[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome to the Daddy o podcast, episode ten. I'm your host, Rob Burnett, and I'm here with my co host, Brad Bickerton. Welcome to the show, Brad. How you doing?
[00:00:09] Speaker B: Welcome, everybody. We're doing well. We're doing well around here. It's a little quieter around this house. Our, our ever present puppy is part of this podcast. He was. He was neutered two days ago. So he is sleeping, drugged up with a cone on.
[00:00:23] Speaker A: His.
[00:00:23] Speaker B: Cone of shame on his head. And the house is quieter. So that's a little bit of the story. We'll give you some theo updates in a little minute, but, yeah, Rob, I'm so happy to be back here with you. And also to last week we did your birth story. Now we're going to start talking about, hey, what are these first weeks like? Pretty cool.
[00:00:41] Speaker A: Yeah. I'm excited for this new phase of the podcast and for anyone who's new, who's listening. This is. Brad and I have both either are or have been ceos. We have decades combined of business experience, and we're also both. I am now a new father. Brad is a slightly more experienced father by a couple of months. And we're doing this to document our fatherhood journeys and mixing. How do we be the best ceos we can be, the best parents we can be, best fathers we can be, and the best partners we can be. So join us on this journey as we figure stuff out, learn and grow.
So, yeah, Brad, it's been two weeks tomorrow since my son Arthur was born. It's been a wild ride.
[00:01:21] Speaker B: So you're still counting in the days. Is he 13 days old or is he two weeks old? Where you.
[00:01:25] Speaker A: He is 13 days old. We're still on the days.
[00:01:28] Speaker B: All right.
And you were just tapping on this a little bit last week, but I wanted to get back to it this week. What do you think the average daily diapers changes are?
[00:01:42] Speaker A: So our little guy feeds like a champ, which means he poops a lot.
[00:01:47] Speaker B: Good.
[00:01:47] Speaker A: So I would say we are in the double digits in a 24 hours period.
It's pretty wild. It's pretty intense.
[00:01:58] Speaker B: It blew me away. I didn't understand the volume of diaper changes when you do this kind of in the CEO thought, so 15 diapers a day for ten days, that's 150 diapers. And then there's going to be another ten days and it ebbs and flows. But here in the states, you really just have to order and buy from Costco, big box store. There's no not Buy this in bulk option. And the more I go through life and I meet people, different socioeconomic statuses, different places, different parts of the country. Even the hospital where we get our babies checkup, they have diapers, all of them. COSTCO. There's no other way to do it.
[00:02:43] Speaker A: And we don't have that here.
We didn't understand the scale yet, so as a rookie mistake. So we're buying, like, one or two packs at a time, and we basically, every time we go past a pharmacy, it's like, all right, back and grab another pack.
Yeah, that was one of the diapers I feel like is one of these things that everyone thinks about, and a lot of people are grossed out by. I'm just shocked at how JUSt Kind of not BAD it is. It's just really not that bad. And as a dad, it is ONE thing. So I'll tell this right off the bat. I'll tell a story. So at night, laura and I have divvied stuff up where her job, she's BREAstFEEding. We're exclusively breastfeeding, which is a whole episode we can do. It's been really good. It's been really positive for us, but it means that whenever Arthur wakes up at night, Laura's breastfeeding him, which can take anywhere from 10 minutes to an hour, which means her sleep is pretty severely impacted. She's been nice enough to not make me stay up while she's doing that, and I often sleep through some or all of the feeds, but then my job is I do 100% of diapers at night. That's just what I do. We split it that way. And we joked that early on he was very happy with mum feeding, but then I would pick him up and put him on a cold changing table and change his diaper, and he'd just scream and wail and be very upset. And so, Laura, we were joking that he was going to start associating me with the horrible cold, getting his diaper changed, and Laura with all the comfort and warm and food. Good news is, for any dad who's early on in this, I think diaper changing, actually, it's already evolved over the last 13 days, where he's much calmer now. He understands already that it's not this big, horrible thing. He's much calmer. And it's a chance for us to kind of chat and me to look at his eyes both at night and also during the day. So I actually try to do as many of them as I possibly can, both because it's an opportunity to bond with my son. But also, it's a really nice, you get a lot of brownie points for taking a diaper change off of your wife's hands or your partner's hands. So I recommend just diving in and getting into it.
[00:04:49] Speaker B: So at first I was a little bit secretive about this, and then I wasn't, and it didn't affect anything at all. I like taking the diaper change because it's something I can do, but I don't mind it. It's kind of a chop wood, carry water job. Great.
But she acts like, oh, are you willing to do a diaper change?
Yeah, I was pretty busy just standing here talking to you, so I don't know if I could really spend the next three and a half minutes doing, oh, yes, of course I will. And then she caught onto that pretty quick.
And, yeah, I do diaper change whenever I can. I. Never mind. And later on, the style of poop will change. But again, you and I have talked about this before. We're adults. This is biology.
It's not as nasty. I've had father friends who literally almost gag when they think about doing a diaper change and wiping poop. For me, it was kind of like, I don't know, I've been picking up dog poop for a long time. I've done a lot of mountaineering. I've kind of put gauze on people bleeding and pussing out before. This is not nude. This is pretty low level and consistent. Same person doing the same things. Right? That's me to Theo, you to.
[00:06:01] Speaker A: Do it. So I'm always conscious in this podcast, this is not meant to be like a dudes. Like, we're better. There's none of that, right. We're just two guys trying to be better partners and fathers for everything. And I'm always going to be hesitant to kind of jump into biological or any kind of differences. But one thing I just think is fun as a guy, and I don't know if this is just for me or whatever, I get to take a little bit of pride in the mechanics of it.
I treat it like a pit stop.
I've called it like a combat change. Like, okay, we're in a restaurant, I'm going to go. And it's in and out. So I got my stuff and I got my style, and I got my process, and I can knock it out real quick. Whereas Laura will take her time and she'll sing to him and be slow. I'll be, no, no, I'm going to be in know I get to have fun. With it, and I get to kind of be my thing. And Laura's like, okay, if we need to do it quick, Rob's the guy who's got to do it because I trust him to go quick, which is kind of fun.
