Renegade Motherhood with Jen Morris

Jen Morris has been birthing ideas, raising businesses, and blazing trails for nearly two decades. As the founder of Renegade Motherhood, she is committed to elevating, amplifying,​ and connecting moms in business. 

Today, Garrett and Jen discuss the transition into motherhood and what it's like when you're career driven and business-focused.

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Q: Who are you before labels, titles, or what someone could Google about you?

A: This has to be one of the hardest questions I think I've been asked on a podcast so far. So, I am a deeply creative, constant generator of ideas, rooted in community connector. I would say those are things that would probably not come up in an official bio. Ideas have always been at the core of who I am.

Q: Do you feel like you were able to lean into that as a kid? How were you as a kid?

A: I was the kid that was always in some sort of my mom's old dance costumes putting on a show for whoever would watch—that was at home, at school—until about eighth grade. In high school, I was very shy. I had a lot of allergies and environmental allergies that made me pretty sick as a kid for quite a long time. This was in the 80s and early 90s when allergy was not really a thing. It's wild how much that has shifted. So, I think always feeling crappy left me a little more of an introvert at school. But then, with my people, it was always, “Let's put on a show. Let's do a commercial. Let's do a Saturday Night Live style sketch.”

In high school, I was trying to find my thing. I love to sing and perform, so I auditioned for the first fall play. The theater teacher was new and he took a chance on a freshman and cast me in a supporting role. That was it. I never looked back and I spent four years in high school doing all the shows. I often would create my own opportunities to write. I was editor of the newspaper. So, high school was a time that I was still socially awkward. But, if you gave me a stage, it was no problem. That's been a throughline for me ever since.

Q: Talk to us about that experience of being on stage.

A: I've gone through so many different cycles with it. In high school, I was just playing. It was fun. The audience was always going to be supportive. My theater director and teacher had a great group of kids who really wanted to do a lot of theater, and he just gave us tons of opportunities to do that. We were very fortunate.

Then, I went to college and ended up double majoring in musical theater and public communication and public relations. Then it gets to be academic. So, you start learning the technique, and then you get in your head about it. So, it was this disconnect.

Then, pursuing it professionally out of college, it was a constant internal conflict. Some roles would just feel good. I could just settle into them. Some roles, I was constantly outwardly looking in and being a critic. I'm not a super strong dancer, so that never felt accessible and easy for me.

When you are pursuing it professionally, it just takes on a whole different level of importance that you place upon it. When you put importance on something, it's the first thing that can get you to disconnect from your body because this stress response comes in and you start getting rejected all the time. It's really been a struggle.

Some of the best advice I ever got is a director and a friend of mine told me once, “Wear the damn jeans.” The back story is that he was someone I'd worked with a couple of times before, and he had given me some great opportunities. He was casting a show for a regional theater. It was a show where there was a partner there for me, and it wasn't a big dance show. So, I was really excited. It was comedy and music. That's totally me. He knows me. So, instead of being like. “Ray knows what I can do. Just go in. Be yourself. Do it,” I still got into my head. I thought I needed to be like all the other musical theater actresses in New York City circa 2007.

So, I remember going to Gap down the street from wherever I was living at the time and being like, “I need a dress.” I found this dress that didn't even look very good on me. But it was what they probably would think this person would wear. I get this dress. I sing a song that wasn't really good. It just didn't feel good. It's like if you have an interview for a job or something or a date—if you're not an actor listening to this—you have a bad day or a bad interview. It just feels not good. That's the feeling I had in the moment in real time. But I still was like, “Well, maybe he'll give me a callback because he knows me and he knows what I can do.”

He didn't. He called me and said, “I just want to let you know personally, I'm not calling you back. I was like, “Well, I appreciate the personal touch.” Because that's rare. You rarely get that. And he goes, “Can I tell you why? Can I give you some advice?” He said, “Jen, you just looked like you were having an out-of-body experience. I could tell you weren't comfortable in the dress. You weren't comfortable with the song. Wear the damn jeans. You look great in a pair of jeans and heels.”

Like, it's okay to do the thing that everyone else is not doing. This was almost 20 years ago and I still remember it very well. It’s this idea of being you and being your own brand, even if it's not necessarily what you think someone is looking for. I find that just is so important in anything, whether it is acting or having a business. It's so easy to get caught up in what everyone else is telling you you need to do to be successful and to forget about how you embody that for yourself. When you're yourself, you're just more confident.

Confidence takes a lot of cultivating, but I think it's more fun when you're just doing your thing and being yourself. It can feel sticky sometimes. I still struggle with it, but at least it's like I'm doing it in my own way, in my own body, in my own words, instead of spending all my time and energy trying to read from someone else's script.

