the options. How do I feel in my body? Do I notice what’s going on in my body?”
And it’s important that we’re also doing this other work of subconscious self-worth work, whatever, as well, so that I do trust myself. But just taking those moments to tap into intuition in our body, that’s how it starts. It just starts with those little small moments of, does this feel like a yes or no? Do I remember what yes or no feels like in my body, and tapping into that.
Jenna: Yeah, I love that. And I can see totally how it’s all about trusting yourself, because I think even when I was even doing some of the practices that you recommended last time we chatted. I was like, “Well, is this just me wanting this or is this actually what I should do?” And so, I recognize when you say that trust ourselves is such a big part of it, that’s a piece of it, trusting what’s happening in my body. Not that I’m trying to create any one thing or the other, but it really is that I trust myself to know what’s best for me and my kiddos and all of that.
Alright, Crystal, well, we’re definitely going to have to do a part two on the travel side of things and how you made it happen because I know it was beautiful and messy and hard.
Crystal: It was so hard. It was so hard, yeah, well, we’ll do a whole other episode, have me back on any time.
Jenna: Perfect. Thank you so much for sharing your expertise and we will talk again soon.
Crystal: Thank you.
Thanks for listening to this week’s episode of How to Quit Your Job: A Mom’s Guide to Creating a Life and Business You Love. If you want to learn more about how I can help you stop making excuses and start making moves, head on over to www.jenna.coach. I’ll see you next week.
Jenna: Hi Crystal, thank you so much for being on the podcast. I’m really excited for our conversation. Do you mind just starting out and telling us a little bit about yourself, what you do, your family, all that good stuff?
Crystal: Yeah. So, I’m in Canada. I have four kids that I homeschool. We just came back from traveling around the world for the school year, which was wild. Years ago, I took a degree in psychology and I planned on becoming a therapist. And then I stumbled across life coaching and it was amazing and the rest is history. I’ve been doing this now for five years, which is wild and I love it. I mostly help parents, but I kind of coach on relationships of all types. And I love talking about intuition and reparenting and connection based parenting and we’ll probably get into some of those terms today if you don’t know what I’m talking about, but yeah, it’s been a fun journey.
Jenna: Yeah. And I really wanted to have you on the podcast because everybody I work with is a parent. And it’s a part of their identity and a part of their life that, of course, is a huge factor in starting a business and of course, being a mom. And so, I wanted to talk about your expertise in parenting and coaching. And really, I’d love for us to dive into what reparenting is and how you use intuition in your coaching.
Crystal: Yeah, okay. So that’s a lot of things. I will first talk about parenting. So, a couple of my kids are neurodiverse, high functioning autism and ADHD, anxiety. And as I was kind of struggling parenting that way and kind of navigating that, I read a lot of parenting books. I really aligned with attachment and connection right off the bat. There is a book called Hold Onto Your Kids by Dr. Gordon Neufeld, and I read it when my kids were toddlers. I should also say the ages of my kids. My youngest now is eight and the oldest is 17.
So back when they were in preschool, maybe kindergarten-ish age, then my oldest was in public school for kindergarten and then we home schooled the grade one. So, I’m reading this book and I loved it. I aligned with all the principles of attachment. And I was like, “Yeah, this is such a great way to parent, this is so beautiful.” But then just struggled to do it, I just would read about it. I would study about it. I did all the things. I went to some of the trainings that they did at the Neufeld Institute and I was like, “This is not working.”
Anyway, so years and years and years later, I hit what I feel is kind of my parenting rock bottom. I probably have hit those a few times, but one of them definitely. And decided to hire a psycho educator that was certified through the Neufeld Institute because she kind of knew the paradigm that I was interested in. And I honestly only met with her one time and just talking to her and having her kind of open up my eyes a little bit, really helped. I think at that time I didn’t understand my role in it. I didn’t understand my influence in my child’s behavior.
So, they were having really big meltdowns and I didn’t realize that I was also just having a big meltdown back, which was making their meltdown more extreme. And so, as I started to turn inward and kind of just assess my role in things and started to calm myself down more, I realized over time that my son’s behavior changed dramatically. We’re talking hours a day meltdowns every day of the week to maybe once or twice a month for maybe 20 or 30 minutes, and way more easily consolable afterwards. And this is without him going to any individualized therapy, this is without medication, anything.
