214: Really EASY Focus Tips for Mom Entrepreneurs

Welcome to episode 214. Feeling pulled in a million directions as a mompreneur? Juggling tasks, battling overwhelm, and chasing those next-level business goals seems like a constant tightrope walk. But what if you could harness the power of focus to turn your hectic days into laser-sharp productivity? In comes today’s podcast guest Severine Naessens a seasoned entrepreneur and mother to a teenage daughter.

Say hi on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/melissallarena/

About Severine

Séverine is a mom, multilingual effective communications coach, consultant and trainer, university lecturer and keynote speaker. Born and raised in Belgium, she moved to Mexico at age 24, where she worked for the Belgian Consulate, built out a Digital Marketing company, and became a life coach and communications trainer, and consultant. Over the years she has participated as a lecturer for La Salle University in Cancún and as a speaker at different events that promote the development of women and responsible communication. She has also been a guest on various international podcasts and has been invited to Radio and Television shows throughout Mexico to speak about topics related to parenting, business communication, and female empowerment. Recently widowed, she decided to once again reinvent herself and moved back to her native Ghent with her teenage daughter, after having lived a fulfilled and exciting life in Mexico for 23 years. Tapping into all of the knowledge and experience she has gathered over the past decennia, she currently serves as lecturer on diverse and inclusive communication for the Artevelde University of Applied Sciences for the students of the bachelor’s in international communication management. Besides teaching at the university, she is serves and supports high-achieving professionals in creating clarity and establishing responsible communication with their loved ones and teams alike. She does so by providing personalized consulting, training, conferences, workshops, mentoring and one-on-one coaching sessions to identify the obstacles and provide practical solutions out of the wide array of tools and insights she has gathered over the years.

Links for more information

Instagram @coachseverinenaessens

https://www.facebook.com/CoachSeverineNaessens/

Websites

https://www.severinenaessens.com

https://www.highachievingparents.com

LinkedIn

https://www.linkedin.com/in/severinenaessens

About Melissa the host of Unimaginable Wellness

Hi there! I'm Melissa, an executive coach empowering mompreneurs. Tired of imposter syndrome holding you back? I help moms like you transform that doubt into fuel for success. Feeling overwhelmed? Let's nip that bud together and unlock your productivity superpowers. And forget chasing milestones solo - I'll show you how to leverage the magic of networking to reach those seemingly distant goals for your business. Because with the right connections, anything is within reach for a mompreneur. So, ready to ditch the overwhelm, amplify your voice, and take your business to the next level? Let's get started! Say hi on Instagram and I’ll send you gift via a link to a free chapter of my bestseller Fertile Imagination: A Guide for Stretching Every Mom’s Superpower for Maximum Impact: https://www.instagram.com/melissallarena/

Additional links:

How to get unstuck in your business quiz? https://www.tryinteract.com/share/quiz/64fb50ebd9dce900148cdff8

Mom Mogul Webinar Replay: https://witty-thinker-2643.ck.page/7e884a0f0a

Schedule a free breakthrough 30-minute call: https://www.melissallarena.com/sessions/

TRANSCRIPT

Melissa. This is impromptu. Love it. Yes,

Severine:         I love it too. I appreciate you having me. I've been following your journey and I'm super excited about everything that's going on and everything that you're sharing with the world. Thank you, thank you. Thank you for doing that. All the moms, all the mompreneurs, we can use that piece of advice and yeah, that backing voice going, you're doing all right, girl, doing it. All right. So happy to share this space with you.

Melissa:          Thank you. Thank you, ine. So why don't you share a little bit about yourself and then also in terms of your motherhood stage, because I have little boys and my twins are 10 and 10, and my eldest is 12, but I'm at a different stage than you, so that can be included in your little about cine portion.

Severine:         Well, about me, I was born and raised in Gant Belgium, a wonderful medieval city, which I left at age 24 because I moved to Cancun, Mexico. Quite a bit of a difference there. I did that straight after I graduated from university as a business translator, and I went out to venture for a good six month sabbatical, which turned into 23 years of building up a life in Cancun, Mexico. I absolutely adore the country, the people, the food, the whole thing, the culture. And as I was in Mexico, I developed into a communications coach, trainer and consultant. That being said, it's not about marketing, but it's about interpersonal communication, and I've been able to also put a focus on diverse and inclusive communication as I've been asked by the university to create courses on that for the students on international communications management. So it's full. I'm coming full circle, leaving school, I went out into the world, learned from the world, learned from the experience of being married to a Mexican wonderful man, the father of my daughter, who is now 16.