Q: Did you always want to be a mom or is that a decision that came later in life?

A: I'm sure as a kid I probably played with baby dolls, but I don't remember being like, “Oh, I definitely want kids.” But, I also was never like, “I don't want kids.” I think it was like, “I hope that I would meet a person that I wanted to procreate with.” And, it was a little bit later for me. I was pregnant with my first and went in for my first appointment and saw the thing where they said geriatric pregnancy. I think I just turned 35. I was like, “Are you kidding me with this?” My husband is several years older than me too, so I feel like when I met my husband, when we got married, I was like, “Yes, I do want to try. I hope that we are fortunate enough that we can.”

Q: What was becoming a mother like for you?

A: It definitely was and it still is a wild journey that nothing can ever prepare you for. I actually used to do a lot of work in wellness and nutrition and some postpartum. I would talk a lot about the literal things that change when you have children via pregnancy and postpartum. But, even if you haven't given birth, some of this stuff still happens. Your brain changes. Your gut microbiome changes, which plays a huge role in communication with your brain and all the systems in your body. No one is talking about this. We talk about all the things having to do with birth, which is important, but that's just the very tip of the iceberg when it comes to all of it.

So, I think a big shift for me that happened was I was very much into my entrepreneurial journey. I started when I was in my early- to mid-20s. So, I had a solid ten years of building a business before I had my first. So, that was a big shift, because I was very used to my time being my own. I am not someone that is a scheduled person. I am kind of a hot mess.

It's funny because when I was acting in New York, I nannied a lot. So, I had a lot of experience with other people's children, which is maybe why I was like, “Yeah, I'll do this, but not now.” Because I was pretty aware of how much work and, oftentimes, just how boring it is too. So, kids had always been a big part of my life. But, I remember with my first who is now seven-and-a-half that being such a big thing.

Feeding was hard at first, and then just the level of sleep deprivation that I just don't think you can ever fully be prepared for unless you're a nurse or a first responder who is used to shift work. I did struggle with that piece. Then, I think it shifts your relationships too. My husband and I definitely went through that. You don't know until you're in it. There are definitely some really hard moments.

I found out I was pregnant with my second December 2019. We had just moved to a new town about 30 minutes north of where we were before. Then, COVID hit. So, that was very strange, because my husband couldn't be part of anything. He went to the first eight-week appointment and then he couldn't go to anything else. He was able to be at the birth, thank God. But, that was just a weird time.

I think because I'm an extrovert for the most part and I need to be out with people and just sitting in a coffee shop to work, that was hard. It took a long time for me to shift out of that. So, I think has my journey been harder than others? Easier than others? I don't know. That's relative. But, I do wish there was more stuff that was talked about.

We go into all these Facebook groups and we're asking for people's opinions, total strangers’ opinions. Sometimes, that can be helpful. But I think oftentimes, it just breeds this insecurity that we're already feeling and makes us not trust ourselves.

Q: I'd love to know more about how you decided to come up with Renegade Motherhood.

A: So, I'd had a couple different businesses—affiliate marketing, network marketing, health coaching—and had a group clean eating program I ran in New York City. That was awesome and a lot of fun. So, I have built a lot of businesses and I’m really happy for that because I think it's shown me you can make a lot of money in a lot of different businesses, and I did. But, you have to find something you really love, and it's okay that it changes.

I'm a manifester, so I’m meant to start things, start a movement, and then move on to the next thing or develop and train other people to do it. So, looking back, even though human design is still kind of newer to me in the last five years, when I found it, I was like, “Oh my God, this is wild. How spot on this is?!” So, I had several different businesses. I like doing lots of different things. Pre-kids, I could do that. I could have all these different businesses, and networking groups were always a big piece of it.

So, I had just started my first business and I was in a show at the time. This woman was also in the show, and I was telling her about my business. She was like “I'm part of this networking group called BNI.” Many people have probably heard of or been to a meeting. It's Business Networking International. I never heard of it. She's like, “My boss is in a group and then he pays for me to go to this other group. If you want to come, check it out with me.” I was like, “Yeah, sure. When is it?” (Thinking she'd be like, 6:00 at night.). It was seven in the morning, which now, as a mom, is nothing, right? But then, I was like, “Oh my God, that sounds horrible.” But I was like, “Okay, I'm willing to go.”

