Kate Northrup supports ambitious, motivated and successful women to light up the world without burning themselves out in the process. Committed to empowering women entrepreneurs to create their most successful businesses while navigating motherhood, Kate is the founder and CEO of Origin Collective, a monthly membership site where women all over the world gather to achieve more while doing less. She is also the author of Money: A Love Story, Untangle Your Financial Woes and Create The Life You Really Want (Hay House, 2013). Kate and her work have been featured on The Today Show, Yahoo! Finance, The Huffington Post, Refinery29.com, and in Glamour, Red, Prima Magazine, Soul & Spirit, and more.
How becoming a mother changed you and impacted your work?
Becoming a mother has made her humble. It radically changed her perspective about the world and continues to teach her the significance of surrendering and allowing things to happen as they are going to happen as opposed to trying to get them happen the way you want them to happen. After becoming a mother, she was a little lost work wise. Her book, Money: A Love Story, came out in 2013. She loves her book, and it helped a lot of people. But as soon as the book came out she knew that talking about money was not her life’s work. She acknowledges that the first year of motherhood has taught her much about entrepreneurship, about slowing down and following the natural rhythm of nature and our bodies in our creative work. Becoming a mother helped her to discover what she is meant here to do, which for her is working with entrepreneurial moms.
How do you view your first book now?
She speaks more about time now. She used to be obsessed with productivity but has realized in the last few years that the point of life is not to put as much in our day as we possibly can. Many similarities can be seen between the way our culture has poverty mentality around time, and the way so many of us have poverty mentality around money. She used to speak about money, but now she is beginning to explore how that’s true with time as well, like how we can actually expand time and create abundance in our relationships. That is a new frontier for her and what she has been teaching about lately, just as she used to talk about money.
Time and money are the two biggest mental obstacles the people face, and you have touched both of those topics and explored it in terms of abundance perspective as oppose to lack perspective. Can you tell us more about it?
She says that each of our lives has limits, but within those limits, we can expand things through the way we perceive them. The theory of relativity shows that how fast the things go is relative to the observer. Because of that, the same amount of time spent enjoying the things we cherish will appear a lot more different then the time spent worrying over something. Our experience of time can shift based on what we are doing. Perspective changes everything, and just as our perspective around money, our experience of an abundance of time can change profoundly based on our perception. Seeing people that have too little but they are still in content with their lives can change our perspective a lot.
What’s your take on culture, how we are changing as woman entrepreneurs?
We are a part of our culture, and because of that, we can change it. We have been brought up to believe that growth is about addition, it is about adding more knowledge, watching more videos, attending more seminars. In reality, as her friend Danielle LaPorte once said, growth is about deconstruction. It’s about removing the layers and seeing what you truly are when you take it all away. Your experience of life should be based on your internal experiences and not around chasing the external factors. When Danielle LaPorte, after her recent book launch, couldn’t make it to the New York’s Time list, she was devastated and realized how much success is taking up too much space in her life. So, the lesson here is that it’s ok to slow down from time to time. What matters the most is how you feel about yourself at the end of your day.
Why do you think women, in particular, are great entrepreneurs when they become moms?
The entrepreneurial journey is incredibly similar to the motherhood journey because nobody is telling you how to do it. You have to be innovative and think on your feet. Mothers are intuitively good in that, so they tend to be more successful when they step into entrepreneurship.
The other things mothers are good at is that they are wired to be aware of multiple things at the same time, like what’s going on with everyone in the room, how they are all feeling and how can we come up with a solution that could serve every single person, which matters are a lot when you are an entrepreneur.
Let’s start talking about Cycles and what Origin is really about?
Origin is her membership for mom entrepreneurs or nurturers. It’s for women who are innovative and willing to work outside the system. They are associated with nurturers, whether they are caring for the community, their children or other loved ones. She wanted to create a space for women to come together and talk about the ways they can grow their business and thrive as mothers without just working harder. The culture has taught us that the only way to succeed is to work harder, which is not exactly true. Sometimes the harder we work the more we are making it worse. She suggests that we should take inspiration from mother nature instead. Just as there are four distinct seasons, there are four distinct seasons for a woman throughout the month. Women are most productive when they acknowledge all these four different energies, and begin to plan their time and projects accordingly.
What’s the best advice you have ever been given?
Read your baby not a book.
How can we get in touch with you?
You can find her work on katenorthrup.com.
If you are interested learning more about Origin you can go to origincollective.com.
She is also active on Instagram (@katenorthrup)