[00:07:00] Speaker B: That's totally fun. That's great. And then there's the other piece of it. It's not quite like a pit stop side, which is you never know what you're going to get.
And right now, you're still in the marconium and colostrum and moving into feeding. Right later on. And with Theo, he would only go to the bathroom. He still kind of only goes to the bathroom every two to three days. The doctors literally told us a baby pooping can poop every day or every six days. And they're both totally normal and fine. They're both. And you're like, well, okay. And so when baby doesn't poop for a while, and then all of a sudden, you're kind of like, is he farting or is he pooping? And then you open it up and you see what you got. You got nothing.
Or ho, hey, it's big. And this is going to take a minute.
That's great. I like the pit stop analogy. All right. What else is going on in your life? You've got baby. He's 13 days old. 14 days ago, you were worried about when is baby going to show up, and now here you are two weeks later. Talk to me.
[00:08:08] Speaker A: Yeah. I think that the biggest surprise, kind of joyous, lucky break for us is that he's a pretty agreeable baby. I think this is luck. Maybe a little bit of Laura and I in him, but he's not colicky. So he's not screaming and crying all the time.
And I'll say he's pretty reasonable when he's crying, it's usually almost always because he's hungry and you feed him and he's fine. Ironically, in the second week, he's gotten a little more fussy, I think, because he's growing. And so he's a little gassy and a little just uncomfortable in the world. But we've yet to have knock on wood, there's plenty of time for it, but we've yet to have a big meltdown or crying through the night or any of that stuff that we had kind of been mentally gearing ourselves up for. So certainly up four or five times a night and certainly cries a lot. Very kind of helpless, but also will sleep for two or 3 hours at a time and is okay to get put down in a cot and doesn't have to sleep on us or with us. So a lot of those things have made our lives a lot easier over the last two weeks than we otherwise anticipated. So that's been really, I think, probably a mostly lucky break in the hand. We were dealt with the child we were know.
[00:09:43] Speaker B: I have similar stories on this, and it's lovely. And I don't really know that I've ever heard anyone talk about regular hard babies. I don't like the word easy. As, you know, regular hard babies. I mean, it's still hard, but I remember Theo's day one moment, one through today. He's seven months old yesterday, he's looking for things to be interesting, fun, cool, and he's confused when they're not. Yeah, he gets cranky when it's ready to go to sleep or needs something, needs food. Sometimes he just needs to be held, but he's not looking to rage. And you hear these stories, and I just kind of thought that that's what kids were like. They were just tough. And it turns out mostly, not mostly happy. And they have some needs and solve those, and you're good.
Well, cool. I'll give you a little update on Theo, and then maybe we go to the b block.
[00:10:37] Speaker A: Yeah, let's do it.
[00:10:39] Speaker B: So 13 days ago, when Arthur was born, Theo was not mobile.
Maybe he really wanted things that were out of his reach, but he couldn't get them. And then over that weekend when Arthur was born, coincidentally here, Theo started learning to be mobile. And mobile doesn't move from pseudo crawling to crawling. There's all kinds of things. And my father Larry, said it the other day, there's creeping, and then there's crawling. And I was like, okay, creeping maybe, is it? And there's a lot of versions of it. And for him, it's kind of. He leans down, he goes from a sitting position to kind of a push up plank position back to a sitting position. But magically, he's four inches further in that exchange. And then he does that more. And for him, his rest position is sitting position.
He's tired or he's confused, or doesn't know where he's going, or he's distracted. His rest position is getting back to sitting. And then in this last ten days, he is now doing pseudocrawl. Sometimes people call it army crawl. And so it's wild here in the house. And my father. Alarm bells for the stairs are everywhere. And my little anecdote about that was, I was eight or nine years old when my half brother Scott was born, and I was supposed to be watching him, but I was watching tv as well. And then I heard him crying. And there was a single step in my father's house from one floor to another. I didn't think he could move. I didn't think my brother's dot could move. So I thought my job was just to listen for him, not realizing that he could move, and maybe he couldn't have. Maybe that was the first time he ever crawled that was indelibly linked into my mind. And so now when I watch Theo and I see all these stairs in her house, both, someday he'll go up them, right? And once you've gone up the stairs, then that set of stairs is a danger. But also every set of stairs in our house, which there's, I guess, three.
Yeah, I am super duper on alert, even if he's 30ft away and have to go around a wall to get there. My dad alarms like, baby is free, he's open. Oh, my God, there's a gate. Oh, he's got to fall. Run. Put the gate up.
[00:12:46] Speaker A: One of my favorite things right now, in these first two weeks when he's completely immobile, is I can just put him down somewhere and be like, stay, and he's not going to move. So I can like, oh, I got to pick something up or pack a bag or throw something in the car. I can just put him down on a chair or on the couch, and he's not moving. And it's great. And I know that day when my days are numbered with that.
[00:13:10] Speaker B: Yeah. And I'm just a little ahead of you. And a lot of people that I talk to, other dads that I chat about with this, oh, it's such a great time before they're mobile, and maybe there's some terrorist times coming, but right now it's just really fun because he truly is moving. It's almost an expression of joy. It's something he wants to do. And I would love to someday have us interview someone who talks about this drive that's within children to do stuff. I get the drive to eat, and I get the drive to my diapers dirty. I get the reason to cry for that. But the reason that Theo looks across the room and sees something interesting and then tries to figure out how his body can do the right form of actions so that he can get there and touch it and put it in his mouth, that, to me, is that, where does that drive come?
You know, there's nothing there. And then that's part of us, and we can get into some of the philosophy of that later.
But, yeah, so Theo is not 100% mobile, but act as if he's 100% mobile is the right way to go.
[00:14:17] Speaker A: Let me ask you what might be a quick question. Might be a long question. Is, all right, so how do you have to adapt now that he's mobile, both with your partner and also now that you're back at work, how does that change your ability to focus versus not? Are you doing anything different?
Right.
