Zibby interviews Harvard MBA, best-selling author, and “queen of unsolicited advice” Samantha Ettus about her 2016 self-improvement guide for working women, THE PIE LIFE: A Guilt-Free Recipe for Success and Satisfaction. Sam talks about the importance of nurturing every part of our lives (each of the “seven slices”), rejecting guilt and embracing messiness in motherhood, the myth of maternal instincts (dads can do everything moms can do!!), and her passion for empowering women and helping them achieve financial independence.

Transcript:

Zibby: Welcome, Sam. Thank you so much for coming on Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books. This is so exciting. 

Samantha: I know this is a long time coming. I'm so excited to be here. 

Zibby: Oh, it's so nice because I feel like we were introduced through mutual friends.

And of course I have your books, but it took until now for me to read it. And I'm really sorry. But in the meantime, we've become friends, which has been so much fun. And we you've helped me so much with so many things, including Prioritizing and all this stuff. And now that I read your book, I'm like, Oh, you like coach people.

This is like what you did. This is why you give me such good advice. 

Samantha: Yes. I'm I'm the queen of unsolicited advice. I think I gave you a ton of advice on a walk when you weren't even looking for it. 

Zibby: Yeah, but it totally helped. Okay. The pie life is your book. It came out in 2016. But is completely relevant today.

And like literally in my head, I was like thinking of four people. I had to send it to you immediately. You must read it right away because so many of the things you touch on and it's really your, well, actually I should let you explain what is the book. You explain the book and then I'll.. 

Samantha: What makes me so happy because I think in the book world, we get so much.

so obsessed with what's the newest book. And even with my own book, I sometimes like get worried because it came out a few years ago. Is it still relevant? So that that's really good to hear. Thank you. So I actually wrote the book because I felt like we were in an era of so much negativity about how women were.

We're talking about managing their professional and personalized. It was in the age of Anne Marie Slaughter, whose cover article in the Atlantic Monthly made such waves. And it was, you know, women can't have it all. And it was so much negativity. And I felt like there were three frameworks. Women kept being sort of sent.

One was the idea of juggling and anyone who's ever tried to have a conference call with like a baby or a dog in the room, that's not It's not possible. You know, one was having it all and we actually can't think of any man or woman who technically has it all. And then the other was the work life balance scale, right?

And anyone who has a full time job or a real career knows that you can spend equal time amount of work and at home and be successful. So it just was, it was all these really negative frameworks. And I, I had been managing my professional and personal life successfully. I had. Okay. a lot of women friends who had been doing it and were really happy.

At that point I'd worked with thousands of women and I knew that the happiest and most fulfilled were those that allowed themselves to participate in their own professional goals. And so I decided I needed to write a book on how to thrive in both areas. 

Zibby: Amazing. You have a quote where you say it's not selfish to have friends when you're a busy working parent.

It's essential. You have advice where you're not aiming to win the FaceTime game in parenting. The best parenting comes through, you know, in the quality moments. You have, you have all these, you know, You systematically go through all the parts of your life and talk about like why it's okay and why it's imperative for women to work to own their passions, how to be great parents along the way and um, how to use hobbies and relationships and sex and like everything, everything in your life to create this pie where you slice it up and like have a better life.

I didn't explain that very well, but maybe you should talk about your, okay. system. 

Samantha: Yeah, so, you know, I, when I grew up, I had a very unusual childhood. I was almost like had a full time job as a tennis player. So, you know, I would go to school, I grew up in New York City. There was really no competitive tennis players in New York City.

So I had to drive outside of New York every day for an hour to go to tennis after school. And I still went to a very competitive school where there was three hours of homework a day. And so I didn't, I didn't really go to parties. I was always playing tennis and on the weekends I had tournaments every weekend.

So I had to be very disciplined. I still had friends. I still had some semblance of a social life, but I remember lying in bed at night and thinking about my life in categories. So I would think, I think the categories at the time were tennis, school, boys, you know, relationship with my parents, family, and, and friends.

