~ It is hard work! No one tells you how hard motherhood really is. You will want to quit. You won’t want to admit it, but there will be times when being a mom seems so out of your wheelhouse that you will want to run. Don’t. Stay the course. Let that tenacity guide you in all other areas of your life. Motherhood is empowering!

~ You learn on the job. Children don’t come with guidebooks or how-to-do’s. You will never learn on the job more than in your journey as a mother. If you can navigate the baby and the teen years you can do just about anything! So, what can you learn? What can you conquer with the tool set you now have amassed?

~ You are never too old to “want your mommy!” Seriously! For most of us, our mothers represent home, heart, security, and acceptance. Who doesn’t want that? Take all those traditions, recipes, and celebrations from previous generations and pay them forward with your own children and with your own interpretation.

~  Leadership begins with motherhood. Our own mothers who organized, planned, orchestrated and created everything in our early lives taught us how to multi-task, negotiate, manage, delegate and ultimately lead. As parents, we in turn do the same. We are the first view of courage and leadership that our children experience. Powerful! If you can lead a play date and navigate the mommy world you can run any business.

~ A mother’s love cannot be expressed in words.The bond is eternal. We don’t get to pick our moms. We only get one of them and two if we are lucky in our marriages, or if we have a step-mom, we get a bonus.  As moms we are doers and nurturers and our actions speak long before and decades after our words ever do. Your love and your energy enter the room before you do. Use that in every encounter you have.

~ A mother is both a teacher and a student. We guide our children's development, choices and core values. Somewhere in the process, they too will enrich, enlighten, and ultimately teach us as well. Be open to receive. Where can you be curious? How can you be more playful? What can you learn?

~ Worth, value, and wealth are not always measured with money. There is no monetary reward for parenting and being a mom. It is the hardest job with the least traditional pay. Instead you earn love, respect, happiness, personal growth, and legacy. When taking a look at your professional life, how are you measuring your worth, your value, and your wealth? Is it only through your paycheck or your title? What else are you gaining? Success is measured and defined in many ways. When you look at your whole life through that lens, is the overall picture different?

~ There is no Band-Aid box big enough to fix everything! When our children are small we tend to swoop in to protect them from harm yet as they age, we need to be able to transfer those skills back to them.They need to show up for themselves in good times and in bad.

For parents of teenagers and beyond…imagine this: You are at the checkout counter at the drugstore and you are buying a box of Band-Aids. The cashier informs you that you can no longer buy Band-Aids. They cannot sell them to you any longer. If you want them, your kids will need to show up and purchase them for themselves! Why? In order to fix things throughout their lives, they need to understand that not everything goes as planned, or works out, or can be fixed. Use this visual next time you feel the need to “make it all better so that they will not have any adversity.” You will never look at a box of Band-Aids the same way again!

~Seek out the middle page. We live one life with many different chapters. Yet as humans, we power through the beginning of our story and then often fast forward to the end of the book. Seek out the middle. The middle is today. Today is the thing you have the most control over. Tomorrow is unknown and yesterday is gone. Today is tomorrow's memory, today is the time to spend with your children, and today is the first day of anything new you will do. The middle page grounds you in the moment. This is your spot. Begin. Create. Do. Be.

~ Create legacy now! May is the ideal month to access if the choices you are making in regard to your personal and business persona are in sync. We think of legacy as something that we leave behind after we are gone, yet it is so much more than that. Our legacy is something that we have the choice and the power to commit to TODAY! What do you want your legacy to be? Are the things you are doing and saying right now taking you closer to or further away from the results that you seek? What is the message you want to impart to your children?