[00:14:36] Speaker B: So, pre mobile baby, I could both have here in my office and have on the floor playing with the thing, and he will make a noise if he needs something. So another thing about Theodore is he's really good at self play, and we give him space for that. And if he asks for help, if he asks for support or just wants to be helped, we'll give him that. But we'll also give him watched free time to do his thing again. He's seven months old.
Well, there's other times when I kind of know he's played for a little while. Maybe the nannies left. And we know that he just needs a little feeding and stuff. And I've got him. I can put him in the front pouch, and I can take a call, and I can talk about weighted average cost of capital and raising around and firing a co founder and a riff. I can do all of those big boy topics with the baby who's just kind of hanging out on my front pouch. And the client may or may not know. He doesn't know. Now that he's Mobile, he doesn't want to be in that front pouch when he's awake. He wants to be scrambling around. You kind of can't dual task or multitask with someone saying, hey, I'm so sorry. You just let go 20% of your workforce at the same quarter that you're going to increase your partnership sales by 50%. Oh, I'm sorry. The kids over there. And he's trying to get towards the stairs. So that's a real leveling down of what I can do in my home office.
We're fortunate enough to have a nanny for enough hours that I can solve for that.
Yeah. So that's my answer to a question, possibly your question.
[00:16:09] Speaker A: Good. That's good to know. Well, why don't we take a quick break? And when we come back, we're going to dive deep into the first two weeks and learn lessons and talk about our experience.
[00:16:28] Speaker B: Hi, everybody. Welcome back. This is the Daddy o podcast. I'm Brad Bickerton here with my co host, Rob Burnett. And as we're still launching this podcast and getting used to it, talking about our own stories, and there's this really rich time we have right now where we can just ask questions of ourselves and record what's going on with Rob, his wife Laura and his new baby boy, 13 day old Arthur. And so this is what I'm going to ask Rob. Rob, what has it been like in this 1st 13 days? What have you learned? What have you seen? What's changed? What have you done? Well? What did you fix because you were doing poorly? Please give us your story. Give us your anecdotes.
[00:17:05] Speaker A: Thanks, Brad. So kind of everything's changed, right? Everything's changed and nothing has changed.
I'm still the same person. Life still goes on. But we are in this really beautiful moment where both Laura and I are off work and we get to kind of be in this bubble and learn about how to be parents and learn about our son. So I think the first thing I want to make sure I bring up is I talked about in the birth story after the birth, the kind of crash of emotions of like, I had this adrenaline high, and now I'm kind of off of it. And I felt kind of some real anxiety in those 1st 24 hours around kind of introducing him to people, wanting to introduce him to other people.
And I will say that over these next two weeks, that kind of love and connection with my son has really grown in a kind of steady, repeatable march forward. And I think that's so cool. It's probably the best part. You just kind of look at them and go, I'm not sure I was ever the person who had the big thunderstrike of, like, I love this person, but it's just been this very steady march of, like, every day it's more and more and more, and every time I look at him and interact with him, it's more and more and more. And that's been just absolutely beautiful, and I can't even really do it justice, but that's been the overwhelming emotion and experience of the last two weeks, which has been great. And so, again, I want to share this for the sake of being open and because hopefully our listeners are going through similar things and hopefully they want them to feel alone. But I do want to dive into the specifics, but that's the kind of overarching emotion.
[00:18:42] Speaker B: And just, again, for the listeners sake, this has been a slower process for me. I've liked him the whole time and thought it was great. But it wasn't a thunderstrike that wasn't thunderstruck. And it's taken its time and yet every day it still grows for me. So it's just different ways. And I'm not ashamed or don't have a problem with it because I love my son and I love him more every day, but it's just a different cadence or a different version than you. But yes, also, please dive into the first couple of weeks. Go on.
[00:19:14] Speaker A: So I think that the thing that I was most worried about, and I think a lot of people worry about is sleep. And so I wanted to kind of talk about that first. As I mentioned in the beginning of this podcast, we've been blessed with a pretty good sleeper from the gun. We often get two hour, maybe even three hour chunks of time where he is asleep and we can sleep as well. And that's pretty incredible and it's been really great. The one maybe piece of advice or the thing that has maybe not advice. Here's what has worked well for us, and what's worked well slightly because our child's been cooperative, but what's worked really well for us is Laura and I have never been afraid to go to bed early. And what we found is that getting in bed at like 730 or 08:00 now that we're both off work, right, in this early days, sure. And basically kind of we'll read. Mostly we try to read either to each other out loud so he can listen even though it's adult books, or we'll watch some tv if we're feeling a little less kind of good about ourselves.
But what we found is that basically he can fall asleep and we can essentially turn off the light and try to fall asleep right away. And then we don't typically get out of bed until eight or 09:00 a.m. The next morning. So when you talk about eight to eight, that's like 12 hours in bed. And if you're up for 4 hours of the night, changing diapers, feeding, you're still getting 8 hours of sleep. And we're lucky that we're good with going to bed early. Like, I could fall asleep at 08:00 in the evening, no problem. And that's worked out really well for me. So almost somewhat embarrassingly, I use a WHOOP sleep tracker.
I'm consistently hitting my sleep goals in these first two weeks, which is so ridiculous that I'm almost like ashamed to say it because it's just not what you're supposed to have happen. But I think that's what worked out well, right? Having really lucky on the kid side in terms of he actually does like to sleep, but also we've been very proactive about it's 730. Let's just get in bed.
