[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome to the Daddy o podcast. We're your hosts. I'm Rob Burnett.
[00:00:04] Speaker B: And I'm Brad Bickerton.
[00:00:06] Speaker A: And, yeah, welcome. This is season one, episode six. It is December 29, where this will be coming out a little bit later, but we are just between Christmas and New Year's. And for anyone who's new, this is a podcast where Brad and I are ceos, experienced entrepreneurs, and company leaders. And we're going to talk about the intersection of being a leader and being a dad and overlapping lessons and how to try to do both at a high level.
So, Brad, how is your week going? Merry Christmas. Happy holidays. How was your Christmas?
[00:00:40] Speaker B: Christmas is a mixed bag, but thank you and good to see you. Christmas is a mixed bag, and it's a lot of learnings real fast. That bachelor Brad, which is just a couple of years ago, Christmas was throw some ski stuff or whatever, drive up, see the family, hang out until I was tired and come home. A totally different world now. And I'd heard that before, but now I've experienced it. And it was lovely to see my sister, twin 16 year old boys, and a 14 year old daughter. So my nieces and nephews, it was lovely to see the whole family together. And also, what my friend gave me the insight on is we lost home field advantage. It is so much easier to be a father, and there's still work to be done in this week that it's so much easier to do at home than at the grandparents house. And we didn't do that well. We did not find time to sequester and make sure that we were resting and sleeping, so we left the day early. No harm, no foul. Everyone's still good in the family. So Christmas was a mixed bag on that. And then the second piece was, this is the first year in 18 years that I haven't had a ski pass because we just didn't have time to ski. So Christmas is a mixed bag. The last piece is a lot more Christmas gifts when you have a kid and you're schlepping a lot more stuff home.
And that's just part of the story of you get less gifts, they get more, and there's just more volume of stuff in the car. So, mixed bag for Christmas. Rob, how about you?
All right, we're kind of in a dead zone here, but maybe we got that little.
[00:02:19] Speaker A: Can you hear me now?
[00:02:20] Speaker B: I can hear you. Can you hear me?
Oh, Rob.
Someday we'll figure this.
Hmm?
I can hear you typing.
[00:02:41] Speaker A: Right off the bat.
Can you hear me?
Yeah, I can hear why you're freezing for me, this is multiple times, and.
[00:02:55] Speaker B: It says uploading for you.
[00:02:57] Speaker A: 99%.
[00:02:59] Speaker B: Yeah, I'm also 99%.
[00:03:03] Speaker A: Why don't I try leaving and coming back?
[00:03:07] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:03:17] Speaker A: It. All right. Am I back?
Cool.
[00:03:22] Speaker B: I took advantage of a chance to have a bite.
[00:03:24] Speaker A: That's good.
[00:03:26] Speaker B: I can hear you the whole time.
[00:03:28] Speaker A: That's so weird. That happens to me. Yeah, I think it must be on my end or something, because. Yeah, you just freeze up on me and I can't hear you anymore.
[00:03:35] Speaker B: You freeze up on me. Video all the time, but audio, not so much.
I'll give a one, two, three count, then I'll ask you about your Christmas, if that works.
[00:03:45] Speaker A: Well, you know what? Actually, I think we might have to, because I'm the one recording. It's now started at zero, and this is going to be multiple now, which makes it harder to cut together. So I think we might just have to start from scratch, unfortunately.
Yeah, I don't mind. Yeah, I know. Good lesson. Hold on. Let me just.
[00:04:07] Speaker B: Well, yeah.
[00:04:13] Speaker A: I think if we. In the future, because I hit record, I think it might be better if you pop out and back, because that seems to have worked.
[00:04:21] Speaker B: No problem. And we'll just have to do that. And so I just ran through and I finished my anecdote, and we might have to do this asynchronously a little bit, which is fine by me. But. Yeah, why don't you do the intro again, and I'll tell my Christmas story again, and then I'll ask you for your Christmas story, and we'll keep moving on.
[00:04:41] Speaker A: Sounds good. All right, let me try it again. And we're recording anyway.
All right. Welcome to the daddy O podcast. We're your hosts. I'm Rob Burnett.
[00:04:53] Speaker B: And I'm Brad Bickerton.
[00:04:55] Speaker A: And it's Friday, December 29. It's between Christmas and New Year's. Brad and I are together. And for anyone who's new, this is a podcast. Brad and I are ceos. We're experienced company leaders. We're entrepreneurs. And Brad is a dad. And I'm about to be a dad. And so we're here talking about the intersection of dad and business and lessons you can learn about being a father and being an entrepreneur. So, with that, Brad, Merry Christmas. Happy New Year's. Happy holidays. How is it going? How was your Christmas?
[00:05:25] Speaker B: Happy holidays to you, too. Christmas was good. Mixed bag. Everything's different now with baby. And I just remember bachelor Brad. It was pretty easy. I'd work up to the last minute, throw some stuff in the car, some ski stuff, head up to my folks and then just have Christmas come home with a couple of things. Now it's a whole production. We had to buy a carrier for the back hitch of the car to carry extra stuff. We have two dogs and baby. And then what we didn't quite get right was how much stuff baby gets for Christmas. That's all fisher price, big plasticky things that then you have to figure out how to pack those in the car. And so that was lovely and a difficulty at the same time. The thing that I'll say later in my mistakes is it's very hard to lose home field advantage with young baby. Home field advantage. You have your home, you have the places you like to go and the coffee you like, and if you need space, it's available and you know how to do it. And we didn't do that 100% correctly. We should have stayed less time with family, not because they're bad, not because we don't love them, not because we weren't having a great time. It was just too much for us. And when we get back to the dad fails part, I'll talk about how that really created extra strain for us during this season. And so that was learning lessons and that was good. And Rob, I'm going to hand it off to you. I really want to know how is it being almost ready for baby during Christmas season with family?
Rob, thanks for asking me about Christmas and that's a bit of my story. I'd love to hear about yours. What is it like coming into Christmas almost to baby, but not quite there.
[00:07:07] Speaker A: Yeah, it's. Thanks, Brad. It's kind of fun, right? It's a new experience. Everyone's highly anticipating baby. So we did Christmas in the UK this year because obviously we weren't going to travel back to the States with Laura, 36, 37 weeks pregnant.
So it's all very anticipatory, though. We're starting to feel the shift of like, okay, all the presents are for the baby, which is great.
I'm in my thirty s. I don't need gifts for myself. I'm good. And we got a couple of little things, which is awesome.
Everything's very baby oriented, which is fun.
The downside of my Christmas is I got Covid.
