[00:00:01] Speaker A: Welcome to the Daddy o podcast. We're your hosts. You got Rob Burnett here and Brad Bickerton. This is episode four. Brad, I feel like someday we're going to stop counting the episode numbers, or maybe we'll keep counting, but I feel like someday we're going to run out of episode numbers and we're just going to say, hey, welcome to the podcast.
[00:00:18] Speaker B: Or even better, just welcome to the pod, which is helpful.
[00:00:21] Speaker A: Welcome to the pod. Yes, because we're cool pod.
[00:00:25] Speaker B: Let's be proud of ourselves that our stated goal and mission is to get to six episodes and ask our friends and family if this is publishable or not. And so four matters on that list.
[00:00:37] Speaker A: And this is four and four weeks for those keeping track at home. So we're good. On today's episode, you're going to get updates from Brad and I about where we're at. And then we're going to dive into coaching, both on the CEO side and on the baby side. We got some insights into what it means to have a coach and how that can be helpful both in business and with a newborn. And then stay tuned till the end to hear our dad wins and dad fails of the week. But Brad, how are things going with you?
[00:01:08] Speaker B: Things are going great on the dad, the husband, just I'm having a great time. Theodore is amazing. He's also changing, and we're learning new things. And for my entire life, people have said, once you have a kid, things change and you learn things. And I went, and now I'm in it. On the life and business side, ups and downs. Last week we talked about I was sick and then what that's going to do. And then just the markets are hard right now. And so on the CEO side, I've got a lot of desperate clients on big discounts. And so financially, it's like, where are we going to go next? What's our hope and what's our strategy? So, mixed bag between dad and CEO side. Rob, what about yourself? Give me an update. We haven't talked in a week and hear how it's going.
[00:02:01] Speaker A: A lot of the same as you, actually.
It feels cliche to be a startup guy and just saying, oh yeah, the markets, they're bad. Markets are bad, but the markets are bad. And it means it's a bit of a rough time at work. Lots of ups and downs, lots of stress, which is od or feels somehow different when I'm also waiting for a baby to arrive. So trying very hard to kind of mitigate that stress and not let it creep out of the office, so to speak. But on the baby front, lots of fun stuff has happened in the last week. When we last talked, it was the day before thanksgiving. We made it through thanksgiving dinner. That's good. We're now almost at 33 weeks. We're at 32 and a bit. So according to the Internet, our baby is the size of a bunch of celery because the Internet likes to compare babies and fetuses in the womb to foods.
So it's celery week in our house and, yeah, some ups and downs. I'll fill you in. So, on the upside, we were home in the US with my family, and my sister and brother threw us a baby shower, which was lovely.
So we came back to the UK with a whole pile of books, basically a whole suitcase full of books and baby clothes, which was awesome.
Huge shout out to everyone who came. We were so appreciative of all the stuff. And I'm trying to think of a good anecdote other than it was a real moment where got to relive some of the books that I had as a kid and I hadn't really thought about in a long time. And that was really nice. And the way we did it is in lieu of cards, people brought books and then wrote little notes to the baby in the books.
So now we've got a shelf filled with baby books, and the baby's got kind of signatures from all of their aunts and uncles and cousins, and that's going to be really fun. So really looking forward to that. And I thought that was a nice thing to do.
[00:04:06] Speaker B: It's funny, too, right? We'll talk on the business side in a second. But it takes a community to help with this.
We're not helpless. We have agency and we have wisdom and we have family. But we need help. We need people to give us those books, to give us those reminders, those perspectives, or those used baby clothes. We need them. And on the business side, same. We need perspective and we need help, and we need capital, and we need good employees. And you're just never doing these things alone. It's this really od way that we go about the world, that as a husband, as a father, as a CEO or executive, you kind of feel like you're supposed to be an island. And yet every time anything works out right, it's because you lose that mentality. I'm not an island. I couldn't be an island. I need other people. I need to help other people. Wow.
How crazy is that? Oh, wait, that's the way it's always worked.
[00:05:08] Speaker A: Yeah. Just to build on that, because we're riffing now, but that's my biggest kind of learning over the years as a leader in a company and now as a CEO. I'm trying so hard to make the people around me better. I'm trying to delegate, I'm trying to pass things off versus trying to take it all myself. And I think that's really helped heading into fatherhood, because I am like, probably a little bit to my wife's annoyance, I'm like, let's get everyone to help us out. I will take anything. Hand me down clothes. You got it. You want to come make us food? I'm in.
