"You just gotta go with the flow."
Serena Williams has urged her friend Meghan Markle not to worry about being perfect as she prepares for motherhood.
Serena, who is mum to 18-month-old Alexis Olympia, said that she put herself under pressure before welcoming her baby.
"Accept mistakes and don't expect to be perfect. We put so much pressure on ourselves," she told
E! News.
"I had all those high expectations and what I was going to do and then I had what I was going to do.
"I was gonna recover and I was gonna be great, and this is a time that everything is not going to go as planned.
"My whole life is so planned and this is the one time where it wasn't. You just gotta go with the flow."
Meghan will be the "best mom", the tennis pro added.
Serena and Meghan have been firm friends since meeting at a charity sports event in 2014.
"We hit it off immediately, taking pictures, laughing through the flag football game we were both playing in, and chatting not about tennis or acting, but about all the good old fashioned girly stuff," Meghan wrote on her website of their first encounter.
Serena was a guest at Meghan's wedding to Prince Harry last year and also helped to plan her baby shower in February.
