Why Your Pre-Kid Pace Stopped Working
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Ambition after kids doesn’t disappear. It runs straight into your new life, over and over, creating collisions of all sizes. In this first episode, I walk you through what I call a “collision point”, why they happen, and how to start spotting your own.
If the pace you had before kids isn’t working anymore, nothing is wrong with you. Your life just wasn’t rebuilt to match who you’ve become.
Listen in as I share why high achievers don’t see these collisions coming, the quiet collisions in logistics, identity, and ambition that most of us just absorb, my own story – how I went from COO at a growing company to experiencing two major collisions that changed how I worked, and why I treat this as an infrastructure problem and not a willpower problem.
It’s time for you to notice the collisions in your own life. The time of day that always falls apart, the decision that always lands on your plate, or the handoff that always breaks. You don’t have to fix it yet, just start noticing.
If you’re a mom and a highly ambitious woman, experiencing your own collisions in life or building a business of your own after stepping into motherhood, this is for you.
I started The Collision Point because I spent way too long thinking something was wrong with me after having my daughter. Truth is, nothing was wrong with me. Nothing about my life had been rebuilt to match who I’d become after I became a mom. I kept experiencing “collisions” in my life, and not all of them I recognized right away, but once I finally realized why they were happening, I stopped running my life like the version I was before I had a child. This is my hope for you, to be able to name collisions you may be experiencing in your own life, understand what they actually look like, and to give you tools to help you walk through them as they are happening. Collisions don’t ever fully go away, but they can happen less and you can actually see them coming. So let’s define what a collision is.
What is a collision?
A collision is what happens when ambition doesn’t pause for motherhood. You’re still ambitious. You still have big goals, in your career or in your own business, and those goals don’t stop just because you had a kid. They run straight into your new life, over and over, in big and little ways.
Most of the time you don’t realize it’s a collision until you’re deep in one, or until it’s long behind you. That’s how I found mine: I’d already muscled through them without stopping to understand what was happening structurally or how to change it.
Why it happens
It’s not because you’re doing anything wrong. The pace that worked before kids doesn’t work anymore, and nobody helps you rebuild your life to match the version of you that exists now. You’re still expected to hit the same speed and the same benchmarks, but you’ve added a second full-time job underneath all of it. We never sat down and renegotiated what we were carrying. We just added to the pile, and often beat ourselves up if we slip in either area.
High achievers have it the hardest. The “you just get it done” superpower we’ve been validated for our whole careers, becomes our biggest downfall in motherhood. In some cases, it is about capacity, but it also goes way deeper than that. It’s about identity. You’re a different person now, and you can’t operate the same way.
What collisions look like
Most aren’t dramatic. They’re quiet and common, which is exactly why they’re so easy to leave unfixed.
Logistical: School pickup lands on the client call you can’t move. It’s 9pm and you realize you never signed the field trip form. You’re the only one who knows the pickup schedule, picture day, and where the extra key is. We think of our businesses as having operations, but we’re also carrying an entire household’s operations in our heads at the same time.
Identity: The guilt of wanting one night to yourself. Resenting how easy your partner’s calendar looks next to yours. We tend to treat these as the “soft” stuff, and I’ll be talking about them a lot this season.
Ambition: Saying no to the thing you’d have jumped at before kids, then spiraling about whether everyone thinks you’re less committed now.
And under all of it, every decision at home and at work runs through you. You make decisions all day, then walk in the door to “what’s for dinner?” and “where’s that school form?” If any of this sounds familiar, you already know what a collision feels like, even if yours never got loud enough to stop you.
My first collision
My daughter was born in November 2019. I went back to work three months postpartum, the same week COVID shut everything down, with a NICU baby at home and my anxiety already in overdrive. Before she turned six months old, I was promoted to COO at a small tech consultancy. I helped grow the company from $3 million to over $5 million and from 7 employees to 28. It was an amazing opportunity, and I kept turning the pressure up.
This was everything I’d wanted: the baby, the big job, the big salary. Around age two, a little voice started saying I want something different. I ignored it because I didn’t know the next step, and because on paper I had it all.
After her second birthday party, I had a full breakdown. My husband helped me find a therapist who changed my life, and she helped me understand that I was a different person after having my baby. I had no language for it then, but that was collision number one.
My second collision
I started Hive Ambition, now Ambire Collective, mostly because I needed it. I still had big goals, and I wanted to be around other ambitious women. Within a year, the membership grew past 100, I’d run a $20k cohort, and I’d picked up five 1:1 clients I wasn’t even looking for. I kept adding and never took anything off, all with a toddler who still wasn’t sleeping.
This one was harder to spot because I was so on fire about what I was building. Then the hives started: swollen lips, eyes swollen shut, my whole face, then my body. I made many ER trips and went through steroids and specialists, and nobody could figure it out. Finally, a doctor pointed out that I wasn’t acknowledging how much stress I was under. My immediate response was that I was fine and that I loved everything I was doing. What she said to me in response really stuck with me. She said, even if you love all the things you’re doing, it can still be stressful.
That’s when I finally listened. I went part time with my corporate job, then eventually left to go all in on Hive Ambition and my 1:1 work.
Notice what both collisions have in common: I loved almost everything I was doing. I wasn’t doing the wrong things but I was piling all the right things onto a life that was never rebuilt to hold them.
Infrastructure, not willpower
I tried to build my business with everything I’d learned as a COO, and none of it worked like it was supposed to. Those strategies were never built for women, and definitely not for moms.
So I started thinking in terms of infrastructure instead of willpower, the same way I would on an executive team, just built for who I am now. I brought on a co-founder in year two because I needed to take my own advice about getting support. And after two years of working one-to-one with clients, I kept seeing the same thing: they weren’t bad at their jobs, they were building one system for business and a separate one for life, and those were never actually separate. I started calling those breaking points collision points, which became The Collision Map that this show is built around.
What’s coming this season
Over the next twelve weeks, some episodes will be me working through a collision in real time, before I’ve figured it out. Others will feature women further into their own version of this, sharing their own collision points and how they make ambition and motherhood work. I’ll talk about the hard stuff, and I’ll never pretend it’s as easy as color-coding your calendar.
If this episode felt like somebody finally said the thing out loud, follow the show so you don’t miss the next one, and send it to the friend who needs to hear it.
Quote of the Episode
“It wasn’t that I was doing the wrong things, it was that I kept piling all the right things onto a life that was never rebuilt to hold them.”
Ashley Sterken
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