Entrepreneurship as an act of radical self-care

Tara Hunkin: 00:03 This is the My Child Will Thrive Podcast and I'm your host, Tara Hunkin, nutritional therapy practitioner, certified gaps practitioner, restorative wellness practitioner and mother. I'm thrilled to share with you the latest information, tips, resources, and tools to help you on the path to recovery for your child with ADHD, autism, sensory processing disorder, or learning disabilities. My own experiences with my daughter combined with as much training as I can get my hands on research I can dig into and conferences I can attend have helped me to develop systems and tools for parents like you who feel overwhelmed trying to help their children. So sit back as I share another great topic to help you on your journey.

Tara Hunkin: 00:46 A quick disclaimer before we get started, My Child Will Thrive, is not a substitute for working with a qualified healthcare practitioner. The information provided on this podcast is not intended to diagnose or treat your child. Please consult your healthcare practitioner before implementing any information or treatments that you have learned about on this podcast. There are many gifted, passionate, and knowledgeable practitioners with hundreds if not thousands of hours of study and clinical experience available to help guide you. Part of our goal is to give you the knowledge and tools you need to effectively advocate for your child so that you don't blindly implement each new treatment that comes along. No one knows your child better than you. No one knows your child's history like you do or can better judge what is normal or abnormal for your child. The greatest success in recovery comes from the parent being informed and asking the right questions and making the best decisions for their child in coordination with a team of qualified practitioners in different areas of specialty. Now on with the show,

Tara Hunkin: 01:54 Hi, I want to welcome everybody back to the, My Child Will Thrive podcast and video show on YouTube and I want to welcome today my guest Faith Clark. How are you today? Faith. Hey Tara. Good, good. So before we get started, I want to tell you a little bit about Faith, and why I was thought it would be amazing to have her here with us today. So what we're gonna talk about today is entrepreneurship as an act of radical self care. And that's something that actually faith came up with. So I can't wait to dive into that. But before I do that, let me tell you a little bit about Faith. Faith is an intuitive strategist and a new venture specialist. An author and an academic nerd, a design thinker, and an Outlander junkie.

Faith Clarke: 02:47 She helps disruptive, eclectic businesses, infuse their core DNA into their team so that they can catalyze social change from the inside out. She especially loves to do with special needs family run businesses who create space for people with special needs. Faith is also the author of Parenting Like A Ninja, an autism Mom's guide to professional productivity, which is an Amazon bestseller and reflects her own journey with the crazy chaos as special needs parenting and the need to harness energy and be protective. She believes entrepreneurship is a perfect mental and psychological health choice for many special needs parents and offers the opportunity to do business differently while creating more of what our communities need. She's also the host of disrupt and lead a podcast showcasing courageous entrepreneurs with complex family lives who navigate daily chaos and create more of the change in the world they want to see.

Tara Hunkin: 03:45 And she's also currently helping her two younger children, Simonne and Zachary. Simonne's 18 and Zachary's 15 with their first project, which is called Inspiraction. It's a creative art company that offers illustrations and stories in art that inspire. And in addition, her son Jayden, who is 20 with nonverbal autism, wants to write a book about his experience with anxiety. So you have your hands full, but yet you do it with a smile on your face. Every time I talk to you, I get I feel more relaxed in general. So you inspire that another. So that's why I think today's conversation that we're going to have is so perfect. And as I said to you before we got started typically, and you also said too, typically when we talk about entrepreneurship, we are talking about how stressful it is, how difficult it is to start a business.

Tara Hunkin: 04:49 It's all about the challenges around it. Now. Also the flexibility that it tends to give us in our lives. But then a lot of entrepreneurs say it's not nearly as flexible as they thought they would be, which is why I think your perspective on this as one, so unique and so exciting because I do think entrepreneurship is really a great well great thing in general, but, but also at it, it tends to help a lot of parents that want some flexibility around their lives. So let's dig in and figure out how you came up with this perspective on her entrepreneurship and, and your journey with your son and, and your businesses.

Faith Clarke: 05:29 So it's interesting, right, because I think every time we think Self care, we think, you know mani petty and a massage, which I really need a pedicure.

Faith Clarke: 05:42 I haven't had one in years. So I think we think in these kinds of really specific ways. And, but I think for me, two own, the fact, that self , that's Faith care was the only way to care for Jayden, my son with autism. And then, you know, as an expansion of that just, it was the only way to parent then it took me kind of having no Faith care to recognize what was happening for me. And so I think, you know, anybody who has a child with chronic illness, you tend to be really outward facing. I mean, I was, I have been and still am on a constant 24/7 kind of high vigilance parenting relationship with him. I sleep with my ears open. No, because if there's anyone who could, Mmm. Disarm the autism proofing of our home, it's Jaden.

Faith Clarke: 06:38 And so I'm thinking, you know, did he get the window open at two in the morning? And so there's a lots of this kind of constant monitoring of the environment and perhaps not equivalent monitoring of my internal world. And the results of that was just, you know, sleeplessness and all of the good stuff. Sadness and anxiety and anxiety about Jaden, but exactly that became more generalized and anxiety that was about monitoring the safety of the family and the kids and, and I call what their lives are going to be on so on and so mixed in with that. I was not, I'd stopped working and I was happy to stop working. I really didn't care both working for others. After I got Jayden's diagnosis, but I realized that over time I, all of my sources of energy, were gone. And it took some time for me to realize that I really loved, like, I love talking to people informally and long deep dives over coffee and stuff like that.

Faith Clarke: 07:39 And I love it. Teaching, I love presenting, I love facilitating learning experiences and I love the feeling I get afterwards. It's like a euphoric high. I had systematically removed all those things from my life and there