At this time, he was undiagnosed and a neurodivergent meltdown can be pretty huge. And so, this was significant for our family. And so, I realized, okay, wait, there’s more to this. And so, I started kind of doing a little bit of my own work, but that’s when I found The Life Coach School because things were going well enough that I felt I could go back to school. So, found The Life Coach School, became a coach, started doing all of this work kind of within parenting on myself. I wasn’t coaching on parenting yet. I was just like, “Let’s see what we can do here.”
And then I started learning a little bit more about the nervous system and emotions and trauma and connection and kind of dove into all of these things. And in the end, completely changed my parenting. I don’t have to stop myself from yelling. I just don’t yell anymore at all. And my kiddos are just doing great, they’re doing fantastic and we have a really great relationship. But I realized what I feel like was missing in all of the books that I’d read, not just that one.
I’ve read so many parenting books since then along the same kind of philosophy, is that if you were parented in a way that didn’t create a secure attachment, if you were in a childhood where your parents were really passive or permissive, or if they were very authoritarian and kind of controlling and coercive. You’ll likely have your own wounds from childhood, not likely, you’re going to, everyone’s going to. And so, then we’re trying to parent in this lovely, beautiful, healed space way when we haven’t done our own healing and it constantly would just get blocked for me.
There is nothing that anybody could say or do that would help me parent in that way. And when I came to kind of realize this, that the healing was within me and it didn’t have anything to do with my kids and then as I changed, my kids changed too. I was like, “Why is this not being taught? Why is this not in all those books, put an addendum, by the way, you won’t be able to do this unless you go find a therapist or a coach and do your own work.” So, for me the work now is what I call reparenting.
So reparenting is just really figuring out, what were those things that happened in my childhood that are affecting me now and how can I change as a parent now going forward in the future? And the reparenting process is uncovering what’s coming up for me. When I’m feeling emotionally activated, what’s coming up for me and why and how can I be my own best friend? How can I be my own parent? How can I be the kind of parent that I needed when I was younger to myself now?
And a lot of this healing is not so much on a conscious level, when I first certified through The Life Coach School, it’s very cerebral. It was very conscious. It was very much you talk through things. So, my journey was kind of a yearlong process, even after I became a coach to kind of uncover what worked for me, what tools worked for me, what modalities worked for me. Now that’s what I do for people. So, I call it reparenting and it’s really for people, even if you’re not a parent, it’s also for you.
I have clients that have not had kids yet, I work with couples, because anytime that we’re feeling emotionally activated, often people call that a trigger. Whenever we’re feeling triggered there’s always a reason for it. There’s always something going on under the surface, and that’s what reparenting can help with.
Jenna: Yeah, I love that. It reminds me of the concept, unlearning, kind of looking at your past honestly, your habits, the way that you move through the world and just being an observer and really trying to unlearn those things that for so many years have been so second nature. So, can you put me in a timeline of sorts, when did this start? And I’m curious about it because I’m also curious about when you started your own business. So, when you transitioned from being a stay at home mom to start your own business and when this parenting journey for yourself was going on.
Crystal: Yeah. So, in 2017, we moved across Canada to the other side of Canada for my husband to do his MBA. He was in corporate and he was hating it. And he was like, “We’ve got to do something else.” And an interesting side note is along this journey, I’m also trying to figure out home schooling. Nobody around me does home schooling. And I found this philosophy that I really loved, and it’s called leadership education or Thomas Jefferson Education. But the basis of it is that you mentor your kids through inspiring them through your own learning and all of that.
So, at the time I’m just this tired stay at home mom and I’m like, “What do you mean, my own learning? All I do is poopy diapers and late nights.” Anyway, so I started reading books again and remembered, well, I really love psychology. So, I started reading Brené Brown and I started kind of doing my own thing. And as I’m doing this, I’m trying to help my kids figure out, what is their passion, what do they love uniquely, this self-directed learning approach? My husband kept coming and having conversations with me like, “But I hate my job. Am I supposed to like it? Wait a second.”
And I was like, “Well, no, you make the money, just go.” I was like, “I don’t want to have this big rupture.” Anyways, it did end up rupturing because he was just like, “I really don’t want to do this for the rest of my life. I cannot imagine this.” And so, he left, and he decided to go do his MBA. So, we traveled across the world. At this time, I don’t think I realized how difficult it would be on my neurodiverse kiddos, and it was a huge shift for them. And even though they were excited about it consciously and they would be like, “Yeah, we’re happy to go.”
