How It All Started - The Pilot

​Welcome to the Mama's Redefined Success podcast. My name is Danielle and I'll be your guide as we get real about finding your true north on this expedition of motherhood. Whether you're a new Mama who just got in this path of discovery or you're already in the thick of the chaos and you'd give anything to find your way to a path, either way, I've got you. I've gone down a lot of paths in life and motherhood, from corporate executive workaholic to stressed out super mom who didn't know the word no to an anxious and depressed stay at home mom of two just trying to get through the day. And now I'm getting my footing as a mom and business owner. I'm here to share my journey in a raw way to hopefully help you so you don't feel alone as you navigate your path. Here we embrace where we are today, but we don't stay there, so get ready to laugh, learn, possibly cry, and definitely grow as you journey to redefine what success means to you, so you can thrive in who you're meant to be. Let's go. 

Hey Mama's, with this first episode I am so excited. I would just love to give you a quick look into what led me to start the Mama's Redefined Success podcast. So let's joining back in time BC before children and I use that term on purpose because just like this world look different before Christ came into it, your world is going to look a lot different than before children came into it. And we're going to talk a lot about that on the podcast and how this is an amazing thing and you may have to go on a journey to redefine what success looks like to you now post children, but once you take those steps, you will thrive and who you are truly meant to be. And that is so exciting. But for now, I'm gonna give you a glimpse into how I ended up here. So after I graduated from college, I got into advertising. I was an accounting executive and television and radio, and my main role was to find new clients and manage them. I did this for a little over 10 years and I loved it. I mean, I loved it. I ate, I drank, I slept work. And since TV and radio were always on the air, I was always on call. And honestly, I kind of liked it that way. I was definitely a workaholic. I was always thinking about new ideas for my clients, new ways to grow my business and theirs. My favorite clients were even the ones that let me help them with their entire marketing. I'd write their commercials and be in them my job and the success that I had in it. It defined me and I let it until the days when that job became more like a chore. And what I loved about it, like helping my clients and doing all of those things, became more like a bureaucracy, with paperwork and budgets and detail work and things that did not matter to me. And everything had changed. And so I decided I was going to leave media completely. And even though that was a really hard decision, I knew it was the right decision for me at the time. And y'all, we are going to talk a lot on the podcast about listening to your gut, that inner voice when it comes to finding your true north. So I digressed back to the story. After leaving media, I made a couple pivots in my career and I wound up getting licensed in insurance and investments. And I was teaching financial education to families just so they knew how the financial world worked before making their decisions with their investments. You guys, I thrive when I'm helping people. I also love learning about people. And ever since I can remember, I was always reading, listening, attending conferences in self development. I'll never forget going on a family vacation one summer when I was younger and we were in like beach chairs on the beach. My mom and I were reading and she looked over at me and she was like, Danielle, why are you reading that? Don't you just want to relax? And I was reading The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey and loving every second of it. You guys, I am a novel girl Like this is a fun read for me. I am obsessed with all things self-improvement, and if you haven't figured it out yet, I tend to immerse myself in anything that I'm passionate about, whether it's my career or things are people I love. I put my heart into it and I tend to go all in. So it shouldn't have been that shocking to me when I became a mom that I would be an all in mom, but because of how I defined myself up until that point, I was actually a little lost.