And my friends were really important to me. And I would be very, very deliberate and disciplined about how I organized my day so that I had a couple of hours or an hour to talk to my friends at night after I did my homework. So I always thought of my life in those categories. And when I was managing my own very crazy professional and personal life with three kids and a husband and a career and all sorts of other things, I started putting my life into slices.

And when I did all this work with all of these women who were managing a ton of things, I realized that we all have things that fall into seven slices. And those seven slices are our careers, our families, our romance, or our quest to find one, our friends, our hobbies, our health, and our community. And everything kind of falls into one of those categories.

And the idea is not to beat yourself up on how much time you're spending in each slice. The idea is to be very, you're probably pretty, you know, logical and pretty like rational about how you're dividing your time right now. The idea is to make goals for each slice so that they exist. So even if you are a new mom and you're so busy and you're sleepless and you have a career and you have a, a partner, you can still make time for a hobby, even two hours a month, because that will really make you happy.

Or you can still go out for that margarita with a friend. Like those are the kinds of things that actually make you better at your job as a mom, make you a better partner, make you better at your work. And I think so often, especially as women, We talk about things in a suffering kind of way. And, you know, I'm, the more I suffer, the better off my kids will be, but it's actually quite the opposite.

The more you feed your soul, the happier you are, the happier your kids will be. And the more you can give to the other people that you love in your life. 

Zibby: It's so true. Well, in terms of timeliness, I feel like this whole pivoting moment, right, where women have the ability to really pursue what they love, especially if their kids are empty nesting or even if they're going to kindergarten and they suddenly have all this time and they're like, okay, now what?

I mean, I had coffee with a really, really smart, amazing girlfriend who was like, well, it's been so long. Like I've lost my confidence in the work world. Like maybe I can't go back. And I'm like, of course you can go. And she's one of the many people I want to give this book to. But you give everybody a roadmap where you have to start like looking into yourself.

Like, what are my goals? Like, what, what do I want to achieve? And like little quizzes and like, how, how am I going to, like, what is meaningful to me in my life, which I think is such a great way to sort of ground the reader and the person and figure out like, Okay. Well, what is next? What do I love? What am I passionate about?

What is my, where do I get in my flow state? And, and I know other people and books come at this, but there's something about you sharing your story the whole time and all these little anecdotes from your life and your friend's lives and co founder and people you've coached that makes it like, Oh, this woman is like talking to me and giving me advice.

And particularly, cause I know you, I'm like, Oh my gosh, thank you. This is so great. 

Samantha: I mean, I think that, you know, obviously one of my sort of goals is I can, if I can reach someone before they've made that choice of leaving completely, I'd like to save them from that decision because 90 percent of women who leave the workforce at 60 some point want to get back in and only 50 percent of women are able to ever get a full time position again after they leave for just two years.

And that's a really scary stuff that we don't share with women. You know, we never look at a man who's going to have a baby with his wife and say, are you going to, you know, focus on your baby's feeding and sleeping schedule? and take a couple years off. Are you going to go back to work? We don't say that to men.

And it's really unfair to put that guilt when a woman is pregnant immediately into her head. And the, you know, there's so many ways to keep that pilot light on and to, to keep your foot in the workforce. And it leads to a much more fulfilled filling future and economically, by the way, most people can't afford to be in a situation where they don't eventually get a full time job again, and it puts your family in most people's cases in a really risky financial position to leave completely.

But what ends up happening, and I see this all the time is because the cost of child care in America is so exorbitant and outrageous that we don't have universal child care. It makes it so that often couples do what I call faulty math. And they will look at the lesser earning spouse's income for one year and say, Oh my gosh, that's like the same as the nanny or same as daycare.

So you leave your job and you'll go back to it later. And the problem is you really need to compare those like five years where you really need intense childcare until your child in, in full time kindergarten to your future earnings. Cause that's really what it's about. But I really, you know, deeply believe that like We've somehow along the way lost the idea that our lives are supposed to be fun and exciting.

And I know that you, Zibby, and I share that, that wanting to say yes. You know, we, we say yes. I mean, many people in our lives probably think we say yes to too many things, but I would also say that we have really fun, fun, full lives. And I think that that is more important than all of the rhetoric around, say no more often, you know, you know, cancel your plans, limit the things you do, because really when you think about the most fulfilled people in the world and the ones who are, or you're idolizing or the ones that you admire, they're out there doing things and living every day.