It really got worse, their behaviors really got worse, especially this one kiddo, he was nine at the time. So, this is in 2017, so we move across the country, we’re living in a place where not only do we not speak the language in the area that we were living in, but we don’t know anybody. We have no support. We’re so far away from our family. Canada’s really big. We’re on the opposite side. Anyways, that’s kind of when this whole process started happening for me when my kid was about nine.
So, between 2017 and 2019 is kind of when I was doing my own, what I call now inner work, I didn’t really know that it was inner work. All I knew was that my child would have this meltdown, and I would just kind of pause myself, and I would just go in my own room and I would do my own thing, usually it was crying or yelling into a pillow or something. There wasn’t anything big that I was doing at that time. I was just trying to interrupt that pattern that we had gotten into.
I have all the language and all the reasons why it’s working now, but at the time I really thought that my kid was the problem and that we needed support for him and that if he were to change that, I would be able to parent in the way that I wanted. So newsflash, that’s not how it works. It’s the opposite way. But at the time I didn’t know that and I was drastically shocked in 2018 when I looked back. And was like, “Wow, his behavior is so much better, what happened?” And the only thing I could pinpoint was me. And I was like, “Could that have been that big of a difference?”
And so, I started just trying to spend more time with him, to connect with him. I did what I could on my end and things started changing more and more and more. So, in 2019, we came back to Alberta, my husband has an internship out here. In the end, he decided to leave corporate forever and he started his own business. And now we’re both entrepreneurs and work online and it’s awesome. So, at the time he had an internship and things were starting to go better for us, I felt pretty good about where we were in life and how parenting was going. And that’s when I started looking for a master’s program.
So it was in August of 2019 that I found The Life Coach School, planning on starting my master’s in September, but found The Life Coach School instead, started that and certified at the beginning of 2020. And still was not really coaching on parenting. I was coaching moms, but I was kind of coaching anybody on anything. So, I had some business coaching going on and I was kind of just coaching on relationships. And in the back of my mind I was like, “But I can’t coach on parenting yet.”
I just knew that there was still some stuff that I needed to work through and so that became my focus. I got coached. I did my own work. I did my own learning. I started learning more and more even after The Life Coach School, I started taking other trainings. And through that whole process, started really shifting my parenting in even more drastic ways than I think that was possible. I would have never thought it was possible to stop yelling. If you had asked me to list my characteristics, I would have been like, “I’m a really impatient person.” And I don’t feel that way anymore.
And I don’t feel the need to even try to stop yelling. It just doesn’t come up. I’m just not as emotionally activated as I used to be. So that’s kind of timeline journey wise, started my business in 2020. I’ve been doing it now for four years. And now I homeschool, run a business online while my husband does also and I hang out with my kids a lot, which is also its own journey. We went traveling and I was thinking that things were going pretty well and I’m like, “Oh, this is the next level.” This is spending all my time with my kids and traveling was a whole another thing to tackle but yeah, so that’s kind of how I got to where I am now.
Jenna: Yeah. And I imagine that work that you did, I mean, of course it impacted your business because now you teach others this reparenting tool. And oftentimes I always say, “We’re client zero.” And it doesn’t mean that if your life is a mess, you can’t be a great coach. But it is really important to always be self-coaching and for us to be doing the work as well. And so, I think you being client zero in this case, of course had huge implications on what you’re able to do now with moms and people in general.
But I also imagine that you doing the work and you getting to a place in your household where you also just aren’t so emotionally triggered and exhausted all the time from that has a huge impact on being able to do everything that you do today. I wonder, what is your experience with the positive effects of reparenting and time and energy in general?
Crystal: Yeah. I think it’s made a difference in every area of my life, every relationship, everything. And I do think the coaching tools work to help anybody and everything can help for sure. But I also have seen this over and over again that you can’t take people to the depths that you haven’t been to. And it doesn’t matter if you’re a therapist, if you’re a coach or if you’re a counselor. I’ve coached a lot of therapists. I often get clients that are therapists and haven’t really done their own work yet. They feel called to get into mental health so they do, but they haven’t really been their own client zero yet. And so that’s the work that we do.
And I really think that the depth that I was able to get to in parenting allowed myself to be able to help people in the deep way that I am because it was hard. It was deep. It was really difficult. I have a client who has, I can’t remember if she has six or eight kids and four or five of them are neurodiverse and have been diagnosed with high functioning autism. And as we coached together she found out that she also had it. But just the difficulty, the parenting difficulty that they were going through was so intense.