And when my first was born, Gabriella, I decided to go back to work part time. I asked the company that I worked with if I could take on their marketing and so they essentially created a position for me to do that. And I was working three days a week and I thought that's what I wanted. I was sending Gabriella to daycare and I was missing many of her first. And honestly, I was feeling like I should be home with her. Not because she hated school, but just because I knew that she would have preferred to be with me. Like she even told me that and I truly wanted to be with her. So once I had #2 Michaela, I knew I couldn't do it anymore. And so I resigned. And while that was my choice and what I really wanted, once I was in it, I found myself going a little stir crazy with my life. The lack of adult conversation, feeling like a milk factory having two in diapers because the first decided she was gonna revert back to diapers. Since I was clearly taking care of her sister, she thought I would take care of hers, right? There's just an aloneness that you feel when you're dealing with all the things that keep you up at night about your kids and your feelings, but you don't really talk to people about it because you kind of think you're crazy yourself. So you're sure everyone else would think you were crazy if you said what you were feeling. And then you'd stack on the dishes and the laundry and the cleaning and the mess and, you know the way that you just give up caring about what you're yourself or what you look like. Just because, you know, you never really see any other adults other than maybe your husband and other moms picking up at preschool that are pretty much in the same boat as you. And I just was drowning. I decided I needed to do something. And my husband had this great business idea. It was his idea though, but I really liked the idea and I wanted to. My entrepreneurial spirit kicked in and I was like, you know what? I should do this. I should start my own business. And so I did. I started Date Deputy. It's a it was a company that I designed dates for couples, I planned the dates, I booked the reservations. It was a lot of fun. But around the same time I was also a member of my colleges like local alumni association and they asked me to enter their presidency run, which is like a four year commitment. So I started the business and then and I accepted that. And a big part of why I wanted to stay home with the kids in the 1st place was because I wanted to be involved with their school. So when Gabriella started kindergarten and Michaela was going to Two's preschool, she was going like two days a week for a few hours a day. I started helping in my oldest daughter's classroom, her teacher each week. And then I volunteered to be the pod parent for the whole kindergarten pod, and I was also helping the preschool when they needed me. So I was stretching myself very thin. So thin that one day when I got out of bed, I, like, could not stand up. Like, literally every time I tried to stand up, I would almost pass out. I had to have my kindergartner call my parents, who brought over my grandma's transport chair to get me to the hospital because I could not stand up. My heart rate was so high and my blood pressure was so low that they couldn't even get a reading on me. And they ran a ton of tests. Mri's, blood, you know, heart monitors, all the things. They even decided they wanted to admit me and keep me overnight. They were keeping me on the heart floor because they were worried. Like I was worried but the only thing they ever found that was wrong with me was my potassium was low. Like not alarmingly low.
Y'all. Nothing was wrong with me and it was like this huge wake up call for me. At the time I actually thought it was God saying like yo Danielle slow down but getting closer to God over the last few years, I now realize that he's not the one that actually hurts us. He's just always there to help us when we get knocked down. And there had been so many times that God had been trying to tell me things that I had dismissed. Like, you know, either done nothing about it or outright ignored what he was like trying to, you know, give me these little hints and cues and just your gut again tuning into that intuition. But I thought he just, like hit me upside the head with the 2 by 4 and said that I need to listen. But I now know that he was just waiting for me there when I finally hit that wall and back then, after a lot of reflection, I decided to step back from the business that I had started. So I continued like the presidency that I was doing. And volunteering and momming, of course. But my health, it still wasn't right. I was in a lot of pain and it had been in this kind of pain. It was like joint pain, all this pain in my body. And that had happened like when I stopped feeding Gabriella, when I stopped breastfeeding her. But then Fast forward to now, you know, it was happening again. And so I started seeing all these specialists and you know, they sent me to other specialists who ran tests and yada, yada yada. Finally they came came up with a diagnosis of fibromyalgia. And the cure for that, if you are is if that's what you want to call it is narcotics or just live with it, right. And I am not going to get my on my soapbox about fibromyalgia or any of that right now. But what I decided to do was I made a lot of changes in my lifestyle. And we will talk about some of those later.
And we'll talk a lot also about, you know, what you can do, like how you can tune into your body in future episodes. Because you guys, I still wasn't aligned with my true north at that point. And this was actually just the beginning of a downward spiral for me. So let's jump forward to when the world shut down, when everyone became, like, so polarizing in their beliefs, so divisive. Let's face it, it was crazy in 2020. And I did did not do well with it. I am sure you all know about this time and how everyone had super strong opinions that if you didn't agree with, not only were you wrong, but you were like evil or against them in some way, shape or form. And y'all, I am an extrovert who likes to play devil's advocate and nobody wanted that. And after months of being cooped up in my house with my germaphobic husband and my two kids and and all the COVID opinions, which led to political opinions and everything, I went to a dark place. Like, really dark. I never wanted to kill myself, but I didn't want to be alive anymore either. And I was actually upset at myself for bringing two children into this world. I was literally depressed and I had never experienced anything like it before. It was everything I could do to get out of bed someday as much less take a shower or take care of the kids. And I had to pretend like everything was OK. At least I thought I did. I mean, I know I was not OK and I didn't have to pretend that, but I did not tell a soul. And y'all, we'll talk about mental health a lot through all the episodes. And it wasn't until that point, you know, I have had a lot of close family and friends who have struggled with depression and anxiety for a long time.
And up until that point, I could never really wrap my head around it. I never really thought it was a choice they were making. But I did think that, you know, it was something like they needed to be more positive or, you know, but this is not like that, it's different. It was not like that at all. You know, this is not that, it is not a choice that people are making. I was super depressed and I didn't tell a soul, like I said. But out of the blue, an old coworker friend reached out to me about like, a ridiculous business opportunity, and my first thought was, are you kidding me? Like, I can barely take care of myself right now, and I'm going to have to start homeschooling A kindergartner and a second grader in a few weeks. Like, are you kidding me? But something made me say that I would take a look at her business opportunity and I keep my word. So I did. So five days later, after feeling like I couldn't shake this company and their heart and mission, I said yes to starting a new business again when I needed nothing new on my plate. I was literally wondering if I was crazy when I said yes. Because I don't do things halfhearted. But this time I was listening to my gut and I knew I wanted more for myself. And even though I was in this like, you know, spiral role and everything was going wrong, I just knew that something was there that was going to change my life. And this one decision, it did. It changed my whole life. At first it just gave me something to do which I loved, which was shop, I love shopping and I started plugging into all the things that the founders and the leaders were doing, which this was brand new company at the time and we had so much stuff going on. It was all amazing and inspiring and just super aligned with my values because they want to change the world one person at a time by helping them feel good about themselves and y'all, that's what I want to do.

