Hi, this is Makayla with Honest Talk Radio. Honest Talk Radio is a space where we will be sharing the good, the bad, and the ugly in real, raw conversations to try and do our part to reduce the amount of shame, guilt, and judgment so many of us women face. Our hope is that through these conversations, you will feel supported and encouraged in every aspect of your life. So let's get started.
You guys, I am so excited for today's guest. I have Christine Gallagher joining me from Fort Bliss, Texas, and Christine and I are going to be chatting about entrepreneurship, motherhood, and everything in between. Christine is the founder of the Military Quality of Life Consulting and as well as the PCS Stressless Kit. Stressless PCS Kit.
And so I asked Christine to join us on the call today because I wanted her to share her story and her journey about being military solace, but more importantly how she's navigating this uncertain world and life that we live. So Christine, welcome to the show. I'm super happy that you're here. Oh, thank you so much.
Good morning from Texas. As Makayla said, my name is Christine Gallagher. I go by CC, friends call me CC. But I am the president of Military Quality of Life Consulting and the newly launched product called the Stressless PCS Kit.
As an army spouse, I'm also an entrepreneur and a proud mother to two highly mobile military children. And for me, I'd love to give you a little bit more about my professional background. Through six moves and 10 years of marriage, I have worked across multiple industries, including teaching and higher education, running national nonprofit programs and government relations efforts for two of the nation's leading military service organizations. Those were the National Military Family Association and the Military Officers Association of the American and I've also served as an agile IT project manager and defense contractor leading the Department of Defense's military spouse and plan partnership partner portal and the spouse transition program, which was a newly launched program last year.
And for me, much like many other military spouses, maintaining employment is so extremely difficult through all of our PCS moves, wherever we're moving or wherever for us, our me tells us we're going. And so that's why I added entrepreneurship to my resume. And I launched military equality of life consulting in 2015. And since then, I've worked with about 12 different clients, including federal government contractors, online profit programs and organizations, foundations and national brands to equip them to greater fulfill their mission of serving our military community in relation to social impact operations and strategic communications.
So it's a very exciting and impactful, impactful entrepreneurship journey that I'm on. And the most recent addition, as I said, is launching the stress loss PCS kit. And I did that in January of 2020, so about six months ago. So I expanded the mission to serve our military families directly.
And the goal was to help us organize our moves as we go from one home to the next. So I can certainly dive into that product and how it came to be. But that's a little bit about me. And I'm just so happy and grateful to be here with you and can't wait to dive in more to our conversation.
Fantastic. I love that. What you're doing sounds absolutely amazing and so needed in our community. And so you had mentioned in our pre-podcast questionnaire that the military quality of life consulting came out of a challenging PCS.
And one that you, you know, a heavy-hearted resignation letter, I think that's something that a lot of us can relate to is having to say goodbye, not only to our friends, but having to say goodbye to a piece of ourselves when we arrived. Right. So can you expand a little bit more about that? I sure can.
So we were stationed in Washington, D.C. and we, that was our longest duty station. So I think we were there for about three and a half years. And the employer I was working with at the time, you know, we got orders to Fort Carson, Colorado and my husband's like, let's go, like we're getting ready to move.
And I approached my employer and I wrote a, you know, a remote, you know, job description. I said, you know, this is, this is what I can do for our organization remotely. And unfortunately at the time, they couldn't support it. And, you know, and so for me, my heart was broken.
And it was a position that I loved, people I love working with. And it just was like the perfect storm at the time. So I, of course, I got home and I'm like screaming and crying on the floor, like it's, you know, a three year old having a temper of natural. And I'm like, oh my gosh, this is my fourth, fifth job out of graduate school.
I am just exhausted with reinventing myself, we're moving to a new community, granted it was a city, but I just to go through the interview process and to meet new friends and to network and, and just to get that going again just felt so overwhelming to me at the time. And so my husband was like, well, just start, start a consulting business. You work with all these incredible organizations who are out of the DC area. And they still want it to work with me.