And I just thought, I remember as I was working with her and I was like, “I would have never been able to relate to this. I would have never been able to help her in the way that I can.” So even though back then, I wished that I didn’t have to go through what I went through, like we all do. I do feel it really helped me in the future. So, as I kind of figured out parenting over in this sphere, there was a few things that I noticed. One is just overall calm, calm within my household. My household is just not as skitzy everywhere. I mean that still happens for sure, but it’s just not as disruptive in a way that’s negative.
There’s some happy disruptions and stuff, but I would say the number one thing probably that was a shock to me was sibling conflict. I had no idea that there was influence I had within that, energetically, that as my energy shifted, that it just diffused things. And so, it’s not that there’s no conflict at all, but the conflicts are very small, they just fizzle out within a couple of minutes. There’s never name calling, there’s never huge hours long arguments or people being mad at each other for days like it was in my childhood home. It was continuously all the time, just the most wild.
And I often look back on that because I’ll just get annoyed at some little thing that happens, and then I’m like, “Oh, wait a second, this is not even a big deal at all. This is the tiniest little thing.” So, I think that was a shock for me because it wasn’t something I worked on. I was working on myself and I was helping, trying to heal my relationship with myself and with my kids. So, I thought that was interesting, that that came about. But as far as not being exhausted anymore, I think that I just take care of myself better. I think that reparenting is understanding what I need and giving myself my needs.
And so, I just know daily I have this morning practice and it’s just like taking a morning pill. I have to do that every single day and I might be able to shorten a little bit on some days but that is just a necessity. And then I have to take even more of that morning pill practice if things are more difficult. And things got a lot more difficult when I was traveling and I realized, my nervous system is actually really dysregulated right now. So, then I was like, “Hey, what can I add to my morning practice to kind of help me during this time?” And that is really what helped shift things for me there too.
So, I think a lot of it is giving myself what I need so that I can be more full, starting with myself first. I can’t give other people compassion. Compassion is kind of the fuel of connection based parenting, compassion is where you want to be. But it’s really hard to get to when you’re in anger and you’re trying to get over to compassion. But to get there, we have to get to compassion for ourself first. We can’t give what we don’t have. And so that’s what reparenting for me is all about is coming to compassion for myself and allowing myself to feel empathy for myself first. All the things I want to give to my kids I give to myself first.
So that’s a daily practice, that’s a throughout the day practice. And as I do that, I’m not as physically tired because I’m not as emotionally tired. But I also think it changed how I showed up in my business as well. It changed everything in my business, I think, and just also how I live my life. I think that, I guess the lessons I learned in parenting, I realized, are just truth lessons. They’re lessons that are just across the board true, intuition, connection being important, connection to self being the most important.
Jenna: Yeah, I mean, I always just love the connection between our physical exhaustion and our emotional exhaustion because I don’t think that we naturally make that connection, if we are not emotionally exhausted. Or if we’re not angry and frustrated and all of these big emotions, all the time, we actually have more energy, and are able to find time to do things.
I also am curious what you would recommend for moms who feel like they can’t possibly have a morning routine for themselves because the morning is all about the kids waking up, the kids having to eat, get ready for school. And I know your youngest is a little bit more independent now. But I’m curious what you think about that because the morning does feel so hectic. It feels almost impossible to have this moment to ourselves where we are able to gear up for the day. So, what worked for you in that?
Crystal: I will say if you really feel like you can’t. I think there’s always a way to do it, but if you’re at the beginning and you’re just feeling like there’s no way, start doing it in the evening and see what shifts for you energetically. And then see if you can also do something in the morning. But I think it’s just adding in really little things. I think when we think of meditation, we’re like, “Okay, I have to go sit and be quiet and still for 20 minutes. Who has 20 minutes?” I meditate for sometimes it’s 30 seconds, in the morning I probably never meditate for more than two minutes.
Every once in a while I’ll do a longer meditation but that is uncommon. And so, my meditative practice is usually just breathing in through my nose, exhaling twice as long out through my mouth, focusing on my breath, releasing my thoughts, they’re going to come in and I just let them release. And they’re going to come in and I just let them release. Sometimes I’ll think of an intention for that day. So maybe I’ll think about I want to feel full, or I want to feel connected. I want to feel expansive. What would that feel like in my body?
And then in my breath, I focus on expanding that feeling in my body and just kind of spreading it out and imagining what that would feel like so that I can bring that energy into the day. So that literally takes two minutes. So, you can lock yourself in the bathroom and you can be like, “I’m going to take five minutes for myself here and I’m going to do this.” I think that journaling is an essential practice. So, whether you’re doing that at night or whether you’re doing that in the morning, journaling.