I want to help moms to feel good about themselves, to feel good about their lives, to really get to be present with our kids and their families and everyone in their life. So just like that one. Yes. Changed everything for me, you guys. I don't believe that anything happens by accident. Just like I don't believe you're still listening to me right now by accident. I believe you're meant to find this podcast so that something and you can change. And y'all, I don't want any of the credit for that change because you're the one who will have to do the work. There is something that you need to do to change your life. Because don't get me wrong, I love my kiddos. Like with all my heart and soul, I would die for them. I'm sure you all feel me on this. Like we don't even know the kind of love that we're capable of until we have children, right? But also, you need time for yourself. All the things you do in life cannot be for your kids, or for anyone else for that matter. Even if they're still breastfeeding and you are there. Everything you can Get out and take a walk, do some yoga, find a mom's group where you can talk to other adults, listen to an audio book or a podcast like this one would be great. I have done a lot of work on myself to get here. And like I said, I've always loved self improvement and learning and I knew I wanted to take my knowledge of that and share it with other moms. So this podcast is for you. If you're a mom who's in that dark place or if you're a mom who is brand new and you're feeling overwhelmed, I want to help. You never see that dark place. And then for those moms who really aren't depressed, but you just know you want more, you want more. And you know there is more in this life that you can have for yourself, but you just don't know what or exactly how to get those answers.
I want to help you because I've been you. All of you.
I am far from a perfect mom. Even if that exists. It just doesn't. But I am still on my own journey and I believe that journey will never stop. But with what I've experienced and come out on the other side of, I believe that I can help you navigate your journey with maybe less potholes and construction. Like you guys. I'm really married to this journey idea. Okay. But that's what I plan to do with Mamas Redefine Success. So I hope you'll embark on this journey with me, because I know I'm going to keep moving forward towards my true north. And my hope is that you will too, and we can do this together. 

Thank you so much for listening. If something you heard today spoke to you, I hope you'll use it on your journey. It would light me up to know what hit home with you, so please share this episode on your social and tag me so I can encourage you. And thank you personally for sharing. I'll meet you right back here next week. Keep smiling. Y'all.