I was listening to a podcast yesterday and a highly successful female founder and author shared a story.

She was a relatively new mom (with an almost two year old) and agreed to a 6-month deadline for her next book. Just after agreeing to that timeline, she found out that she was pregnant. “Oh wow,” she thought, but figured the timeline was perfect, she could finish writing before she delivered! A few months later, however, she suffered a miscarriage.

At that point, she knew that finishing the book by the deadline was going to be hellish, if not almost impossible – but she pushed forward anyway and tried to make it work, suffering through the next couple of months writing while trying to heal physically and emotionally from the miscarriage while under extreme pressure from herself.

As she neared the deadline, she did indeed have to push it back another 3 months, which prolonged the self-described hellishness to a total of, at minimum, six months.

This person shared that she was internally compelled to suffer through because she wanted to be able to hit the deadlines that she could hit before she was a mom. (Aka, the not-self pattern of needing to prove oneself in Human Design.) She knew that her publisher would totally understand if they knew the circumstances she was under, and still, this inner patriarchal judgment made her degrade her quality of life for at least half a year in order to prove something that literally no one cared about.

(And her business was doing quite well and had been for some years, so it wasn’t a financial pressure either.)

This story absolutely blew my mind because there is NO WAY that a woman listening to their body, their intuition and making decisions from a place of wholeness, harmony and radiance would do this to themselves.

Can I say it again?

Your health is more important than your book deadline.

Your health is even more important than your business.

I’ve seen female leaders lose and almost lose their lives because they were ignoring their bodies signals and intuition for too long.

Please, put yourself first.