Severine:         So we're in the midst of our teens. It's all good. We are having a great time, wonderful relationship. I've been able to build up with Iati as I have learned to communicate as a mom. So it's like the full package of becoming a communications coach is thanks to the struggles I had with my four-year-old child back in the day when her dad and myself, we split up. So I learned to communicate, and that comes with a lot of breaking of patterns, a lot of breaking of paradigms, and shifting into a healthier relationship based on clear effective communication, respectful communication specifically. So I've been able to take that entire experience and now I can share that with other moms, with other dads, with other leaders as such, because as moms and dads, we lead our families and in business, we lead our teams. So pretty much the same from a communication standpoint.

Severine:         So I'm really blessed that I can bring my passion for communication to the world and do that professionally. I get a lot of fulfillment out of sharing this with others and guiding others into a better communication, better relationship with the people around them. So that's in a nutshell, and I've come back to Belgium after 23 years in Mexico. We've been here for a good year and a half. It's been a challenge to readapt to my own culture, and I think you can relate after being away from the US for quite a while and then coming back. That story of becoming immigrants and then reintegrating into your own culture brings a lot of struggles, but a lot of interesting wisdom as well. So it's been quite the journey.

Melissa:          Yeah, I mean it's interesting because then it's different cultures, different languages, different, and when I think about, let's say from a Spanish language and Spanish that's so generic because I don't know, I guess Mexican or even the precise province where you were in Mexico culture, I'm pretty sure that your experience coaching leaders has been quite varied, and I am sure as far as the way that you've had to adapt as a mom, entrepreneur has been just as rich in terms of the different things that you've had to incorporate in your practice and how you are as a mom for some time, and in terms of just a daughter and being a single mom, right? I'm sure it's shaped a bit of how you've organized yourself. And so in terms of your background and in terms of your journey as an entrepreneur, I'm very, very curious about how you have bubble wrapped your sanity through the different stages of motherhood. But then I'm super curious if you just shared a bit of what was going on during those moments as an entrepreneur. So maybe early on setting the foundation or when you had a change or disruption in childcare, curious how you decided to bubble wrap your sanity. I think that would be so valuable for other moms.

Severine:         Obviously it has grown a lot and I've learned a lot over these past 16 years. In the very beginning, I was miserable. In all honesty. It was hard because I was running a digital marketing company at the time, excuse me, and at that time I was doing full-time job as a leader, as a business owner. That's a 24 7 thing, and then you become a mom, and that's another 24 7 thing that comes along and struggling. I had a lot of struggles figuring out when to do what I mean as a baby. She was with me in her crib next to me in the office. I mean, I was carrying the kid along with me. Luckily, I got into decent and good daycare very early on. So I was able to hand her over to the experts on childcare, and I go into my office and do my thing, but it was hard to incorporate the motherhood into the professional me.

Severine:         I'm very driven and I can get very laser focused on working, and I would forget I have a child. I mean, it happened that I forgot to go to daycare to pick her up because I was so focused on working. I had totally zoned out on the motherhood part, and I would get a call, ma'am, already 6:00 PM we closed at four. Is everything okay? It's like, oh, shoot, okay. I'm on my way on those little things. After a while that I came to the understanding that I needed to rearrange everything that I was doing, and that's where I learned about focus management and focus management has been through the years I've become more and more proficient in, it has been a life raft for me to bubble wrap my focus, and I will schedule walks into my calendar. I will schedule everything that has to do with my child into my calendar and plan my focus for work around that.

Severine:         And that has helped me to bring my child, my family as a priority, but not dropping my professional activities because I am who I am and I keep going. So I think focus management has been the key for me to learn to be present when I'm working. I'm present working. When I'm with my child, I am present as a mom, even though those chunks of time, not necessarily, they're not necessarily large chunks of time, especially now as a teenager, that kind of stretches out into two adults cohabiting because 16 is almost adult and she has become very independent, which I am super grateful for. So it has keeps changing over time. But I do try and I say try because sometimes I do fail at that to be very, very present with my focus. So focusing is one thing that did help me kind of get out of that mayhem that was going on because motherhood as a professional and motherhood in all forms can be mayhem because there's a lot going on. Whatever it is that you do, whether you're a stay at home mom, because that's a 24 7 job as well, whether you're a professional, whether you're an independent, whether you're a freelancer, whether you're a public person, it doesn't matter. Mayhem happens when you have kids around.

