We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Beth Rivelli. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Beth below.

Beth, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Who is your hero and why? What lessons have you learned from them and how have they influenced your journey?

My life’s hero is my mother. It has been over 30 years since she left this earth and I still miss her.

I credit my mother with teaching me so many amazing life truths and skills, the most valuable of all is to reach out when you need help. My mother was an explorer, she was curious and she passed that on to me. In all transparency, it is that skill that saved my life during some very rough years.

As a coach, I’ve learned the rarity of that gift as it is common for people to hide out of shame, to keep their pain to themselves. Freedom comes in being with it and in being with others in it.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

Becoming a Motherhood Story Coach started from my own experience of missing motherhood, one that took years of work to heal (not that you ever get “over it”). Because of that, I thought I would coach women who had also missed motherhood. But as I delved deeper I noticed something I’d never before considered, something that lit a fire in me and set me on this path.

What became clear was that missing motherhood was a symptom of something else in our culture, some other root cause that led me to put a microscope on why 1 in 5 women in the Western world have missed it. Only a small percentage of that one in five have actually freely chosen a child free life.

Through conversations with women, a lot of writing and a lot of revelatory sparks, I identified an outdated, cultural mindset that is working against women who are otherwise breaking barriers in every other part of their lives.

What became clear was that women in the liminal space of motherhood (prior to becoming a mom) are given little guidance, education and support.

And underlying all of that is an unspoken cultural rule that says we are not supposed to talk about it and that we’re just supposed to handle it and hope that everything works out. That may have worked better back when my grandmother was young, but not so much now. Few of us are talking about it. We tend to live in a collective, conscious silence and seem to be okay with it. Until things don’t work out or we start to fear they won’t.

I even had one woman describe it as Fight Club since the first rule is to not talk about Fight Club.

I like to say that women’s roles have evolved, but our cultural mindset around motherhood has not. That means we are living out new roles, breaking barriers and, at the same time, trying to tackle this part of our lives using an old, limited handbook of sorts. When our new reality and the old mindset collide, women are often left feeling frustrated and powerless.

When women take on the work to transform their relationship to their motherhood journey, they find an elevated mindset, one that says they can explore and don’t have to know the path, one that reinforces the message that it’s okay to get supported in this part of their life, one that opens their eyes to how much they don’t know about their body and fertility and one that empowers them to truly own their vision and take action.

As one woman who did my program said:
“I wanted to be a mom my whole life. And I didn’t realize just how much a part of my brain didn’t want me to become one… that I was totally terrified of becoming a mom. I think that fear had been in my blind spot for a very long time. And, you know, I probably never would have taken it out into the light of day if I were just sitting alone by myself.”

That is the power of breaking the silence! This is what I’m passionate about.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

Dropping the blame game.

While my mother was my hero, she was also human. Through her I learned to blame and judge my father for some of the pain she felt in their relationship. From time to time, everyone encounters pain in relationship. My mother did what a lot of women do, she sometimes blamed him for it. That is a pattern I am still unlearning. It’s an easy, default way of being for me, to power up and judge, specifically with men.

My most poignant unlearning moment occurred when I least expected it, when I was walking across my bedroom to put laundry away. At that point in my life I was divorced and living alone for the first time in years. I was a strong proponent of the “he’s the problem” mantra and loved to point out all of the ways my ex-husband had destroyed our marriage. What I didn’t know until that moment was that I was so stuck in it that way of thinking that I could not hear anyone when they tried to point it out. And many friends had tried to point it out. Then in this benign moment, it hit me, “I was difficult to live with.” That was the first time that I finally realized what it meant to take responsibility for my part in the breaking of our relationship.

I love coaching women who are stuck in the same space, because I get it and have so much compassion. I like to ask, “What if you were just 1% responsible for what is going on?”

How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?

Let’s reframe “had to pivot” to “chose to pivot.” I like the reframe, because I am the kind of human who has pivoted many times and, each time I’ve done it, it’s been a choice I’ve made from my gut. I just have to follow my intuition, even when it doesn’t make sense.

The coaching I do now and the passion I have around it prompted me to leave a really good job that I loved. I had been working at Salesforce for nearly five years and I had told myself that I would retire from there. And then my passion won out. I just knew that I knew that the next step was to go all in with my coaching. So I did.

I did the same thing back in 2010 when I left a company where I had worked for 10 years to start my own Project Management consulting firm. In retrospect I laugh, because I had no idea what I was doing. I wouldn’t even consider myself a good project manager at that point. That didn’t stop me. I knew that I knew. It was that choice to take that risk that changed the trajectory of my life. Was it easy? No. There were times when I couldn’t pay my bills. Was it worth it? Without a doubt. The person I became through that experience was so worth it.

I like to say that being an entrepreneur has little to do with even the impact we make in life and so much more to do with who we become in the process.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.bethrivellicoaching.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/Bethrivellicoaching
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/bethrivellicoaching
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bethrivellicoaching

Image Credits
Dana Magnus, https://www.danamagnus.com/