We recently connected with Bailey Feldman and have shared our conversation below.
Bailey, so good to have you with us today. We’ve always been impressed with folks who have a very clear sense of purpose and so maybe we can jump right in and talk about how you found your purpose?
Back in my mid-twenties, I first took the CliftonStrengths assessment where it identifies your top 5 strengths. My number one strength was Belief. The write up is this: People exceptionally talented in the Belief theme have certain core values that are unchanging. Out of these values emerges a defined purpose for their lives.
Language is such a powerful tool and It was an ‘Ah Ha’ moment to be able to name something and explain moments in my life where I had feelings of disconnection or discontent. It also left me thinking, so what exactly are those core values, what is my purpose? This triggered a lifelong focus on finding language for what I care about and what’s important to me. I value beauty and excellence, I value community and kindness, I value bravery and confidence, I value gratitude and spirituality, and the thought of being connected to something greater than myself. It’s these things that help me understand what in my life is going to fill my cup, why I respond to certain situations in certain ways, and who I should surround myself with. So, back to the question, I think I have found purpose in different ways across different seasons. For example, I found purpose in my consulting career because I believed in the approach we took and what we stood for, it aligned with my values. However, things shift. By defining and naming your values, you are much closer to being able to tell when they are out of whack. I knew my previous career was coming to an end because motherhood shifted the way I viewed my job and purpose. I was off balance and where I used to find purpose, no longer tracked with my values. As you grow and live and experience, you get more information that shapes you. New data means new possibilities.
As a working woman and then a working mom, I started to feel so much fire inside around supporting women. It truly made me feel like I wanted to go into battle and demand more. Women and mothers deserve more than what’s being made available to us in America. I got to this point where I realized I have the skills and ability to make and I couldn’t sit around and wait any longer. Building Fount + Flourish was in response to truly feeling like I had no other option or route to take. It was the only thing that made sense to me, even if it was (and still is) absolutely terrifying.
Finding your purpose means understanding, naming, and re-evaluating what you value most. It also requires us to be in tune with how we are intuitively responding to our experiences and the world around us throughout different seasons of life.
Great, so let’s take a few minutes and cover your story. What should folks know about you and what you do?
My husband and I live in Maryland with our three little girls, our dog, and our 4 chickens (and yes, life is quite a big, beautiful mess 99% of the time). Professionally, I am a leadership consultant and coach. I have spent my career focused on people and fostering relationships, bringing people and groups closer together and closer to achieving their goals. But after 9 years working across international non-profits and management consulting, I decided I wanted to use my gathering, consulting, and coaching skills to help more women. Women add such unique value to communities but are lacking the support systems needed and are often forced to choose and sacrifice – Work or Motherhood, Play or Family, Boss or Wife, Friend or Selfcare. Fount + Flourish was established to fill the gap of the support systems that we are currently lacking, with the hope that one day we become superfluous because these systems exist without us. Basically, I started Fount + Flourish out of a strong desire to revolt. To break down walls that felt like they were suffocating me regarding work, community, and family. To fight for women who put everyone and everything above themselves. To break cycles of self-sacrifice, guilt, and loneliness. It started with creating space for women and continues to evolve into a much larger experiment to change behavior of how we see ourselves in the world and how the world sees us.
Fount + Flourish is two words and stands for two main pillars of work that we do. The Fount, a source, is our community. We create space for women to connect, move, create, and learn together. We offer a social membership program where we get together monthly for a social activity which has involved everything from happy hours to sound baths. Our community is about bringing a multi-generational group of women together. We have women in their early 20s to their 60s that hold titles ranging from stay at home moms to CEO’s. This isn’t a networking group or just about friendship. It’s about bringing women together in a way that builds support systems and resources. So, when you come, maybe you meet a friend or maybe you meet a mentor, or an expert. During the day, our amazing new space also offers coworking memberships. This bright, beautiful, womens co-working space is a way for women to get out of a coffee shop or their home office and spend some time each week with other women by working, connecting, and collaborating.
