Finding the Middle Path Between Ambition & Motherhood

Somewhere between girlboss hustle culture and the idyllic “soft life” sits a reality most ambitious moms are quietly navigating: the middle path. In this honest and heartfelt conversation, Ruthie Sterrett explores what it really looks like to want both—a meaningful career and the capacity to show up for your family—without burning out or abandoning your ambition.

Ruthie shares her personal story of leaving corporate life, navigating the mental load of motherhood, and building a business designed around flexibility, purpose, and enoughness. She unpacks why society pushes women toward extremes, how high-achieving moms internalize unrealistic expectations, and the cultural and structural challenges that make modern motherhood feel so heavy.

You’ll hear insights inspired by research from McKinsey, Lean In, Harvard Business Review, and real conversations inside the Consistency Corner community. Plus, Ruthie reframes the 5C Framework—Clarity, Calendar, Content, Consistency, and Conversion—as a tool to help moms define success on their own terms.

If you’ve ever felt like you’re doing everything and still not doing “enough,” this episode will feel like an exhale. You’re not failing; you’re pioneering a new model of motherhood. And you don’t have to do it alone.

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@ruthie.sterrett
@theconsistencycorner

Transcript

Ruthie Sterrett (00:01.602)

Welcome back to another episode of the Consistency Corner. Today, you're getting a little version of Sassy Me, because I got some things to say about what we're going to talk about. And I'm going to start out by saying, you know the new Taylor Swift lyric that is, did you girlboss too close to the sun? Yeah, that one. That one is causing quite the chatter on the internet. And everywhere I look, it feels like women are being asked to choose a song. You can either be high achieving,

color-coded calendar, 5 a.m. girl boss, or you can swing the other extreme, soft life, sourdough starter, fully present, trad wife. But what if what most of us want is actually somewhere in between? A few weeks ago, I saw a clip from Reshma Sajjani, I might not be saying her name right, but she's the founder of Girls Who Code.

and she said it perfectly and I'll share the whole clip for you because I really want you to hear what she has to say.

Ruthie Sterrett (01:05.888)

When she said, I want something in the middle, I want to be able to drop my kids off at school and crush my job. I don't want to have to pick between being a girl boss and being a trad wife. That's a lie. That's a con. And I'm not buying into that. I was like, yes, that's it. Because that is not just her story. That is our story. It's my story. It's your story. And I know because I'm having these conversations inside of our communities that my

Network is feeling this same thing that we want both. We want to be present moms. We want to be good moms, but we also want to be successful in our business and we were high achievers. So we want both. And I remember sitting back in my old corporate job. I was regularly getting up at 5 a.m. to squeeze in a workout. I was rushing to get to drop off and in the office by eight o'clock, I had back to back meetings. My phone is buzzing with updates from the school.

Sometimes saying can you please come to the school? Which is a whole other episode for another day. My inbox is overflowing and I'm literally thinking like this cannot be what having it all looks like. The cold coffee, my shoulders aching from the tension that I was carrying and not just from the weight of everybody's expectations, but my own. I loved my career, but I hated

constantly having to prove myself and being chained to a desk from 9 to 5, Monday through Friday, actually 8 to 5 and sometimes 8 to 6. And I really hated that I just didn't have the mental capacity to keep up with being a great mom and a great corporate employee. So when I resigned in 2022, I knew that there had to be a better way. I knew that the reason I had never been able to find

that perfect job with the work-life balance I was craving is because I was actually meant to create it. So fast forward a few years and I'm running the consistency corner, dropping off my son at school, scheduling client calls around baseball practice and field trips, but still catching myself asking, am I doing enough? The conditioning there is real. I remember having a conversation with my mentor saying,

Ruthie Sterrett (03:27.714)