Thankfully, it was the day after Christmas that I came down with it. But unfortunately, that means the last three days I've been isolating. So I'm calling from the bedroom where I'm not allowed to leave. Good news is a very light, very mild case. Just a little bit of a scratchy throat and some stuffy nose. I feel basically perfect now after three days, so I'm hoping can get out of here soon. Mostly we're just being cautious because of Laura and making sure that we don't get her with COVID before the baby comes. But definitely a little bit anxiety inducing. If it had been a week or two later, we've been really worried that I wouldn't have been able to go to the hospital with her if the baby was being born. So actually good to get this out of the way now.
[00:08:33] Speaker B: So that's been our mixed blessing there.
[00:08:37] Speaker A: Yeah, a little bit of mixed blessing, right. It's actually kind of good. It reminds me, Laura got Covid maybe a month before our wedding, and I hadn't gotten it yet. I had been vaccinated, but I hadn't gotten it yet. And I literally stayed in bed with her and tried to catch COVID from her a month before our wedding because I was like, if I get it now, I probably won't get it at our wedding. And I didn't get Covid then.
So this feels a little bit like, okay, you know what? I'm going to get it out of the way. It's going to be done. I'm not going to have to worry about catching COVID when my baby's born because I would be able to go to the hospital. And the joke I've been telling everybody is everyone's like, oh, are you missing Christmas? Is it horrible? And I was like, I don't know. I don't feel that bad. And I've been basically been able to be in a room for, like, three days and sleep and hang out and watch tv and have my food brought to me. And I don't think that's going to happen again for another 20 years. So I am enjoying the rest period here. I don't think I would have ever had an excuse to rest this much with only a couple of weeks left to go before a baby's born.
[00:09:38] Speaker B: It's a good thing to do. And I believe our first or second episode, I talked about how I started paternity leave part time, month before baby, and we had an induction date. And every week for four weeks leading up to the induction date, I took about 25% of my workload off. And that was in part because Sarah Beth needed the help. But it was also a time for me, not because of COVID but a similar thing. A break, a pause, and a chance to reframe coming into fatherhood, not just provide and protect chop wood, carry water. And so I'm hoping you're getting that as well, though, of course not voluntarily.
[00:10:16] Speaker A: Yeah, it's definitely a little. I knew I was run down coming into this, and this actually leads into what we're going to talk about later on in the episode. Stay tuned for a discussion about kind of staying healthy and staying fit as a dad and as an executive. But I was definitely run down coming into this holiday season, and I don't know if that contributed to me getting sick or not, but being able to sit and just be in bed for a couple of days, even though I was sick has been really a big recharge, and I'm not usually that kind of guy, but massive recharge, feeling much better. And as we head into baby, definitely going to be, I don't know if I'm going to be able to kind of take 25% a week off, but I think starting to switch that mindset, starting to kind of wind things down, take things off my plate. It's been a good moment to kind of transition some of that stuff, which I think is really nice.
[00:11:11] Speaker B: I want to dive into that a little bit more just from the businessy side. And one thing that I'm always coaching people on is taking time away from the day to day to do think work. A because only the leader, and usually only the CEO actually has permission or ability or insight into that. But the other thing is, and this was interesting too, is it's the only way to truly stress test your team is by being gone, because you can't see what little projects you're picking up or what things fit in between silos of work. And so, interestingly enough, paternity leave or illness is not just a time for you to reframe your mind and do some think work. It's also a time for your team to see if and how they're capable or incapable of taking projects off you so that you can go work on more valuable things. That's just a piece of my coaching that I put out there quite frequently. And then the other piece of it is just general health. If you can never hand stuff off to people, you just get more and more as your company grows more and more weight on you. And then eventually you are run down.
And I want to pause there for a second, because one of the reasons you might be run down, and I don't know if we want to share this on the podcast or not, but your company just went through a capital raise during the end of the year, and there's no such thing as an easy capital raise. I've been involved with probably hundreds at this point. So I just wanted to ask you, how is it coming with a company that's growing and it's doing its work, but it has a need for capital at the same time as you need to have some space for.
[00:12:41] Speaker A: Baby.
[00:12:41] Speaker B: I wanted to ask you if those two things are something you want to talk about in this podcast or leave for another day.
[00:12:47] Speaker A: No, we can talk about it a little bit now. I mean, it's a good moment, right? It's what's happening right now, which is, and I mentioned in some earlier episodes, we went through some layoffs.
Like a lot of companies, we got closer to the end of our Runway than we were comfortable with and we had to make some changes, hard ones, but they were good to do. And then, yeah, we were very luckily, and not luckily, a lot of hard work from a lot of great people. We closed a financing before Christmas, which was really nice. Classic. Kind of gotten it done.
I won't call it the last minute, but certainly got it done right before the holidays. Got it in, which is really fantastic.
We were able to publicly announce the completion of the fundraise right before Christmas, but did the closing right after Christmas, which is really kind of a great Christmas present as an entrepreneur. Hey, we got another big chunk of cash to go chase this dream, but it's definitely one of those times in the company where things are not on autopilot. And I think, to your point, Brad, you need to take think time. And I found, as a leader and as I've taken on different roles in my company, because I've gone from being basically a business development associate to running the business development team to becoming the COO to then becoming the CEO. I found in each of those roles that there's like, obviously, with every role, right, there's ebbs and flows of how hard you have to work, and there's ebbs and flows about how much time are you thinking and strategizing versus how much time are you doing the blocking and tackling.
And I found that over the last couple of years, I did a lot of blocking and tackling, a lot of digging in there in the trenches with the team, fixing customer service or building a new onboarding process, like really doing the nitty gritty day to day stuff. And I've done so much training with my team that I found in the last six months or so, I've really been able to step back from a lot of day to day stuff and spend a lot more time strategizing, thinking about bigger picture things, which is really fun and really different. And the only problem with that is some of that bigger picture stuff you cannot pass off and you need to be around for things like the financing. So I'm counting my lucky stars that this all got done now and I'm basically going to be in a hardcore sprint between now and basically when the baby comes around, planning for this new capital, figuring out what we're going to do next, putting processes and plans in place with my team so that they know what they need to do. So that the biggest fear I have heading into this from a business perspective is we just got a fresh capital. We have to execute on it. Our one way is not unlimited. We need to get better, we need to grow revenue, we need to create new projects.
And if I'm out for a month, I have to get a certain critical mass of planning done before I get on leave in order for my team to be able to take it and run with it while I'm out. And so that's my job right now, is I'm very focused on getting things that making the decisions I need to make now and I need to make with the powers that be above me.
So that by the time I'm ready to go, and that could be any time from a couple of days from now to a couple of weeks from now, when I have to go and I get that call and Laura goes into labor, my team can take all those decisions and run with them for a couple of weeks while I'm out. And I'm excited about that. I think I'm in a good spot, but that's where I'm at. I don't know if that answers your question, but that's certainly what I'm thinking about.
[00:16:20] Speaker B: It's funny how it kind of comes together like that.