[00:21:39] Speaker B: Is it rich? Roll podcast. He had a chopped up one of his best stuff for the year on Health things. And one of the anecdotes that came out from one of the experts was you can go two, three days, four or five days without food, without really any problems, and you can go 30 days without any Health problems. And water, it's a third of that. You can go a day without water and you'll be fine. You cannot go a single day without sleep. And yet it's the thing we sacrifice first and the most, and we sacrifice it in this really crazy way where we think, well, I just sacrificed an hour and a half or 2 hours for four days this week because I was busy and I had to get to my hit workout class and I had to stay up and have the cocktails or in the case of baby that I needed to sacrifice my sleep because I needed more time to do the things. The answer is to get rid of things so you have more time to sleep. So that's the first half of what I heard. The second is there's theories of sleep and why we sleep is a really good book and it talks about different versions of sleep. The people who fall asleep late, the people wake up early, and then the bimodal sleepers. And bimodal means you sleep for 4 hours, you're awake for 2 hours of sleep for 4 hours. Right. And when you come to a society, it's good to have someone who's like that because they're up in the middle of the Night kind of checking it out, making sure the saber tooth Tiger is not coming at us. We're all capable of going to bed early, going to bed early, waking up early, going to bed late, waking up late, and we're all capable of bimodal sleeping. We just all have our own preference for you. You've almost created a bimodal sleeping thing. If you go to bed super early, knowing, not knowing when, but knowing you will be interrupted, yet you can still get your full WHOOP score, which I also have. WHOOP. And now we know who our first sponsor will be.
[00:23:32] Speaker A: If we get sponsored by WHOOP. I'm going to be over the moon. Count me in. Hey, WHOOP, if you're listening, I'm in.
Yeah. And I think that that's where I'm not back. We're going to have some episodes where I'm going to be back at work and we're going to figure it out. But I know I don't work well on little sleep, and I've got a weird. We can go into it later about the fact that I work late hours because I work in the UK, so I work till 10:00 p.m. Every night. And that's going to be a tough thing that I'm going to have to adjust. But for now, that is the foundation of basically everything that's gone well over the last two weeks is the fact that we're sleeping. And I think, Brad, you mentioned it maybe on the last podcast or the podcast before. Sleep is so foundational for everything we do. And so I think as a partnership for anyone who's heading into having a baby, or even if you're in it, figuring out how you guys are going to do sleep, where you take care of each other. So I've mentioned the podcast. I let Laura, Laura, basically, she has to be up more because she has to feed, but she never has to get out of bed unless she needs something like she needs to go to the bathroom or something like that. She doesn't get out of bed. So I get out of bed, I have a fleece hanging over the end of my bed. I put it on just because it's cooler in her house and over my boxers, and I go and I change the baby. I come back, take it off, crawl back under the coverage. But Laura never has to get out of bed. And she appreciates that because she's up more than I am. But she never has to kind of go through that kind of really waking up process of getting out of bed, turning on a light, doing all those things. And that's a really good way to balance. And so talking to your partner about that and having that back and forth and sacrificing the late nights, the cocktails, the watching the tv shows to get some sleep, because I know once I get back into work and being a dad, I'm never going to make it unless I make that a priority.
[00:25:32] Speaker B: You just hit the magic word for me.
So on the business side, on the coaching side, I don't like using angry metaphors. I don't like using military language. I think it's overused.
Know, von Klotswich said, on war, blah, blah, blah. Therefore, that's how I'm going to ride my bike today. I just think it's a false comparison. However, there is one thing that I talk about where I use fight language, as in impose your will upon others to the degree of almost violence. And that is fight for your priority list.
Because everyone else will dictate to you what they think your priority list should be. And if you think I'm wrong, look at your inbox. And your email inbox is the testament to what other people think your priorities should be. And it is them and their need. Okay, so that's my little soapbox part. But use the word priority in this case. Prioritizing the family unit through sleep being the priority of the family unit is more likely to lead to good results than the other way around. Having no priorities and just trying to stick it out, gut it out, see what the baby's going to do, see what mom's going to do, see what I'm going to do, and just hope for the best and then just suffer. No, just take a second to say if you decide that your priority is worth fighting for and your priority is sleep, because sleep matters, everything else just becomes dimmer.
[00:27:00] Speaker A: Well, and also, I see you've got a buddy there.
[00:27:04] Speaker B: Yeah, I've got a golden retriever with his cone of shame, and he's looking at me saying it would be nice if we could go outside and play, but unfortunately, budy, you've got another ten days of not being able to lick yourself. It's very sad.
[00:27:20] Speaker A: That is very sad. But I'm going to take this one step deeper, which is because there's strategy and tactics, right? And sleep can be a strategy where sleep is my priority. I want that to be what I want. But also, you might not care about sleep. I care a ton about sleep, but you might be sitting there going, I don't really care. I don't mind living off of 5 hours of sleep or whatever, or you just don't care. It's not your thing. I'd rather be up.
I think a priority for anyone, and I'll impose my opinion here, is a priority for anyone here over these first couple of months of parenting should also be your partner.
And maintaining the chosen relationship of a partnership where you decided to reproduce and have a child.
And I tell you what, you know, when Laura and I fight a lot more when we're.
So if your priority doesn't have to be sleep, but if your priority is I want to come out of this very trying time with a really strong partnership, or I want to spend good time with my kid, or I want to be ready to go back to work, sleep inevitably is going to be like the number one tactic for any of those other priorities, and so you got to figure it out. Just know that anything else you want to accomplish here, step one is going to be sleep. And I have it way easier than a lot of people. Some people who listen to this are going to have a child who's going to scream all night. And that's an entirely different level of organization and partnership with your co parent, whoever they are, because you're going to have to have some tough conversations about how do you both survive this moment.
[00:29:08] Speaker B: But in the end, this is the survival tool. And I like that you talked about sleep as a strategy, not as a tactic. And I think that's where people go wrong, is they think that the way I sleep every day. So then that's a tactical thing that I do. You don't win on tactics. Tactics help you and move you. But having a sleep strategy in your life, and then, of course, now it's the you, me, and we with your partner, that's super important and good.
And I have a golden retriever running in circles. And he is also part of our sleep strategy, which is a whole nother thing because we've talked about him before. But I want to move on a little bit more. I know you have a couple more things to say about what you've learned the last couple of weeks, so sleep, huge priority. You, Laura, conversation about it. What else have you been?
[00:30:00] Speaker A: So, yeah, the next thing, and I will say that I took this from a book that I'll put in the notes called bringing up bebe. It's about an american woman in Paris learning how the french parent. And one tactic she uses or strategy she uses that I've adopted is this idea of kind of the pause or observation.
