Finding Your Identity as a Serial Entrepreneur & Mother with Chelsie Antos

I’m so excited to share this conversation with Trades of Hope founder, wife, mama, and serial entrepreneur Chelsie Antos.

She has been an incredible source of inspiration to me for years as I navigate entrepreneurship and mamahood, and I know this conversation will inspire and motivate you as well.

Chelsie is a movement maker, mama, wife, and world traveler. After founding Trades of Hope, a multi-million dollar company empowering women, she has gone on to start The Outside Fam. The Outside Fam is a business encouraging young families and children to get outside and reclaim their peace in an age of technology.

Listen to the episode!

Chelsie’s Journey in Serial Entrepreneurship

Chelsie and her husband are two entrepreneurs in a pod, loving to create things together! Recently, they had two little girls and felt passionate about making time and space for intentional offline living.

As entrepreneurs, Chelsie said, we live and share a lot of our life online and it’s easy to get sucked in, become obsessed, and lose the ability to log off intentionally.

After hearing a statistic that said the average kid today gets outside less than a prison inmate, Chelsie and her husband began The Outside Fam, a movement calling entrepreneurs and families to the outdoors.

But, this wasn’t Chelsie’s first stint in entrepreneurship! Chelsie helped co-found Trades of Hope, a multi-million dollar company empowering women globally.

What does balance in entrepreneurship look like?

It’s hard, she said, “Anything in life worth doing is hard. My mom always said, ‘If anything in life is worth doing it’s going to be hard, you just have to expect it and you gotta be okay with it.'”

They began the movement #takebacktheweekend, encouraging followers to completely log off social media for two days out of every week.

As entrepreneurs it’s hard to disconnect, easy to keep trying to get ahead. “So, there has to be a time,” she said. “Where we have to choose to not get ahead, to not try and reconnect with the online world.”

She loves the online world, she said, but “there’s a way to do it responsibly, and we’re going to take this time for our family.”

What else do we discuss in this episode?

How balance has benefited her entrepreneurial life
How structure and free-spiritedness serve each other to create a full, joyful life
How Chelsie founded a multi-million dollar company at the age of 17
How she balances her achievement-driven nature with her desire to mother
How she’s seen herself grow as a leader in entrepreneurship and motherhood
The identity shift she’s had to make through entrepreneurship as she’s stepped out of her multi-million dollar company
The habits, intentions and practices she’s developed over time that has contributed to her success

Powerful Quotables from Chelsie Antos

“We made a commitment together to make sure our kids understood the value of the outdoors, of real face to face connection with people, with their community, with nature, with faith, and with God through the earth.”

“As an entrepreneur it’s incredibly hard to disconnect. It’s easy to just keep checking your email and trying to get ahead. So there has to be a time where we choose not to get ahead, and to not try and reconnect with the online world.”

“We have a planned free-spiritedness. We love that type of life, we don’t have a ton of structure. But we also have intentional planned-ness. It’s not something that just happens.”

“I don’t believe you can be a true free spirit if you live without structure, because then what happens is your time is taken up by any whim you have in that moment, and you never get to accomplish the actual things that bring you joy, that bring you that free-spirited fullness of life.”

“I want to be able to use both sides of what God’s given me. I want to be able to use the entrepreneur in me, achievement-oriented. I think God loves that we want to create like Him. I want to use that side of me while also being present for my children and being a mother because He created me to be a mother. Those things can blend, but it does take some practice!”

“For anyone who has started a business or is achievement-oriented, it’s easy to wrap your personality up in what you do because you tend to think you are your gifts, the tools God’s given you, but you aren’t the tools God’s given you. You are just you, and God just loves who you are.”