One of the phrases I use when I'm teaching how to raise capital is there's no such thing as an easy raise by getting into a raise. Whether it's angel or in your case public or ibanking or vcPe, whatever it is, the easiest grade I'll ever give it is regular hard, and that's just a part of the deal. And the CEO always has to be involved. Even when you get to the level where you have a CFO and ibankers, the CEO still needs to be involved because no one thinks about writing big checks unless they feel they have some access to the main stakeholders. And that's why regular hard is as nice as it gets and then the other side of the scale, of course, is impossible. But it's funny to me how often in business and in life, two completely unrelated things come together. So it's a capital raise. It's after a hard year of capital raises for the entire sets of the industry and babies coming at the same time. But I want to say, I just want to honor you and I love your perspective, which is, you know, your job is to not let momentum falter or die when you are not there to foment that momentum daily. You may not be able to hand off the thinking work, the project work, the big picture work, but you can hand off activities to what I call your blue line employees, your executives, the people who can think through problems. And you can make it that whether you come back in two weeks or two months, the company can still have moved forward. Maybe not as fast as you were there, but you didn't falter on the momentum. And I really feel that's one of the vital things that we need to do as we take time and space for dad, for fatherhood, as well as for personal, in our health, is make sure that the company doesn't falter.
But on that side, go ahead.
[00:18:12] Speaker A: All I was going to add to that is it goes into our discussion later, because whether you're a dad or not company, your job as an executive or in any capacity is to not let the company, not to slow the company down. You need to keep momentum. And so, yeah, if you ever want to have appropriate balance in your life, you have to build systems and processes that allow the company and allow others on your team to take and run with your ideas. If you're a CEO, for example. And so, yeah, if you want time to be able to take care of yourself, you want to be able to go on a vacation, or you want to be able to be a very present father.
If you can't let anything go and you can't plan ahead, you're either going to cripple the team when you leave or you're never going to be able to get to leave in the first place. But what were you going to say? Brad?
[00:19:05] Speaker B: I actually want to touch on that plan ahead because it's one of my joys. And I've been told, and I believe giftings is to be a strategic thinker. And for me, strategy, the shortest time frame of strategy is 90 days. For some fast moving startup companies, I may say 30 days. So 30 days out or 90 days out, that's the beginning of strategy. And I'm pretty good at that. And in fact, the way my brain works is I like that. I like having that. I have thought through this process. I've talked to enough people. I have whiteboarded it myself, maybe even written a memo or strategy memo, or just gone on a walk and talked myself through it as though I was pitching it enough times that I have a mental mind frame of where this company is going and what it's doing, as well as those milestones along the way. Because you push towards the milestones, you don't push towards the strategy. And the reason for that is most people, the strategy is too obtuse, too far out there, too far away from their day to day. On the flip side, where we are right now in life, in baby, we have been hit by so many external events. One of the things that we talked about last week was we both own properties in Denver, but we use the rental income of those to rent our home in Boulder. And that's great. We love Boulder. We want to be here, but just with the housing market rates right now, it's better to do this kind of step transaction. But we didn't realize that we'd exposed ourselves to the risk of our landlord could sell the property at any time. I've rented for many, many years. I've owned for years. I've been a landlord. I've never encountered this. And I think it was two weeks ago today while I was doing a strategic planning session that I learned that we're losing our home.
Well, fast forward to now. We're moving next week.
There was no chance to come up with a strategy for what is it like to go through a move with baby? What is it like to share the activities between two working adults while also hiring packers and movers and doing things like making sure that we have Internet at new place in a crossover week. And that's been a real struggle for me as somebody who likes to be strategic, have the mind frame and the thoughts out so that I know where we are as the tactics are coming along and then boom, chaos comes into our life. Now, it's something Sarah Beth and I do very well together. We're able to sit and own the we didn't cause it, but we do need to solve this and I'm very thankful for that.
But in the baby side of life, I have a lot less control because there are more external factors than either in my coaching of ceos or my running of Delta awesome. Or in previous projects where the external factors were a little bit more known and you could shore up against them I don't have that so much in fatherhood. It kind of just feels like ready, fire, aim, needs to be the mentality, and that's not me. I like to think through projects.
[00:22:01] Speaker A: I think on that note, it is funny.
This might be similar, but not exactly the same as what you're talking about, but I'm definitely like the.
I pride myself on being able to be both strategic and tactical. So I'm very good at thinking high level, but then I'm also very good at implementation. And in our relationship, there's always the joke of, like, who's the CEO in the relationship? And I'll defer to Laura on most everything, but I'll stand up for myself that I am definitely good at implementing. Like making a plan, like, okay, doing logistics, things like that. And because Laura likes to be in charge, which is great, she's awesome, sometimes she struggles to emotionally let me do the logistics, even though she'll admit that I'm better at the logistics. And that's definitely something that when it's just the two of us, it doesn't really matter, right? If we get out five minutes late from the door, it's annoying, but it's not the end of the world. When we throw a baby into the mix, we're already trying to kind of emotionally grapple with the. You're right, you kind of have to shoot from the hip. But logistics also matter a little bit more. If you only ever shoot from the hip, you're going to drive you crazy. So that's something I'm grappling with for sure. This kind of getting ready for baby and getting ready for how we're going to plan our days and who's going to control what.
[00:23:28] Speaker B: So I'll give a little theo update because it'll help fill in this part of the project. Because he's a dynamic force. He's not the same daily, and so his changes are not announced, they just happen. And one of the things that's happened in the last two weeks is his ability to sit up, and desire to sit up is greatly increased.
And I didn't know that two weeks ago. I'm still getting used to the fact that he can roll over, and yet now he's moved past rolling over. He wants to crawl and he wants to sit up, and he wants to do these new things. And so we're behind on his growth pattern, and so we have to do some ready fire aims shoot from the hip work because he's not the same kid he was two weeks ago. And the big unlock was Christmas. We don't know if it was just his growth, who he's becoming, that he was able to sit up more, it's easier to hold him. He's moving and he's playing with objects more. He's able to hold them, pick them up, put them down. We don't know if that was just natural or it's because he was exposed. The house had nine other people in it and he was able to watch and pattern and grow so quickly. I don't know. But when we came home six days after we left, he was a different kid. And so now our parenting for him is different than it was six days ago. And that's a lot faster than it happens in business and it's a lot less in our control. But what I wanted to get to it is Sarah Beth and I see this differently because when we interact with him, we're having different interactions. Intersubjective. What we feel and see and know of him is personal to us and going way out of our way to describe how we're feeling about it or what we're seeing him do, to the point where it almost sometimes feels over communicative that Sarah Beth, I don't need to hear all that except for I do. Or the vice versa.
That's a little bit different. And we both have to give up control or understanding and we defer to over communicate and we still do it. Yeah, I'd give us like a b minus on that. So I can't wait to see what happens with you and Laura as you guys get into months. 3456 post baby yeah, well, and I.
