The Topline: Prioritizing Self-Care

In this episode of the Topline, we welcome entrepreneur Tauna Batiste who is starting two new businesses while raising two young boys, and doing homeshcool for her first-grader. Throughout it all, Tauna reminds us about finding a balance and prioritizing self care.

What is your scenario like right now with work and family?

Tauna: I am a budding entrepreneur. I'm launching a few brands this week, so it's been a crazy week for me. I am the wife of Tremaine and I have two boys, Andrew and Alex who are one and six. We are all currently at home in the same house hanging out and we have been since March. At my previous role, I traveled quite a bit, so it was a big switch to staying home. 

We decided to full-time homeschool Alex. It was a better solution for us. He's in first grade, so there's a lot of flexibility and I was homeschooled as a child, so I knew what to expect. There are a ton of resources out there, and it's really working out. I asked him the other day, “How do you feel about homeschool? Do you miss going to school?” And he said, “I don't like COVID, but I like homeschool and I want to stay in homeschool.” It's a good plan since we're going to be here for a while.

We now share a space for class and an office. I get one corner, he gets the rest of the room. It’s going better than I had hoped. We've been able to find some joy in just exploring our world, and he's a great age where they're just learning so much. We’ve been following his lead and learning about different things. We’re doing a unit on weather and he's very excited about hurricanes. I've loved watching him learn. That's been a hidden gem in all of this crazy.

How does that work? Are you building lesson plans each week or is your husband leading the homeschooling?

Tauna: My husband and I co-teach. I have a background in youth programming, so I developed some curriculum. Every couple of weeks, we do a new unit and we tie everything into that. I teach on Mondays and Thursdays and he teaches on Tuesdays and Fridays. We take Wednesdays off to regroup. Now that I'm getting busier with work, I am going to be hiring a homeschooling coach who will help me. I'll still come up with some of the ideas, but she'll take care of putting together all the resources and things for me. 

I don't have an eight-to-five schedule, but I never really had one. When I traveled, I traveled with my son. I was a nursing mom and about half of the trips, Andrew came with me. Sometimes my husband or a nanny would come along with my older son. We made it work. We could have had this whole conversation pre-COVID and it was still figuring out how to work and be a parent, but in a very different way for me.

I would need to take a break from meetings to go pump or visit a kid. I've had my family all get sick on the road. I've had that happen a couple times. It was a lot of going back and forth from meetings to the hotel to check on my family. All while trying not to get sick. So I have learned lots of tips and tricks.

I love Shipt. The greatest thing that I tell people that COVID that has done for parents is the expansion of delivery service and pickup service. We have needed this all this time. In our local area, we haven't had it in the way that it is now. I save so much time. Order it online, have it delivered or pick it up, and keep it moving. For parenting, that has really made life a lot easier to balance. I'm all about the delegating.

Lots of the services are free. Go use them! I started using Shipt when it first came to our market. I was singing its praises all around and. That was when I was pregnant and didn’t have the desire to walk through a store. I was pregnant over the wintertime, so it was perfect. Then Target started drive-up, and Kroger and Walmart. If they do charge, the charge is low. It's worth the time. Think about how much you could get done in that hour that you're not walking around the grocery store. 

The other thing I’ve started using is laundry service which has changed my life. They pick up dirty laundry and deliver it clean, folded, and ready to be put into the drawer. It is amazing. I can do my own laundry, sure. But I have children who go through multiple outfits a day, so it piles up, even though we're at home. Then I'm frustrated because it's in the way or I don't have time to get to it. So finally, I decided to delegate, just like I tell my businesses to do, and it changed my life. 

My next thing up is I want to hire a cleaning service because I don't have time. There's no reason for me to beat myself up when it needs to be done.

I really want to do things that are going to have an impact. My sons are not going to come back later and say, “we wish you would've done more laundry.” They're going to say, “we love that time that we went out and played in the rain and jumped in the puddles.”

Some of it is those non tangibles. The mood. We’ve got to stop beating ourselves up because that mood transcends. There's nowhere else to go right now to have quality time. When you're so worried, the time becomes not quality if it’s in the back of your mind that you didn’t get the laundry done.

How has being a mom affected your career so far?

Tauna: Before I started this journey, I knew I wanted it to be woven in this way. I had to be deliberate in the roles that I've taken. I follow those same rules of when you're interviewing. You leave personal life out of it because I want to see how and what a company believes about family going into it. There've been companies that have been a turnoff because they're not family-focused and they don't recognize the value of that. I've left places for that purpose.