So when a baby is screaming, all you want to do is scoop them up and figure out what's wrong with them. And I found that taking a minute from the very start to look at my child and say, like, okay, he's crying. What do I see? Is he twisting? Is his hand in his mouth? Is he rooting? So is he sitting his head back and forth? Is he kicking his legs? I've tried to, from the start, be very observant, and I think that's already paying dividends. So I'm already starting to figure out, like, oh, that looks like he's working on some gas. Oh, he's very clearly hungry with that. And also sometimes children chest, especially the really young ones, they'll just cry for like, 30 seconds to a minute or not even really cry. They'll kind of make a lot of noises, and then they'll just stop and they'll go right back to where they were. And if you scoop them up or really interrupt them every time they do that and you really react, you're not learning them and they're not learning themselves. And so that's been a really nice thing that I'm glad I read about it, because now I'm really trying to practice it. Is this understanding, the trying to understand my son and his underlying motivation for being whiny. He's a 13 day old. He's not strategizing. He's not scheming against me. He's not trying to manipulate me. But it is good to try to understand where those noises are coming from, because on a practical level, one time I was like, I think that's gas. And I avoided getting pooped on because I waited just a little longer to change the diaper. And the result was, while he was on the table, he pooped in the diaper, the old dirty diaper. And I didn't have it open, which I would have had, like, 30 seconds later if I hadn't taken a minute to be like, let me see what's going on here.
It's a success. It's huge.
[00:32:35] Speaker B: Well, as you know, when I do leadership training, which is either the first session with an executive coaching, or sometimes this is all I do, right? I just do a quick leadership training. The very first thing that I teach people or determine if they have capacity for, is observational skills.
Smart people, like regular people, can learn tactics, and smart people can figure out strategies. And leaders observe. They always, always have that. And observation and empathy. Empathy is a longer story. Not here for today. But observation skills is the first. Because if they can't do it, if you can't teach a person, sit quietly in a room and watch what's going on, then you're not going to get to the next level. Skills. So I love that you're already bringing that into your fatherhood journey, and I'm sure you bring it in actively in your CEO journey.
And it's something that I have found to be cynical, without which not. Don't even get started. If you're like, no, I don't like observing things. I just do stuff because I'm smart. Great. Don't be a CEO.
Maybe be a father. Totally fine. Yeah, but don't be a CEO.
Cool.
Keep rolling. Tell us what you're learning and observing.
[00:33:50] Speaker A: So here's the next thing that's been very clear to me, right. Is let's be clear. As fathers, we don't have boobs.
Now, some of you will go down a journey where you're bottle feeding, and the feeding can be much more split. But we're on a journey of, we're going to try to exclusively breastfeed for as long as possible. Laura's currently not even pumping. We're not even using a bottle with breast milk. But what that means is that there's a trap here, because the number one comforting thing for our child is being fed. And what it means is that, and I cannot do that right now, and I won't be able to do it for months.
And so it's really tempting to just hand him off to mom anytime he's crying.
And I think this is a trap that a lot of fathers end up falling into, which is, I'm only off for two weeks anyway.
Most dads in America probably only get two weeks. Maybe you're lucky you get a little longer, maybe you get less. And I'm sorry if that's the case, it seems criminal, but I'm coming up on two weeks right now. I can't imagine going back to work tomorrow. But if I had know if I had to, and I leaned into Laura being the primary caregiver because she's got the food source, it would be very easy for me to slip into a very secondary role. And I think this is a trap for two reasons. One is I think there's a ton of joy in being an active parent. And I've loved. One of the big successes for this week was like, Laura needed a nap. And I managed to get Arthur to, like, I got him through, like, two whining sessions, and I eked out like another 45 minutes of him being quiet before he needed a feed because I observed and I said, okay, tried things. Oh, you know what really works for him? Cranking up music on my iPhone and putting it pretty close to his head and it calms him right down. He jams out and it's great. And he gets very serene with loud 2000s music from my high school years. He loves it.
Or, like, rocking or this kind of pat, this hold this thing. Getting good at that stuff has been really useful. But then, second, I just know that there's a trap laying ahead for parents, which is mom's usually off for longer, mom's the food source.
And to be fair, mom does it to herself, at least in our relationship, where Laura wants to be very active in taking care of him, wants to hold him a lot, things like that. And it'd be very easy as a dad to kind of take a step back and be like, okay, mom, you feed him. Oh, you want to hold him anyway. You hold him, and before you know it, you talk about a year later, dad doesn't even know how to comfort his child, take care of things. And so then you inevitably end up in this place where I think a lot of couples feel like they end up, which is mom feels like she has to do everything, and dad feels like he can't do anything because he can't do anything right because he never learned how to do it. And so this is my kind of, I don't know, plea coaching to any dad listening is like, be proactive about coaching yourself and learning, because if we have to go back to work, which we usually do, because this is the way things usually are, and we're usually going back before our partners, who are the moms, you could really deskill in this stuff very quickly, especially because your kid is changing so fast. He reacts to things differently from two days ago than he does today. And I just can see how all of this can lead to then what I talked about earlier, which is how your chosen partner is such an important relationship.
I can see how it could lead to resentment because you don't feel like you could do anything right, and they don't feel like you can do anything right, but they feel like they've got to do everything for you. So that's a long rant, and I'm 13 days into my fatherhood journey, but it's so blaringly obvious to me that I need to be super proactive at building skills to take care of my son that are unique and separate from my partners so that I have something to bring to the table in this relationship.
[00:38:05] Speaker B: It's a lot of complexity in what you said there. Overall, yes, you're good. And I love the framing of it's a trap, and by a trap, it's once you get into it, you get worse and worse into it. And so one of our jobs in fatherhood is to notice when we have drifted and how to get back. And there will always be an ego hit, a lot of times an apology, sometimes skill building.
I don't know how to change a diaper. My son's now six months old. That kind of concept, it's like, oh, you have to start over then. The other thing is, mom's going to be better at most stuff because she's doing it more or she's uniquely talented, she's doing the diapers more because she's just holding him more. Right. Just the way it is or because you're physically at work more. Okay. We don't have boobs.