[00:25:46] Speaker A: Love the move towards over communicate in business and in life.
I think people under communicate. They under communicate. I tell this to my team members all the time. You got to talk to each other, especially in a virtual environment, you have to talk to each other all the time. Do not assume that other people know what they're doing. You have to use boards and all these things. But that's a conversation for a different day.
Any other life updates, Brad, that we.
[00:26:12] Speaker B: Can'T wait to get to that conversation? A different day.
[00:26:17] Speaker A: Exactly. And excuse me, I've got a little cough from that Covid leftover. Anything else you want to go over before we move to our next segment of the podcast?
[00:26:28] Speaker B: No, I'm very happy to get to health and showing up.
[00:26:34] Speaker A: That sounds good. So let's take a quick break and then we'll be right back with how to stay healthy and how to take care of yourself both in life and as a dad. All right. Welcome back. So, Brad, let's talk about, I think one thing you and I have always been connected on is kind of our love for the outdoors. We've skied together, we've threatened a bike ride together a lot. I don't think we've ever actually done, but, and I think both of us care a lot about taking care of ourselves. And I know for me and Laura and our partnership, fitness has been a big part of our pregnancy journey. And so I thought it would be good to talk about kind of know how we think about fitness, both as a dad and during pregnancy, as a supportive partner, and then just as a human being who wants to be as high a performer as possible. In the know, one way I can kick this off is I actually remember Delta awesome sent out a newsletter and I tried to read it as much as I could. And I know you included a book in there about kind of longevity and health and lifespan and things like that. And I remember reading it and really changed. You had said you changed your perspective, and I know it changed mine. And I know fatherhood is often a big perspective changer as well when it comes to healthy habits and things like.
So, you know, as you think about your fatherhood journey and the pregnancy journey you and Sarah Beth went through, how did kind of longevity and fitness and health, what role did that play in your journey? Why don't you talk to us about that a little bit?
[00:28:10] Speaker B: Yes, I'll start at a half step back. And so David Sinclair is a PhD professor at Harvard, and he wrote a book called Lifespan. And it's about how do we. Lifespan is how long you live and how well you live together. Right? So no purpose living to 500 if you're miserable.
When I was 39, I'm now 42. I wanted to know what the journey of your 40s was going to be like. And Sarah Beth and I weren't back together yet. And so I was staring down this. I've got middle age coming, or middle age here, depending on how you define it and what is available, what can I do? And so I gave myself two tasks for my forty s. And task number one was learn how to age gracefully. And it was right about this time. That's a little mean spirited. But Top Gun two was coming out, and Tom Cruise still looks like a movie star. And Carrie McGillis from Top Gun one, not so much. And what's the difference there? What's the genetics? What's the life choices? What's the just what has happened?
And I realized that there are certain people who age gracefully now, is that income? Is that food, is that diet, exercise? What is. I didn't know. I was just coming into, my body's getting a little older, it's a little harder to keep the fat off. And then out of nowhere, not out of nowhere, on Joe Rogan's podcast, David Sinclair's on there, and he's describing what he's done as a PhD research professor in longevity. So I buy his book and it changes everything for me because I realize there are people who are legitimately studying this at the highest end of the medical practice, and there are things you can do to help with that. The second thing I promised myself in my forty s, and it's interesting, I haven't said this in a while, but this podcast is perfect for it. The second thing of my forty s I wanted to accomplish was have more but different adventures in my 40s than my thirty s. And in my thirty s, I climbed a lot of mountains. I finished grad school, I started delta. Awesome, many of these things. So those are two things learned how to age gracefully and have more adventures. And adventures for me at the time were still physically minded. Triathlon, maybe an iron man, climb more mountains and such.
What ended up happening is, after I did Montblanc and then attempted Madahorn, I came back and doing high end, dangerous mountaineering was gone for me. I'd graduated and this is another story for another day. And literally I came home from that saying, this part of my life is retired, it's over, it's too dangerous. The cost of entry is too high, the amount of time, the amount of money, the amount of danger and all that. I had a pretty scary fall on the matterhorn that was not injurious, but very scary.
And then Sarah Beth and I got back together the next month and started this new adventure, which is fatherhood.
So putting all those things together, I learned that in order for me to be the best father and businessman and executive I can be, I have to be a degree selfish with my body and my brain and my diet and my exercise. And that's not a want to have, and that's not a nice to have, it's a need to have. Because if I continue to burn myself every 90 days, I look at every quarter and I burn myself out, and then I take three days or a week of just crash time. I'm sick, I'm tired. Belly fat is coming in, alcohol is too much. Sleep is just an idea that was not sustainable to achieve the business goals or the father or husband goals that I wanted to do. So I took a big step back from those things and asked myself, who is the man I want to be at 50?
And that's what I've tried to design my program around now. Am I doing it well? It's been a pretty tough year. It's really hard to hold this true. But what's really interesting, we were just talking in our break about how hard it is to talk for a full, solid hour as we're doing right now, and making sure we're having enough liquid and all that. One of the reasons I've got a little bit of a cough right now is just before this recording, I had 35 minutes space and I walked over to the other room and I did a 20 minutes peloton hit workout and I took the quickest shower imaginable. And because of that, I've got a little bit of a cough. I'm a little dehydrated. But I know, I know, I know that 20 minutes on the peloton three times a week, not even including anything else. That's part of me being a good father. That is part of me being a good husband. That is part of me being a good leader of my company or a coach to other leaders. And it took a lot of humility to be able to put myself first in that so that I could do better in all the other things I'm doing.
So that's a long winded, rambly story off of your quick question. If you have any follow up questions, I'd love to. Otherwise, I want to hear a little bit about what you're thinking as you're coming into 40 in fatherhood and your longevity thoughts.
[00:33:23] Speaker A: You it yeah, I got you now. I'm excited to listen to that for the first time. When I edit this, I'm going to get all this wisdom. It's like getting to listen to the podcast for the first time.
[00:34:04] Speaker B: It's kind of tough because I left it with handing it off to you. Do you have any questions?
[00:34:10] Speaker A: Oh, no. Well, give me the cliff note. Give me the cliff notes. Just like the 2 seconds.
[00:34:16] Speaker B: Where did you stop hearing at the beginning?
[00:34:18] Speaker A: Basically, I asked you a question and you went off and I didn't hear anything.
I got zero.
[00:34:27] Speaker B: Oh, wow. So I talked about mountaineering, and then my personal life goal in my 40s was to learn how to age gracefully and have more adventures in my forty s and my thirty s.
And so I talked about that a little bit. And David Sinclair's book and the Matterhorn and getting back together with Sarah Beth.