And they really spend very little time feeling guilty about it. 

Zibby: Yeah. There was a girlfriend I had a few years ago and we had coffee one day or lunch or something and I'm like, well, what's new with you? And she's like, well, I've decided not to feel guilty anymore. Yeah. She was a working mom. She was commuting in from like Westchester somewhere.

She's like, yeah, like my kids are like, they're great. They're so lucky. They, I, you know, I'm done. I'm not feeling guilty. And I'm like, what? That's an option. But I, you put it in your book so well too. Like, A, how we're supposed to think about guilt in general, and B, like that each scenario where we are in trouble does not mean we should feel guilty about our past decisions.

Like your whole concept of, okay, this is a messy moment. This doesn't mean that I shouldn't be working. This doesn't mean I'm not being a good mom. This means that it's just a messy moment in my life that like this event is on this day, or I met this, you know, it's, it's just a, it's a way of reframing life, which I find incredibly helpful.

Samantha: Yeah. I mean, the reason I love the analogy of the pie is because the most delicious pies are not the store bought perfect looking ones, right? They're the, the messy gooey dripping over the side ones. And I, I believe that that's what our lives are supposed to look like. I mean, my morning this morning was a shit show.

I don't know about yours, but like, I'm sure in social media, it doesn't look like a shit show and it looks perfect. And everyone's like, Oh my gosh, how does she do it? And then how does she do it? She does it with like. such a mess. You know, like my leg is fully scratched from this other dog this morning because my dog gotten a thing with its other dog.

And I mean, it was, you know, and I had like three kids, my husband's out of town. I had to walk the dog. I have someone coming in from out of town. I have a crate that's at work. I mean, that's how all of our lives are. And I think sometimes, you know, we'll see another, uh, Mom at drop off and we'll say, how are you?

And she'll be like, great. And you're like, why are they all great? And I'm feeling like crap. And it's because no one's telling the truth, you know? And so I think it's, it's, it's actually much better to sort of be like turning your sort of bad moments into stories. That's kind of how I think about life.

And I think that if you expect it to be a little bit messy, you can laugh at it. But if you expect it to be perfect, you're going to be endlessly disappointed and angry with yourself. 

Zibby: Piece of the book. Well, there were so many, but one piece. I can't stop thinking about it. So you had one of the people you coached when you did your radio show was upset because she only spent 10 hours a week with her kids because she was working all the rest of it.

And you got her to reframe that and think, wow, like you spend 10 hours uninterrupted with like complete focused attention. That's actually really good. And it got me thinking because I'm like, well, I'm certainly with my kids way more than 10 hours a week. I'm with them. A lot when they're not in school, especially in the summer, but like, how often am I with them completely focused on them without getting distracted or doing something else or checking my emails or like, hold on, I just have to do this.

And could I, you know, could you build in 10 uninterrupted hours a week on your schedule? I mean, maybe that sounds bad, but like that's a lot of time to not have. 

Samantha: I mean, think of how many moms or dads can say that when they're with their kids, even if they're with them for an entire day, how much of that day were they not checking their phone?

Were they literally looking into their kids eyes and listening to what they said? It is so rare. And by the way, that's rare for all of us these days, right? You know, I feel like in many ways, like my oldest child was so lucky and even my two oldest were so lucky because they didn't grow up in the era when we were strolling them with smartphones in our hands, you know, but like, how rare is it to see a parent of a young kid without putting a device in their hands to calm them down or to shut them up or whatever?

It's a very different world than we all grew up in. And if you think about the time you spent with your spouse, Wow. If they were always a little bit distracted, you'd never feel seen and heard. And when you're with your friend, if they're checking their phone every five seconds, you don't feel like you actually had dinner with your friend.

You felt like you had dinner with, you know, their phone or a shadow of who they were. And so I think so often, you know, even when I see, I always say, Hey, going to Disney world or Disneyland, because I hate how people treat their own children and it breaks my heart. And so often you'll see someone get frustrated with their kid because they're tugging on them.