I want the in laws and I want my mom around. I want people to come hold the baby. And my wife's like, can we have some time to ourself? Not that we haven't even gotten there yet. And I'm like, no. I want people in the door. I want people hanging out. I want people to hold the baby. I want people to let me nap.
So I'm definitely taking the collective approach here.
I can't claim to be any kind of expert on any of this, but it feels like in western society, we've gotten very individualistic. I've got friends who will say, yeah, for the first two weeks of the baby's life, I don't want anyone around. We're literally going to be kind of in a hole. And if that works for you, that's great. But I feel like that's maybe needlessly hard or certainly isolating. I would feel like that was very isolating for me.
[00:06:30] Speaker B: Yeah, there's a balance, right. And it depends. Also, there's the social and the biological pieces here. The social pieces. Is it hard to be alone, just you, spouse and first baby? No, there's plenty of stuff to do. You'll be fine. But on the biological side, you don't know where baby will be at, where mom will be at, or where you'll be at. You don't know.
Use the phrase, it's a known unknown. And so you're prepping for a known unknown, and you want that to follow your preference set. Who am I? What do I like? What's good, what's worked for me in the past? But you know that the minute after baby first cries, after baby's first born, you're going to have to reevaluate all these things.
[00:07:19] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:07:22] Speaker B: A lot of cultures, over time, give mother and baby a significant amount of time just to harbor together as each other. And something that I learned is biologically, they go from babies inside womb to babies outside womb. But there's a physicality, there's a social side of it where baby doesn't quite know that mom doesn't quite know that they need to still just be together.
And giving the space for that matters a lot.
Okay, I want to jump back one topic. I know we're riffing and we'll go through the agenda some more, but one thing that you were kind of referencing is a line that I love, which is delegate. Well, which is difficult.
And then delegate till it hurts. And that's about. It hurts you. Right. And I don't like to delegate this because I'm good at it or I like it. And so for you, if socially, you need to delegate, bring us food or take me for a walk as dad, delegate till it hurts. Because that's what society is about. That's what our culture, our friends, our family. This is what we're here for. We're here to help you, not in a time of need or desperation. Maybe that happens, but hopefully not. This is actually the time to delegate to the people who love you so you can receive their TLC, their tender love and care.
I ain't good at that.
I'm terrible at receiving.
And the switch in this is, it's not necessarily about me receiving this TLC. It's about the family unit, of which I'm a part receiving it.
So you're hearing me. You're nodding your head.
You'll get it a lot more.
[00:09:14] Speaker A: I'm sure it's going to hit me like a ton of bricks. And I think I love that term, delegate till it hurts. Because I think that it circles back to, actually, the conversation I think we had in the last episode around parental leave. We talked about, if you don't pressure test your team, you'll never figure out. Now, friends and family, you're not trying to pressure test them, but it is good to delegate and see what you can get back and see if you can get yourself back on your feet. But listen, this is all speculative on my end. We'll see if I eat my words in seven or eight weeks when the baby comes, which I'm sure I will.
[00:09:46] Speaker B: Point of this is to record it.
[00:09:48] Speaker A: Yes. Get it on record.
[00:09:51] Speaker B: How are you guys doing? How's pregnancy going?
How's the traveling over the pond? What's going on? Just feed us, fill us. Tell us what you're up to, Rob.
[00:10:01] Speaker A: Yeah. So the travel has been pretty good. Pretty easy, actually. So knock on wood. That was actually a really smooth thing. So for anyone who doesn't know, we flew back from the US to the UK, and we're going to be here for the duration through the birth.
On the pregnancy side, we're into the third trimester, like I said, we're at 32, almost 33 weeks. And Laura, she's sad. I can say all this, but she's always felt big. Like, as soon as the bump started growing, she's like, I don't know how it can get any. But now, now it's really like, okay, this is becoming a physical problem. It really is heavy. She's bumping into doorways and things like that.
So she's still doing great, still being very active, still keeping up, and we need to do an episode on activity and fitness during pregnancy in particular.
[00:10:51] Speaker B: Absolutely.
[00:10:51] Speaker A: Maybe next one.