It's just I physically wasn't going to be there. Right. And so that's how, you know, that night I logged into legal zoom and I bought the name and I logged into GoDaddy and I bought the URL. And from there, I started this business not knowing really where it was going to go or what it could turn into.
And simultaneously, as I launched this business, my resume was farmed out by my professional network and I was hired full time by the defense contractor supporting spouse employment and transition for, for DOD. And so, so I at the time and over the years I had both of the simultaneous positions that supported our community for the greater good. And, and so that's how the business started and I can get more into like the transition into the business full time. If you're interested, I don't know.
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I want to highlight something that you said that you said that you started, you know, you logged in and you started the process of creating, getting the legal, you know, the name and getting the GoDaddy name and you, the part that stood out to me was not really knowing where it was going to go. And that to me is so powerful because so many, that stops us.
That stops us. Yes. It stops me before not knowing the big picture, but you don't have to know the picture to get started. No.
And as, and I could ask you this too, as a business owner, you know, you, you define success in different ways, right? For me, maybe at the time success was like getting the URL and the legal entity and the foundation of the business just to have it. And I was like, okay, I can grow it into something. And I think I started out with like writing blog posts as a guest contributor, which I earned, you know, maybe not as much for posts, but it, but like my first check, I feel like I put it in a picture frame in my, like my remote office as we kept going and moving, but it was such an incredible feeling.
I'm like, okay, I can do this. So I moved from, from contributing blogs over and over the years, like the business, it took shape every year. It was a little bit different because I was working full time and because we were growing our family too. And so, so for me, the goal was ultimately to build a business where I could step into it outside of full time employment.
And then I could really create that malleable and flexible schedule and so forth. But, but going back to your original thought of I didn't know where it was going. I didn't know. I didn't know how to run a business.
I have a, I have a, an undergrad in masters and advertising and communications and I, I have no idea. But here we are. And so now I'm full time in the business and I work with some incredible clients and, and I'm very blessed in that manner. I think that's amazing.
And, and everything that you said about every year looked a little different. So, you know, I talked on a previous interview about how it's more about the process. It's more about the journey than it is about the, the ending, you know, about the, what it looks like when it's wrapped up in a pretty bow because it is, we're constantly evolving as people and we're constantly evolving as a business. And so creating something that can grow with you, you know, when you were talking about having your, it was your fourth or fifth job outside of graduate school, you know, that's something that a lot of us can relate to and that we, I saw in a military style forum recently how they're like, I feel like I have no value because I, I go home and my friends have all these, have these long careers and I'm, whatever I'm approaching my thirties and I haven't, you know, I haven't had a career because we're constantly changing.
What, what would you say to someone that's dealing with that? That is hard. And I would not say, so for me, I have worked across so many industries. And what I have found success in is the skills that I can transfer from one to the next, right?
So I don't necessarily have a career trajectory. However, I know my, my passion is supporting the military community professionally as like the thread that goes through it. But I've been able to do that across universities as a defense contractor, supporting federal programs, working in the national nonprofit space, but also locally within our units and family readiness groups, volunteering and serving on board. So I would say to that spouse, it's like, find those transferable skillsets and don't get hung up on the word career.
Because it's really hard to do that because for us, it looks a little bit different, but just figure out what those transferable skillsets are and then figure out as you go what that looks like. And I'll say this. So I married my husband right out of graduate school. So and we got married and I was looking for corporate America.
I had studied advertising and communications for many years. And we ended up moving to Fort Campbell, Kentucky, which for me was in the middle of farm fields. And I remember going up and I'm like, what am I supposed to do here? Because there is no corporate America.
I see corn fields across the street from our house. It really pushed me to broaden my viewpoint. So I started teaching at a local university as an adjunct professor in their communications department. And that led me to another job in Alabama when we moved there in their comms department.
And then when we moved to DC, it's kind of like, okay, I have these skillsets. I can teach. I can educate. I can advocate for whatever that role is and whatever I'm passionate about.