And not journaling as in, this is what happened in my day or I’m going to pass this down on to my grandkids. But journaling for your own mental and emotional health. So, I think of it as mindful journaling or intuitive journal. Just writing down whatever comes and then asking yourself questions and then writing down more, just to kind of dig into what’s happening. A great way to start, if you’re listening to this episode is, on your triggers, so whatever triggered you recently. And then you’re just going to ask yourself, why, what’s underneath that? What’s bothering me about that? What am I making this mean about me?
Why does this feel like such a big deal? How does this feel in my body? So, journaling, while asking yourself really great questions is a really powerful tool. So, I have a daily spiritual practice as well, so that includes prayer and scripture. But whatever your daily spiritual practice is, I would have something, a daily spiritual practice and then a thought journaling, some kind of journaling and then some kind of stillness. So, whether that’s prayer or meditation, breath, whatever, to add to that.
So, I would start really small though, the smallest you want to start. If you want to write down one sentence a day, if you want to take 30 seconds of breath a day. Because oftentimes we tell ourselves that we can’t, and so then we don’t because morning is too hectic. But I think there’s pretty much always a way. .Even when my kids were little and they were pretty wild and things were crazy, I really think taking five minutes in the bathroom where I lock the door and have my journal in there with me can be possible.
And I would also offer creating a physical space for yourself will help be that little reminder. So, I often start with my clients right off the bat, “Do you have a physical space for yourself? Can you carve out room in your bedroom or in a closet?” Or maybe it is your bathroom, wherever it’s going to be for you. And get things in there that will help remind you of that, that feel good to you so you want to go to that space. Is it like a comfortable blanket or a pillow? Is it a cute journal? Is it a scented candle? Whatever you want to put in there that makes you feel peaceful, makes you feel supported.
And then that also ends up being your space where you go when you need it, you go back there because you’re like, “I’m having a hard time,” throughout the day and you can head back there. So, I would say just start in the evenings if you need to or start really, really small, the smallest that you can imagine. I was amazed at how one minute a day of meditation over the weeks changed my nervous system so that I was just naturally feeling more patient and more calm and more relaxed. And I only noticed when I stopped doing it and I was like, “Why am I so grumpy today?”
And then I was like, “Okay, wait a second, there’s that.” Then I’ll also mention because moms are your audience here is, cycle tracking. So, you’re going to feel differently at different times in your cycle and that’s going to be a huge thing. So just noticing what emotions are coming up for me at different times of the month and what do I need. Because for me about five days before my period, I just want to burn the whole world down and quit everything in my life. And so now I just know, okay, I’m going to feel that way.
I also get insomnia on the dot, five days before. And so, knowing yourself can be a really helpful tool also so that you’re not like, “Why am I feeling so bad?” You’re like, “Oh, wait a second, I know, I know what’s going on here.” Yeah, so, there’s a couple of little tips.
Jenna: I love that. And actually, I did a whole episode, episode 10 on cycle syncing and how that can impact your business and what to do and what to work on when because it changed my life. I talk about this in the episode, but I was firmly angry at the world that I was in my mid-30s learning about the other phases of the cycle, which are huge.
Crystal: I’m right there with you. I feel like it changed the business for sure. So go listen to that episode and you can hear more about it. It really will help you.
Jenna: Yes. I want to go back to the transitioning your family from the steady corporate paycheck and stay at home mom to two entrepreneurs because I think that’s fascinating. o, talk to me about that transition for you and your husband and your family. I mean, I’m supporting moms to be the ones leaving corporate, of course. And husbands or partners are doing different things, of course. But there’s always this leaning towards the safety or perceived safety of that steady paycheck. A
And I just had a guest on recently, Germaine Foley, who talked about one of the mindset shifts of entrepreneurs being that you kind of have to be ready for inconsistent income. That doesn’t mean it’s going to be less than corporate, but it is generally cyclical and inconsistent at times, so talk to me about that experience.
Crystal: Oh, my goodness, it’s so hard. If your husband can stay in corporate while you leave, you’ll feel better. So, when this was first happening, I first went to school, his internship hadn’t even started, so we were both like, “Is this a good idea? I don’t know.” And the only reason I even was able to do it is because he had a student line of credit left that he hadn’t used for his MBA, that was almost exactly the amount that I needed to go to school. And so, we decided to bite the bullet and do it even though I was super nervous about it. And at the time, I wasn’t super intuitive, yet.
