What’s a challenge you overcame?

Amy | Tauranga

The pressure of raising children and running small businesses at the same time as a global pandemic gave Amy fresh clarity on how she wants to live her life.

“At the time I never took maternity leave so now that’s something that I want to prioritise – spending time with the children because they’re small for such a short period of time.

I think the last few years have been pretty tough. We’ve been in small business, Covid, bringing young children into the mix. I mean I actually felt like the child part was the easy part because it was the business and financial pressure and that kind of thing that was the really challenging stuff.

So I’ve really thought about how I want to live my life. I can be someone who gets a bit caught up in what everyone else is doing and look at what other people are doing. So, not to be cliche, but I have tried to live a lot more authentically.

I’m just so much happier and relaxed having stepped out of that real hustle. I now have the patience to sit with the kids at every dinner time rather than trying to do meal prep for the next day or unloading the dishwasher. We can sit down and have a chat about how our day was or sit down and play Lego for half an hour.

And really listening to what they say. Going up to their room when they should be in bed and they’re trashing their room and playing doctors. And sitting there for five minutes in the doorway, actually listening to what they say, because it’s pretty scary that they’re not going to be like that forever.”