Right. They're like, okay, enough. Stop trying to get my attention. But they're trying to get their attention because they're not getting enough attention. And so I think when you turn it around and say like, how can I make my child feel seen every day? And the bottom line is like you have four kids, I have three kids.

If I have a child who gets, you know, 20 minutes of my undivided attention with them talking to me, awesome. And I feel great about them. And I think that that doesn't mean that's all the time we're spending together, but it's hard to get one on one time with a kid. It's hard to make someone feel heard and loved.

And so I think that if that becomes the parenting goal, rather than they have to eat every single organic thing and they have to be at this practice and they have to, you know, if you can make your kid feel awesome inside, that's pretty much all of, all that matters. 

Zibby: Although, you know, there are times where I am trying, I have to finish something.

Like they're tugging on me, but I'm like, you know, I think this is also the danger of trying to work from home or trying, you know, when the kids are not in school or like you, you do have to finish things sometimes, but you bring up such a good point. 

Samantha: Because I mean, especially in this new world where there are no offices practically anymore and everyone is, is working from home.

I mean, it sounds like a parenting dream. It's actually for many parents a nightmare because There's people at home that want your attention. When I was, my kids were really little. I had my radio show and I used to have a sign that they made. I purposely had them make the sign and they would put on the door and I would say, okay, here's the sign.

It's going up on the door because mommy's busy for the next hour. And they respected it because they'd been invested in making the sign. And it was like, they knew what the sign was about. But even now, I think if your kids hear like, okay, I am busy now, but it's seven o'clock. We're going to do something fun together.

Like, they can then withstand that, you know, that time where they have to be patient and wait for you. I think it's all about, when are you going to be done? If you know, if you say to somebody, I'm going to be done in a half hour, it's a lot easier for them to stomach it. 

Zibby: Yeah. The trick is not like. I mean, I do that too with my podcasts, right?

I'm like recording in progress, you know, goodbye, and they get it. But it's the harder thing is the constant emails and texts and DMs. And, you know, this has to be done and this is due and where's that logo and dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, you know, all that stuff. 

Samantha: Well, I like to say the world does not flow, right?

And it's sometimes when we get really overwhelmed or busy, it seems like everything is urgent. Everything needs to be done yesterday. But at the end of the day, like, you know, I always recommend to people that work with a lot of other people to say, like, these are the two hours, like six to eight are the hours I'm with my family.

And like, unless it's an emergency, I'm probably not going to be checking email. But I'll be back online after eight or whatever it is, like figure out what works for your family and do it that way. You know, it's definitely difficult and it's, it's a constant battle, 

Zibby: But then you also say, like, stop apologizing to your kids, which I love because I feel like I'm always like, I'm sorry, I just have to do this one thing.

I'm sorry, but you're like, okay, like mom, like we're working, we're doing this and we'll be there soon. And I don't know, I think you have great parenting advice, but you also have great. partnership advice. And I love your whole idea of like this partner shift. And you talk a lot about different relationships and unsupportive parents and what you can do to really partner with somebody and take care of your own relationship, which so many people are willing to, you know, put on the back burner.

Samantha: Well, I think so many women, like when, when we went to our new preschool in California from New York, from the very beginning, my husband's, we've always been 50, 50 partners. We both work full time. We're both very, very passionate about our kids. And so from the beginning, we used to, you know, divide everything and you know, he has these things, I have these things.

And so I remember in the beginning of one of the years he was Like making the lunch boxes or something and or taking our kids to school with the lunch and all these parent moms were like, Oh my God, you are so lucky. And I was thinking to myself, it's not luck. Like I wouldn't have partnered with someone who wouldn't want to do 50 percent of the load at home.

Like that's what I grew up with. I grew up with a really involved dad who would sew the buttons and iron the shirts and cook dinner, even though he worked full time. And so that was always my expectation. And so I think that many of us. suffer from low expectations of our partner. And people tend to, you know, if you assume someone's going to mess something up, they're much more likely to mess it up.

