The Skills to Fly High /
Having experienced the highs and lows of life, Hannah Hardy-Jones has transformed the corner of her living room into a home office that is providing international support to mums in need.
Hannah Hardy-Jones and her world first, a personal development app for mums
Hannah Hardy-Jones describes her life in Auckland in 2013 as ‘near perfect’. Her career in HR was going great, married life to husband Nick was fab, they had just bought a house and were expecting their first baby. ‘Then everything changed.’
While at the time the change presented was challenging, it is one that Hannah reflects on with a pragmatic and overwhelmingly positive attitude. Recalling life at eight months pregnant, Hannah discusses how calm she was going into her new role as a mum. A happy, warm character, she ‘was confident with babies and felt prepared’. However, a traumatic birth left her feeling out of control. ‘Those first few days of motherhood, I was pretty high and by day 10 I was really unwell.’
Despite no history of mental illness she was diagnosed with postpartum bipolar disorder. ‘I was treated at home and it was pretty tough. Of course what goes up must come down, so following the manic highs would come extreme lows.’
A year on, Hannah and Nick made the decision to relocate to Christchurch to be closer to family and have a fresh start. ‘Auckland was very isolating and the house had some pretty bad memories for us. But once we had our feet on the ground down here, I felt like I was back,’ she shares with a grin.
Wanting to grow their family, the couple worked with the Maternal Mental Health Unit to realise their dream, welcoming Henry three and half years after Alice.
Her ability to discuss mental illness and her own incredibly personal journey is not only inspiring and captivating, but has been immensely cathartic for Hannah, and motivated her to help others.
Blogging about her story saw her go on to develop a world first – a personal development app for mums. ‘I realised that despite it all, I had been lucky to have professional help. So many new mums are expected to just get on with it.
‘Working through how I could help, I ruled out events and coaching. I wanted to reach millions of mums, across the world.’ So she turned to technology, and working with a developer created The Kite Program, an app for mums that launched in March 2019.
Research during the concept phase of development confirmed what she instinctively knew – that many mothers felt they were missing out on personal development and were searching for something more. ‘An incredible 65 per cent of mothers interviewed wanted to know how to make more time for themselves and to do more of the things they love. That’s pretty powerful.
‘On the flipside, 70 per cent of mums interviewed said
they sometimes felt mum-guilt. This was over anything from not spending enough quality time with their children, to their kids eating too much junk food. It was also interesting to note that 49 per cent of mothers surveyed felt less connected to their partners after having children. This highlights how stretched mothers often feel and our inner monologue…we want time for ourselves, we want to be there for our kids and we want to be connected with our partners. It’s a lot.
‘To me, this was an obvious place to start – to create a programme that would support mothers in everything from improving relationships, organising their busy lives, through to reducing mum-guilt and ultimately their stress levels.’
The name is symbolic for Hannah: ‘A kite is a universal object, that when flying high is amazing, but needs the tools and skills to get there. You can’t do it without them.’ The kite analogy is particularly true for mums who spend so much time helping fly the kites of others, that often their own is forgotten.
‘Being a new mum is just like starting a new job – you have to learn as you go, but you also need to hit the ground running. In the workplace we build in support networks and programmes for managing the health and safety of our workers, and this is what Kite does for mums. It is about providing bite-sized practical activities to equip them with the tools to grow. It is about building their personal toolkit.’
Once downloaded, the app asks three simple questions in order to create a tailored programme based on need. There are 14 mini programmes, or Kites, that contain between 14–30 tasks that can be worked through at your own pace. While the app delivers activities daily, there is no pressure to complete a task and it will wait patiently until you are ready to move on to a new activity.
‘I am very aware that a lot of mums want to be more present, not spending more time on their devices. For this reason, I designed the app so users spend very little time interacting with the app itself; instead it is all about
implementing the activities into real life situations. They are small tasks that fit into a busy life.’
Following the success of Kite for Mums, Hannah went on to launch Kite for Business allowing individual organisations to adapt the Kite template for their own needs and ultimately equip their teams with the tools and wellbeing support they need to achieve.
Reflecting on the last seven years, Hannah is rightfully proud at how far she has come, and is all too happy to share a laugh about the juggles of being a working mum and the ‘glamour’ involved in our home offices – hers a corner of the living room, but one that is rapidly gaining international success.
Hannah’s dream is to eventually make Kite for Mums free of charge, and with an array of ideas in the pipeline and ‘goals to achieve’ there is little doubt she has even further to go!
‘65 per cent of mothers interviewed wanted to know how to make more time for themselves and to do more of the things they love. That’s pretty powerful.’