Severine:         So finding a way of dealing with everything and having that clarity of what is needed so you can set your priorities has helped for me to work my way through motherhood, and then those terrible first two years, that was really, really hard for me to adapt to motherhood. I mean, I can adapt in any professional situation like that because I've got quite some experience, but as a mom, it was very new and it was very hard because it's never what you've expected. You think motherhood's going to be something, and then you become a mom and it's completely different, nowhere near what you thought it would be because all our kids have their own personalities, they have their own needs, and it's a lot of impromptu stuff going on. So yeah, learning to be flexible, that has also been, I mean, the flexibility factor of motherhood I think is key as well, to understand that you will have to be flexible at certain times because things happen with kids and allowing yourself to step out of the rigidity of an agenda and working. And that's why working with focus management has helped me because I'm stepping away from time management

Severine:         Because knowing that I need a block of focus for a certain task, I can move that block of focus around in my agenda, but I know I need to focus on a specific task, so I'm not stuck to, oh, from that time to that time, I need to do this because if something happens, I am flexible to move things around. So that has been a couple of the key things for me.

Melissa:          The way that you bubble wrap. So my question just because, let's see, here's where it's really hard for me, and maybe other listeners can appreciate this or listeners can appreciate this idea of focus management for me, let's imagine I say, okay, three hours, I don't know when or where on my calendar this moment, but for three hours I'm going to write one email, and I know it might sound like, that's crazy, Melissa, three hours for an email, no joke. Sometimes an email will take me three hours. Okay, so there's the three hours. I put them on a Monday and I have them from 8:00 AM when my kids are in school until whatever, three hours later, right? 8, 9, 10, 11:00 AM not a problem. I'm sitting down, I'm typing away. I'm like, yeah, I got this. Then the school calls me 10:00 AM in the middle of the fricking email as I'm actually putting it together and it says, oh, your kids stepped on poop on the way to school. You might want to spare them from embarrassment. I literally got a call like this and bring them a second pair of sneakers or whatever, or trainers, depending on the country that you're in.

Melissa:          How in your history have you thought about those interruptions of your focus? Because that's a chunk, right? So you just said as my example, that's three hours. Here's a block. So then what do you do in that moment? What do you do? What did you do as an example?

Severine:         I would evaluate, first of all, how urgent is the situation? I mean, speaking about needing a decent pair of sneakers, I would ask the teachers, are you able to wash them on the spot? Is there a solution you can do without needing me to go to the school? I think there would be some kind. I mean, in this case, if your child is fallen off a tree, falling out of a tree and hurt their head and they need to go to the hospital, obviously you drop everything in that instant and you go, that's a non-negotiable. Leave everything and go mom situation. But in your situation, I would just ask, okay, is this very urgent? What time do you need to be there at school? And I would say, yes, I will bring a pair of sneakers when I pick 'em up at noon, and that would be for me, the end of the phone call and I would go back to focusing on what I was doing.

Melissa:          So for me, it's hard to then get back into that focus point. Are there, it's

Severine:         The being disrupted.

Melissa:          Yeah, because sometimes my experience has been like, I'll get angry. So a lot of moms, for example, they'll say something like, and it depends on their situation. They've complained about this notion of default parenting. So let's just imagine it's two parents and it's always the mom that gets that call. So there's also this emotional residue that I might now bring back to this fricking email. So I'm trying to be really, really practical based on what literally happened to me. So I'm just wondering, okay, so now being skilled in focus management, what might be one tip, actionable tip that a mom can employ when her focus is broken due to an interruption like the one I shared?

Severine:         I'm going to speak for myself and share what works for me. I cannot speak for you or anybody else, but what works for me is whenever I'm pulled out of my focus for whatever reason, first and foremost, I try to plan my focus moments smaller. I will break a big task up into subtasks, for example, in your case, a big email that needs a lot of investigation. And because if it takes three hours, it means that you're looking up stuff and you're picking things out of different angles and you're crafting something. So I would break that project up into smaller chunks so that I can work in pieces of maybe half an hour, an hour at a time. If for whatever reason in the middle of a focus moment, I am interrupted by an emergency or by something because first and foremost, when I am focusing, I will put my phone away and the only phone calls that can come through are from my family and from school.