But one of the things that the place that would be the handoff to you, the thing that you would have wanted to have heard so that I can ask you the question again, is that I'm learning. Okay, Rob, so that's my long winded answer to your short question. And before I throw the ball back at you, I want to know if you have any follow ups or any questions for me on that little bit of a rant.
[00:35:07] Speaker A: Oh, that's awesome. And I love to hear about that stuff. So you talked about wanting to have more adventures in your forty s and your thirty s and Sarah Beth, thinking about adventure as parents, as a father, are you guys the kind of people like we see on Instagram who are going to throw the baby in the backpack and climb all up the mountains and go skiing? Or have you thought about that? Is that part of your dynamic at this point?
[00:35:33] Speaker B: So let's start with my father's definition of adventure. And there's a difference between an adventure and an activity. And the only difference is an adventure has an element of the unknown or uncertainty.
And you don't always want to do that with baby and with kid because they are enough of an element of unknown or uncertainty on their own. And in some ways, fatherhood is just an adventure of its own. Waking up, not knowing what you're going to get. But I'm going to take this a little bit of a different direction because Sarah Beth's and my versions of adventure are probably pretty close.
But there's another person in this dynamic, which is Theodore's godfather, my best friend Mel.
And we've talked about how do we. His son is turning six, Luke, how do I show up as Uncle Brad and he shows up as Uncle Mel? Instill adventure within these children, that it's okay to be bold and to be wild and to get out there and muck with stuff within boundaries, and how the adventure is received and perceived by Theodore and Luke, and that our job is a guide in the adventure. Not as much a participant at this point. Later, who knows? We'll talk about that some more. So that's the adventure for me, is instilling a sense of adventure in Theodore to the degree that works for him. And I had a great friend and she said, brad, your child might not be an athlete and might not be outdoorsy. You don't know Sarah Beth and you are, and it's likely you will be. But your job is not to push them into the direction of what you wished for or what you're capable of or what you even enjoy, your job is to foment with whatever their skills, their luck, their perception, their desires are and increase that.
That's the adventure for me, is figuring that out and learning how to help. But right now, Theodore is just sitting, so it's kind of hard to fully determine what adventure is going to look like when he has a little bit more agency. But I bet you anything you're not.
[00:37:37] Speaker A: Really sure what his athletic future holds.
[00:37:41] Speaker B: His athletic future might include sitting in front of some canvas with some paint. That might be who he is, and I'm excited to find that might be.
[00:37:51] Speaker A: Who he is, and that'd be awesome.
[00:37:52] Speaker B: There will be parts about him that are not like me at all. And I will have the adventure of learning those and how to develop them and be a part of them. And so that all sits with. It's not an activity because there's an element of the unknown side of the world for me.
[00:38:10] Speaker A: I think that's an awesome way to think about it.
And then just about yourself for a second. One more follow up before we move on. But how do you see, I know you think that kind of like your own little workouts and activities are just important for you as a CEO. As you manage, or as you talk to other people, or as you coach other ceos, do you talk to them about fitness and taking care of their bodies and take care of their health? How do you see that as, what role do you see as fitness and health playing in the role of a CEO?
[00:38:45] Speaker B: So the latin version for that would be cynical, non which means without which not. And so every time I do strategy sessions with companies and I do business development with company or developing the business or corporate development with companies. But I also do executive coaching and with CEO specifically on the executive coaching side, I usually do KPIs that fit in three models. The first is a metric that matters for the business. The second is a cultural health and the last is a personal health. We will always put sleep, diet and exercise just as an accountability function. It's not my job to tell a female CEO, a male CEO, a 50 year old, a 20 year old, what their health and fitness goals should be. That is either a coach, like a personal coach, or somebody else. But my job in part is to record where they're at on that journey so they can't have cognitive bias, they're doing well or not well. And also that we can see in reference when their sleep, diet and exercise is where they want it to be and or growing. How does that affect culture and metrics. That's one of the jobs that I do. And because I've been doing this now for six years with sometimes the same ceos and sometimes many, many different ones, I have learned indelibly that the sleep, diet, exercise and learning capacity of the CEO is affecting culture and metrics. It just straight is that is a hard fact of soft skills. And so that's why Cynicwan non, if your company has hit a threshold that you cannot seem to get above and you are not looking actively at how you are taking care of yourself, that's the first easy, lowest hanging fruit. And if you don't have time to do it, that's also the thing that's telling you you're off. I'm going to add one more thing in there and I feel like you might have a follow up. The other question that I always ask inside of the CEO's personal things, there's actually two. Number one, what have you learned about being a CEO in the last week or sometimes two weeks? And if you haven't learned anything, you're not thinking you've learned something about the role of a CEO in your company that you didn't know two weeks ago. And the second thing is, there's always some metric out there that is really your keystone that tells me or you, you're doing everything right. Back to my very best friend Mel. His is meaningful time with his son when he's doing everything right as a CEO of a bank, then he has meaningful time with his son when everything's in chaos and fire mode that gets dropped and it's the most important thing to him. But it's also the thing that lets us know is everything else in order? And when he doesn't have meaningful time with Luke, we take a look back. Sleep, diet and exercise, often off cultures, often off metrics aren't being hit. It's straight up and straight down. They're all fit together.
[00:41:33] Speaker A: I think that's incredibly valuable. I don't know if I have a follow up so much as just saying that. I think that's an incredibly valuable thing to point out that if things aren't right with you and your body and then these things are all linked.
And I think it's very tempting to think of, oh, I have too much work to work out. I have too much work to sleep. I've got too much work to spend time with my kid. And I think you and I both experienced this, is that our experience is that it's not often that you have too much work. It's that things are out of alignment and therefore the work is not going well or things are out of whack.
[00:42:15] Speaker B: And that's the purpose of the personal KPIs, is to push back against that cognitive bias that you have towards. I have too much work. I can't do this. I want to show that it's the alignment that's off, not the activities that are off. And you just nailed it on the head.
There are times like raising capital, laying people off, bringing in your first enterprise sale. There's good things and bad things. Yes, absolutely. There are periods of time or baby sick, and you're raising capital and you're getting your biggest client. It's probably more germane to the intersection of this podcast that, yeah, there will be times, but I really like to make sure that those times have a discrete goal period milestone when they're occurring, when they're perpetuities. That's where companies start slowly moving into mediocrity. Because you cannot sustain 26 miles of 1 mile sprint times. You cannot do it, and your times will slowly but surely get worse. And eventually you'll get to this place where you're underwater or things are bad, or culture is so rough that people literally don't like signing on. I mean, just like office space, touching that thing and it's shocking you. I come into cultures like that all the time, with profitable, growing companies, and everyone says, I like it here, kind of. I'm making money in commissions, kind of. My equity is growing kind of. And recruiters call me all the time, and sometimes there's better jobs for less money, and I just can't be here anymore. And it's like, well, did you grind yourself into mediocrity because you were trying to sustain a sprint style?
