Coach2Accomplish: Business Lessons from Raising Triplets Part II

It was great thinking back on what a blur the first year of life with the triplets was but it also brought back a lot of great lessons learnt. Make sure you read Part I to get the full list.

1. Some skills we come into the job with, and some we learn on the job

I mentioned in my previous post I was a natural at scheduling things and this was a handy skill to have when trying to make the house run in a somewhat less than chaotic manner. No training required there. When it came to the ins and outs of physically bottle feeding 3 kids (at 3 am in the morning), I had to seek someone who had done this before and learn what the best approach was. It was interesting to hear the different techniques but the one that worked for me, was line them up on pillows, prop a bottle in their mouth and hey presto you could feed three kids at the same time. Now if I had thought long and hard, maybe I could have come up with that on my own, but why to, when someone else already had the knowledge?

2. Get help

For being such independent people for husband and I, this was beyond our comfort zone. You figure there must be someone out there in the world that raised triplets all on their own without help, and so you should be able to do the same. That's probably true. It's also true that they had a very different experience from what we had as a result. Getting the right help allowed us to take a break. One has no idea how exhausting having a baby is, until one has one. This is not one of those things I felt I needed to be a hero about, but I did need to get over my anxieties of being a burden on society and accept the help that people were offering. Before long our fridge was stocked up with all kinds of yummy goodies (that I would have never had the time to prepare), there were people sweeping the floor and the list of just pure generous giving was amazing. There are some things we have the capacity to do and others we need to just ask for help.

3. Take care of yourself

We have such a tendency of taking care of business, which my business then was triplets, than we never consider that we need to take care of ourselves too. This had to be pointed out to us in a rather frank discussion by the team of doctors that were taking care of our children. They saw us just falling apart with the stress and exhaustion of it all and they gently told us to go home and get some rest. I think I needed to hear it from the doctors, for some reason I did not feel I could permit myself to leave the hospital and go take a rest. Unfortunately most of us don't have doctors telling us to take a break and we shouldn't wait till we have run ourselves ragged. Taking care of business includes taking care of you.

4. Pay it forward

Now I sit in my comfortable house almost a million miles from those crazy days and I wonder what can I do to repay all those amazing people that helped us? Pretty simple. I never miss the opportunity to talk to another mom that is going through the same thing. We share our story, resources and anything else we can because we know what it meant to us and so what it means to those parents. We were blessed to be a blessing to others. I see this principle applied in little ways as friends follow other friends on twitter to build up each others networks and as people freely share information they have learnt without expecting anything back. I listen to free recordings all the time of people genuinely trying to save me the time and trouble of making the same mistakes they did in my chosen industry. How cool is that!