The Emotional Labor Podcast - Kelly Ryan Bailey

The Emotional Labor Podcast

Kelly Ryan Bailey is our guest this week and I’m excited to introduce her to our Emotional Labor podcast community. An entrepreneur, speaker, advisor, investor, spouse, and… mama of 3 – Kelly is one smart woman who has parlayed her life experience with major burn-out at the tender age of 36 – into viable business entities. From her SkillsBaby.com platform, Kelly offers workshops, global retreats, and, her new endeavor on Linked In, Let’s Talk Live, focusing on monetizing unpaid labor, which is brilliant.

We had a wonderful conversation about the ways in which culture and society sets up expectations of what it means to be female at home, especially what it means to be a mom. For so long, Kelly, experienced and felt “mom, guilt” if she didn’t meet these expectations. She shared the story about how, one day, her “body stopped” when she was 36 years old. She just had her third child (and third high-risk pregnancy), and the weight of managing a household, caring for two small children, and the pressure she experienced from her boss to get back up and out, flattened her for weeks. Mom guilt steeped through, and she felt like a failure. She said, “everybody loves you when you do things for them, but when you’re not able, guilt becomes stronger and deeper."

Kelly pulled herself through the abyss… And as a result, her goal in life is to empower working mothers. One of the reasons I think her Linked In, Let’s Talk Live, with a focus on monetizing unpaid labor, which is brilliant is because it pulls back the curtain on the value of the unpaid labor at home, I just love this idea so much.