Flourish, stemming from vigorous development and growth, focuses on supporting women powerfully navigate the workforce during their 20s and 30s. Our leadership development programs combine training and coaching to support your first job or management position, salary negotiations, pregnancy, maternity leave, work re-entry and all the things in between. I believe that support working mothers starts when women first enter the workforce and build strong habits and boundaries in hopes that women feel like they have more choices when deciding if and how they want to raise a family. In January, our support is going digital, by offering leadership development course for womens in their 20s that I am super excited for.
There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?
I wasn’t specifically going with a ‘C’ theme, it just happened!
Curiosity, Confidence, and Collaboration.
Honestly, Curiosity, or seeking to understand, would have been my one answer to this question. In a digital age, it’s so easy to simply take the information that is handed to us, so nurturing or developing this skill does require active pursuit. My advice on where to start? Ask good questions. As both a consultant and coach, you spend a lot of time learning and perfecting your questions and it has definitely made me a better leader, entrepreneur, and friend. Start with ‘How’ and ‘What’ questions. Ask yourself and others, “what if” and “how might”. Even if you are sitting across the table from a co-worker or client, asking better questions starts to knock down the metaphorical box in problem solving and take you to a place with more options of what might be. It builds relationships and increases trust, because with each question you are admitting you don’t know something, you want to learn more, or better understand. It signals that you care enough to still be in the conversation and to continue it. So, if anything comes from this article, it’s my hope that just one person asks one extra question to themself or another. That’s all it takes to shift the trajectory of a story.
Confidence. Believe in yourself, believe in your value, and know how to communicate it well to others. We all have something to offer in every room we walk into, but we are our biggest critic. Most people don’t take the time to sit down and define what they value, what they are passionate about, and what they want their life to look like. REAL confidence can only exist if we take time to know who we are and what is important to us. Only then can we confidently communicate it with the world and find the courage to fight for ourselves and what we value most.
Collaboration. WE WERE BUILT TO LIVE IN COMMUNITY. Louder for the people in the back. I love remote work, I love flexibility, and I love time to myself (seriously, I’m a mom of three girls 5 and under). However, we are becoming more and more disconnected as a society and the loneliness statistics are mind-blowing. We were not meant to do it all alone and will live a life unfulfilled if we don’t share it. Living in community is hard, it means exposing parts of yourself you may not want to share with others, it sometimes means compromise, it can mirror back parts of you that you might not want to see, but it makes us all better humans. So, go. Get out and join a group/club/church, learn something with someone, travel with someone, and please, do it in person.
What do you do when you feel overwhelmed? Any advice or strategies?
I recently wrote a newsletter to my community of women about finding focus. As a mom, wife, and friend, trying to start a business and hold tight to the things that make me feel like my own human is non-stop overwhelming. Sometimes, I get home and look around like ‘omg, what have I done.’ Well, the answer that I know deep down in my heart is that I’ve built a crazy, messy, beautiful life for myself. And yes, I have to remind myself of that often. However, the only way that I can work through it is through prioritization and focus. As I mentioned before, confidence and clarity arise from knowing who you are and what you value. It is essential, whether with a friend, in a journal, or with a professional that you explore what your core values and passions are. Once you have those values you can use them as a filter to how you make decisions. The author Priya Parker so beautifully describes a similar thought of making ‘purpose your bouncer.’ When you know the fundamental why, it’s much easier to allocate how you spend your time, money, skill, etc. because you keep asking yourself ‘is this in service of my why.’
Unfortunately, focus often means exclusion. When you are focused you give things up. You have to be comfortable to let go of the things that are slowing you down, distracting you, and stealing your focus. If you get into this awful cycle of distraction and ‘yes’ you end up sacrificing pieces of yourself and in turn withholding the best parts of you from the world. So remember, it’s about focus not exclusion. Giving up so that you can truly give back in more powerful, magical, ways.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.fountandflourish.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thefount_co/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bkilbourne/
Image Credits
Meredith Minor Photography Ashley Caitlin Photography