But she's overall really good. But the one thing I will share, because we're in the business of sharing here and getting prep people prepped. So she started to not feel very good about a week ago, feeling a little sick, and she felt like the baby was sitting right on her bladder. And the baby's been growing, going through a little bit of growth spurt. So we weren't sure. Was it just a physical problem or was there something else wrong?
And to her credit, Laura's usually one to kind of tough things out, but we decided to hop right on it because it was a couple of days before thanksgiving, went to an urgent care, and it turns out she had a UTI, which apparently are very common during pregnancy. So if any dads are out there and wondering if it's a problem, it happens all the time. We got her on some antibiotics right away, and unfortunately, the first round actually didn't work very well, so we had to get on some stronger ones later, which, I know, stressed out Laura, and it's never fun to be taking medication when you're pregnant, but all of it's. The doctors all said it's all safe for pregnancy, and we got her right on top of it. And the result is she wasn't feeling that bad. Cleared it right up. And the lesson there was good to take some aggressive action early.
[00:12:09] Speaker B: Me?
[00:12:09] Speaker A: Yeah, go ahead.
[00:12:10] Speaker B: Set the stage for people. So you've flown to the United States, you're having thanksgiving with family, 32 week, third trimester pregnant UTI, and your company is going through layoffs in a bunch of different degrees. How are you feeling? How are you keeping all that in your head? Right. It's not two sides of the brain that analytically I'm a business leader and socially and emotionally, I'm a father and a husband. You're both at once. And that's what this storyline is about.
I guess I'm going to say the moment that you were driving or doing the paperwork to urgent care, what is your storyline behind your eyeballs? How are you feeling? What are you thinking?
[00:12:58] Speaker A: That's a great question, Brad. So I will say it has been very much a roller coaster. I think one thing that I think I've gotten pretty good at over the years, probably for self preservation purposes, is I'm pretty good these days at leaving work at the door.
I'm pretty good at turning off even when there's stressful stuff.
If it's Thanksgiving or a holiday or a weekend where I get it off, I'm actually pretty good at shutting that down. So it can feel a little schizophrenic where 1 second I'm super stressed out and pulling my hair out and then kind of like the next minute I'm like, hey, I'm here at home and it's like Thanksgiving dinner or we're hanging with family and I'm kind of good.
I think that I can attribute that to kind of years of I've never been a kind of proper practitioner of mindfulness or meditation or yoga, but I've always dabbled in it.
I started a little bit this is way off topic, but I started in kind of some of that stuff way back when I was in college and had a panic attack and an anxiety attack and had to learn how to tackle that.
And I've been lucky not to deal with too many mental health issues since then. But that's one thing. That kind of anxiety attack has kind of popped up here and there and the resulting ability to handle those, I think has actually really helped me in my business career because I'm able to really use those same strategies around the stress of work. And so the last couple of weeks or the last week, week and a half has been times where I'm pacing back and forth and really stressed out, but I somehow seem to be able to kind of leave it at the door and sleep a little bit worse.
That's not perfect, but I've been able to do pretty well. So to answer your question, when we were driving to the urgent care, I very much took on the Persona of my job is to project all the cool and calm in the world. This isn't a big deal.
We're all good, it's going to be fine. We'll just pop some antibiotics, they're going to take good care of you. This is great. Let's do it early and often. Let's just get after it.
I was a little worried for sure. It definitely caused anxiety, but I tried to kind of embody what I was projecting, which was, hey, this is going to be easy. Urgent care is not bad, it's not full.
I know what I'm doing. I'm just going to take control here because she's nervous and I can kind of project calm and be the rock. And I think that worked out pretty well.
[00:15:27] Speaker B: So you're projecting Calm. You're being the rock. Is that the 80 20? How much of that is honest versus useful? You're freaking out on the inside, but it's more useful for you to look cool common collected versus no, I actually was cool common collected. And I know it's going to be a combination of them. Sure.
[00:15:52] Speaker A: If I can. I think I'd call it 80%, actually. Cool common collected, 20%. Freaking out again, just to kind of give you insights into my background. I think that comes from, like, I actually think it comes back from. I'm going to go way back to my past. There was a time in my life where I was a cyclist and a bike racer, and I remember being in college and every once in a while a teammate, and I was the captain of my team and I was running the show and it was lord of the flies, right? It's kids leading kids. I was learning as I was going. I was a 20 year old leading 18 year olds, and I thought I was an adult, but I wasn't. But every once in a while, one of us would crash. And if anyone knows anything about road cycling, when you crash in a race, you can end up with broken bones, you can end up with a lot of road rash, some deep cuts, some real pain.
