Breaking the Mold: A Former Trad Wife’s Guide to Owning Your Voice and Building a Personal Brand

If you’ve ever been caught in a social media doom scroll, you’ve probably seen more than a few trad wife videos. Trad wife is short for a traditional wife. She’s a stay-at-home mom wearing homemade sundresses while collecting fresh eggs, baking sourdough, and wrangling her many children to make homemade Christmas ornaments for their grandparents.

Her 1950s-style role is often praised for the support it lends to her husband’s career and ambitions.

A prime example is Hannah Neeleman of Ballerina Farm fame on Tik-Tok. Her videos depict her life filled with hobby farm chores, homemaking, baking, and raising her eight children, which are all very trad wife duties. (Sidenote: if you’re not even a little ticked off with her husband Daniel for giving her an egg apron for her birthday, I’m sorry I don’t think we can be friends).

I was a trad wife before it was a trend. My days were filled with goat milking, egg collecting, bread making and homeschooling my children on a rural Northern British Columbia farm. This is where I learned a lot about how capable I am at problem solving and how much grit I actually embody.

It’s a rather trying task to wrangle an ornery goat on to a milking stanchion while you’re waddling around the farm with a pregnant belly, but it had to get done, and it did.

The life of a traditional wife was rarely boring, and I love a good adventure, but I was living someone else’s “wholesome” dream. One day, I decided it was time to live my own dream and make it a reality.

Breaking the Mold

There comes a point in all of our lives when the whispers of our intuition become loud shouting and waving. For me this was in my mid to late thirties. “It’s Time!” My inner knowing blared through a megaphone at me. “You get one precious life and it’s time to start living yours!”

I wish I could tell you there was one bright and glorious moment where I stepped into the spotlight, completely reinvented, and busting out of the mold like dynamite. Really it was like a delicate resculpting as I figured out who I wanted to be and how I would get there.

Reinventing yourself is a marathon, not a sprint.

Decide That You Have Grit.

Grit is the unwavering commitment to stick with something until you see success. I’m not talking about trying it out for 90 days or making a half-assed attempt. Stepping into version 2.0 of you requires a whatever-it-take attitude. There’s no going back to the farm.

Success requires resilience and a refusal to quit until you reach your goals. Keep moving forward!

Reverse Engineer Your Goals.

Start with the end goal in mind. Then, break it down into monthly targets to be met. Next, figure out what needs to happen weekly to meet those monthly targets, and finally, break it down further into daily tasks to be completed to keep up your momentum.

JFDI (Just F#$%ing Do It)

Whether you bribe yourself with rewards, find an accountability partner, or decide to make a public declaration of your to-do list on Facebook, do what motivates you!

Consistency is what makes dreams come true.

Get Really Firm In Your Belief That You Are Capable

You don’t know everything you’ll need to know right now and you’ll need to draw on your past skills as well as your ability to adapt and learn to move forward successfully. When I first started creating content and marketing businesses on social media I had a say yes and figure it out strategy. We live in a world where libraries of resources and information are available and usually already in the palm of our hands.
Take advantage of this miracle!

Mistakes are Learning Opportunities

I can not count the times I told myself “Nobody is going to starve or become homeless because of this mistake.” It’s part of the learning process and you’ll learn many valuable lessons through trial and error. Have compassion for yourself.

You are your best asset, treat yourself like the treasure you are. A hardworking woman who deserves kindness and understanding.

Tweak Your Reinvention

If Barbie can have hundreds of identities, we can try on at least two or three. Life is about discovery and pivots. If you start down the path of your new self as a marketing copy writer, but being a videographer who creates gorgeous wildlife content calls to you, go ahead and make a switch.

Maybe you start out as a generalist in a certain field, and after some time find a niche market with yoga studios and retreat planning. It’s ok to head in that direction!

Don’t get restuck inside the box.

Where do you start?

Sit down with a pen and paper. Write out all of the skills you have from managing your home. Managing schedules, financial management, meal prep and planning, maintenance and cleaning, peer to peer mediation, relationship skills, communication skills… the list goes on.

Find the ones that are enjoyable for you and think of ways you could use those skills to help others. Really focus on business to business ideas because this is a model that tends to be more profitable and business owners often understand the value of investing in knowledge and outsourcing.

Document your journey into your new endeavor! Behind the scenes is solid gold in the digital marketing world.

Find networking opportunities and curate a circle of business besties for support.

Taking the main character role is not a fairytale… at first.

Those initial steps toward achieving your goals and leaving behind a traditional life are wobbly and counterintuitive but take them anyway.

The more you move forward, the more trustworthy you become to yourself. It becomes easier to take up space and really live an extraordinary life.

It’s all possible.