I think I have always been, but didn’t really know what intuition was. But I just felt this deep knowing that it was for me, but I was still so scared that I was like, “I can’t do this.” But my husband basically was like, “You can get paid to do something that you already essentially do. No, you have to do this, it’s so up your alley.” So, I did and then he is in his internship program. So, for that whole year I was not taking money out of my business, so I was working and I was putting money back in. I was investing in coaching programs. I was investing in software, things that I would need.
And I just didn’t really care that much, I’m like, “Okay, whatever, I don’t need this money. This is just something that I’m going to slowly build.” Because I’ve always wanted to travel the world and home school. It’s a weird thing to probably want to do, but I’ve always wanted to do it. And I’ve never known how that would work because he had a corporate nine to five job and was like, “No.” And I was like, “But I want to do this.” And he’s like, “It’s impossible.” Anyways, so I kept it in the back of my mind as always this one day, one day we will do this.
So, he comes to me and throughout that year, friends had been coming to me to ask who had been doing all of my tech stuff. So, I had a really beautiful website. I created a whole bunch of digital courses with everything, videos and PDFs and all the things but people keep asking me who’s doing my stuff and I’m like, “My husband’s doing it.” So, he works with a platform called Kajabi and he only does it with them. And so, anybody who is friends with me was reaching out to him to get his help doing their stuff. So, over the course of the year, he has this kind of thriving side business.
He’s interning from nine to five, he’s coming home. He’s waking up in the morning at six to work on these client projects. He’s doing it in the evenings. And by the end of the year, he’s kind of getting burnt out because he’s so busy. But he’s also, like, “I have a lot of clients over here. This might actually be a feasible thing.” I was more nervous, I think, than he was. He was like, “This is really the only way that we could travel and home school, if we’re both working online.” And I was like, “Yeah, but what about our steady income?” And up until that point, I hadn’t had to really worry about it.
So even though it was low, we still knew how much we were going to make every month and I still hadn’t had to dip into the money that was coming in from my business. And so, he said, “Essentially all of our money is going to have to be from you for the first while until we figure this out.” And I immediately just felt so much heaviness and I was like, “Whoa.” I’ve never felt this way before. It didn’t occur to me that somebody who’s the main breadwinner in the family would have so much pressure on them. I’m sure you feel this in corporate also, but I felt this way, how am I going to afford to pay our bills, our mortgage, all the things?
Anyways, so we did it even though it was really scary. And we asked my parents if we could come and stay with them for the summer. This was just at the end of COVID kind of, was it in 2021? Anyways maybe it was still during COVID and we hadn’t really seen my parents at all. And so, we were just like, “We’ll move into the basement, we’ll live there for the summer. If by the end of the summer, it’s going well then we’ll go travel.” By the end of the summer, he had enough clients and I was working and things were going pretty well, but that transition was really tough for me.
I had to do a lot of my own coaching, a lot of my own work, because again, I feel for me it was dysregulating on my nervous system. It was more than just I had to do thought work. I was feeling really dysregulated knowing that, what if I don’t make enough next month or is there enough now? And we started a corporation so that helped because then we were like, “Well, we’ll just pay ourselves the same amount every month.” And it was a pretty low amount that we started with but then it at least felt stable. So even if I had a big month, I didn’t take out more money that month.
And we have consistently done that so that helped a little bit. But I think a lot of it was just kind of regulating my nervous system and just trusting that if I was called to do this, if this felt the right thing for me and it felt so strongly the right thing for him, then there was going to be a way to figure it out. We would figure it out. Even if we had to live in our parents’ basement, we would figure it out, which is a totally new ball game when you have four kids and they’re not little. But yeah, we moved out by the end of that summer and started traveling, and we’ve been doing it since then.
I think it’s one of the biggest exercises in trust, in trusting that if there’s an inner knowing that’s telling me that this is the path for me, that there will be a way. And I also was totally fine with if we need to go get a part-time job to figure this out at the same time or whatever. I’m not against that either. Whatever we need to do to make this work but that we will figure it out.
Jenna: Yeah, I love that. It’s so important and so hard to have that trust when it feels impossible so many times. I know I had that same knowing of this is what I should be doing. And should kind of we use against ourselves sometimes, but it was a good should. It’s, no, Jenna, you need to leave corporate.