[00:38:51] Speaker A: Right.
[00:38:51] Speaker B: We're not doing the feedings. Understood.
There's another piece of this, too, which is sometimes baby just wants mom, and we can put in different reasons for that. Okay? Those things let them be true.
Everything else. Everything else we're participants in.
I don't do it more because I have the time and the schedule. I don't do it more because I don't have boobs. I don't do it more because I'm not just mom.
[00:39:18] Speaker A: Great.
[00:39:18] Speaker B: Those are good excuses not to do as much. This is just the world we live in. But the world I want to live in is I am participating as much as I can in the stuff I can participate in. And the trap is I can't do some things. Therefore I stop doing all things.
That is absolutely a trap.
The second trap that can come in, and I've heard this from other fathers, and it's just you're never going to be as good as mom. And so then you're being observed not being as good. Maybe you're being told you're not being as good, or you just feel guilty about doing something that you're not as good at. For me, there's certain clothes during the winter stuff that it just takes me longer to put on him. And he's going to squirm and scream and cry when it's him and I alone. I will always do it, and I will get through it when we're here together. She doesn't like that I don't do it well. And sometimes I have to stand up and say, I know I'm not doing it as well as you please. And that's all I need to say. Right? I need to acknowledge out loud that I am the inferior person in this. And that's okay, because I'm never going to keep up with the changes if I'm not trying. And it's okay to be number two on the squad. It's not okay to drop off the squad because you weren't.
[00:40:37] Speaker A: Know. I, just to build on, know one thing. Laura and I, we had this conversation in a separate way earlier on in our relationship around, basically around household chores. Because I would do the laundry or I'd fold it a certain way, or I would do the dishes a certain way, and she wouldn't like it. Because we're both adults who've lived our lives and gotten used to things a certain way. And I had to have a discussion with her. I was like, listen, you have two choices.
You can either do everything yourself, which is only going to make you mad at me because you're going to feel like I'm not doing anything, or you have to accept the fact that if you delegate something to me and I don't do it perfectly or do it the way you would do it, even if I've done it in a perfectly acceptable manner, you have to be okay with that. And I think this is a conversation that a lot of couples need to have because. Exactly right, Brad.
Dads, you should have a conversation, exactly this conversation, with your partner and say, listen, you have two choices. Either you can let me fumble through the diaper change and please don't judge me for it, or you can just take it off my hands, but you're only going to resent me more later for it. So let's acknowledge that I might not do things perfectly or even just the way you want them done, because you're doing it more often and you're practicing and you've got it down. Let me build my own systems. And that's a really valuable conversation. It's made my partnership stronger, for sure.
It's allowed us, by having had that conversation, it's allowed us to remind each other. Like, hey, remember how I said that if I order the groceries and they're not exactly the right ingredients that you wanted, you could have ordered them, but you don't want that job. Let me do it. Okay, fine. And we would all acknowledge it.
[00:42:26] Speaker B: So there's this song I heard a couple of years ago, and I can't always get the words right. I think it goes like this. Let it go, let it go.
And I use that in relationships, I use that in coaching. I use that in business because so often, especially high functioning individuals, you, me, our wives, the people that you are helping raise capital for, people I am coaching, they want it their way because they've built up these structures where their way leads to success. But now they're encountering their way times somebody else's way. And the difference between them is minimal. The groceries weren't quite right, except for we're going to get groceries again in four days and we can fix this problem. The Worst case scenario is we get more groceries today or we wait four days and get the things you want. And so sometimes we just have to let it go. And this isn't to be a dude telling my partner, my wife, my love to let it go. This is about me letting it go. I need to let go, especially when I'm not good at something to enter into that knowing I'm not going to be good at it. But it's worthwhile for me to try or be there. That's the let it go for me.
[00:43:36] Speaker A: And let me bring it back to a business anecdote which I think will work well often. The people I've hired at net capital, a lot of them, I used to do their job when our company was six people and now we're 40 people. And I used to do a lot of their jobs. And if I may be slightly immodest for a second, I think I could do any one of their jobs better than they could. I just happen to think I'm quite good at what I do.
But the company would never scale if I tried to do everything.
I inherently have to delegate tasks to someone who will do them slightly worse than I will, but collectively we will do a better job. And if anyone here is a leader or CEO, they know that, right?
You might be able to write the memo better than the person you hired. But you know what? Let them do it. Let them do a good enough job and then you take it and you make it better. Blah, blah blah. This is a great opportunity, especially if our audience is mostly men's who are ceos or executives. Allow your partner to be that for you. Put yourself in the position to be the new hire who's not as good at things, but let your partner who's better at it give them permission to give you permission to do a worse job, but still get it done. Because collectively, the family unit will scale better as more is getting done. I love it.
[00:45:06] Speaker B: I don't think you're torturing this metaphor enough. And I believe with all metaphors and analogies, if you torture it long enough, it'll beg for help. But I think this one is super good. And for me, my job typically is pathfinding and leadership. It's not management, it's not individual contribution. We can get to the meanings of those later, but in baby setting, it's individual contribution. But there's even one place more where I screwed up until I got some coaching on this myself, which I wanted to do more than I was capable of. And I thought the job was x. And it turns out it was Tuesday and so I had to learn. Okay, there's only so much you can do Brad again, right?
Just the intuition of mom. Mom has boobs, baby likes mom better.
[00:45:54] Speaker A: Great.
[00:45:55] Speaker B: I can't actually take those roles on and I wanted to, because they were effort, I could relieve them from the leader. And the second side was I wasn't the leader. Sarah Beth is excellent. She is capable, she is wise, she is good. And this is not a parody situation. This is go with mom's gut. And our first podcasts were about me learning to not have an opinion until I've checked in with her gut. And sometimes it's wise from Internet, from people we know, sometimes it's from nowhere. The universe just gave her an idea. Sometimes it's an old story that is totally broken in her mind. But we're always going to start with her gut is the starting place, not she and I are starting on a white blank piece of paper trying to build what do we do next here? No, we start off with the leader has an idea, we're going to go from there. Leader's idea might be wrong, might need to be double checked, might even need to be figured out. Fine. But we're not starting on a blank white page to individuals. We're starting with, she's right.