And that's why we measure, and that's why we measure the soft things so that we can treat them like hard things.
I don't have any of that, by the way, on husband or father, Jim Franklin's a guy here in Boulder. He talks about not the entrepreneur operating system, but the marriage operating system, the mos, and spending some time to basically do a think week with his wife, Sarah Beth. And I have kind of tried that a couple of times and I think just the chaos of the world. I'm using the same excuses for you now that my clients use with me, but we have an intention to spend time to get ahead of marriage and childhood or having a child, but this particular year, we just haven't been able to get there.
Well, I feel a little bit like today you've been asking good questions, and we got on some of my favorite soapboxes that I've found and developed over years. But, Rob, you actually come from a different perspective because you're so good at having a staff that you're growing. But also, you know, what it's like to be an athlete. Athlete. So I want to get back to that for you. Both sides, fatherhood as well as in business. How are you thinking about your personal health, diet, exercise, mindfulness, as you come into 2024 and business is growing and changing, and life and marriage and family are growing and changing.
[00:46:11] Speaker A: Gotcha.
I think you were onto something really good there that we'll talk about later. But I got one thought to kind of.
[00:46:19] Speaker B: So, Rob, we kind of touched on some of my favorite soapboxes there. Thanks for keying that up and asking the good questions. But I think I'd like to turn it back around to you because you come from a different flavor. First off, one of your great gifts as a CEO is developing your staff. And I know that health and exercise are going to be part of that. But you also were a fairly high end athlete yourself, and you've maintained that. And so I want to get your perspective as you come into 2024, fresh capital, some layoffs, but also some opportunities in business, and also you've got baby coming and what they call the fourth trimester. And how are you thinking about your health, 2024 and beyond?
[00:47:02] Speaker A: Yeah, Brad, I think that's a great question and something I care a lot about. So I care a lot about my health.
I've really had kind of similar to you, maybe similar time frame. I've really had a change in my perspective as I've gotten into my 30s, less focused on performance and more focused on enjoyment and longevity. And I've come to kind of adopt a more holistic view. Right. When I was a cyclist, my goal was to be as light as possible and as fast as possible, and skinny arms and strong legs, to the detriment of basically, literally everything else. And that was awesome. It built a great base of fitness for me, and it was really fun. It was a fun decade of my life. But obviously, I just can't keep doing that anymore, and I don't want to do it anymore. I like other things, too. But what I found is that it's been a great base. And so anyone who's got a base in fitness, whether they played sports in college or anything like that, I encourage you to keep it up.
But I found that it's been such a great foundation for my entrepreneurial and my work life, because we're learning more and more, and there's tons of great resources out there. I'm not a doctor, I'm not a sports physiologist, but there's tons of great resources out there about how muscle and fitness and exercise and time spent outdoors is just good in a million different ways for our mental function, our mental health, our ability to think clearly, think creatively, all of that good stuff. And I think that the number of times I've thought of a good idea on a bike ride or been able to contemplate something on a chairlift, one of my mantras for my team is always that this is a marathon, not a sprint, especially if you're working in a startup. But if you're working in any business, you can't have people burning out every six months or a year because that turnover is too expensive, it's too hard. And a lot of what I found, especially working with a lot of young people, is they're used to kind of that semester mindset. They've been in school their whole lives, and they're used to working really hard for three months and then taking a break and then working really hard again. And they're not used to the fact that when you get to the professional world, development doesn't take three months, it takes three years. It can take a long time to learn the skills and develop the skills you need to climb the chain. It took me six years, well, five and a bit years to climb the ladder from a business development associate to actually the CEO of a subsidiary. That's a heck of a climb. But I didn't do it in a year or two, even though maybe I would have thought a couple of years ago I could do this job, I probably couldn't, or at least I wouldn't have been as good at it. And so the point I'm trying to make is that all of this fatherhood, life and business is a marathon, not a sprint. And so what I've been trying to do is take a holistic approach. And there used to be, actually, when I was growing up, our era, the jocks are dumb and the nerds don't work out, and they're skinny and weak, and they sit at computers. And I think that I like looking back to the old Rhodes scholar paradigm. And if for those unfamiliar with the Rhodes scholarship, it's a scholarship where people can go to, I believe it's Oxford, I might screw this up, but it's for people who are very good at academics and very good at athletics. And now I think they've broadened the category. But the idea is that there's actually something about combining those two that's valuable. And I'm starting to think the same thing. The people I know who are fit, not ultra endurance crazy, but they fit. They work out every day, they sleep well, and they eat well, and they take care of themselves. Those people tend to be sharp, they tend to have energy, and they tend to be more kind of even keeled. And I found for myself that's really valuable. Every day when I wake up, I get my ride in, I eat well, I eat healthy, I feel good, I look good to myself.
That makes me feel good. And yeah, I could get an extra hour or two of work in a day, or an hour or two of tv, but I know that when I do that, I don't feel good.
And so I'm really trying to take this approach to kind of the next level, which is I need to look at every aspect of how I operate in order to be the best person I can be.
And so in work, one thing I always lament is I love developing my people. And I'd like to do, like, book clubs, and I like to teach them. I let them listen into my calls so they can kind of do buddy calls with me, things like that. The one thing I just don't feel is appropriate for me to do is get my team on a workout program. I wish I could. I just don't feel it's appropriate.
It's too hard. But, Brad, I don't know if you've ever done that there. It's easily easier when you're coaching, but when you're employing someone, it's hard to tell them, hey, go to the gym. But I definitely try to show my people that I'm out there doing things and make sure they know that's okay. It's a bit rambly, but the last point I'll make here is that I've taken all of those lessons. And as we've gone into the pregnancy journey for Laura and I, what I found that's been really useful is we've leaned into that as opposed to step back from that. And I think that's been really good. Now, we're not at the end of our pregnancy journey. We haven't done the birth yet, but I know for Laura, she's got an extra 20 pounds on her front or more. And a lot of pregnant women gain a lot of weight. And I can see it, that new weight, that new balance. It would be so easy to take her foot off the gas and step back. But by being fit and active and leaning into it and staying active, every time she feels like she's getting a little bit bigger, she also feels a little bit stronger, and she feels good and she comes in waves, but she's able to maintain. So I feel a little bit like I'm ranting now, but I think that that mindset of taking care of ourselves holistically and maintaining that through the pregnancy and me maintaining my own fitness during the pregnancy, even when Laura's not felt well or taken some days off and rightfully rested, I think that that intention and seeing us doing that together has really made this pregnancy journey a much healthier and kind of happier thing. So, Brad, that was a lot. I don't know anything else you think we should dive in on?
[00:53:22] Speaker B: It was beautiful.
[00:53:23] Speaker A: I could also talk about outdoors a little bit.
