Unconventional, Unrelenting, and Unapologetic: What Those Words Mean When You're Rebuilding
Three words.
Dr. Alison Schmidt asked me to pick three words that begin with “un” to describe who I am. She does this on her podcast, (UN)Conversations®. Every guest gets the same prompt. Most people overthink it.
I didn’t.
Unconventional. Unrelenting. Unapologetic.
They came out of my mouth before my brain caught up. Because these aren’t aspirational words I picked from a vision board. They’re the words I earned. Through five acquisitions, a CEO turnaround nobody thought I should touch, a divorce that dismantled everything I’d built personally, and the slow, unglamorous work of becoming someone new while raising a blended family of four boys.
I want to tell you what each of those words actually costs. Because the polished version sounds great in a podcast intro. The real version is harder. And more useful.
Unconventional: The Path That Doesn’t Exist Yet
I’ve never followed the rulebook. Not because I’m rebellious. Because the rulebook wasn’t written for me.
When I started building in the startup world, there was no “mom tech” category. No women-focused VC funds. No playbook for a woman who wanted to build companies AND be present for her kids. The infrastructure didn’t exist. So I built anyway.
That’s what unconventional actually means. It’s not a personality trait. It’s a survival strategy. When the path doesn’t exist, you either wait for someone to build it or you start walking and let the path form behind you.
MOMumental Moments® was born that way. I didn’t see a movement honoring the quiet, invisible moments that redefine women’s lives. The pivot after failure. The clarity that arrives in burnout. The courage hiding inside caregiving. Nobody was naming those moments. So I did.
Here’s what I’ve learned about being unconventional: it’s lonely at the beginning. Everyone else’s path looks more legitimate. More proven. More safe. The comparison trap will eat you alive if you let it. But comparison is just fear wearing a research hat. Your path doesn’t need to look like anyone else’s. That’s the whole point.
Unrelenting: Build, Scale, Pivot. Repeat.
Five acquisitions. A CEO role everyone told me not to take. A company in crisis that I rebuilt from the inside out.
When I stepped into HeyMama as CEO, the company was bleeding. People told me to walk away. That’s exactly why I stayed. Not because I’m stubborn (although, yes). Because I recognized something I’d seen before: the biggest breakthroughs come from the situations everyone else abandons.
That chapter taught me something I carry into everything now. Momentum isn’t a catchphrase. It’s a practice. You don’t get to be unrelenting only when things are going well. You’re unrelenting when payroll is uncertain and you still show up. When you’re running on two hours of sleep and your kid has a fever and the investor call is in forty minutes. When every part of you wants to quit and the only thing keeping you in the chair is the version of yourself you haven’t become yet.
That same muscle followed me out of the boardroom. This month I'm calling it FORTRESS. Boundaries as architecture, not as walls. The thing you build to hold what matters. When you’ve pitched to investors who said no forty-seven times, a hard conversation with a co-parent doesn’t scare you. When you’ve rebuilt a company from crisis, navigating a blended family feels like a skill you’ve been training for.
The entrepreneurial mindset isn’t compartmentalized. It bleeds into everything. Parenting. Partnering. Showing up for yourself on the days nobody’s watching.
Don’t give up. Especially on yourself.
Unapologetic: The Rooms I Stopped Entering
For a long time, I saw “unworthy” in the mirror.
I questioned whether I belonged at the funding table. In leadership rooms. In spaces dominated by people with different pedigrees, different last names, different versions of what “qualified” looked like.
I used to edit myself to fit rooms that weren’t built for me. Soften my voice. Shrink my ambition. Apologize for being too much, too direct, too emotional, too ambitious.
Then I stopped.
Not all at once. It wasn’t a single moment of liberation. It was a thousand small decisions to stop apologizing for the things that made me effective. My directness. My emotion. My refusal to separate motherhood from leadership.
Someone once asked me: “How do you balance being a mom and a CEO?” I used to hear that as a challenge to my legitimacy. Now I hear it as an invitation. Balance doesn’t mean equal time. It means aligned energy. I don’t hide my motherhood in boardrooms anymore. And I don’t hide my ambition at pickup.