[00:47:02] Speaker A: It's a great way to do it.
[00:47:04] Speaker B: Trying.
[00:47:07] Speaker A: Let me get to the last thing I had on my list, which is family and friends, which is everyone's got different opinions on this. And so I think my first and foremost thing is everyone will have more than anything else. I found that the opinions everyone else had on what the role of friends and family is annoyed me because everyone had an opinion and I didn't like any of them.
And for the record, everyone will have an opinion on everything you do, and you got to just not care what anyone else thinks. I think, go with your gut. Do your best. You can be the best parent you can be.
But everyone had an opinion on. So I'll say that everyone had opinion on who should be around when and for how long. And it was tough for us logistically because we live in the UK right now.
I'm an American. My family's in America in the.
I didn't personally, I didn't want to be an ocean away from my parents while Laura was in labor, when my wife was giving that, I didn't want that. I didn't want to wait. I've had close people close to me say, like, we don't want to talk to anyone for two weeks.
[00:48:26] Speaker B: That's great.
[00:48:26] Speaker A: Too good for that. That's totally fine. But I didn't want that. But then what that meant is my parents can't come over for a due date that they don't know. We don't know when the baby is going to come. They can't come. Just say hi to the baby and then leave and then come back two weeks later. That's just not feasible. So my parents and my mom have stuck around a little bit, and people have opinions on whether that's okay or not. She's not staying here, thankfully, she's staying down the road. But there's just people around. And what I would say is what's worked for us is just being very clear with everybody what we need, what's okay, what's not okay. But we found that being social in these first two weeks has been really good for us. It's been good for Laura's mental health. It's been nice for me and my mental health. And this is the one and only time. And, Brad, I think you talked about this a little. Like, this is kind of the only time in your life where you can really, truly boss around and be super direct with your family and your friends. You can be like, can you come over and do my laundry? And people will be like, sure, yeah, I'm in.
Okay, can you go buy me diapers and then deliver them to my house and not come in and go away? We're like, yeah, I'm in. I got it.
And so the business story I tell again, to loop it in with this, is whenever I get, like, an intern or someone fresh out of college, and I've worked with a lot of people. Like, is a. This is a moment in your career where you can message basically anyone on LinkedIn, email basically anybody, and be like, hey, I just got my first job, or, I just got my first internship. I'm trying to do x. You seem cool. Will you talk to me? And most people will be like, yeah. So whenever someone new, I respond to those every time.
[00:50:21] Speaker B: I go like, oh, the light bulbs on behind these eyes. Let's go. Who is this person? And when somebody says, hey, I've got AA student over here, I go, okay, whatever. Have them call me.
Keep going. Yeah.
[00:50:36] Speaker A: So I always give that. I almost force new employees to do that because I'm like, we have an opportunity to get some value out of you right now. Go send this email to a thousand people, and it's the equivalent here you've got this one month window where your friends, you can be like, yeah, can you come do my laundry? Can you help me? And people will do it, and they'll do it gladly. And something I saw on, I think, Instagram or something, but I thought it was a great.
And I need to give credit. I just can't remember who it was, but someone was talking about how friendship and how not letting, I think they said something along lines like, we shouldn't deny your friends the opportunity or the honor of coming and getting down in the mud with you.
And I thought that really landed with me. It's easy to say, oh, no, we're fine, or we're okay, or, you don't have to help me, or when you come over, I'm going to make ut and my house is going to be nice. And I think that as friends, in particular as friends, but also as family, don't deny the people close to you the honor of helping you when you're down and getting into the mud with you. Let them come and do your laundry, let them make you food if you need that. And I think that's something I want to make more regular.
Let's ask our friends and family, our village for help because we live in the society right now that's very individualistic, that's very cut off. And we historically haven't raised babies that way. You takes a village and so let's take our villages. And so that's been really useful for us in these first two weeks is we've really taken a lot of the load off and the pressure off because people have brought us food, people have come and just been social with us, and we've been able to go and be social and kind of get out of the house a little bit. And that's been just so kind of revolutionarily powerful because we've known right from the start that life can be somewhat normal and it's not this whole different world. And that's been really useful. So that's my piece on that.
[00:52:43] Speaker B: It's a beautiful piece. And I have a couple of friends who we refer to each other as chosen family.
And the way to look at it for me always is if they asked me to do this, how would I react? And if they asked me to do this, I'd be on a plane going over there and beating people up to get out of, to get it, be first in line. And why would I deny them the honor back to me? Because I am not speaking my voice of what I need or what I could even just use for help.
And another part of this podcast that I love, it's an opportunity to grow a friendship that we didn't know each other that well starting this. We just knew each other a bit. It's a grow a friendship, but also talk about what friendship means.
And fatherhood can be very lonely in an individualistic society, but being in charge. What's lonely at the top is something I talk to a lot of people about. And one of the reasons it's lonely at the top is because when you're at the top of an organization, you actually can't ask for help because no one fits within the line. They either don't know what they're doing or it's sacred truths that they shouldn't know. Right. Because it'll change the effect or be wrong to say it. Hey, I'm going to fire my co founder. Who do you talk to in your organization about that? Hey, if we don't raise this much capital, the layoffs are going to go like this. And you're number two of the three part waterfall. But also on the friendship side, who are the people who are going to help enrich me and help me become a better father? Dad and CEO and CEO coach.
I cannot sequester myself from them and expect to get good results.
Then it's just like hope is your strategy. I hope my friends know what I probably secretly need.
That's not wise. The wisdom is being vulnerable. And that was some feedback that I got about this, which was one of the guys I know who listened to this is a CEO and a father of four. And he said, it's amazing to hear two guys talking vulnerably in this day and age and doing their best. Well, yeah, that's kind of what it's all about. It shouldn't be amazing.
[00:54:55] Speaker A: Yeah, it shouldn't be amazing. I hope anyone listening, the whole point is that this should be normal.