And that's how I transition to the nonprofit space. So it's just transferring, but don't get hung up on the word career. So yeah, that's so good. Because like you said, broadening your viewpoint, broadening your, and I would say worldview in a way, because it, the term career is just a word.
It doesn't define you. But so many of us do allow our jobs and our roles and our responsibilities to define, yes, yes, if you're, if you're focusing, like you said, on the skills that you have as opposed to the words wrapped around them, then your world is open. You know, you have so many more opportunities. Even in volunteering, you know, circumstances.
Like I have gained so much of my skillsets from volunteering when jobs weren't available, or I didn't have the time to invest in a nine to five job. I got to analyze the skills for volunteering. Agreed. And for those bosses who are in that season of volunteering, right, or maybe there's not employment opportunities where you're located and that's where your heart's leading you, whatever that looks like, look for volunteer positions where you can quantify the outcome, look for volunteer positions where you can, where you want to work and where you want to focus on in a paid position.
The beauty of a resume also is that you don't have to list like paid positions versus not paid, right? So if you have a chronological versus functional resume, I mean, you can, you can loop volunteerism in there and a future employer wouldn't know. So just, you know, like think about what you're passionate about, where you want to work, and find those volunteer positions where you can quantify the outcomes of what you're doing because it will only strengthen your resume and your talking points, I think. Yeah, no, I completely agree with you.
And I, another thing that you, when you said about, you know, those volunteer hours of volunteer skillsets and being able to quantify them, it's all part of you, part of your journey. It's not, it's not anything less than getting paid. And I know a lot of us wrap success around a monetary number, but there's so much more to it. And I know what makes you happy, right?
Like at the end of the day, and I look at our journey over our multiple moves and where we find, but as a couple, so my husband and I, we constantly redefine success, right? And as you said before, like we are constantly changing, our professional landscape is constantly changing. So my husband and I check in consistently with his job changes, with mine, with our kids in the season of life that they're in, and we worked to define and redefine success as a team. And I feel like that's what's gotten us, you know, this far, and I know you've been married for many more years than, than our 10 years, but I mean, for us, like that, that's what's worked.
And as long as he knows what my goals are, I don't have to feel guilty about that as a working spouse or volunteering or whatever I want to do with our children because we're on the same page. So that to me is really important. That is so good. Being on the same page is your job.
Open communication. I think a lot of times we, I do a lot of marriage coaching as well. And you know, I hear a lot of times that I think it's also sometimes we make things so huge in our minds that we're scared to communicate it. Right.
But once you do, you realize, oh wait, that wasn't that big of a deal. Right. Yeah. Go ahead.
I was going to say, even whether it's personal professional goals, but even things inside the house, right? So my husband, he's, he's working from the installation where he's not deployed and we're very fortunate in that fact. But things about like operating inside our home, like laundry or cooking or dishes or the cleaning all that stuff. Like we, we talk about that and I am completely open with him because I don't like folding laundry and putting it away.
But I'm really starting it, right? I can throw the pot in the washer. I'm so good at starting it and getting it through the dryer. So we, so I'm always one positively encouraging him.
Like thank you so much for folding the laundry and putting it away or for cooking dinner or taking the initiative because I find that when I praise him for the task that he does and even our children, they, it enhances the way that they operate around the house. So open communication. Positive reinforcement. I love that you, I love that you brought that up because again, so many of us feel like we have to do it all.
And I hear a lot of the times like, you can't do it all. You can't have it all. And honestly, I think if you surround yourself with a supportive community, a supportive spouse and communicate, there is a way to have it. It just, it takes work and it's not easy.
Right. But you, but if you try to do it all by yourself, that's when that's just too much. I agree. And even as far as I agree, you can't, you can't do it all to yourself.
You have to prioritize. So I'm being at prioritizing tasks or work where children's activities or family activities. And the thing that I have also learned over the years is that if I'm not good at it or don't want to do it, I'm very good at outsourcing and not feeling guilty about it anymore. So if I don't, if I don't enjoy cleaning our house, right, for instance, and this is like a very first world problem, I would say, but I'm like, okay, I can work or volunteer, go to my kids activities or whatever, whatever that looks like these days, but I can outsource that and that will give me back a couple hours of time.