Crystal: You felt called to do it.
Jenna: Absolutely. And there’s just a feeling of assurance and then your brain kicks in and is like, “Oh, no, this isn’t going to work. What if you fail? What if you have to sell your house? What if you have to do all these things?” I love the honesty there of just, yeah, it was really scary and we did it anyway. And now here we are just returned from that trip around the world that you had been dreaming about and thinking that’s impossible just a few years ago. And now you’re sitting pretty and like, “Oh, we did that, that thing that was on the list.”
Crystal: That I’ve always wanted to do.
Jenna: Always wanted to do, yeah, it’s amazing how that happens. And I just talked to someone the other day too, we were talking about worst case scenarios. And I loved what she said about, the worst case scenario isn’t necessarily failing and going back to corporate, at least for my moms. The worst case scenario is not trying and potentially not having this really amazing life that you envision. If you never left corporate and you guys never got this chance to do the thing that’s been on your mind. That actually is the worst case scenario.
Crystal: It is and I think it all came sooner. In my mind I was like, yeah, one day we’ll do this. But then as we were talking about it, so we’ve done some travel over the last few years, but then last summer, we were kind of chatting about that. And we were like, “If we don’t do it now, our kid is going into grade 12, he’ll be gone.” And I was like, “How sad would it be for him and for us to not have him with us as he’s doing this.” And so, we just decided we’re like, “Even though we don’t feel we have enough time, enough money, enough planning, enough whatever, this feels like the right year and we’re going to do it.”
And in so many ways, miracles happened that made it happen, but it was because we felt it was the right thing and the right timing for us. And so, I think part of this reparenting is also unlearning that we have to know everything, we have to have it all planned out. We have these two kinds of parts of ourselves and this one is this ego part that seeks control, it wants to know everything, it wants to know the future. It’s impossible, by the way. Nobody knows the future. You could get fired tomorrow from your corporate gig and not even know. But it wants to, it seeks this safety and security in control.
But then there is this other true self of us and the true self is very trusting and it’s very intuitive. And I had realized that intuition is something that I really learned in parenting over these years of changing things and that it was something that really served me and that I wasn’t doing in my business life. And so, as I started doing that within every area of my life and every decision I was making, I did lean more into that trust. That trust piece of, if I’m feeling it inside, if my intuition is telling me this is the thing then I will figure it out.
And also, the unlearning piece of success. We tie self-worth to productivity, I think, especially as women we’re like check these boxes, get your to-do list done, do the things and then I can feel good about me. And so, unlearning that, being able to make that separation, any time we feel we’re seeking external validation for something, any time we notice that attachment to, I need this to work out. There’s a reason for that. There’s something within our own self-worth bubble that needs looking at.
And so, the more that we can separate and make that distinction, we get to decide what success really is. We’ve been told what success is. We’re like, “It’s money, it’s followers, it’s promotions, it’s all these things.” And then we meet hugely successful people that really aren’t. I work with them all the time. They don’t enjoy their life. They don’t have healthy relationships. They’re not healthy within themselves. They don’t treat themselves well. And I saw this over and over and over again and I’m like, “That’s not success.”
And so, then I got to decide, what is success for me? And for me it was spending copious amounts of time with the people that I love. That was it for me. And that might not be it for you but for me, that’s all that I wanted. I wanted to spend so much time with them doing the most fun things. And so, do I make a ton of money? No. I’m sure I will in the future when I have a little more time and I’m not doing a million things, but I do think that my life is successful. I’m wealthy in the ways that feel really important to me. And I just continuously remind myself that when my brain is just like, “But we should scale to 10 times this year,” or something and I’m like, “But should we though?”
I wanted to work a bunch more this year because I was like, “I really want this year to be the year that I scale more.” But then I was like, “But I don’t want to give up this home school club that I’m running and actually, I want to spend this day with my kids and not work on it. And I want to spend this day just home schooling.” And anyways, in the end, I’m working two days a week this year. So that’s the way that it landed and I feel so good about it.
And I also feel like it’s kind of magical and that the possibilities of I have no idea what will come in, what ideas will come intuitively, what magical opportunities will come in. I might scale 10 times in an entire year without increasing my hours. That’s how intuition can work sometimes. So anyways, there’s been a lot of unlearning about what success is and also about, do I follow other people, do I listen to other experts or do I listen to myself?
