How ‘baby brain’ may help you start a business

Monday, 25 November 2019

Peri-natal supporter Laura Livingstone explains why ‘baby brain’ may in fact be the perfect tool for building a new business

 

Ask any new or even pregnant mum about “baby brain” and they will have a story about leaving their glasses in the fridge or forgetting their own partner’s name. Forgetting basic information like dates and phone numbers during this phase in life seems to be an inevitability. And it isn’t just in our imagination; recent studies have shown that there is a structural change in women’s brains after pregnancy and birth.*

 

But what if, instead of dismissing “baby brain” as an impediment to our success, we started to see it as our secret superpower? One which makes us extremely suited to starting our own business?

 

After all a lot of women choose to do it. Figures from the Office of National Statistics estimate that by 2025 businesses owned by “a sole female proprietor who has children under the age of 18” will contribute £9.5 billion to the economy.

 

But why do so many mums decide to leave the 9-5 just at a point in their lives when the demands on them are greatest at home? It is usually said that inflexible attitudes of employers are contributing to a brain drain of new parents leaving the workplace. I would be the first to agree that many employers need to update their working practices, but as a peri-natal coach, supporting women before and after birth, I think there is more to it than that.

 

Rejecting the ‘sensible’ option

My own experience made me start thinking that something changes for women after birth. I’d not long been back at work after the birth of my second child when I discovered my entire department was being moved from Cardiff to London. With one son just a year into school and all our family in Wales it meant that voluntary redundancy was more of an inevitability than a choice.

 

In the circumstances, the most sensible approach was to start putting myself forward for similar jobs in a neighbouring organisation. I had a very young family (a four year old and a baby of just a year) so job security should have been top of my list.

 

I went through the motions but my cursor kept drifting back to the webpage I’d bookmarked months ago - retraining as a peri-natal supporter with The Daisy Foundation to coach women through pregnancy, labour and the early months of parenting. I’d done the classes as a client myself and my teacher had been a rock to me during pregnancy and the early months providing support, evidence-based information and building my confidence. I wanted to do the same for other women.

 

More than that, the urge to create something from scratch, to build up my own business, was becoming impossible to ignore. But it surprised me - I’d never really thought of myself as an ‘ideas’ person. I’ve always been in creative professions; I was a journalist, a press officer and a speechwriter before my second son was born. But I didn’t think of myself as creative in the traditional sense.

 

And yet since I first fell pregnant I’d been trying out every craft going; crochet, knitting, sewing, whatever I could lay my hands on. I was full of ideas for blogs and schemes for projects in the house. New solutions to old problems spilled out of me. It was as if having a baby had inspired an itch to create that could not be dampened by the grim realities of sleep deprivation, bills to pay and the ever-growing laundry mountain created by two small boys.

 

Starting afresh

I could not resist the urge to start afresh so I took the redundancy money and set off for my training course to equip me as a peri-natal supporter unsure of who might be my class mates. I had an image of free-spirited hippy types who drifted from one glamorously creative job to the next without the ties of mortgages or gym memberships.

 

But I arrived at the training venue to find a room of women just like me. Some had been made redundant, others had tried to go back to work after having their children and found their employers desperately inflexible, others were still on maternity leave trying to ensure that they built something up that meant they never had to return to ‘work’. But we were all united in our determination to build something that suited us, our families and our dreams.

 

As I started to welcome my first clients I realised that my training cohort hadn’t been a one-off either. In every group there was someone selling handmade items on Etsy, or retraining in a new qualification, or starting up a side hustle in their maternity leave. All these women were new mums, embarking on an unknown and exhausting stage in their lives. Why was this urge to start afresh, create something new, tear down what was there before and be reborn so strong?

 

As I continued my training I started to understand why. The brain changes in pregnancy and during the months after the baby’s birth. It begins to prioritise the areas of the brain that deal with problem-solving, creativity, social engagement and nurturing in order to equip the mother with the skills she needs to deal with the enormous changes that motherhood brings. Scientists think it allows us to learn more quickly, think on our feet and adapt to great change.

 

Admittedly it does so at the expense of the parts of the brain responsible for quick recall of facts and figures but studies have shown that women who deem themselves “cognitively fuzzy” after birth actually perform far better in cognitive tests than they expect.

 

And in the women I support I see not just a change in brain chemistry but also self-perception. An empowering birth and early parenting experience can cause a woman’s level of self-esteem to sky rocket. Even a bad one can leave her with the attitude of, “well if I can survive that I can do anything”.

 

So starting a business in your maternity leave might not be a crazy pipe-dream or just a way to escape inflexible working practices. It might actually be a response to your newly elastic, creative brain and your new found self-confidence. “Baby brain” might not be the end of your career, it might actually be the beginning of a whole new chapter.

 

*https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/pregnancy-causes-lasting-changes-in-a-womans-brain/

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/11/well/family/reframing-mommy-brain.html

 

It’s About Time is an initiative developed by NatWest Cymru in conjunction with Darwin Gray Solicitors, the University of South Wales (USW), and the Federation of Small Businesses. Research carried out by USW showed that women in business mentioned ‘time’ as a major factor in their lives – whether literally never having enough of it, or finding the right time to launch a business, and the right time to grow a business.

 

The It’s About Time series of blogs and articles is designed to inspire, inform and educate through the stories of women (and men) who are finding their own routes to professional and personal success. It is put together by Gemma Collins, NatWest Cymru’s business growth enabler for Cardiff.