I just feel like I'm mediocre at everything. And I hate that. I want to be good. I want to be great. But that's the thing, as high achievers, we're conditioned to try to be great all the time. But it's also our reality is that we actually don't want less. We do want all those things. We just want life to fit. And here's the thing. I also have to acknowledge in this conversation my own privilege because I am

acutely aware in this current environment that as a white woman I am privileged that I come from a background of stability and safety. I have an education. My husband has a great job who carries our insurance and was fully supportive in me quitting my job to build our business. And his he knew that like my time flexibility was what our family needed and although that put a lot of pressure on him

as the breadwinner in our household, it's important for me to share this behind the scenes because I could not have resigned from that corporate job if I didn't have the safety net of his salary. Now, side note, whole other podcasts we could have and the money mindset around attaching my self-worth to what I'm able to pay myself and it being less than what he brings home and all the mindset work having to happen there. But.

I just wanted to share that context because I know when we talk about moms and career women and women building businesses, the background and the context is not the same for everybody. So I wanted to paint the picture of what that context is for me. But the internet loves a binary, hustle culture versus homemaking, girl boss versus tradwife. And algorithms, they reward outrage, not nuance.

So we're served the loudest examples of each camp. One side tells you that your worth is in your productivity. The other one is saying that true femininity means retreating from ambition altogether. But somewhere between those posts and that type of content, we lose the women who are building businesses and packing lunches, who want to feel successful and sane. It's like we're trying to run a marathon in high heels and make it to pick up by three o'clock.

Ruthie Sterrett (05:52.011)

And nobody in society is cheering for either one of those because we're only looking at the extremes. So we feel a little bit lost being in the middle, but deep down, you know that those extremes don't last. The pendulum is gonna swing one way or the other. Ambition without rest leads to burnout. Softness without purpose withers and you start to lose yourself.

According to a 2023 McKinsey report and McKinsey and Lean In report, women in the workplace, 43 % of women leaders say that they're burned out compared to 31 % of men. And yet one in three still say that they want that next promotion. And if you're a business owner, it might be that next level of success. It's not laziness. We have ambition, but we are longing for balance.

we're longing for someone else to take on some of the mental load, whether that's the mental load of your business, the mental load of motherhood, or the mental load of just being a human on the internet, in this world. And a Pew research study also found that half of working moms feel that they're constantly failing at one role or the other. Not because they are failing, but because the system was never built for dual success.

And in 2025, I don't know how my family would do it when it comes to parenting and raising our child if we both had full-time corporate careers without flexibility in our schedule. I just don't know how we would do it. And that doesn't take away the fact that I do have flexibility and I also often become the default parent because of that flexibility. And I'm incredibly grateful for that flexibility. I still

have a max in my own capacity and there's a lot of mental and emotional energy that goes into parenting. There's a lot of mental and emotional energy that goes into building a business. So it's a lot and no wonder we're tired. We were told that we could do anything, but not that we would always still be trying to do everything. And that's something that we've got to learn to let go. Part of this is cultural.

Ruthie Sterrett (08:11.534)

we've glorified the lean-in energy for a decade or more. And when women started burning out, we glorified the opposite, the aesthetic of surrender and the soft girl life. Part of this is also structural, childcare costs, unequal household labor, workplaces still designed around the 1950s model. A 2024 Harvard Business Review analysis actually showed that women still perform 65 % of unpaid household work.

even when they earn equal or higher incomes. And if you have not looked into the Eve Rodzki Fair Play model, I highly, highly, highly recommend the book, the documentary. So, so good. And a former podcast guest that we had on her Instagram handle is she is a page turner. No, she yeah, she is a page turner.

