At cozy and eclectic Left Bank Coffeehouse in Newport, we sat down with Rachel DesRochers, serial entrepreneur and founder of Grateful Grahams, to talk about one of the frequent side effects of professional success: guilt. During her decade as a business owner, Rachel has learned a thing or two about managing guilt. She shared her experience and some tips and tricks, like a regular gratefulness practice and lots of self-love.

There is no single definition of an entrepreneur or the obstacles they face. As part of our year-long series sponsored by Main Street Ventures, our community chose 12 of the biggest obstacles female-identifying entrepreneurs face, and we found 12 women who spend their days conquering them. Explore the whole series here.

Interview by Michaela Rawsthorn. Photography by Chelsie Walter.

Note that this interview contains some strong language.

What is your elevator pitch?

Oh, gosh! Everything I've built is through the vision of gratitude and community.

I asked myself, “How do we change the world through the message of gratitude, and how do we build community through that?” Grateful Grahams, our handmade graham cracker company, has a mission to spread the message of gratitude one graham at a time. It’s also an incubator space. We offer our shared-use, commercial kitchen space for food entrepreneurs through the lens of “How do we help each other?”

How did you end up in the graham cracker business?

In 2009, I gave birth to my daughter, Rosalie (a.k.a. Rosie). I knew I could either tell her she could create her dreams, or I could actually create my dreams and show her. Walk the walk. That was a huge pivotal moment for me.

There are lots of pieces to the story.

I grew up on graham crackers. It was a staple in my home from my grandmother. And my dad taught me gratitude when I was in grade school. So, I've got 25-plus years of gratitude experience and practice under my belt.

Grateful Grahams started when I called my husband at work. I was like, “I think I'm going to start this graham cracker company and we'll talk about gratitude. I'll bake treats. Feed the people.”

He was like, “Okay, cool!”

Everything else got built organically around that. Incubator Kitchen Collective came about when we were doing six farmers markets a week and we were meeting all these makers. We noticed there wasn't a home, there wasn't peer support, and there wasn't real mentorship.

“So, let's create that!”

I literally just flung the doors open into a kitchen and I said, “Come on, let's learn it together.”

The kitchen turned 6 in September and we signed on our 106th company. We also have a little music festival we do called the Good People Festival, and then a podcast called “In Gratitude.”

How have you struggled with balancing those parts of your life: the entrepreneur and parent?

One, there's no balance. There's so much integration. My people have to be part of it. I can't work Monday through Friday and then turn it all off, because somebody is going to call on Saturday and need help.

Grateful Grahams is 10 in April. So, I've integrated these parts over the last 10 years by being really honest with everybody.

I try to weave my story as “brutifully” honest as I can.

I had to come to terms and really face that I’m going to miss stuff. I’ve missed sports games. I've missed field trips. Actually, this week I signed up for a field trip and then my schedule completely shifted, and I ended up being like, “I'm sending Dad.”

I have to be really honest with my people. This idea that we can't tell them what’s really going on because they're only kids… No, that’s not going to work. I'm brutally honest with them. I share the struggles of entrepreneurship with them. I try to make them know that they're part of this. It isn't, “You get this Rachel and they get that Rachel.” No, everybody just gets Rachel.

How did you develop your philosophy for making it all work?

One of the things that helped us get where we are is that I have a tool like gratitude to use. I use that tool when I'm feeling really guilty. Like missing a field trip. I have to mentally do an inventory of the things I've not missed. And I can also say to my kid, “Hey, I feel bad, too. I messed up.”

I truly believe in the practice. And it isn't just me. I think as people – especially women – we put this burden on our shoulders that it's just us. You have to be the perfect wife, the perfect mother, the perfect entrepreneur, the perfect fill-in-the-blank. But no, that's your ego. How do we shift out of that?

I mess up every day. I'm human.

I tell people that at the end of the day, the only thing I'm really good at is hugs, and everything else a bonus. And they're like, “Stop, don't say that. You're so good at so many things!” But that's the point, right?

There's this underlying pressure that comes with being so good at all this stuff. So, for me, one of my mechanisms is like, “Wait a second, yeah, I might be good at other things, but I have to start here.” I have to start at ground level. Because once you're grounded and you have a clear space that you're starting from, then you can go up. But if you're starting here [lifts hand high], you don't really know where to go from here. You’ll teeter.

So I have to break it down to people, and I have to be confident and comfortable. I have to just say, “Let's figure it out together. I'll do my best. Can you do your best?”

Can you give some tips for people who want to practice gratitude?

You can go to racheldesrochers.com and print a two-week gratitude journal.

One of my favorite practices is doing “Roses and Thorns” with the kids at the dinner table every night. They talk about the best part of their day and the worst part of their day. I think it's really important for us to create space to talk about the crap, and to teach our kids that it doesn’t all have to be perfect. It's not all roses and butterflies. There's no perfect.

I have a group of girlfriends, and we can just text each other, and there's no need for a response back. So start a text chain with your girlfriends and say, “This is just for gratitude. Like if you're feeling it or you need it, we're here for you.” I think my social media has definitely turned into my gratitude practice. I try to weave my story as “brutifully” honest as I can.