This should be an unremarkable podcast that everyone goes, this is boring. Why are you guys doing this?
It's silly. Everyone does that. But obviously, at least so far, that's not the case. And I do think that, Brad, you make a good point, which is for, again, our chosen audience of kind of high performing executives who are becoming fathers. I do think it is a mindset shift. Right? You're used to being at the top, being alone, having to make decisions, having to trust your gut. And I think what we're telling everybody from our learned experience is that this is a real moment where you have to switch your mindset and you have to be a follower and be an observer and ask for help and learn from other people and really humble yourself. And if you can do that, there's some pretty fantastic rewards in strong partnerships. And I don't know, I'm having a blast being a dad. I'm 13 days in, so we'll see how it goes. But I'm loving it. I think this is great. I just think it's one of the best things I've ever done.
[00:56:06] Speaker B: I love it, too.
Well, I could talk about this all day. And the wonderful thing is that we can bring these topics back up because we will be recording in a week. And for the rest of our audience, which there is an audience now, we now have stats and data that there are people who listen. You are not alone, whoever you are. And someday we'll find out the community version so you can share your stories together.
But we will continue doing this podcast, and we now have a weekly recording time and a weekly schedule for these coming out. And we're getting better. We've heard from a lot of you that technical acumen is what we need to grow on. So that's good. Some other things coming is we're going to start doing our first interviews in the coming weeks. And so those will be coming out sometime, hopefully in February, maybe in March, where we're going to start talking to fathers and ceos of a variety of things. Whether your kids are in college or whether your kids were just born, whether you're on your second marriage, whether you have five kids, whether you have one, whatever it is, we're going to start meeting and listening and talking to and just extracting beautiful, beautiful wisdom and anecdotes from the market. So we are not done yet. Episode ten. This one is kind of a big milestone for us. Someday I will say the same thing at episode 100. But on that note, let's move on to the last part of this show, which is where Rob and I, we just open the kimono and we share what we did well, and we're pretty kind of proud of it and what we failed at. So, Rob, I'm going to hand it off to you first today. Dad wins. Dad fails.
[00:57:37] Speaker A: Yeah. So full of wins. I just feel know I've mentioned a couple of them on this podcast, but I think a couple highlights are actually, I'll say, my biggest win, which is more a learning than a win, but I'm going to take it. We have a little sling for the baby, and we've gone on long, like hour plus walks with him in a sling. And it is just like the best thing in the whole world. It is a drug because he just curls up on my chest and he gets this asleep and he's taking these big, deep breaths and I can feel him just in total comfort right there on my chest. And it is just like the best drug in the world. I just think it's the greatest thing. So that is just a huge win that he's in there and that we're out and we've actually gotten out of the house. All that stuff.
My absolute favorite. I think it's hard to come up with.
I'm trying to think of, like, a funny fail, and the biggest ones are all poop related. Just getting peed on, getting pooped on, leaving the diaper off for too long and having him poop all over the table. I mean, just so much.
So. I think that's probably my fails. Just all kinds of fails that way.
Thankfully, no falls, no injuries, no illness so far, and a partner who still likes me at least a little bit. So I call that a win on the first two weeks. Brad, what about you?
[00:59:15] Speaker B: I love it. Maybe the flip side. My fails are all funny and small, but they are real.
I did the oatmeal wrong.
So Theo is learning to eat. And I guess there's a certain viscosity and stickiness that evidently I didn't know how to achieve. And I've been shown now three times and failed four to make the proper stickiness of oatmeal. That was a fail. Another fail, which. It's kind of wrapped into a win. But I am actively trying to go to bed earlier, which resonates with what you said earlier, and that's fine, but I'm falling asleep on my back, and I am snoring, so I am getting the whack.
And so I don't know exactly what to do with.
So, yeah, just. Just little fails like that. Hundreds of right. Just. You just don't quite do this right. You forgot the hat, or you did things in the wrong order, and they just didn't work for baby. The lovely thing about Theo is he's actually pretty patient. He's kind of observing what I'm doing, and he doesn't know that I went in and out of the house six times in order to go on a stroller walk because I forgot this and I didn't do that right.
But the win, which is really more of a joy. Well, two wins now coming out. Theo, seven months old yesterday, and we're getting our new house in order. And I'm starting to feel more like I'm punching from my front foot. I'm actively getting ahead of the things, whether it's taxes, or taking the garbage out or feeding Theo on time. I am no longer overwhelmed or overcome by events OBE. So that just feels really nice that I'm failing less because I'm being proactive. And then the second thing, just for a fun anecdote, is we have a music class for babies and it's less than a five minute walk. I had a client cancel a call.
The music class was scheduled during a consistent weekly call for me, and the client canceled. I didn't even think for a second. I'm out, put on my clothes, go out the door. I am going to music class. And watching 45678 month olds do a music class is every bit, as I think I talked about this last week, every bit as perfect and lovely as you could imagine. And then we get to take the recording back home and reinforce it back at home. And so that's the win from the joy of my heart and then the win from me. As a man, I am starting to be proactive again.
[01:01:39] Speaker A: Brad, can they make us an intro and outro?
[01:01:45] Speaker B: I'm certain they could, but who would do the business one?
[01:01:49] Speaker A: That's a good question.
[01:01:51] Speaker B: They do not run a good business. And that'll be something that we can encounter a lot of is a lot of child development companies are not good business people, which is great. They have a big heart for what.
[01:02:03] Speaker A: They do because they love it.
[01:02:04] Speaker B: They don't know how to charge. They don't know how to follow up. They don't know how to fix.
Yeah, that's a whole nother kit and caboodle.
[01:02:13] Speaker A: Well, Brad, thanks. Thanks for being here. Thanks, everyone, for listening. This is the Daddy o podcast. If you have any dad wins and fails of your own. If you've got any suggestions for us, if you just want to let us know you're listening, please email us at
[email protected] and then if please like and subscribe. Share with your friends. Help us grow this thing. That's super helpful to us and we really appreciate it. All right.
[01:02:39] Speaker B: Thank you, everybody. Thank you. Bye.