So, I went and visited a group. I walk into this group and it's mostly dudes in suits and lawyers and insurance, but they were a friendly group. I was like, “This is an interesting opportunity, because me being relatively fresh and green to networking and business, I probably could learn some stuff from these people.” So, I ended up joining. It was a big investment for me. It was like one of my first biggest investments. Through that group, I really learned the power of consistency, showing up, getting to know people, building relationships, and the power of one person.

Somebody who was not even in my chapter—we would sub at chapters a lot together—we became friends. She sold high-end carpets and I was in nutrition, so there was not a lot of overlap. But, one day she was like, “Hey, this woman, Rebecca, is joining my group. I'm just about to leave, but you go—you're both health coaches. You should meet each other.” Instead of viewing her as competition, I was like, “Well, maybe there's some opportunities here.” Turns out she was looking for a product line. I had a product line I worked with. She joined me as an affiliate, and it's been quite literally almost one million dollars of referral over the last 13 years. It just taught me you have to have a network and you have to be out there telling people what it is you do, because you never know who someone's going to introduce you to.

Then, I had my first daughter and, all of a sudden, I was like, “This format doesn't work for me anymore. Being somewhere, having to look decent, awake in a room by 7 a.m. every week is no longer going to serve me.” It's a great organization. I was so grateful for the time I spent with BNI, but I had always noticed if there was a parent, oftentimes, it tended to be a father. It was a little bit harder for moms, especially with younger children getting them off to school.

So, after that, I ended up starting a networking group specifically for women in business. It was still very much we want to be in person. We sit at our computers long enough. This is meant to be an in-person thing. We were growing. It was scaling. Then, COVID hit and we didn't have a digital backup plan. We tried, but people just weren't in it. It ended up being an okay thing, because our own personal businesses were growing. So, we ended up letting that dissolve.

But, when I was coming out of my COVID fog around 2021, I found myself really wanting to get back out there with people. But, it was moms and business. It was very clear to me that I really wanted to connect with other moms in business, because we are not meant to do business alone and we are not meant to do motherhood or parenthood alone, full stop. So, I'm like, here is this group of people, many of whom are solopreneurs who are also parenting, and we're doing it all in this little bubble.

So, I started that. I posted in a local moms Facebook group two-and-a-half years ago, and some of us ended up getting together for coffee. We started coming back every month. But, even then, it was sort of this side thing. In the meantime, I got a postpartum nutrition certification. I was still very much in the nutrition world and, the whole time, I just felt this resistance.

Finally, I launched this whole other program in March. I was teaching my first workshop and it was this full body moment where I was like, “This is not it. I'm building the wrong business.” I literally ended that workshop and refunded the people who had joined the program. There were only a few of us. I immediately took down the sales page that I had spent months building. I took it all down and was like, “The other thing has been right here the whole time.” I just wasn't seeing it or I was having some fear around it.

But, when I really sat with it, I realized that what I still loved about running a business and being an entrepreneur, the thing that kept me in it was the connection. It was the actual building of the business. So, that was the true birth of Renegade Motherhood.

Talk about when you do start finally building something that you are in full alignment with—it just goes so much faster. It's just been absolutely wild to look back. I'm like, that was only March. How was that only March? I remember because it was spring break. It was end of March. It's just wild.

So, anyway, kind of a long story, but it's okay to change your mind. It's okay to evolve. If you're feeling a lot of resistance to something, listen to that because there's a reason for it. Whatever that reason is, there's a reason for it. If we just ignore it, we're going to stay stuck much longer, which I did for a long time.

Q: Talk to us about what you guys do.

A: There's a couple of ways that you can get involved. We do live events. Most of those are Colorado-based, but I'm actually going to Phoenix tomorrow at time of recording to kick off a Phoenix group with a friend of mine there who's a mom and a business owner. So that's exciting. A little out of my comfort zone. A lot of my family is in Phoenix. I didn't grow up there, but it's still new people.

The vision is really to, in 2025, start to identify some other locations to be able to organically grow more locations for the live piece, because that is the heart of who I am—is about meeting people in person. I do have the digital side of things called the Mother Mind Collective. There is a monthly or annual offering, and you can have access for free to the live events if they're near you.

We do digital networking once a month. I bring in guest expert speakers once a month to start talking about different pieces of business—PR, social media, all the different things. We also have coaching hours that I facilitate on a regular basis. There's a whole platform. It's a mighty network community. There's an app and everything. So, you can post what's going on. You can message people inside the app.

So, my vision with that is to grow it to have thousands of moms in business in one place where they're getting the support they need and they can start to build strategic partnerships with other moms who they may otherwise never meet. I have some people in my life who have been a huge part of my life, and I have never met them off of a Zoom call.

