Mother Load | Live Coaching Session #Perspectives podcast with Sharon Pearson

As a corporate recruiter for some of Sydney's top businesses, Sasha Dumaresq was a master of dealing daily with pressure, pace and people. But when the birth of her third daughter made her a mum to three kids under four years, she found herself unhappy with some aspects of her own most important role.

Motherhood.

Wrangling her unpredictable little posse and surrendering the order of her work life, Sasha sank into post natal depression. "I had no connection really to my emotions—I was over functioning, controlling, very controlled,” she says. “If someone asked how I was doing, I’d say, ‘perfectly fine’."

Her need to present a capable, perfect, I've Got This front to the world affected Sasha's relationship with her firstborn, who is now nine. (Her other girls are almost 8 and 5.)

"I shut my eldest down," she admits without hesitation. "I didn’t allow her emotions to be okay because I didn’t know emotions were okay."

Now, years on, Sasha says she is still carrying a mother load of guilt: "I really feel as though I didn’t allow her to be who she is. I feel as though there is so much more I could have done that I didn’t, and so much that I did that I probably shouldn’t have.

"Any time she's not okay, I'm not okay ‘cos I take full responsibility for how she is in the world.”

After trying other ways over time to resolve her heavy feelings and problems around mother guilt, Sasha—who started studying at The Coaching Institute in 2016 and is now a mindset and career transformation coach with her own business—volunteered to be coached one-on-one by me in what is a #Perspectives first.

So this Mother Load episode works two ways: you get to hear one woman's story of what is a far too common affliction for women, and see how a professional coaching session works.

Here's why I think it's important: you can see that coaching doesn't require fancy linguistic acrobatics. I was able to help Sasha unpack her own thinking by asking some simple foundational questions, and allowing her the space to find answers within herself that were already there, that she just hadn't accessed before.

Being willing to go public with your private stuff is never easy, especially when it's magnified by a worldwide audience. So I was grateful to Sasha for her openness and how she whole heartedly embraced what we uncovered together.

I won't give too much away because it's a fascinating episode to watch, but the outcome of the session was it's really easy as a parent to internalise and blame ourselves for creating the dysfunction in our children.