And I've somehow learned early on there that freaking out didn't help. And if I just came over and was like, hey, I got you, you're good. It really projected calm onto at that time, my teammates and I think that lesson has kind of carried me through over the years in all kinds of different contexts. And so these days I find that, yeah, there's the underlying anxiety, there's the underlying freak out.
You can't help but let it in, like, oh, God, what if she takes antibiotics and it hurts the baby? And years from now they've got allergies because their gut flora didn't flourish in utero because she took antibiotics. It's so easy to let spiral and somehow I won't claim to be any kind of magician, but somehow I've managed to kind of take that stuff and put it in a box and put it over there and not just kind of project calm, but actually kind of be calm and level headed in a lot of these situations.
But it certainly helps me when I know that I have to be. It makes that box, the lock on that box a little tighter around those anxieties when it's like, hey, listen, I'm not going to let that out because Laura needs me right now or someone else needs me, right? So got to keep that thing locked in and go forward with calm.
[00:18:00] Speaker B: There's a thing, and I think it fits in three different zones here, athletics, leadership and fatherhood, where my brother would talk about this as performance on demand.
When it's time for the thing to happen, you get the thing done. And I look at that as a lot of times in fatherhood or the biological process of pregnancy than birth, know, postpartum and where we are now into the toddlerhood.
How do I show up as both? This is Brad, this is who I am. Like I'm freaking out, I'm having a bad day, I'm stressing out. I'm the one who needs to be talked down. I'm allowed to have that space, but generally speaking, because I fit. And the point of this podcast is dad plus business leader, CEO is a lot of times I need to let my stuff come out later.
I need to have performance on demand now.
And I might just need to just down regulate or down queue what I'm doing and be more calm, cool and collected, be more pragmatic, get it done, or emotionally available to say, hey, I'm here as a supporting function. And if later I need to cogitate on that, if later I need to talk to my best friend about what I went through, that's okay. Never not okay, right? Don't just let the thing die and I shove my emotions down into a pit and they shall never come back up because that hydro will.
I love, I love the way you described it, Rob. And it's interesting getting this anecdote from you about driving to urgent care while in a semi foreign country. Because you guys live in the UK, you do not live in Chicago, you're doing all those things that you're saying, well, practically my best and highest use is get done these tasks. And when I do those tasks, I actually feel better about myself that I helped my family, you helped your family do that and didn't get so ingrained within the storyline of what are these problems? How do they manifest the gut floor and fauna and the antibiotics, you knew that that was existent. And there's a time and a place where you could just live in that. But you said, yeah, but my job is to drive.
My job is to fill out forms. Yeah, that's beautiful, man. I appreciate it.
[00:20:32] Speaker A: Yeah. And at some point, maybe we have to get.
This is an armchair expert podcast, for sure. And at some point, we need to get. I want to get an expert in here on that because I definitely see it every day in my startup life, where you see the people who encounter a problem and they freak out, and it might be freaking out, visibly, like yelling and pulling their hair out, and it might be. You see it a lot in employees, like the kind of quiet freak out or the quiet, oh, this is a problem. I'm going to wait for someone else to solve it, or I'm going to take the easy road, which is like kind of faux work, but it's not actually solving the problem.
And then you see the employees or the people who really tackle the hard thing, and maybe they fail, but they tackle it. And I feel like this kind of ability to stay cool and calm and see the problems and then just execute against them, whether you succeed or fail, it's that game time mentality. It's that performance on demand. And I do think that some of it's inborn, but I think a lot of it's a muscle. And for any entrepreneurs out there, ceos, anyone in a position of power, you should remember that it's a muscle that you have to exercise and flex, and you have to push through hard things. And you should practice staying calm in every situation and working with a clear head, because your body will respond to you and you'll be able to stay calmer and collected. And so I'm hoping to use those skills in fatherhood. When my baby's crying, I'm hoping I can come to the baby with a calm, happy demeanor, even when something's screaming in my face. And hopefully that calm can project onto the baby. We'll see what happens, but that's kind of my goal.
[00:22:17] Speaker B: I think this is a big differential, too, between fathers and mothers.
We'll kind of move into our section two in this one, which is that coaches are really good at helping the understanding between the mother and the father. And I know there's lots of different versions out there, but in my case, mother and father, that when Theodore is screaming and crying because he just doesn't have the circadian rhythm, hormonal balance. To fall asleep when I am holding him in that, I don't mind that he's screaming and crying in my arms.