[00:53:25] Speaker B: And one thing I want to say, of course, our relationships with our spouses are very different than our relationships with our employees and our clients.
But there's one part of this that I believe strongly in, and this comes from my christian side and the Bible side, is that there was a guy who didn't make it into the disciples, and his name was Barnabas. And Barnabas means the encourager.
And I always loved that thought, that while dictating or determining or judging either spouse or employee for decisions, health, fitness, or their genetics or their preferences, judging is pretty bad. We really got to stay away from that. And sometimes people define judging as criticism with emotion or the shoulding of know, Rob, you really should.
Nonviolent communication should is often considered the most violent word in the english language. But encouraging is very different. And encouraging is subtle, and it's kind and it's full of heart and belief. I believe that a person can do better on their health and fitness. I believe I can, rob. I believe you can. I believe I can help you. And I really want to. And so I keep that mindset of the bright line that I'm not going to, or the black line that I'm not going to go across is dictating, is judging. But the thing I will never stop doing is encouraging. And one of the ways I encourage is just speak honestly about my truths, my wins, my losses. And let it be known that a person can be a part of that win and loss journey. Because as soon as they are, then that means they're on the train for growing. Because when you start admitting your wins and losses, for sleep, diet, exercise, that order of importance, then all of a sudden, you're measuring them and you're being intentional about them being better. And I heard a lot of that in your, what you call a little rambly rant. You are very much on that train, and it's one of the reasons I appreciate you, my friend.
[00:55:32] Speaker A: I appreciate that because I know, too, I feel much more comfortable talking about my own journey than talking about my wife's or certainly trying to give any advice to pregnant women, because there's plenty of that out there, and I'm certainly not the expert. But one thing for guys out there who want to be Barnabas, who want to be encouraging, I'll give you two tips that I think are important that have helped me in our journey.
So the first thing that helped me was gearing up. So I'm lucky that my partner is really fit to begin with, and so we don't have any tension there. I don't have to tell her. I don't have to tell her. She should. She just will. But we definitely had conversations about, hey, let's get fitter during this lead up to pregnancy because it'll probably be helpful.
I really focused on, I don't like how strong my arms are, and I don't like how strong my core is. One of your lines is weak core, and I feel like I've got a weak core and I've got strong legs. Funny little anecdote, this gym we've joined has this little, like one of these machines that does your body mass, and it'll tell you kind of your biological age and all those things. And if you do a couple of different lift, a couple of different weights and a couple of different sets, and you put in your data, it'll tell you kind of like your age, of your legs and your core and your arms.
So the lowest your age can be is 21. My legs are 21. And for the record, I'm 34, my abs are 49, and my arms are 71.
So I am way out of whack. And so I told that to Laura, and she laughed her butt off. But I can credibly go to her and say, hey, let's join a gym. Because I want to work on my arms and my core, because I want to be a good dad. I want to be here for you, and I want to just do it because I think it's good. Because I want to live till I'm 100, and I want to be here for you, and I want this partnership to last a long time. So will you help me do that? And we can do it together. That really helped. And we started that before we got pregnant. And then it certainly kind of setting that intention really helped while we were pregnant because we knew we were in this together.
And then the second thing.
[00:57:59] Speaker B: So I just want to get to the arms and core that is a vital part of fatherhood, because you will be picking up an 810 15 pound moving weight hundreds of times. And I had a little problem with one of my arms and my right arm, and I didn't want to go to PT, and I ended up just doing isometrics, holding heavy weight for a minute or two for a bunch of weeks to get that tendon stronger because I was actually having difficulty holding my son and that was a burden on the family.
Because if I can't hold my son as well or for as long, or I have to hold him only in the front pouch and he's not having that, then I'm not being a co parent in that moment. I have to hand him off. So where I'm going with this is, a, yes, I did the work to fix it, but b, you're going to need your core and your arms because you are going to be lifting things from babies to cribs to other stuff. That part of your chalk would carry water is get in shape.
[00:59:05] Speaker A: You're going to need 100%.
I kind of want to focus on the dads here, right. But moms need that, too. And so the more encouraging you can be, the better off you can be and bring her along, the better you'll be. And then the second thing I wanted to make sure I got to that, I think really helped with Laura and I is, I think one of the things women struggle with, and I hate even stepping into this territory, but there's obviously the stigma of weight gain around pregnancy.
[00:59:37] Speaker B: Go for it, man.
[00:59:39] Speaker A: I'm just going to go for it. Right?
There is a worry and anxiety amongst women about weight gain in pregnancy, and that is completely understandable, because even if you basically gain no weight yourself, a baby is six, seven, eight pounds. There's placenta, there's water. You will gain weight. You'll gain ten or 20 or actually more, probably 2025, 30 pounds. Even if you are perfect, that's a lot of weight. And when you start to mix that anxiety with a husband saying, hey, you should work out, that's a recipe for disaster. Because for a lot of partners, that's already a touchy subject. They might be insecure about their body changing because they're growing a bump, and then you're saying, hey, let's go work out. If you bring it up at the wrong time, that can be incredibly insulting and tough and a million other things. So one thing I always tried to make sure I conveyed to Laura, and I'm able to be credible about it because it's a big part of our relationship, is I was able to say to her, this is not about how you look, and it's not about how much you weigh, and it's not about how your stomach looks. This is about the fact that my partner is someone I care about, and my partner is someone who I love doing things with, and my partner is someone who I want to live a long life with. And so, Laura, this is not about you getting your pre pregnancy body back. This isn't about my attraction to you. I will be attractive to you no matter what.
But I do care about you feeling good, about you being able to lift our baby and about your body healing.
And I think saying that explicitly to my partner and to Laura, I think that made her feel a lot better. And it put me on much more solid ground to be the encourager when it came to fitness in the pregnancy journey, because I'm able to credibly tell her, this isn't about how much you weigh and you're looking great and the bump looks awesome and you're doing such a good job. And hey, you did ten minutes on the bike, that's fine. Come on. She's never done ten minutes on the bike. She won't stop. I can't get her off the bike. But it puts me, I think, on more solid ground, and it puts me in a place where I can show that I understand her anxieties, but I'm able to still be encouraging. So for any dads or dads to be out there, those are some tips that certainly help me in our journey.
[01:02:20] Speaker B: So I want to wrap this up, if we can, by one of the reasons you and I started this podcast was it was hard for us to find good material that fit within the world of leadership, but also just dad material that made sense to us. And I was given a book by my friend Jonathan, and I gave it to you. It's called the expectant father. And a lot of the reasons this exists is because that book exists. And one of the lessons in that book that I remember very clearly was the guy who did the research armin brought. He said that 90% of men find their pregnant partner sexy, and I did, and they do.
[01:03:01] Speaker A: I do, too.