So, I wanted a place where I could do both, where both were available. So, it's been really fun and growing. I have these moments of like, it's all going to fall apart. Part of my mission is to normalize a lot of this stuff that I think so many people are telling you to ignore. It's normal to have those questions.

We're doing our first live summit on November 15th, which will be in, Lafayette, Colorado, Boulder County. I'm really excited. It was one of those things where I talk a lot about build the plane in the air. I think so many times this much more patriarchal, masculine way of doing business is have a plan and have all your ducks in a row and then hit go. I fell into that mindset after I had kids. I need to have more systems, more systems, and the systems totally stopped me. They slowed me down. They were very expensive. I knew I wanted to do the summit. I was like, “I'm going to figure this out as I go and put it out there.” It's been very well-received and almost sold out. So, that's super exciting.

Q: How do you talk to your kids about work and about it?

A: It’s Indigenous People Day and my oldest daughter is off school. My youngest is at a private preschool, so she's there today. So, I got her lunch and I said, “Neve, I am going to be down in dad's office. I need this hour to do this recording.” Just earlier, she was helping my husband with a couple of things. Then, she wanted to come help me, and I had a moment where I was like, “I just need to get some stuff done because I'm prepping for three big events this week.” But then I was like, “Okay, come on up. You can be my intern.” So, I put her to work and she was using the paper cutter and cutting stuff up. Then later, she comes over to me and she goes, “Look, mom.” She had drawn some posters of Renegade Motherhood. She wrote “My mom, Jen, created Renegade Motherhood.”

So, I think it's just one of those things where it's just in the fabric of what you do. There are days where it's hard. I'm traveling a little bit this week, but I really have always been big on just being completely honest: “Hey, mom works for us to be able to pay our bills.” They don't see it. How would they know? It's not always easy and they're often hard on me about it, but I try to just enroll them in the goals.

I remember when I was launching The Mother Mind in June. I had a big event and I couldn't take them to school that morning because I had to get to the event early to set up. I said, “I'm going to pick you up from school, but this is a big day for mom. I'm going to tell you my goal. Will you ask me about my goal when I get home?” Sure enough, they were both like, “How is Renegade Motherhood? Did you hit your goal? How many people?” So, I love that.

Then other days, they just scream. So, I don't have it figured out by any stretch of the imagination. I think sometimes, maybe it was our generation too. It was sort of like don't talk about work at home. I really try to celebrate with them and try to share when it's hard. It's hard. I don't feel guilt. I don't really know the word for it, but it is when you're being pulled in multiple directions and you love what you do and you love your kids. It can be hard. But, I've already completely blocked off time this weekend that I'm not scheduling anything except being with them. That's something I've had to really work on is making sure that there is complete off time where it's a non-negotiable.

Q: How do you continue to be inspired or what inspires you? What advice has been most helpful for you as an entrepreneur?

A: Two things come to mind. I remember when my littlest was really little and things were challenging. I was talking to a friend and she was like, “You're just in a season. I was in that season, and you will be in another season soon.”

The other thing that came to mind is I think so often we don't stop to actually think about what we want to build. There's a big difference between wanting to build something that brings in $3,000 a month and something that brings in $3 million a month, because each of them create another set of problems—good and bad.

There's so much noise out there about having six-figure months and seven-figure years. I think it's important that moms make money because we can solve a lot of problems with it. I think moms are inherent problem solvers. So, if we can put money in the hands of more awesome moms, we can get a lot more done.

But that said, sometimes people will come to me and be like, “Well, I'm just really stuck in this and that, and I feel like I should be doing this and that.” I'm like, because this is the path I have walked and I still struggle with, you can either outsource all of it. Do you have the money to do that? Or, you need to go back to what it is that you actually want to build. If right now your parenting and everything else in your life means that you need to start with the $3,000 to $5,000 a month business, or the $1,000 a month to $3,000 a month business, if that's going to cover your needs, it's okay to start there. It's okay to build that foundation and start there.

I just don't think that that's something that enough people are really talking about. So, I think people sit in the beginning and they're just like, “But I need to be doing more.” Sometimes, actually, you should be doing less so you can focus on the thing that's actually going to move the income needle.

So, if you feel like you're in this spiral, it's a good question. What is it I'm trying to achieve? Or, what is it that I'm looking to get out of this experience—whether it's your business, a program you're putting on, or just an income goal? What do we need to do to get to that? It's probably not being on every single social media outlet 24 hours a day—probably something very different.

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This blog post was written based on kozēkozē Podcast Episode 387: Renegade Motherhood with Jen Morris.