I feel like I'm holding him in his difficulty. And then Sarah Beth feels like she wants to take this pain away from him.
And it's just interesting that differential, and that's normal and acceptable and good. Same thing on the CEO side. We can have clients, we can have employees. We can have anything where they're effectively on a temper tantrum.
And I've had this before. A client of mine recently is going through a frivolous lawsuit, and it is beating her up because it's all about this person who's frivolously suing her, is also posting like crazy on social media. Why? She's awful, terrible, evil, wrong, and just cherry picking little ideas and things, and that becomes part of her story is, am I evil, am I wrong, or how do I combat, how do I fight this? And my coaching to her is, take a step back.
This person's having a temper tantrum. Just hold it. Just be with her in it. Because this frivolous lawsuit will logically will resolve itself.
We can schedule out the next four months of how this thing will work. Your job is not to engage in the freak out, in the temper tantrum. Your job is to just take a step back, do your best, observe, decide, and lead.
Easy to say, hard to live.
Okay.
[00:24:33] Speaker A: All right, thanks, everybody. Welcome back into the second half of the podcast. So, Brad, we want to get into coaching. And I think the conversation before the break really kind of teed this up. So you're a full time executive coach, and it sounds to me like, from what I've heard, you've brought some coaches into your life in the parenthood journey. So why don't you kick us off and talk to us about that?
[00:25:01] Speaker B: Thank you so much.
[00:25:02] Speaker A: So, there's two coaches that we've hired.
[00:25:05] Speaker B: One's a lactation consultant, and the other is a sleep coach. But they're really not actually people. They're just angels. We can't see their wings. And these are people who really meaningfully care about what they do. And their business acumen is suspect, but their heart, joy, and value is just crystal clear. And we talked about this a little bit last week of whom do you hire and how much do you hire and how much help? And I said, as much as you can afford, because the more help you get, the more you can do what you're supposed to do. Be there. And we said earlier, delegate till it hurts.
And then the funny thing for me is I'm a professional coach. I've done it for six years. I've helped businesses understand it. And so this is what I've learned about coaching generally. Well, first off, there's two flavors, but the concept is still the same. A coach's job is not to take something that's not working well and make it functional. That's a therapist, that's a consultant and an advisor.
We've driven this thing off the ditch. It's in the ditch. What do we do?
What a coach's job is, make it less likely to go in the ditch and make us go further and faster. And that's something that I love to do in my professional work. But now I'm in this position of something new for me, where I'm hiring a similar mentality.
And the lactation consultant, her number one job for us is minimizing fear mongering from the Internet, just giving us the basic truths of the facts. This is how this thing works. That's how that thing works. Oh, that's great, because we can do all the research we want in two fields. Talk to friends who have kids or grandmas or grandpas who remember having kids. Internet research. Neither of these are particularly useful because they don't have a lot of at bats. They haven't seen 50, 60, 70 kids. So they're not going to understand the particular style of your kid when he shows up, when she shows up. Also, the context of you as a family today. Here, 2023 heterosexual white couple in Boulder in their how much is that other person's stuff relevant to that context? And then the Internet. This is the particularly pernicious part about the Internet. The good information is the hardest to find because it's the least sexy or has the least reason to be liked, commented on, promoted. Okay, so we have these two problem sets. Problem set a, anecdotes from friends and family not going to be contextually relevant. Problem set b, information on the Internet. The most likely to find is the worst. How do you solve that problem? Oh, go to somebody who actually gets paid for a living in their wisdom, in their experience, and also in their authority to come and give you the basic truths and facts. And this is invaluable. If I ever give a gift ever in my lifetime to a first time father, mother, couple, whatever, it will be some kind of coach, probably Amanda, who's a lactation consultant, because that works. The second coach that we have is a sleep coach.
And there's something that we just didn't know going in that based on a baby's kind of their age. But development is a better context than age. It's just a softer measurement tool, and that's hard. We like to think of age as a fixed quantity, but it's actually developmental. But based on the baby's development, there's a certain amount of hours a week at night, certain amount of hours per day they need to sleep. And this falls within a pay me now or pay me later concept. If a baby sleeps really well, really great, really long, overnight, they're going to have small, short sleep windows during the day.