And I'm kind of being, you know, ungrateful or angry that our house is dirty and, you know, just having that on my mind constantly. So that's something else I feel is if I've gotten over over the past couple of years is just outsourced to grow and find more time for everything that's important to you. Oh, I'm there with you. I think it was time to get there though.
The outsourcing part and not feeling guilty about it. I think it was a long time to get there because I felt like, oh, I'm spending our family's money and I should be able to do this. But truly, what did everybody, my children, my husband, they got unhappy with my chai-la. They got angry with my chai-la.
And like you said, instead of nagging them to do things, or you know, my kids are so very much responsible for cleaning up their own mess. But the overall is I could yell at them on a Saturday to clean up the house or we could spend time doing something together as a family. And I'm also helping someone else out by paying them. Exactly.
Yes. Yes. 100%. Oh, my goodness.
Yes. I want to circle back around real quick. You had talked about getting tired of, you know, when you started your consulting agency, getting tired of starting over. And that's something that I can really, really, like I can understand that because for me, it was, our spouses have a name that follows them.
They have a rank that follows them. They have an OPR or EPR that follows them. So going into a new location, they have something to give them credit, right? Something that's saying, hey, this is what I've done in my past.
For us, we don't have that. And I'm not saying I want some paperwork to be able to follow me around because I've been starting fresh as a good thing. Right. But again, it's so difficult.
So how, you know, I just wanted you to expand on that a little bit more about the entirety starting over so I created something so I can take it with me. Yes. No, that's a very good point. Right.
Our spouses, they come into a unit, a position, and they already have a built in network. They already have their colleague and their mission and they have everything that they need to go. Go, go, go. Right.
That's just what's our life. And for us, like how do we reinventing ourselves? It comes in every facet, right? It's almost like you have this, you know, beautiful life, like you're in Rome right now and you're in the middle of a PCS back to the States.
And so all of these friends and for your children, probably their school and activities and your neighbors and your home, it's like you pack it up and then you dump it out on the other side and you're trying to like put it together as best as you can. And so whenever we move, I spend a lot of time prepping for that transition. So it's a lot of communicating with friends to see like, who do you know there? Who do you know in that location?
And it's also doing research on schools. I love one of the resources I have tapped into every single move and this may be unrelated, but military one source has health and wellness coaches. So someone, you know, I myself when we're getting ready to move, I may not work out as well or I may be stress eating or, you know, doing all these things. But any transition I've had, I've worked with this one life coach and just health and wellness coach to keep me on track.
So military one source has some really great free resources, but professionally I'm on LinkedIn. So if you're on LinkedIn, please reach out and say hi. And I'll start networking professionally that way. And so but with building my business, the beauty of it is that I am able to take it with me.
So my business has operated out of four separate states as a foreign entity. So it was a more brave and Delaware and that's where I paid those taxes and and we've lived gosh in Colorado, California, Texas and Northern Virginia. And so I can take it with me. I can mold and shape it.
I can work with as many or as little clients as I'm as I'm able to. And if I don't have, you know, as many clients, then that's where I find my joint volunteering and serving on board and serving within our local chapters for certain organizations. And so for me, it just gives me some really great flexibility and an opportunity to grow and an opportunity to create greater impact. But hopefully I gave you some good.
Yeah. Well, and one of the things that I heard you saying is that, you know, if there's there's different seasons within your business, then your business is being able to be molded depending on where you are and what your priorities are in that moment. Yeah. And so we may not have the OPRs and EPRs to follow us or that built in network, but if you spend time researching and granted like in my situation, you might research one place and then get PCS to another.
But but spending time preparing for the PCS can really help set you off on the right foot once you get there. And so I love that either professionally, personally, and then also for your children and kind of finding those networks for them. And so leading into the prepping for for PCS, tell me a little bit more about your stress left. Yes.