And so I think that we often talk to our partners as though they will be buffoons if they change a diaper or if they cook a dinner and that's just not true and not fair. In fact, it's funny that we're doing this interview today because there was an incredible article today that I cannot stop thinking about in the New York Times about the fact that the idea of mothers being nurturing and having a maternal instinct is totally false and that it's not scientifically proven. It was actually created by Darwin. It's, it's the craziest thing. It's all a myth. That myth has created so much guilts and pain for so many parents. 

Zibby: Wow. Okay.

So as I mentioned, you weave in a lot of your own story here and towards the end of the book, you start talking about a season that was a little harder for you personally and how everything sort of raised its head, or that's not the right expression, but your dad got, I'm saying had bladder cancer and you had shingles and your kid had pneumonia.

And then you, you end With your mother passing away really suddenly. And I just, my heart was breaking for you. Like, I'm so sorry. Can you just like, what was that whole, how did you get through that, that sort of season of, of really, really difficult times there? 

Samantha: Wow. I've done so many interviews about this book and no one's ever asked me that question.

I was certainly caught off guard by my mom getting sick. She got sick. sick and then passed away within a five week period. It's like start to finish. Like she was perfectly healthy or so we thought. And then just one night I had like this mini stroke and it turned out to be lung cancer. Um, and it was just super sudden.

She was living in New York with my dad. I was of course with my little kids. In California, and there were so many other things going on right like the shingles and the and I think these things just happen like we're all so stressed and busy and then something like that happens and you know I'd had this funny experience when I moved where I had received this thing from school that said who's your emergency contact?

And we moved to Los Angeles with zero friends and zero family here Like I literally had no friends and so my emergency contact was like thousands of miles away and I thought to myself, okay for the sake of my family like for our safety safety, I need to go out and make friends, which is kind of the last thing you want to be doing when you have a one year old, a three year old and five year old and you're not sleeping, you know, but I was like, I just have to put myself out there for their sake, not even for me.

So I really had built a really strong community here out of necessity. I mean, I totally put myself out there in the beginning. And I remember for the Jewish holidays, like we weren't invited anywhere the first year. And so the second year I decided to have this yum Kapoor break fast and I invited all the Jewish people I knew in the community and even people who weren't just who might want to come and like 30 people came.

And then now we do the same break fast every year and it's over a hundred people and we just keep inviting the same people every year and keep adding to the list. And I created that. It wasn't like I was sitting around the next year waiting for an invitation. You know, I was like, all right, well, if I don't get an invitation, I have to create one for other people.

Cause I'm sure there's other people in the same boat as I am. So anyway, when my mom got sick, I had a very nice community here that could chip in, you know, and help my husband with the drop offs and the pickups and the meals and all that stuff. And just to give an example, you know, and some people might disagree with this, but In those five weeks, so I have this tradition where I take each of my kids on a one week trip internationally to the country of their choice, just the two of us when they hit age 10.

And so when Ella, my oldest, With 10, she and I planned this trip to London because that's where she wanted to go and I had already planned out the entire trip and it was for one of the five weeks between my mom's getting sick and dying and we still went on that London trip and I was totally present with her, totally engaged with her and then when I came back and dropped her off in L. A., I went back and to New York, but I, I didn't cancel that trip. And I think that most people would have probably canceled that trip, but it was very important to me that like life can't stop, right? Like there's always shitty things happening. And it's one of the reasons that I'm like, so against when people are like, Oh my God, thank god, the book that 2021 is over. Oh, that was the worst year. Or, you know, I had the worst week, you know, this is going to be the worst week or, you know, this is going to be the worst day because my kid's in a bad mood at 10 a. m. Like these are all moments. Life is a series of moments and one moment might be awful and the next moment is going to be awesome, but there is no perfect day.

There is no perfect year. And so the same year my book came out is the year my mom died. Right. And so I didn't decide like this is going to be the worst year because this is the year my mom died. Like, we're not alive for that many years. So if I like, you know, throw the towel on an entire year, it's just, it's not fair to the rest of the people in my life.

So I think going on that trip with my daughter, she was super close to my mom. And then when my mom passed away, it was very hard for her. And I look back and think like, You know, part of the strength she had was that she had all this attention for one week, just a couple of weeks before my mom died. So anyway, I, I don't mean to sound cold and obviously like death and illness is such a serious thing and it, it, it crushed me in many ways, but I just think that, you know, life is so complicated and all of our lives are complicated.