And if a baby sleeps a lot during the day, they're going to be tough at night.
Why am I bringing this up? Other than throwing some wisdom bombs at it's, we would have never found that truth or understood it if, honest to God, Sarah Beth, if she hadn't gone to our network and said, who can explain this to us in a reasonable way in context for our family?
That's the value of a coach, reasonable understanding of the truth in context to where you're at. And as I've been understanding this now, purchasing coaching for something I'm not good at, I go, oh, this is why people hire me.
[00:29:59] Speaker A: Is it that the coaches can really see the patterns that you can't see with a data set of one? Like, they see 70, 8100 kids, and they can see the patterns where the only data set you have is the one child?
[00:30:12] Speaker B: Correct.
I like to liken it to this. Nobody knows what the back of their head looks like. Theoretically, in your mind's eye, even like, oh, I could use a mirror. You never do. And even if you did, you wouldn't know it too well. You cannot have perspective on self, not if you were taller or handsomer or did this better course or did this thing, or communicate better with your spouse. Perspective on self is just close of impossible. And even if you could do it, it wouldn't actually be worth it because it'd be smarter, faster, and cheaper to hire somebody else who says, hey, rob, I've noticed the back of your head looks a little like.
And the pernicious part is, especially anybody listening to this this far is smart enough to know two things.
They have cognitive bias, and they can't detect it, and that's brutal, right? My cognitive bias says I'm probably doing the right thing most of the time, and then the pernicious part is, but I can't detect it because my blind spots reinforce themselves.
So a blind spot, one of my favorites is somebody who's done something once it was successful, therefore follow it. And the business side.
I meet a new founder, CEO, venture capitalist, board member, whatever, and they start talking to me about implementing traction eos and failing fast. And big rocks, little rocks, chunking them up. And then I take a look and say, well, what are you guys doing? Oh, we're manufacturing $500,000 sensor units.
I know that you've read this book, and I know you've listened to some podcasts, and I know that two of your team have been in software tech before, but the context of fail fast move forward, it just doesn't work in a large hardware play or the other worst part is this also could have been successful in a different time and context in your life, and it is not appropriately context to fatherhood.
Right. And we just have this bias of this thing worked before, therefore, I'm going to double down on it now instead of what works for the now.
Okay, so that's a long, rambling rant.
[00:32:34] Speaker A: Yeah. Well, I tell you what, in my experience here is much more in startups than currently in fatherhood. But God, the Internet is filled with things for parents. But I know a visceral experience I've had on multiple occasions throughout my kind of time in leadership at a startup is having especially employees come to me and go like, we got to do this thing differently. I'm listening to this guy, or I saw it on Instagram, or I listened to this podcast, or this guy gave a talk at the conference, and we got to do it this way, right? We got to do scrum, or we've got to spend more on advertising, or we've got to get an influence, whatever the thing is, whatever the flavor of the month is and the number of times I've just had to be like, you've got to put that stuff down. You should always be learning as a human being. You should always be learning. I do book clubs with my employees. I want them learning, but I want them learning in a slower, deeper way.
And what I found is that anytime someone comes to me with kind of a quick fix or know, Gary Vee says this, not to call out Gary Vee or Mark Cuban or these guys are saying, you got to do it like this.
Like you said, it totally lacks the context of where we are at this moment with this company, with this group of people in this market. And I feel like parents make a lot of the same mistakes as, oh, I saw a fit looking mom and dad on Instagram who only feed their kids crepes on Tuesdays and look at how healthy and happy their kid looks. That must be what I'll do. I'm going to feed my kid only grapes on Tuesdays. And it comes so thick and fast. So all that's to say, brad, I want to get back to your perspective, which is talk to me about how that Internet search in particular, how does that feel to you around childhood? And then do you experience the same thing I do with your clients in the startup space or in the business space?
[00:34:33] Speaker B: So we talked about this think episode one.
I switched my mentality from what can the Internet or people we know tell us to? Let's use Sarah Beth's gut instinct as the start.
And the reason for that is that I do not have a good blind spot, discernment, bullshit meter, what the Internet says, and a Google search is going to give me the highest, most rated thing. And its value is suspect. It can't trust the value of what we do and we research.
So that's a part of it. The second part that I just really try and hold on to, and it's difficult because it's a soft thing. And the paradox are the soft things or the hard things is people have been doing this for a while. I'm probably going to be okay.