[01:03:02] Speaker B: The mistake that we make is not knowing that it's very common to find your partner as their bodies are changing more sexually attractive, number one. But the other thing is, without realizing, that's normal. Voicing that and that's what that book and I would like. Anyone listening to us now should have permission to say to your spouse, I am sexually attracted to you right now. And it's this opposite world. Because if a woman gained 20 or 30 pounds over nine months, non pregnancy, that may not be true. But with pregnancy, with my wife, whom I love, and I'm watching this journey and I'm enjoying and I'm holding and I'm cuddling and I'm bringing her food in crazy different ways. And I go to the whole foods food bar and I get seven different meals because I don't know which parts of which one she wants. And she wanted the fries and shake I got on the way home.
She doesn't feel sexy in that. And I needed to learn. And as I'm saying this now, I hope she hears this and I hope that I leave this podcast today and remind her that even post pregnancy, as she's working through strengthening her bodies in ways that are easy and not easy, that I find her sexy still and voicing that I believe is my responsibility to remember. And I just want to thank you, Rob, for keying me back into that lesson.
[01:04:28] Speaker A: For sure. Yeah. Boys say things out loud to your girls. It's a broad brush, but I'll paint with it anyway.
We don't say things out loud enough. We don't communicate. Tell your partners you think they're sexy. Tell them they think they look good. Tell them that the bump looks good, that you love the bump. The bump is awesome.
Yeah, there's a lot more to talk about. It does look actually really cool. It looks good. It is not some big fat beer belly. It looks great.
It's fun, and it's a fun time, and you get to enjoy it. You enjoy this time. It's different.
It's a new phase in the life. So there's a million things we can talk about. But dads out there work together, stay fit. And if you're listening to this on the CEO side of things or on the executive side of things, take care of yourself. Get out there. Get a fitness routine going. And if you want to talk to Brad or I about it, shoot us an email at
[email protected]. Happy to talk to you about what works for us.
Brad, any last thoughts on this stuff or should we wrap it up with dad wins and fails for the week?
[01:05:37] Speaker B: I want to go right to my wins and fails.
[01:05:40] Speaker A: Go for it. You seem excited. Lead us off.
[01:05:45] Speaker B: Yeah, I'll key off with the win is Theodore is finally taking some bottle from me. And he won't take a full meal's worth. And we'll talk about ounces and how you measure that and pumping when you're a little bit on the other side of baby.
But he's really rejected it for me for a while. He's now taking enough for me that I've finally keyed into something that he needs in order to fall asleep with me, usually in what's the lily? A front pouch. He needs to know food is available. He doesn't necessarily need to eat. And that was our big unlock. That was our big win that I now can say, okay, he's coming into the two hour mark. He's going to get fussy and need a nap. 2030 minutes. But before he gets fussy, I'm going to offer him the bottle. Let him take just enough that he knows food is available. That will satiate him enough that then his head will just Bob. Just burn. And that means I am now able to do a full cycle with baby without mom. And so that's my win. It's a huge win. And anyone there with kids less than six months or a year old will be smiling and nodding their head and say, that guy finally got it. I got it one day, too. And Rob, I'm giving you this lesson for free ahead of time, but someday you'll get it, too.
And then my dad fail was we are so busy with Christmas and move and our first vacation in forever all being slammed together that I knew something was wrong. But I didn't take action to fix it, which was I knew that we were burning ourselves out every day. And I knew that because we're hard driving people, we won't really admit that we're over our skis and going too hard and too fast. And that's what happened during Christmas. Nobody's fault.
My sister's lovely. My parents are lovely. Everybody's great. But we woke up on the 27th a couple of days ago, and we were so unbelievably fried, we couldn't even put words to it. And then we had to tell the family, we need to leave early, which seems like a slam. We fixed it later. And then packing and driving home was literally all the energy I had left and I could have. And I'm going to should myself, should have known ahead of time this was coming and set the expectations correctly of 72 hours outside of home turf is our limit right now. And I tried to push it to six days because my family's cool and they love Sarah Beth and Theo and I love them. And that was my fail. And my mistake was not advocating for the family for a known known.
[01:08:33] Speaker A: It's a good lesson.
[01:08:34] Speaker B: Brad, Rob, as we wrap this thing up, I would love to hear your dad wins and losses. And then we're recording. Well, let's do that and let's wrap it up. Episode six, your wins and losses, sir.
[01:08:46] Speaker A: Sounds good.
I'd say that my fail start there is very similar to yours.
I got Covid this week, which sucks. And I'm not going to say I saw it coming, but I was run down. It's been a hard couple of weeks, and the combo of stress at work, not sleeping well combined with Laura getting bigger, so she's not sleeping quite as well. And we usually actually sleep quite well together. My sleep has been off for about two weeks and I feel it. And that plus Christmas day, which was awesome here with the in laws, but kind of pushed it really put a big smile on. And I woke up the day after Christmas with COVID And I am sure being run down played a part in me being susceptible.
So the fail is definitely kind of catching COVID That's a huge bummer. And I had to miss. It's the first pregnancy thing I've missed. I had to miss our 36 week scan where we checked the baby and Laura got to go with her mom, which was actually a sneaky win because they really enjoyed it. It was really fun for Laura and her mom to do that together, but I had kind of taken pride in being there for almost literally every step of the pregnancy journey, and I missed this one and that bummed me out.
But the win in all of this is two sides to every coin. I'm psyched because it's good to get Covid out of the way. I'm feeling good, I'm feeling fine, and it should be done now. And the baby's due in about three weeks. And I will have this under my belt and out of the way. I don't have to worry about getting sick leading up to the pregnancy and not being able to go, which would have been way worse than missing some little scan.
So I'm actually really happy about that. And we learned on the scan that our little baby boy is going to have a full head of hair when he's born.
So that was a cute little learning for the week. And that's to both Laura and I were both born with full heads of hair. So our little boy is going to carry on the tradition, it seems, from the scan. So that's are, that's my win, is I get to learn that my boy is going to get some of this hair, at least for a bit.
All right, Brad, this was awesome. It's so good recording with you. I hope you had a great holidays for everyone else out there. If there's anything we can do to help, if there's any topics you want us to dive into, if you like the podcast, please subscribe, share with your friends, follow us and then send us notes. Tell us what we're doing well, tell us what we're doing bad. Email us at
[email protected] and stick around next time. We probably have one or two more episodes before my baby arrives, so stay tuned for the lead up and it could be none. We're on baby watch at this point. So, Brad, great as always.
Yeah.
[01:11:51] Speaker B: I'm so thankful we're doing this. And I love the fact that we push things out of the way every week to be able to record this, to help each other and help others and create a video diary for our children. And thank you for inviting me to do this. And I can't wait till we get to episode 56 instead of just six, so be super. Well, my friend, can't wait.
[01:12:14] Speaker A: You too. Thanks everybody.
Bye.