You have everything inside of you to do whatever you feel like you're put on this earth to do, but you have to start. You have to take that first step; you have to try. You have to break away from the fear, which is terribly hard because you're going to fail. You're going to be laden with guilt because you've messed something up, or you've mixed up days and you've missed something. Or, you could not.

If we were interviewing a man on this topic, do you think the conversation would go any differently?

Hell yeah!

I've always been the loud blonde in the corner who just shows up wholly as herself. I admire how much work that takes a woman, and how men are just naturally that way. I'm sure the guys aren't fighting about what they're wearing to the meeting.

We all need wives. I look at the men that I work with and everything; they have women in their lives who are doing a lot of the work. Here I am, I'm doing it, plus a lot of the work. And I have an awesome husband who does all the laundry. We can't fit that normal mold. I can't keep up the house and keep up the businesses. I need help.

As women, do we have to fight more for it? Do we have to fight for our space more? Men show up knowing they've got it and they can nail it. When we show up, unfortunately, it’s like we still have something to prove. We hold ourselves back because it's really hard to show up as ourselves 100%.

What advice would you give to your younger self?

How about I give you the advice that was given to me when I was that younger me? We moved when I was in the sixth grade. I started a new school and I was the awkward kid. I was the fat girl getting all the name calling and all the shaming that girls do.

My dad looked at me and he said, “They don't love themselves.” [Tearing up] That's it. We all need to love ourselves so much.

Raising a daughter now, I'm like, “You have it all inside of you.” I was the lucky one who was taught that when I was in that fumbling age. I learned that they were mean because they weren’t doing the work to love themselves. I got to look at my crap every day and ask, “Why did that affect me?” That’s my stuff.

Being taught that when I was in the sixth grade completely transformed my next decade of life. Because I knew it was about me. I knew I had to love Rachel before I could love anybody else.

Are there things that still come up that make you feel guilty?

I spent the last year on a journey of self-care. I've been doing this, again, almost 10 years. This past year I halted a lot of things and I just said, “Wait, this has to sit on a shelf. I can't do this right now.” Part of it was that guilt because I let myself get spread too thin.

You're going to be laden with guilt because you've messed something up, or you've mixed up days and you've missed something. Or, you could not.

Do I have kid guilt? Yeah. I have one who's in college now, and we can talk about stuff. When he's out on his own, I want him to look back and be like, “I never got it before, Mom. Now I know why you couldn't make it to this or that.”

I have no guilt over raising fiercely independent children because that's my job as a parent.

There was guilt this week when I couldn’t volunteer for the field trip. I said I was going to show up more for my kids at school and field trips and, of course, I had a meeting and I couldn’t make it. But I think what helps me dissipate all the guilt is the fact that I talk to them.

Why are we afraid to talk to people? We want to put our kids in this bubble. But we're going to hurt them because we're not telling them the truth. Not telling them is not being protective of them because it can get to a point where they don't know what the heck is going on.

How do you recognize when you're getting burnt out and what do you do about it?

I think part of it is exhaustion. Once I've gone for seven days where I’m up for three hours in the middle of the night, I'm like, “Okay, hold on, something's off. What is it?” I take inventory to uncover the stressor, and find out who can help me figure out that stress point.

I usually have no problem turning it off, but again, I've been doing it a really long time. I'm out of the space where I believe if I stop working that everything's going to fall apart. How many women are building something and then that's their story? “If I stop, everything's going to go away. They're going to forget about me.”

I also put up very clear boundaries. For me, it’s not joining clubs because, right now, I know that I won’t be able to give them the attention they deserve. I even stepped off the two boards I was on 18 months ago because I was like, “It's not fair for your organization to have somebody that can only show up a 10th of the time.”

It’s okay to have boundaries.

Grateful Grahams has actually been able to grow more in the last year because I've stepped back a little bit. We want to control our journey, right? But the reality is that we need to trust that path.

I've gotten to where I am because I've trusted myself along the way. I trusted my gut. I've trusted every decision I've made as a business owner, as a mom, as a wife, as a woman, as a leader, and as a gatherer of women.

I can't control the outcomes. I can lay down the vision and the idea and the plan, but I also have to step back and let the plan unfold. And that's scary as fuck, right? Because we go, “As soon as I let go of control, something's going to happen!” But the opposite is once you actually let go of control, the whole flower blossoms.

You have to trust that you have it. Otherwise, why are you doing it?

Tell us about an influential woman in your life.

There are women I'm following on Instagram right now and they both are expanders – folks that are expanding who you are and are people you can look up to. One is Lacy Phillips with To Be Magnetics.

Locally? There are just too many of them! Like Kyla Woods and I are coming together each week to do a little live storytelling thing. Stevi Carr is doing really awesome stuff with women's wellness right now. You guys at Women of Cincy are doing awesome stuff. Or I think about women in food like Jeni Britton Bauer; she's a badass. These are impactful people. I guess maybe the thing is: They're all truth tellers. None of these people that I go to are afraid to say that’s it's really fucking hard.

There is no single definition of an entrepreneur. Check out our year-long series, "This Is Entrepreneurship." Sponsored by Main Street Ventures.

This Is Entrepreneurship: Rachel DesRochers on Guilt