She's Not a Failure, She's in The Middle of Her Story! Supporting a Mother When Things Don't Work! (Part 7)
Entrepreneur Parents - Pretty & Punk Podcast | Family Success, Business Tactics, Relationship Goals
This episode explores the emotional complexities of supporting mothers facing business failures or personal disappointments. Host Ildiko Fer
Key takeaways
- Avoid rushing to provide 'lessons' or 'fixes' immediately after a failure occurs.
- True support involves sitting in silence with someone rather than offering unsolicited advice.
Main topics
- Emotional support in entrepreneurship
- Navigating business failure
Notable quotes
A lesson offered too early can feel like permission to stop grieving so that everyone else can become comfortable again.
Conclusion
The episode provides a compassionate framework for building supportive
Transcript preview
Speaker 1 (0:00) Imagine a mama just like us, dreaming about bringing a business to life for years. She finally does it. And now it's time for the launch. Speaker 1 (0:15) She had been preparing for this day for months. The boxes were stacked neatly against the wall. The photographs were ready. Her children helped place the labels on the packages. Everything was perfect. Her husband had watched her work long after the house became quiet. At exactly nine o'clock, she pressed the button. The product was live. She sent the announcement. Then she waited. At first, she refreshed the screen every few seconds. Nothing. She told herself people were busy. Maybe they hadn't seen it yet. An hour passed. Then, too, by lunchtime, one order had arrived. It was from her sister. That evening, people began asking, how did the launch go? She smiled and said, it went well. But later, after everyone was asleep, she sat alone on the floor beside the boxes she had believed would already be leaving her home. She was not only disappointed by the numbers, she was embarrassed. She had talked about the idea, invested money the family could have used elsewhere, asked people to believe in something that now appeared to be proving them wrong. Her phone lit up. It was another mother, a good friend of hers. How did today really go, she said. This time, she didn't want to pretend. Hardly anyone bought it. The response came quickly. I'm coming over. She arrived without advice, without a speech about persistence, without asking whether the marketing had been good enough. She sat on the floor beside her, looked at the boxes, and quietly said, I know how much this meant to you. For a while, that was all that the mother needed to hear. Speaker 1 (2:40) She didn't want to hear another plan. She didn't want to hear a lesson. She just wanted someone willing to sit beside her when the dream did not look impressive. Because anyone can celebrate an announcement. That's the easy part. But the people we remember are the ones that stayed after something didn't work out. Those are the ones we can truly lean into. Get comfortable. We're about to have another valuable conversation. This one's for the mamas. So grab your snack, grab the people that you love, and let's go. Oh, that's better, right, babe? Yeah. Speaker 3 (3:38) Yeah. Speaker 3 (3:41) She founded an architectural concrete company. He Speaker 1 (3:44) founded a $100 million clothing company. She Speaker 3 (3:47) took the world by storm as a social media star. He Speaker 1 (3:50) took the world by storm as a famous serial entrepreneur. Together we started Speaker 3 (3:55) a business. Speaker 1 (3:55) And had babies. Speaker 3 (3:56) Now we're figuring out the best ways to do both. Speaker 1 (3:59) Join us as we learn from other entrepreneurs going through the same life struggles. As Speaker 3 (4:04) they share their life hacks about success, love, kids. And Speaker 1 (4:08) everything in between. Speaker 1 (4:11) Welcome back to the Becoming Unshakeable series brought to you by the Entrepreneur Parents Podcast. I'm your host, Ildiko Ferenci. If you're new here, welcome to the family. And if you're returning, I'm so glad that you're here. This is episode seven of Mom Supporting Moms. Today, we're talking about the moment after the launch is quiet. After the opportunity falls through, after the answer is no, after a mother has risked being seen and begins wishing she could just disappear. Supporting a mother does not only mean encouraging her dream while it is filled with possibility. Speaker 1 (5:00) Sometimes it means staying close when possibility has been replaced by disappointment. It happens more often than we'd want to admit. And listen, what we say in the moment that these things happen, where they come crashing down, it really matters. Speaker 1 (5:26) We got to remember not to turn her pain into a lesson too quickly. She's imagined this day, perhaps for years, perhaps as a child. When someone we love is hurting, we often rush to make the pain useful or hurt less. We say things like, everything happens for a reason. Or at least you tried. Now you know. Maybe it wasn't meant to be. You will know what to do differently next time. And that's a lesson. Perhaps those words will become true and helpful later. But we don't want to jump into that yet because timing truly matters, especially in this infant stage of what just happened. A lesson offered too early can feel like permission to stop grieving so that everyone else can become comfortable again. She may eventually want to study the numbers, and she should. Ask what went wrong. Examine the message, the price, the timing. Look at the product. Step back. Study it. But on the first night, she may simply need someone who understands that it really hurt. She needs someone who doesn't diminish the disappointment because the business was still small. She needs someone who's not going to remind her that worse things happen. Could be worse. Speaker 1 (7:23) Pain does not need to be the worst pain in the world to deserve tenderness and love in that moment. And we have to lean into that before asking, what did you learn? And instead of what did you learn, perhaps we could try asking what part of this hurts the most? Speaker 1 (7:55) Then listen long enough for the real answer to hear what her heart's really going through in the moment. Let me just start with, she may be grieving more than the result of what just happened. She may be grieving the future she quietly attached to it. As mothers, we have the vision. We go after something for a reason. And it's got to be a pretty big one. Speaker 1 (8:29) Maybe she was hoping for an income that would relieve the pressure inside her home. She was probably imagining in that moment that this will help the family. I could bring in this other income and there's going to be finally room to breathe. Speaker 1 (8:58) She was hoping for perhaps flexibility. She believed that it would give her more time with her children. And she was hoping. She was hoping she could fall into the confidence that she imagined would finally feel like she's accomplished something. She's been through so many hard years of getting here or months or whatever it took. She wanted to finally lean into that confidence. She wanted the proof she had hoped would show the people around her that believing in herself had not been foolish. That is why saying it was only one launch or something along those lines may not reach her yet. Speaker 1 (10:02) To everyone else, yes, it was just a product. It was just the launch. But to her, it may have represented freedom, security, purpose, legacy, or the beginning of a different life that she just dreamed of for her husband and her children. We can't support her well if we only see what failed on the surface. We don't know what she was attached to. We have to understand what she believed it would change in her life, in her children's life, in her husband's life. And we need to remember the outcome is not her identity. Speaker 1 (10:52) Disappointment has a way of becoming personal so quickly. Like an identity. The product didn't sell could become, I'm not good at this. The proposal was rejected. That can become, no one takes me seriously. Or the business closed becomes, I failed my