And, you know, I was able to come back and show my mom all the pictures from London before she passed away. And that was how I managed it. There's, you know, there's no perfect way. 

Zibby: Oh my gosh. I love that so much. And I'm so sorry you went through that. I'm so glad you had the moments with Ella and that she had what she needed because you're really giving her that gift.

And I also love that people do so quickly say, you know, even like this morning I got off to a bad start and I'm like, Oh, it's just gonna be one of those days. You know, but it's not like I'm having a wonderful moment right now. I've had already many wonderful moments today. You know, you can get stuck in that narrative.

Well, today's a wash or this year's a wash or because of this, this is going to be a wash. And it's a reframe on how you live every day of your life, which is like incredibly, incredibly valuable. I don't think that's sounding flippant at all. I think it's a coping mechanism that everybody desperately needs.

Samantha: Yeah. That's a great way to put it. 

Zibby: Oh, so Sam, I know you're already an entrepreneur. You have this amazing company that you're running and all of this, like you're doing Park Place payments, but you also have this women leader guru coaching. Are you doing any more of that? Is there any way to Scale what you started, because like so many people need that too.

Like Yeah. How do you, how do you keep up with both pieces of, of that? 

Samantha: So I was always obsessed with financial independence. Again, that was like a legacy of my mom and she was like very crass in her lessons to me, and she'd be like, you can't sleep with money. Like, she was always giving like very crafts, but very meaningful lessons.

And she would point out women in our apartment building and be like, yeah, she hates her husband, but she has no money of her own and she can never leave him. So never be like her. So. Because of that, I was always obsessed with financial independence. And when I was on my book tour, I met so many women who got stuck in situations because they had no money of their own, or they had no ability to get back into the workforce.

And that was actually what drove me to start my company. So people are like, well, I don't understand how you were this like work life balance guru. And then you became a payments expert. And I'm like, I am not a payments expert. I spend all day thinking about how I can make tons of women financially independent.

And that is so meaningful to me and it's the best thing I've ever done. So we now have 1300 account executives in all 50 states who sell to their local businesses. So they sell payment processing, which is a really boring product, by the way, to their, you know, hair salon and their kids, pediatrician and all the business owners they already know.

And it makes them supplemental income if they just want to, you know, have a stash for new shoes every month. Or it, it allows them to pay for their kids education based on how much they want to work. It's all part of the gig economy. So that is my full time thing. As part of that, I have a podcast that I co host about extraordinary women.

You've been on the podcast. It's called What's Her Story because I've always been obsessed with women's stories and it frustrates me that we don't hear more women's stories or more of a variety of women's stories in terms of, you know, I still do a ton of public speaking and speak to a ton of big groups of women.

I've been engaged in coming up in a week or two to a group of thousands of women. I what's really hard for me, and it's so funny because to be you and I, I feel like have gotten to know each other super well in a very short period of time. But this part of me, like even just talking about all the advice and stuff, like I love talking about this stuff. And I feel like I can help so many people and it frustrates me that I can't do more of it. And I was just telling my kids the other day, cause I hosted this call in radio show for so many years where people call me with their problems and like, I loved it. You know, if I could have done that 24 hours a day, like that was like my jam.

And definitely that part of me is not as, as, uh, fulfilled anymore, but you know, in five years when I sell my company or whatever, I will probably return a little more than that stuff.

Zibby: Oh my gosh, amazing. So where can everybody find you? Let's say they, like, where should they go? Who's, where should they follow you?

How do they find out about your speaking engagements and all of that? 

Samantha: They can follow me on Instagram at Samantha Ettus and Twitter, same thing. Facebook, same thing. 

Zibby: Amazing. Thank you. Thank you for your book and your friendship and all the rest of it. It's inspiring and really awesome. And I know this book and hopefully this episode will help people out there who may be at a crossroads or may just need like a fine tuning of their life hacks or whatever it is.

I know it really helped me. So thank you. 

Samantha: Thank you, Zibby. 

Zibby: Thanks.