Jenna: Yeah. And I’d love for you to maybe talk a little bit more about that piece because we were talking the other day and I shared with you, I am out of touch with my intuition for sure. I am all brain and I know that I did share, I felt when I was starting my coaching business that this has to work because I felt so strongly about it. And that’s probably the only time that I’ve felt like that in making a big life transition. But what about the little things, the little decisions we have every day? And I was talking to you about the decisions I have with my upcoming birth.
So, how can you if you’re starting from a place of all cerebral, where you just make decisions with pros and cons lists. How would you recommend somebody get in touch with their intuition and maybe have that as part of their daily practice or at least an awareness that they can bring into their life?
Crystal: Yeah. So, you’re speaking my language, pros and cons lists were my whole entire life. I remember doing this since I was little. I remember being 12, maybe even 10 and being like, “Should I do this or no?” And I would write down and I would talk to people about it. I was very much, I didn’t feel I had the answer. I would have used to say that I was very indecisive. I don’t feel that way anymore, I’m really decisive now, but it’s something that I built and grew. I think it’s like a muscle.
So, I think this is actually a really great question to end on because I feel intuition is its own thing and it’s just such a beautiful space to go. So, one thing is that intuition comes through self-trust. So, the best thing that you can do to work on intuition is to work on trusting yourself and is to work on being okay with failure. Another thing is that it’s very connected to our self-worth. If I don’t believe in myself, if I don’t love myself, if I don’t feel I’m enough and not consciously, but also unconsciously, then I’m not going to trust myself as much. So all of that is kind of its own piece to work through.
Secondly, is creation, so creative solutions come to us when we’re not looking for them. So, if you can do something to go just create, maybe I paint a picture, maybe I go for a walk and just spend some time in nature, do something to get yourself out of your cerebral head. That’s usually when the coolest ideas pop in, when you’re not looking for them.
And I would say lastly, this one’s really cool is that intuition comes to your body, so it doesn’t come to your cerebral brain, it just won’t. It comes through a different spot and everybody kind of feels it a little bit differently, but it’s fairly similar. And so, one way to really tap into this is to figure out, what did it feel like for me when it was a yes? So back at the time when you felt, I really knew that that was for me, how did that feel in your body? Do you remember?
Jenna: Yeah. It felt very like my chest was opening and also, sort of sinking at the same time. It was almost, it wasn’t a heaviness, but it was an opening that I could feel my chest moving down.
Crystal: Okay, I love that. So, I describe mine to people as kind of a grounded-ness into the earth, almost like a strong tree. But then also an opening also like a tree, the leaves kind of growing up, that’s how it felt for me. What about a time where you knew something wasn’t for you, where it was, this is a no, I don’t agree with this?
Jenna: Complete tension and tightness in my back and in my shoulders, everything tightens up.
Crystal: Yeah. And can you feel the difference between those two feelings?
Jenna: Yeah, absolutely.
Crystal: So that’s the compass that you start with. That’s your yes/no intuitive compass. And things will always feel pulling towards one way or pulling towards the other way. So, I think about my upcoming birth and I’m like, “Okay, wait a second. What’s happening? What am I feeling? These are the options. How do I feel in my body? Do I notice what’s going on in my body?”
And it’s important that we’re also doing this other work of subconscious self-worth work, whatever, as well, so that I do trust myself. But just taking those moments to tap into intuition in our body, that’s how it starts. It just starts with those little small moments of, does this feel like a yes or no? Do I remember what yes or no feels like in my body, and tapping into that.
Jenna: Yeah, I love that. And I can see totally how it’s all about trusting yourself, because I think even when I was even doing some of the practices that you recommended last time we chatted. I was like, “Well, is this just me wanting this or is this actually what I should do?” And so, I recognize when you say that trust ourselves is such a big part of it, that’s a piece of it, trusting what’s happening in my body. Not that I’m trying to create any one thing or the other, but it really is that I trust myself to know what’s best for me and my kiddos and all of that.
Alright, Crystal, well, we’re definitely going to have to do a part two on the travel side of things and how you made it happen because I know it was beautiful and messy and hard.
Crystal: It was so hard. It was so hard, yeah, well, we’ll do a whole other episode, have me back on any time.
Jenna: Perfect. Thank you so much for sharing your expertise and we will talk again soon.
Crystal: Thank you.
Thanks for listening to this week’s episode of How to Quit Your Job: A Mom’s Guide to Creating a Life and Business You Love. If you want to learn more about how I can help you stop making excuses and start making moves, head on over to www.jenna.coach. I’ll see you next week.
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