That was a really great segue, by the way. So I was so the concept of this came about we we were a PCS thing from Colorado to California. And each move I had gotten a little bit more strategic with the products that I was using. So I would order like G labels from Amazon.
I'd order that color duct tape and the Sharpie markers. And there was one move where we were going to Colorado to California and we had to drastically downsize by like two thirds of our house to fit into the cell home in the middle of the desert on the installation. So California, California, and you couldn't we didn't want to live off installation because we were like on this island in the desert. And so I was like, okay, every box coming out of this house is going to fit in like the perfect position in that room.
And it's going to be great. So as we got orders from California to four glist Texas, the project management mind in me was just like, that's it. I'm going to develop my own labeling system. I'm sick of going behind these movers and writing, writing notes on these boxes and placing, you know, critical open first on the sheets and the towels and pots and pans.
And so that like honestly, that's like really what happened. And so when we were in California, I invested money and time from the business into hiring a designer and was like, okay, I need eight different label types here, the icons I want. I need them all different colors. I want to be able to write contents on the labels to give me the flexibility.
They're handwriting maybe great, but maybe I want to write something else on it. And then an opportunity to place whether they were critical or not. And so that's kind of that's how it started. I had the first test test, I say kit coming here to Texas and I gave a kit to my friend who they are neighbors of ours, but they were moving to South Korea.
So they're moving probably like yours going to Rome where it was long term storage short term in the crates and you know, all the things. So we both executed our moves and it was terrific. And when I realized for her going Oconus was that the movers in Korea didn't speak English. So the fact that you had these labels and door hangers that kind of directed the moving crew was incredible.
And she's like, like we went so fast and I've never been unpacked so quickly because they weren't moving boxes a second time or third time or furniture. And for us, we I learned, you know, you have the five or six moving men who are bringing your boxes on the dollies. Once I showed them where everything was going, it was like clockwork. And so I said, never again, well, I knew without having this color coded system to help direct traffic out into the next home.
So we launched. It's so simple, like it's such a simplistic process. So we get here in El Paso, we go to the moon and then I find a local printing vendor here. And so I said, okay, I'm going to invest some money and print a certain number of kits.
And so we launched in January of 2020, so about six months ago, and we sold over 400 kits, which is amazing. And so we have military families who are using them and I'm finally starting to get more feedback on the product because of course of the stop movement and now people are starting to go. And then also businesses and programs that support families moving. So that's been like another clientele, I guess clientele for these kits.
And so it's exciting to see a product from idea, concept to, you know, like the rainstorming development and now it's for sale. So it's really, it's cool. It's such a neat process. Oh my gosh, I need to do a year ago because we have, when we get to Virginia, we have no kidding for separate shipments arriving in one house because we have four shipments because we were supposed to go to Hawaii, like I mentioned before, and we ended up two weeks before leaving going to Rome.
So we already had some stuff in storage. We had some stuff already going like the express shipment going to Hawaii and then we had to quickly scramble at what was left and decide what we wanted to take to Italy and that meant the rest of it was going again into another storage facility. So we had Hawaii, New Mexico and Texas and Arizona is where three things were and then Rome. So four shipments are going to show up.
And I'm like, I can, I'm already feeling the anxiety of when they don't get there. Like do I even want it? Do I just want it? Yeah.
We've been in the drive by. Oh my gosh. So I will definitely be it for the next move because we're only supposed to be in Virginia for a year, maybe two, hopefully two. And so I'll definitely be needing your kid for the next one.
After 18 years, you know, the next, the last few will be perfect. Oh, you know, we're defining, but oh, that just gives me chills because of, and I'll just point this out. Kudos to you for being able to flex and not necessarily break down completely when they're like, you're not going to this side of the earth, but you're going to the complete opposite. And well, your stuff will find you at some point.
I mean, I feel like I'm going to panic attack at that point. Like, oh my goodness, because things change so often. So how do you, how do you deal with, with plans changing? How do you cope with that?