And so my decision making doesn't need to be as robust or aggressive.
I can just make decisions and do my best and see what happens. Because there's this beautiful interaction in play and I don't want to take this too far. The flash thought I have right now is Theodore is an entity who has needs and desires and joys, and I'm playing with him as those grow.
It's kind of like the market, going out to the market and asking the questions, do you want what I have? Do you need it? Is it valuable to you? Do we want to do more together?
And this is the thing is that a baby is not a fixed set of inputs, outputs. It's a human and it's beautiful and it's joyous. And it's by far the most thing is interactive. I am not a producer and provider of food for this baby. Food, shelter, Maslow's lower hierarchy. I'm an interactive player with his life and his development and his joy. And we said this a week or so ago, I didn't know what it was to have the smile from your son until I did. And it was great. And then I found out what hugs are, and hugs are better. And that's interactive. He's not hugging a straw piece of man. He's hugging me and I'm receiving that. So anyway, I answered a question, maybe even yours.
[00:37:12] Speaker A: Hey, I think it was good, but I'm going to dive in because I've got some more specific questions.
Talk to me about. So you've hired two coaches to help you with the fatherhood journey and you told us what they are. It's sleep consultant and an a lactation consultant. Can you talk to me about the day, week, hours before you hired the first one? What was it like? What was life like? What was the decision making process? Was it easy? Was it hard? Were you guys tearing your hair out? What did that look like?
[00:37:42] Speaker B: Yeah, I love that.
So the lactation consultant came through a recommendation from a friend. So the network worked there.
Sarah Beth and I had an agreement. We still have this agreement, which is we're kind of willing to try anybody once because we're going to know on the coaching side within moments. And they know too, within moments whether there's a fit. This is fixing the problem, this is helping. It doesn't even have to be a problem with a lactation consultant because before we left the hospital, they actually bring in a lactation consultant then. But at hospital, baby and mom are still figuring that story out. Colostrum is the name of the first milk that comes out and she was a chatty cathy, but didn't understand us, our context or anything.
We really hired the lactation consultant not because we had a problem, but because it was an opportunity for gain or growth. And you were saying this a second ago, you always want to be learning, but there's something so different about a person who is choosing to become an expert in this field, in this case, lactation consultant, choosing to make their living off of being an expert in that field and showing up in your life to apply that wisdom. That is totally different than Instagram or a book. They're just absolutely different formats.
Okay, so that was leading up. That's how we found her. I don't actually remember Sarah Beth did this, how we found the sleep consultant. But again, we didn't hire this person because we had a specific problem. We hired this person for education and learning and she is way, way better at the business side of it and she's also good at the information exchange and the being with us in context side. So her best practices, and I love this, is she does this all through Zoom. She records it and gives it back to us behind her paywall. Fantastic. I have no problems with any of that because we get to listen to it again. And if we want to. We can send this to our friends to say this is what it's like working. By the way, our sleep consultant's first name is Patience.
Her first name is Patience.
[00:39:55] Speaker A: That is so perfect.
[00:39:57] Speaker B: It is beyond perfect. It might be a little too perfect, like maybe she dubbed herself this name has three children, but she spends all day, every day, meeting lots of families, contextually helping them out. And of course, not just finding what works in her practitionership. She goes out to the educational field, to the phds who are researching this and finding the new things that are actually true. And I said this before, baby sleep. I didn't know this, and I never would have found this on Google. Is baby needs. Pick your number in context. Our baby, probably 14 hours a day of sleep. Great. And it's pay me now or pay me later. If that's true. She went to the research and found that's true, then here's how to apply it.
I can't imagine how many lifetimes I would have to live to be able to pull that out myself and do it well.
It's beyond understanding how I could have got there and also lived my life. Right. I need to exercise. I need to eat. I need to sleep. I need to monitor my stress. I need to do dad CEO podcast.
I never would have got there on my own.
[00:41:09] Speaker A: This is outsourcing knowledge, right? It's the same concept as a housekeeper or a gardener or a chef. Let other people do that stuff. And in this case, it doubly compounds because it lets you do something better and makes your child happier, which is presumably less stressful on you and all those things. So talk to me, Brad, about it. Sounds like I heard one or two things, right. That your child needs a certain amount of sleep and it's pay for it now, pay for it later. What are a couple of other concrete things you've learned from these coaches that you apply that our listeners should know about?