My nonprofit life is service and a lot of times…it goes deep into the evenings and it takes weekend time and that's time that belongs to my family. And I'm very cognizant of restoring them, what is due to them because they make a lot of sacrifices for us that way. If an organization doesn't support or celebrate that, we're not going to have a long relationship.

Someone said to me when I got married that jobs will come and go. Your family is who you want to be there at the end, and you have to make the investment. You have to make the priority.

It has looked different at every organization. It's always been setting boundaries and allowing my work family to get to know my family because I think it's a lot easier when they have a name. There are certain things I know wouldn't work for me just because they don't have the flexibility and family comes first.

What do you feel like you need around you to be your most creative self? Do you have those conditions in your life right now?

Tauna: First and foremost, the amazing partner that I have. Knowing when I do have a late night that someone's got it. I don't have to worry about if the kids are getting fed or being snuggled. Knowing that they're covered makes it so that I can go out and raise millions and speak to with that attitude that I'm not stressed. 

The other thing is that I need to be doing work that matters. I've been very strategic and making sure that the work that I do matters, and it makes me be creative. It gives me ideas and I get giddy and excited about helping others. I need a good challenge, too. If everything's status quo, I am going to be bored out my gourds. I need a problem to solve, and that brings me alive. So those are, those are things that support my creativity these days.

Is there something that you and your family have started to do, that's becoming a new tradition for you now that you're home and you're together so much?

Tauna: We have started Friday movie nights and that's a big thing. We started with projecting them on the wall and it rotates who gets to select the movies. We have been way more scheduled now. Giving the kids that consistency has been helpful to us. We're at a place where lots of things are happening developmentally.

We're just trying to make sure that he's getting enough rest, but that he knows what to expect. With so much uncertainty, routine helps us all. Also, allowing ourselves freedom to say, “I don't have the time to do that.” I know we're at home all the time, but I literally don't have the time to do that, and that’s okay. 

Something that my husband and I just started this month is that we are allowing each other to take a reprieve every quarter. We had not been away from our children. We've been very careful not to put our kids at risk or parents at risk. That means that we have been with our children 24 hours a day for a very long time. 

What we've done is we book a modest hotel for us. I was gone for three days and two nights. The next week he was gone for three days and two nights just to give ourselves a chance to have quiet, to reset and just have some space. And that was amazing. I cannot recommend it more. I think that finding ways to find your quiet is important.

With the weather cold now, my walks are going to be shorter. Where, where am I going to find that time? So I'm still working on it. I’ll admit that I don't have a full on answer for that. Sometimes I just linger when I go to pick up my target order or I take the long way to get it. Self-care is definitely different. 

Self-care is so crucial because this isn't probably ending anytime soon. Tell me your thoughts on the length of this and the prediction.

Tauna: I come from working in rare disease for the last five or six years. Most recently I worked with a population that was very vulnerable as a condition that is terminal for those that have it. Going into this, I was there and I'm very protective of those folks.

You start to consider how are we going to prepare our families for a pandemic that was not on the job description? We started to consider all of the things that go into it. For me, it was looking at how people are responding, our varied commitment to it, roll out of it, standards of it. It's going to take a while in this.

A lot of people came in and thought, Oh, we could get through it fast and we'll be through it by summertime. Not necessarily. The process for developing drugs is lengthy. Science takes time. It has a process. A lot of people don't understand about clinical trial, that there's three phases that they have to check. One first is safety. Is it safe to give to people? The second phase is to see if it actually works. Do we have the dosing right? Is it having an effect?

The third phase is a longer-term extension of the second phase. Is it working right if we switch these things? If we have more people? All of that takes time. You don't want to show efficacy just for a week. You need to show it over a course of time. The challenge is that this disease keeps mutating.

You have a lot of people trying to figure out how do you cover the key points, key components, key areas for it, but they also have to understand the disease first to do that. So there's just a lot of science that goes into it. That helped me inform my folks. It's gonna be awhile for the most vulnerable in our communities.

If you had to put sort of one idea on a T-shirt for working moms, what would it say?

Tauna: “Give yourself grace.” “You're doing a great job.” I tell my friends that all the time. Did you keep them alive today? Great. Then you did a great job. When it comes down to it, they are fed. They have a safe place to be. You're doing a great job.

We're all grieving at the same time and grief is not rational and it kind of ebbs and flows. It can bring anxiety and it can bring anger and can bring frustration but give yourself some grace. You didn’t have a good morning? You could try to have a good afternoon. You didn’t have a good day? Try it tomorrow. It's not been a great week? Try again next week.

We have to give ourselves the room to be human, to be vulnerable, to make mistakes and to apologize, pick ourselves up and try again the next time.