You know, I think the biggest thing, and this is what I want to talk about is helping, helping military spouses navigate these uncertainties because I've been in the military life for 18 years. There's been a lot of uncertainties. This is not the first time, you know, something like this has happened for us, but I know who I am, and I know who I want to be in my family. I know what drives me, what my passions are, what my purpose is.
And so because of that, I can flex. And because I can communicate with my husband like you mentioned, communication is key. It's okay. And I also own my feelings.
When I want to cry, I cry, and I don't apologize for it. I spend some time owning my feelings and my emotions, and then I don't stay there. That's the key. It's a lot of, and then also not candy-coding things for my children.
You know, they know that it's hard. They understand the uncertainty. But together as a family, we talk a lot about the benefits of the change, you know, the benefits of the change in plans, the benefits of moving. And then we share in the misery, you know, we share, we comb as we're together.
We're not afraid to show our emotions, I think is the biggest thing. I'm not afraid to tell my husband when I press or he did, or when I'm mad. But I also preface it with, I know you can't fix it, and I don't expect you to, because a lot of times when we do get, I don't want to build resentment. So I have a program, you know, resiliency over resentment, be resilient, not resentful, and that's what military life has taught me, to be resilient, not resentful.
I love that, because there's so many situations where you can choose to be resentful, right? Like where you get to the point of where you're angry and you can't control it. But I love how you talk about open communication and it's like a team effort in terms of experiencing it together and going on these adventures. But yes, resentment is a real thing.
So just ensure that you put those strategies in place so you don't get there. Well, and resentment can creep in. Resentment is one of those where you might not even know that it's happening. You know, just one negative feeling is leading to the next, and then all of a sudden you find yourself thinking, why am I?
No, angry. Why am I so mad? And I think that comes down to trying to control the things that are out of our control and not focusing on the ones that we can. Yes.
Because there are things in this life, in this military crazy life that we can control. And most of that is the choices we make, the attitude and the mindset that we have. Agreed. No, I love that.
And I also want to point out, I love that you said that you're open about feelings because I feel as in our army life, and this may be completely me, but I often, I used to hide them because I was like, I can't disturb my husband. Like, he's got his job and I've got my stuff. I don't want to show my feelings. Let's just get through this life.
It's not the way to be. And so it's creating that comfort, comfortable environment and a safe space. And maybe I'm going to- Exactly. Yeah.
Go ahead. Sorry. There's a little- I'm happy to be guilty. I didn't want him to question whether I was in this with him or if it was just- I was frustrated.
But then once I realized, you know what, we're a team. And if I'm frustrated, he's frustrated. And it's okay. And then we're going to work together to figure it out.
Right. And vice versa. If he's frustrated, I care. Sometimes I have to be the one that's like, all right, come on.
Anyway, I will only do that. Or he's doing that for me, but we balance each other out in several regards. So yeah, only your feelings, not being afraid to show them is huge and not feeling filthy about it. But I know we both have things that we need to get to.
But C.C. I love this conversation and I hope we can keep it going on another episode sometimes. But before we go, any parting words for listeners today. I think the only thing for our- If we're talking to the military spouses, ensure that you define success for yourself.
Get selfish about it. And focus on what makes you happy, what makes you tick. gives you that fire in your belly and and also figure out what that means for your family, but it's okay to think about yourself. It's okay to define that as a spouse.
So focus inward, right? Focus on you and don't feel guilty about it because you in order for your family to thrive, you have to take care of yourself. Exactly, exactly. So much truth in that.
All right, where can the listeners find you outside of this podcast? Yeah, so military quality by consulting, our website is MQOLC.com, stresslesspcskit, stresslesspcskit.com, and we're on a variety of social media channels, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram. So check us out, shoot me an email. I would love to hear from you all and I'm cheering you on from from here.
Awesome, and thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you for listening to today's show. If you'd like to come on the show and have an honest conversation about connecting, relating, and encouraging women, contact us at hello at honesttalkinternational.com.
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