She talks a lot about motherhood and the mental load on Instagram, so that's a really great follow if you're like, my gosh, thank you for finally putting a name on this thing that I'm constantly feeling. But part of this is, like I said, cultural and psychological. We've internalized that rest equals weakness, that asking for help is not okay. We should ourselves to death with

I can do it better, faster, more efficiently, and I can do it so I should. But when we finally slow down, then it sometimes starts to feel like failure because it's different and our brain isn't used to that feeling. And meanwhile, the old algorithm over here, the content hamster wheel and the attention society keeps whispering, post more, produce more, prove more. So yeah, finding that middle path,

It's not just about time management, it's identity management. And for me, it started with giving myself the permission to want both. I love a color-coded spreadsheet and the thrill of signing a new client. I love sitting on my couch with my laptop working while my son's doing his homework. I love to stay up till 11 o'clock at night working on a new business idea. But I also...

Ruthie Sterrett (10:29.162)

love to be available at 11 a.m. for a therapy appointment or a trip to Home Goods. That's the middle path. Ambition with boundaries. Building something meaningful without building a prison out of our own expectations. And it's not one size fits all. For some women, it's scaling back to working during school hours only. For others, it's hiring help so their genius can shine where it matters most.

For some, it's about having access to capital when starting or scaling a business, which as female entrepreneurs is a whole other conversation that we need to be having more often. But the common thread there is choice. At the consistency corner, we talk a lot about our 5C framework, which is clarity, calendar, content, consistency, and conversion. And it's actually the foundation of every single marketing strategy that we build.

But I want to talk about those five Cs here in a different light. Clarity. What does enough look like for you? What's your definition of enough and success? The calendar. What season are you in? And what season is coming next? Are we planning for that? Content. What's the story that you're telling yourself about success? What content are you consuming that's shaping the way you feel about your own business and your own success?

Consistency. What rhythms make your life and this season of life sustainable? And conversion. What are you really trying to create? Is it money? Is it margin? Is it meaning? Is it all three? Because when those answers become clear and they align, that's when your business starts to support your life instead of swallowing it. This isn't just about logistics.

It's grief sometimes. Grieving the version of who you thought you'd be before you had to choose. Or the version who believed that she could do it all if she just hustled harder. I don't know about you, but that was me 10 years ago. If I'm being honest, maybe even that was me five years ago. I mean, heck, let's be really honest. Sometimes that was me five minutes ago. Like if I just push harder, I can do more. I can do all the things. But it's also pride.

Ruthie Sterrett (12:54.156)

Because when you've built something from scratch, while keeping small humans alive and relationships intact, that's Olympic level balancing. So if you're feeling stretched or like you've never fully been able to be in one world or the other, that doesn't mean you're doing it wrong. It just means you're pioneering a new model of motherhood in real time and navigating a system that was not built to support your success. Here's the thing.

I don't have the answer. I'm still figuring it out every week, every season. But I'm asking the questions and learning and having conversations because it's important that we talk about this. What I do know is that a middle path exists. I see it in the clients we serve, ambitious women building brands that let them pick up their kids, care for their communities and still chase dreams. I see it in my community who believes as strongly as I do that moms can change the world.

They need some dang help, okay? I see it in myself, creating a business that is not just about proving worth, but about building capacity. So this episode is not a how-to. It's more like a we-to. We all are craving, or I think most of us are craving, that middle ground.

If this conversation resonated, I would love if you share it with a friend who's walking that line between doing and being and talk about it together because these conversations matter. Talk about what works for you, what's working for her. Community matters and we're in this together. And if you need somebody to talk to, send your girl a DM on Instagram. I'm here for a voice memo and let's talk through this. Because when we keep talking about it, when we cheer for each other, instead of comparing,

That's how we build the world that we actually want to live in, that we actually want to raise our children in. Not burnout, not too soft. Strong enough, steady enough, human enough, right in the middle. That's where I think real success lives. I so appreciate you being here for this episode of the Consistency Corner podcast. Like I said, let's talk about this. If you have thoughts, send me a DM. Let's voice memo in Instagram.

Ruthie Sterrett (15:13.011)

or be sure to come to our next social media mixer where we have real life conversations, networking and workshops for founders just like you. Thanks so much and I'll see you in the next episode.