Severine:         So if that happens, which is a very small chance, if that does happen, I evaluate the situation, I look at the urgency of the situation and I see, do I need to act now and leave everything as it is and go If yes, I do so, and there's not much you can do about that. If it's not a huge emergency, can somebody else take care of it? Can I count on somebody around me? In your case, it could be your husband. In my case, it could be my brother, for example, or my mom. If I could ask them to step in and take care of the situation, that's the second thing. And then the third thing to go back to my focus, I will get up, walk around, do a breathing exercise and set my mind back on the focus. But I literally get out of my chair because I can understand the feeling of frustration. I was on a roll and they interrupted me, and it's like, I can't get back into it. Just snap out of it if need be. Go outside for a little, walk five minutes, come back, breathe, drink some water, sit down and continue. That's what works for me to get back into my just snap out of whatever is troubling me and to get back into the focus.

Melissa:          That makes a lot of sense. And I think anyone that's listening is going to totally appreciate the fact that you also said that you break up the task into smaller steps, but then on top of that, the time that you allot to them is way smaller. So it's kind of like you're setting up the game so that you win. It's like, how can I make this favorable? So I'm sitting here, I can't control outside factors or the world, so how can I make it so that today or this moment is going to feel like a success? And being super honest, I haven't done that in a lot of instances. So there's so many different frames of thought that I have read. For example, Cal Newport Deep Work, his book is about having extraordinary deep, deep focus in big increments of time. And it's interesting because while that might work for someone that does not have to take care of their kids, I have three kids.

Melissa:          Each kid is a variable. We're talking exponential potential for interruptions in the course of a day. But point of the matter is, I think what you just said, for me at least, and anyone that's listening, I would love to hear your thoughts, what you're getting out of C'S wisdom. But for me it's like, okay, there might be many ways that you can, what is it? Slice up an onion, an apple, whatever. But if you're a mom, I think it's really important to understand, depending on what your kid needs from you, it's important for you to tailor what's going to make you feel like you have the greatest chance of success. To be honest, you don't want to end your day looking at your to-do list and saying, and again, I didn't get through it.

Severine:         And that's the main idea. If you do work with a to-do list, and I have for many, many years, and I tend to go to to-do list for certain things, but I always make it bite-size, make the task. So you get to tick off a whole bunch of things on the list because that makes mean it's a human thing to tick things off and feel good about it. It's like that little spread of, yay, I did it, and if the yay I did, it means that I don't know you were able to read 10 pages in a book. That's great. I mean, I've got a whole stack of books I need to read, and I'm being gentle on myself setting smaller goals. I'm a big goal girl. I love big goals and I love big challenges, but I always break 'em up into smaller pieces so it's manageable and I can shift away and be flexible if needed.

Severine:         But I always, obviously you need the discipline to get back to what it is that needs to be done. No use for you to break up a huge project into 10 bite-sized pieces and not start, you have to go tackle piece number one to move on to piece number two and be disciplined in making sure that over, for example, you set your goals for the week, but you're flexible on moving things between Monday and Tuesday, for example. It's not, flexibility is not from, oh yeah, I'll do it next month. It's being disciplined and having those goals, but being reasonable and taking into account all those factors that can interrupt. I mean, life will happen with kids, it certainly does. So there always may be something impromptu. And also one of the main things I want to share is make sure you plan for me time. One of the things that I've seen as a mom, and I did that in the beginning as well, is I would forget about me. It would be the kid and work the kid and work the kid and work. They didn't work. And then, oops, I have a husband.

Severine:         So I would start planning a little bit of meet him because unfortunately my marriage did break and we didn't make it past four years with her in it. We spent 10 years together. But one of the reasons was I was so focused on work, work, work, work, work, and also, oops, the kid, the kid that I had forgotten. I had a husband. My marriage went down to drain because there was no time to focus on that. There was no way for me to manage all things together. But anyway, it is what it is and it was all good. And that is something that in my later marriage and my second marriage, I did plan on spending quality time with myself, quality time with friends. And it's not that I would see my friends every day, every week. It would be maybe once a month, but it would be quality time because that as well as a woman, as a mom, like they say, it takes a village to raise a kid or kids, and it also takes a village to support each other and building your village, having your support system there for you to listen and to speak with and to have fun, got to be something fun in there.

