In this episode, Christy Keating – a renowned parent coaching and coaching business expert – tells us why she personally felt called to coaching and why this business model stood out to her as she was beginning her entrepreneurial journey. She also shares the secrets to her thriving business – social media platforms she loves, marketing tips she uses and courses she took to get started! We chat her challenges and how she overcame them, and she leaves you with a few key pieces of advice for getting your own business off the ground as a parent. Check out Christy HERE.

Creating A Thriving Business, Balancing Motherhood and Staying Sane with Christy Keating

Christy Keating is the founder and CEO of The Heartful Parent. Christy loves helping parents find more love, joy, and connection in their families and with their children by helping them discover newfound energy in their parenting, develop an appreciation for what they have and who they are, and create sustainable ways to achieve their vision or dream for their family.

Christy is a Certified Parent Coach® , a Certified Positive Discipline Instructor, a Certified Instructor with the Gottman Institute. She is also a long-time leader and speaker at the Program for Early Parent Support,

In addition to her work as a parent coach, Christy is a licensed attorney and former prosecutor of 20 years with an expertise in the prosecution of sexually violent predators, as well as an active member of the National Coalition to Prevent Child Sexual Abuse and Exploitation. Through The Heartful Parent’s sister company, Savvy Parents Safe Kids, Christy offers child safety workshops, presentations, and consulting to both parents and professionals.

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BULLET POINTS FROM THIS EPISODE:

  • What does hustle like a mother mean to you?
    • First of all, I think when you’re a mom, you have super powers. Like I just think that we have to acknowledge our own awesomeness and step into our ability to figure out how to do the things that we want to do. And for some people, hustling like a mother is going to mean leaning into motherhood, you know, not working and taking care of their family as their primary job. For some people, it is going to mean balancing more and sort of recognizing that they can be a mom and they can be something else. And so for me, that hustle has meant making it work so that I can balance those pieces of my life that are important to me, so that I show up in the best way I can as a mom.
  • I would love to hear more about your story. Tell me about your journey. 
    • I wanted to be a lawyer for a lot of years. And I went to law school with the goal of becoming a prosecutor. I achieved that goal, and I worked for almost 20 years. 
    • When my older daughter was born 12 years ago, my world was rocked. Everything shifted. And I’m sure your listeners are familiar with this experience. It felt like the rug was being pulled out from underneath me, and I didn’t know who I was professionally. I didn’t know who I was as a partner with my husband. For a while it was pretty bad, frankly. I certainly hadn’t figured out who I was as a mom yet. And so it was a journey. 
    • I’ve started to realize I had this passion and interest in learning about parenting and how to be a good parent and how to show up as the parent that I wanted to show up as for my kid. And one thing led to another. I found this coaching program through the Parent Coach Institute.
    • I got super lucky that I connected with a woman in our community who had started a company called Savvy Parents, Safe Kids, which was all about educating parents and professionals to prevent child sexual abuse. She didn’t want to run that company anymore. She asked if I would be willing to, because it fit right in with my expertise in the legal field. So I ended up shortly after starting The Heartful Parent and folding Savvy Parents, Safe Kids into that. 
  • What made you feel called to coaching? 
    • It really goes back to that time – it was about a one-year period after my first daughter was born when I was flailing.  I just needed some form of support and I didn’t know what that was and I didn’t know how to get it.
    • Looking back, I thought, my goodness, if I had the support of a coach who could hear me and listen to me and, you know, help me come up with ideas and just normalize the experience that I was having, that might’ve made a world of difference.
  • What were some of the things that you did in particular that kind of helped build your client base as you were starting that coaching business? 
    • I would say I did a lot of work for free or very low cost. I did a lot of speaking engagements. 
    • I also was really lucky to discover a local group at the time that was called Business Among Moms, which still exists. The ownership has changed. That group gave me some fabulous networking and there were monthly meetings where there were little educational things and networking. 
    • I was a part and I still am in a bunch of different Facebook groups where parents show up to get help. I offered my help for free, not in a self promotion way that would violate the rules of those groups, but in a  I’m genuinely here to provide some help and some answers way. 
  • What would be your last key pieces of advice here for our listeners who are balancing being parents and also working on their businesses, wanting to thrive at both, but having a hard time?
    • The first thing we have to learn is to let the guilt go. That is easier said than done, but we have to come to a recognition that, and really sort of focus on when we are with our children, who you want to show up as, as a parent. And if like me, we can show up better as a parent because we work, then we should let go of the guilt around that, because now we’re actually the parent that we want to be for them. And so figuring out how to kind of do whatever internal work we need to do to let go of that guilt, I think is step number one. 
    • And then step number two is to, not just with work but in all areas of our life, remember that we have to put ourselves on the list and not just on the list, but like at the top of the list. And so I talk with my clients and inside my academy a lot about self care, but not the kind of self care that’s like a pedicure and a massage – I love those things  but that’s not sustainable self care. We have to be thinking about what we need to do on a daily basis to show up in our businesses and in our families with our sort of our most whole selves and guilt doesn’t serve that. And self-care does.
  • Can you tell everybody where we can find you?

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