Turning childlessness into a home working business

A truly inspiring guest post today from Lesley Pyne.

Lesley overcame a painful personal challenge and made it into a home working business that helps others.

Hello, I’m Lesley Pyne, I’m childless and I support childless women to heal and to live a life they love.

It’s taken me over ten years and some hard work to be able to say that openly.

How I turned my struggles into a home working business and force for good.

What’s it like to be childless?
If you have children or you didn’t want them, you may not realise just how hard it is for those of us who wanted children and didn’t succeed to be open about who we are.

You may not realise how debilitating it is to go through (in)fertility treatment, and the stigma and shame that women feel when we can’t do that one thing that’s expected of us. So here’s a taster of what it’s like to be childless.

It’s isolating and makes you feel alone especially when all your friends are having children and that’s all they talk about.

It’s hard to find new childless friends.

It’s like grieving and like any grief it takes time to heal. For some that time is relatively short, for others it’s long and ongoing.

The grief, sadness and shame are hard to shake off, they feel like they’ll always be there, and they come and go.

As a result of the shame and stigmas many childless women hide their story and who they really are. This quote from Dr Brené Brown sums it up well; ‘Owning our story is hard but not as hard as spending the rest of our lives running from it.’

How I stopped running
I spent almost ten years running from my story and hiding the real me and honestly, it was excruciating. I wished and hoped that the feelings would go away, but they didn’t. It was only when I started learning NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming) that I learned techniques which healed my grief and enabled me to build the life I wanted.

Something was still missing though. I had given up my job and, like many childless women I struggled to find my purpose. I wanted to make a difference in the world, but I wasn’t sure how.

For what seemed to be a good reason at the time, I set up a home working business to coach midlife women. The trouble was it wasn’t really me.

Then I took control of my story
After a while I realised that the authentic me would support childless women but didn’t have the courage to do so, because it would mean telling my story and that seemed much too scary.

At the start of 2013 I was really stuck. I decided to work with a small business coach and after a few months I was ready to launch my authentic, childless self to the world in support of childless women.

She helped me to understand who I could help and to understand their pain. I know how I can help them in a unique way and I can articulate that clearly.

And most importantly, the work we did enabled me to be very happy to tell my story.

What I have learned
I’ve learned so many things over the last few years and these four apply equally to coming to terms with my childlessness and setting up a home working business:

1. Being childless and having a business can feel isolating and lonely so find others who are in the same position and grow together.

2. Even if you know your destination you need a guide, someone who’s travelled the path before, who can help you to imagine your future and to navigate towards it.

3. There is no magic cure. In order to have and be what you want, be it a positive life or a new business, you have to put in some effort, and most importantly you have to do something different. Others can help you, but the buck stops with you.

4. It takes time and the path will be rocky. Having a positive mindset and learning from the things that don’t work will help you to keep moving in the right direction.

And most of all I have learned from my own experience and that of the women I’ve worked with that when someone’s light shines from within it is beautiful and it gives others permission to do the same.

Lesley Pyne supports childless women to heal and to create a life they love. She went through ‘too many’ unsuccessful cycles of IVF and uses her first-hand experience and professional skills in NLP and time line techniques to help other childless women.