Severine:         Doing that also helps balance out everything else, specifically me. Time, time with friends and time with your partner. If you have a partner is super important so that you can fill up your cup to then give it to the kids. You can't run on empty, right? Because if our car runs low on gas, we go get gas. Or if it's an electric one, you plug it in. But we forget to plug ourselves in to that source of joy, that source of energy that is our friends, our family, our spouses, and have some decent me time to recover. So you can keep pouring into the kids' cups.

Melissa:          Agreed completely. And I think it's interesting because for me, I feel like, okay, I hear that message, I hear that message, I hear that message. It's exactly the same idea in terms of nutrition and health and dieting and exercising. I've heard that message, I've heard that message, I've heard that message. But I want anyone that's listening right now to just look at her calendar right now today and just see, did you put anything that is going to be remotely fun or restful for yourself today? Absolutely. That's something that's like undeniable because if it's not on the calendar, oftentimes it doesn't get done. So that for me is a huge, huge point of advice for anyone that's listening, that's like a quick little check mark. And you know what? If you do have something on your calendar, then put a check mark there so you get that high that Severine was talking about because that counts too. That is totally just as important ing. Where can listeners find you, learn more about you and send you a dmm if they got value out of this conversation.

Severine:         You can find me on LinkedIn with my name, nonsense. I'll share all the links with you as well as well on Instagram, coach ens and on Facebook, same thing, coach ens. It's easy to go find, and right now my website has been translated into Dutch, so for the English speakers, it won't be much value on that website unless you want to learn Dutch. Come on over ine na.com. We'll be back online in English later this year. But for now, social media is the easiest to reach out and send me a dm and I'm always open for a talk.

Melissa:          Thank you, Severine

Severine:         Pleasure.

Melissa:          Severine is so generous. I wanted to just share with you three points that I know you can apply immediately to your life and feel way less overwhelmed. Point number one, chunking down your projects, chunk them down, almost making it as if it's impossible for you not to be productive in that increment of time. So what does that mean? For example, as pivoting was saying, if you're going to write an email and there's different elements to this email, such as the research phase or the writing phase, maybe chuck it down so that this way you're only spending 30 minutes on researching during one point of time on your calendar. Really being generous with yourself as far as giving yourself ample time to accomplish that one thing, but setting yourself up to win is key. The second point is really about making sure that you are absolutely giving yourself some grace.

Melissa:          If you are a new mom or if you will become a mom, you need to understand that you have no idea what is ahead. I think Cine said it best. Nobody really knows what it's like to be a mom until you are a mom. So this uncertainty, the same uncertainty you might feel if you're making an investment in your business. Think about it, magnified 10 times as a mom because the stakes are that much higher because it's your child. It is a piece of your heart, so give yourself grace because you do not know what's ahead. And that is, again, why being nimble, which as an entrepreneur, you must be as a mom. It's just like this non-negotiable characteristic that anyone who has been a mom has had to embrace. Third point is the following. Reach out to your girlfriends who are mom entrepreneurs. You can share this episode with them and use it as your excuse to reconnect with a mom, entrepreneur.

Melissa:          A lot of us need connection. This conversation with Cine really originally started as a check back in get back in touch conversation on a Saturday morning for me. But I wanted to then really capture ING's wisdom for you, and it became a podcast reconnect with your mom, entrepreneur, friends. I think it is so important you can create connection opportunities for you all the time, and that is something that I wanted to just point out. Cine is an amazing person. She's ahead of me in terms of her motherhood journey and her business journey, and it is for that reason that I will say this conversation is going to help me very specifically as I plan out my upcoming week, I'm going to chunk down my projects even more aggressively. Hope you have the best day ever. Share this episode with your mom, entrepreneur, friends, and reach out to me on Instagram.

Melissa:          I want to hear from you. What about this conversation really landed. I'm at Melissa Laina, Emelia ssa, L-L-A-R-E-N-A. This information will be in the show notes. I appreciate you immensely. Have the best day. Reach out to me on Instagram. I want to hear from you. I want to be sure that I'm putting content out there that is going to apply to your life and is going to help you feel sensational and just more focused and clear on what needs to happen so that you can build the biggest business of your dreams, have the most impact, and still be a present mother.