Seven years ago today, I did a big thing
I carried three tiny humans to 34 weeks and delivered them naturally.
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The best gender reveal surprise party ever.
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Exactly what I had hoped for 2 girls and a boy
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30 odd people in the birthing suite.
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One pediatrician moved to tears because it was a career highlight.
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I needed to channel my game face so bestie and Hubby ran off to have celebratory drinks.
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They celebrated a little too early, got cut off, but left the pub shouting to all and sundry “She’s 10cm Dilated!”
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Me waiting for them to get back so I could start pushing.
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Between pushing out number 2 and 3 I confessed “Wow. Pushing out three five pounders is way easier than one eight pounder. I feel a bit guilty it’s not harder!”
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One head first. One breech. One footling extraction.
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25 minutes and our lives changed forever.
These are many hard polished gems I’ve dug out of my travails.
Here are five. I had the triplets so you didn’t have to. You can thank me later.
1. There is an intelligence greater than effort
Before kids, I was the Queen of Making Shit Happen. You couldn’t outwork me, out lift me or outpace me.
I’d spent 18 years as an elite athlete learning how to apply force.
My motto was “If something makes you uncomfortable. Stare it in the face and do it over and over again until now the things is comfortable.”
100 Burpee Pull Ups. Done.
Door to Door Sales. Done.
24 Hour Row-A-Thon. Fuck you I don’t want to. But okay. Done.
But it all came to a screeching halt when I discovered falling pregnant was the first thing I couldn’t make my body do.
After 14 months of fertility treatment, four ovulation inductions and a miscarriage, I finally thought: Wow. You really can’t force this shit.
So I surrendered the idea that I might ever become a mother. I came to genuine peace with the possibility that my fate was to be Favourite Aunty Bianca.
I fell pregnant the next month.
And my most magnificent creations required zero conscious thought from me. There I was growing a heart, and lungs and a spines and organs, and I had nothing to do with it.
Zilch. Na-da. Stare at that in the fucking face.
After 33 hours drug free in labour with my first born Pete came rushing to me to a message from my mother. “Your mum says – Tell her there’s no trophies for doing it without drugs!”
The imaginary council of birth regulators with watching over me immediately burst into flames.
I said .. “She’s right. GET THAT EPIDURAL MAN STAT!”
Next minute Pete’s watching the monitor spike seeing contractions come through that previously had me moaning like a beached walrus.
He says “How was that one?”
I looked over blissfully unaware and said “That one what? “
The greatest masterpiece of my life is what happens when my conscious mind gets out of the way.
When I stop letting my conditioning pre-tell how the story’s gunna go.
Motherhood was the first time I properly experienced that Divine feminine intelligence of creation moving through me.
We have access to an intelligence far greater than effort and logic.
When we let the conscious mind step aside, we hand over to an organising power that builds a magnificent version of thriving that our minds could never have imagined.
2. Hard work and sacrifice as a prerequisite for success is a construct of the mind
Once you know effort and logic aren’t the be all and end all to forcing outcomes – for me, it was like pulling back the green curtain on The Wizard of Oz.
When you think hard work and sacrifice are the only thing that creates success, you go looking for the hard thing first. Difficulty becomes how you choose. You’ll take the harder option over the meaningful one without even noticing you did it.
Devotion runs the other way. You choose what matters to you and the effort comes along with it. The sacrifice doesn’t feel like a sacrifice, it’s just what you value playing out in real time.
With one baby, you still expect to do it all.
Four kids under three was such an “I am in over my head” moment that I gladly put down the mother martyr and took the help.
Three babies at once made receiving non-negotiable.
Which meant I stopped living in that toxic paradox “When I’m with my kids I feel guilty because I’m not working, when I’m working I feel guilty because I’m not with my kids.”
I stopped giving myself a trophy for doing it the hard way for the sake of it.
3. The work that makes you come alive is the work that compounds
Once I stopped hunting for the hard version of what I could exchange for money, I let myself show up only for the stuff that came easily. I stopped being over-responsible and gave myself complete permission to let the ball drop on the stuff that wasn’t my genius.
I became known for the work that only I could do, and then I started being sought out for it.
Turns out it wasn’t just the most enjoyable. It was the most profitable.
The more energy I had for things I loved doing, the more energy I had for my kids – I was no longer playing a zero sum game.
I didn’t have to take energy from motherhood to give it to my work, or take energy from my work to give it to my kids.
The things that made me come alive gave me more life to give everywhere else.
4. Compounding growth gets you out of survival and gives you a vantage point
When effort is the main engine of your success, your business only grows when you give it manual labour and conscious attention.
Friction and grinding are always there, because that’s the only way you know how to make a result happen. It creates pressure and a permanent low hum of performance anxiety.
You end up responding to whatever is directly in front of you as if it’s a survival event.
An email about a late bill, gets the same response as a child falling off a high chair.
Everything is urgent. Everything requires your intervention. Everything depends on you.
But when you find the spaces where your gifts are most valued, you’re trading in a different currency.
Soul currency – the stuff that comes out of your aliveness.
The things that come naturally to you. The way you see something. The way you shift something in a room. The thing you can do that other people find incredibly valuable, but you’ve barely noticed because it feels so easy to you.
And when I started trading that soul currency for financial currency, something very different happened.
My results became disproportionately large compared to the time and effort I was putting in.
I was creating more value with less effort.
Which meant I had more income and more time.
For less effort.
And that was how I finally stopped treading water and gasping for breath.
I was giving from gifts and resources I had in overflow. And when you’re not in survival, you don’t need to dictate the terms of how it comes back to you.You can appreciate things for what they are, so then they can appreciate.
The appreciation is always upstream of the next financial windfall.
When you’re in survival, you cut things off that were just about to bloom, because your system tells you that you can’t afford to wait. Your brain tells you that you can’t be flexible with your terms or accommodate people in other ways. It’s a very myopic way to do business.
I stopped trading my time and effort for dollars and started trading the things that were uniquely mine.
And when you do that, you create leverage.
Leverage creates spaciousness.
And spaciousness gets you out of survival.
Once you’re out of survival, you can actually see.
You can back yourself without waiting for evidence to show up first. You’re on the right track because you have the ability to use your discernment. Is this fight-or-flight response actually about my circumstances, or is it living in my body and not in reality?
And from that vantage point you can create more leverage. You’re not the brickie down in the mud laying bricks anymore. You’re the architect, looking at the whole system, choosing what happens next.
5. When you prioritise your aliveness over your survival programming, success starts to regenerate you
You stop reaching for money and recognition and achievement from a place of wanting them.
And because you’re not wanting them, you’re not gripping the idea that it has to happen in that exact way for you to feel good. You feel good regardless. You don’t need to control every tiny step.
That’s why the results you want can arrive more easily, and in greater abundance.
You’re no longer trying to extract a feeling from an outcome. You’re not using success to regulate something inside you. You’re creating from a place where you’re already whole.
And when you create from there, success doesn’t take something from you in order to hand something back.
It regenerates you.
Seven years today.
Even in the moments I’m responding to the chaos to be like ‘This is NOT the mother I put on my vision board” I’m thankful I was raised to be so tough.
Massive thank you to the Matriarchs of our family, our dearly beloved and late Grandma Pam and of course my mother, Marmar – the GOAT of handling tough shit.
I said Hendrix “Thanks for choosing me to be your mum.”
He says “Thanks for choosing me to be your son”
Happy birthday, my little teachers.
Bianca x
