Mum to be and entrepreneurship: how challenging is it?

Everybody will agree on the fact that entrepreneurship is not easy. The pressure is high, the success highly depends on you and your motivation, without talking about other factors that you cannot control.

• As a future mum, you are very often very tired. As some of you know, in addition of my ventures, I am also working full time in a telecom/software company. When I leave my full time job, I am exhausted and of course it can be manageable but it is also very easy in these conditions to lose motivation....
• As a future (and great) mum you also need to put the baby as your first priority. So even if you are more motivated than ever, you need to take a bit of distance sometimes and reduce the sources of stress around you. Is that really easy / possible in entrepreneurship?
• You will also have less time with all the doctors appointment, sickness, ...
• You will have to review your plans and planning because your life is going to change. Going to business trips will not be easy, you will have some unavailability at the end of your pregnancy and you will definitely have to take some time off when the baby is born.
• You will also have to manage the perception people have about you. Some people see pregnant women like sick people and will have extra attention on you. Some will be annoyed and will find you less productive (even if you were the same person with the same energy). Some of your customers may have worries about the future of your collaboration with them. They could be more picky, less patient, and not always understanding.

• ACCEPT THE CHANGES: The first big step is to accept that loosing motivation or energy during a period is normal and acceptable. Nobody can run a race without getting tired on the way. During a period, we decided with my team that it is time to relax and take plenty of time to review our concept. We let the platform to run itself and with few tools we were building data to understand and best strategy to adopt. When you run a lot, you do not have time to see the landscape around you and this have helped us to understand the weaknesses of our platform. And to not feel completely "useless",  every time you feel you have a bit of courage to do something, do it straight away! Do not hesitate to cut the requests into small actions.

• BE ORGANISED: As you will have less time straight from the beginning of your pregnancy, take this as an opportunity to learn to manage your time in a better way. Sometimes I feel so overwhelmed and then I am thinking twice about how it would be with a child around... So I am now trying to use additional tools / apps / technics to manage my time better. For example, I use the app Paper on the Ipad Pro but you can find a lot of other apps on different devices.

• LEAN TO DELEGATE: The stress is probably the most thing to manage. Especially because the bills at the end of the month still need to be paid. So at the end of the day you still need to work and the stress may make you feel like not useful or like if you are failing in your job / carrier / venture because of your baby's project. So the only solution for you here is to make sure that the tasks that are key in your business are still done. If you do not have employees that can help you, then do not hesitate to ask help around you. Obviously I don't suggest you to borrow money here and there but really to learn to delegate what you can delegate so you can focus on delicate subjects. Some members of you family may be able to help you.