Unapologetic doesn’t mean reckless. It means clear. It means I stopped waiting for permission to become who I already was.
The Moment That Changed Everything
Dr. Alison asked me a question nobody had ever asked before: “What was the quiet moment that changed everything?”
Not the big, headline moment. Not the acquisition or the title or the launch. The real one.
I was driving my son to school. Late. Exhausted. He was mid-tantrum. I was holding it together the way I always did. White knuckles on the steering wheel, running through the mental list of everything I was already behind on before 8am.
Then The Chainsmokers came on. “Something Just Like This.”
I turned it up. Loud. Way too loud for a school morning.
And something shifted. He stopped crying. I stopped clenching. We started screaming the words. Then singing. Then laughing. Full volume, windows probably shaking, two people who had been at war with the morning suddenly on the same team.
He walked into school in an entirely different mood than the one he woke up in. And I drove to work proud. Not of a deal I closed or a meeting I crushed. Proud of that. Proud of the redirect. Proud of the instinct to turn the music up instead of the pressure up.
That’s a MOMumental Moment®.
It wasn’t quiet at all, actually. It was loud and messy and set to a Chainsmokers track at 7:45am. But it was the moment I realized: this is the work. Not the boardroom performance. Not the curated version of motherhood. This. The chaotic, imperfect, music-blasting Tuesday morning where you choose connection over control.
Those moments don’t make the highlight reel. But they rearrange everything.
The Failure Nobody Talks About
I also told Dr. Alison about my biggest failure. Not a business failure. A personal one.
I failed by trying to do it all. Perfectly. Quietly. Alone.
I thought being a strong leader meant holding everything together without help. I micromanaged in business. I over-functioned in my personal life. I told myself I could outwork the overwhelm.
I didn’t trust. I didn’t trust my team to lead. I didn’t trust my support system to hold me. I didn’t even trust my own body when it was screaming for rest.
Burnout caught up with me so deep it made me question everything I’d built.
Here’s what I’d tell a woman who is in the middle of that right now: Burnout isn’t a failure of stamina. It’s a failure of systems. Of boundaries. Of support. You don’t need to push harder. You need to build differently.
That insight is one of the foundations of everything I create now. We’re not building spaces for women to grind through another season. We’re building ecosystems where they can thrive through every transition. Where “doing it all” is no longer the goal. Doing it well, supported, and sustainably? That’s the new model.
Three Things You Can Do This Week
I closed the podcast with three tangible things. I want to give them to you too.
1. Name your MOMumental Moment®.
Take five minutes today and write down the one quiet moment this year that shifted something inside you. It doesn’t have to be dramatic. It might be a conversation. A realization in the car. A sentence your kid said that cracked something open. Naming it gives it power. That’s the first step of reinvention: seeing what’s already happening inside you.
2. Audit your energy, not just your calendar.
For one week, track not just what you do but how each thing makes you feel. Where are you drained? Where are you lit up? Reinvention doesn’t always mean a dramatic pivot. Sometimes it means reorganizing your life around what gives you energy instead of what takes it away.
3. Stop waiting for permission to become who you already are.
If you’ve been waiting for someone to tell you it’s okay to start that business, leave that job, write that book, or rebuild your identity after divorce or motherhood: this is your permission slip. You don’t need to have it all figured out. You need to take one unrelenting step. Clarity comes from action, not the other way around.
Listen to the Full Conversation
This essay was inspired by my appearance on Dr. Alison Schmidt’s (UN)Conversations® podcast. If you want the full, unfiltered conversation about unconventional leadership, reinvention, and what it really takes to rebuild, you can listen at unconventionllc.com.
Dr. Alison asked me a question at the end that I’m still thinking about. She has a way of making you see your own story differently. That’s what good conversations do. They don’t just confirm what you already know. They crack something open.
Reinvention isn’t just possible. It’s powerful.
MOMumentally,
Erika
Erika Hanafin Austria
Founder, MOMumental Moments® · Publisher, MOMumental Reinvention
Co-Founder, NeonID · Former CEO, HeyMama · 2x Top 50 Women Leaders, Virginia
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