[00:41:45] Speaker B: Yeah. So I'm going to go back to fear sells better than wisdom. So here's a piece that I'm almost nervous to say, which is funny because I now know it.
Almost everyone I've talked to about this, and the lactation consultant taught us this. Babies sleep in bed with parents for a long time.
That's totally fine, and that's not harboring or injuring them.
And the chances of you smothering them are negligible.
And I don't even want to say that.
[00:42:20] Speaker A: Right.
[00:42:20] Speaker B: Because you and I both have law degrees. We're like, well, don't talk about product liability. Because you're going to be on the hook for it.
[00:42:26] Speaker A: Everyone should consult their physician before doing anything with their baby.
We're armchair experts. We don't know what we're talking about. Do it at your own risk.
[00:42:36] Speaker B: We're not even experts. We're just armchairs.
[00:42:38] Speaker A: Yeah, we're just talking heads at this point.
[00:42:41] Speaker B: But that's the funny thing, is this particular situation might be more risky or a worse result for your child to be in a bassinet in another room. But we would never have a problem with that because the Bassinet company holds that liability, and that's okay. And so that was the first thing. Lactation consultant, she just really down regulated our understanding and our fear mongering of can and should. Baby sleep in bed? Yeah, for us, absolutely. Helps Sarah Beth sleep, helps baby feel comfortable, feel warm, have access to nutrition. All the. That was. That was a complete revelation. We almost feel like we've had to fight the world to hold on to this because the second side of that is. And then baby will just get used to sleeping in bed with you and will never become independent and grow and change and.
[00:43:36] Speaker A: Got. I've got one thing on that, Brad, and this is from advice I've heard from my mother back in the day. She was worried about my use of a pacifier when I was a kid, and her pediatrician told her something. She's like, I have never seen a man walk down the aisle with a pacifier. It's like, they're going to get over it. They're going to grow up. It's going to be okay. If you're worried about it now, it's going to be fine.
[00:44:06] Speaker B: That's the exact lesson that we needed to dispel and the coaches helped kind of move that. Exactly what you just said. Nobody thinks that if you carry your kid, you hold your kid too much from when they're one to three, that they'll never learn to walk and they'll never join the cross country team. Nobody thinks that. But we think that sleeping in bed or doing just breastfeeding or whatever it is, that somehow we are ingraining within them a weaker sense of self or society or ability.
Yeah, but I was still falling prey to those concepts that, hey, the right and righteous thing is get baby out of bed, into bassinet. Bassinet out of room. I don't mind him being there.
It is not difficult for me physically or in relations with my wife. It is not. So what was the driving action towards? I really want him to be able to sleep in the bassinet. I really want that bassinet to be in the nursery context.
There was no legitimacy in that. So the same thing that both coaches did in their context where they brought us the right answer and they gave us permission to dispel the known, proven wrong answer, that's so easy to buy into. That's what the coaches did.
[00:45:31] Speaker A: That's awesome. And it's know, just to circle it back to, you know, when you're a CEO, when you're startup CEO or any CEO, I keep bringing it back to startups because that's my world. But Brad, you work across the spectrum of size of companies or you're a leader in any way, whether it's in the c suite, whether you run a team. It is so easy to get caught up in the dogma and the moment and just narrowed in and blinders on what you need to do or whatever problems in front of you. And I think that's why Brad, obviously this is your job, but having a third party who's a little bit neutral and an expert come in and let you test your assumptions and show you kind of let you pick your head up and see the forest through the trees can be so, so valuable. Brad, I wondering if we need. I think we found our first two interview subjects for this podcast. I think we need to get both your coaches on the pod to ask them some questions directly.
[00:46:33] Speaker B: I'd love to do that. It would be super valid. And the funny thing is, what is cheap versus what is expensive?
They are cheap. They're an hour, I don't know, 100 and $5200, something like that.
We're having a baby and we're going to max our out of pocket and mom's not going to be working for a while and my business is going through its rocky road and really, can we really afford is that is the dumb, dumb gremlin in your mind?
Can you afford not to do this? Because the only way you afford not.
[00:47:08] Speaker A: To do.
[00:47:10] Speaker B: I mean, Amanda, lactation consultant, she saved Sarah Beth and I at least five or six mental hours in both of our own heads of angst and anger or even just communication bias. Like I thought x and she thought Tuesday, right?
And how is that not worth 100 and 5182 hundred dollars now? No, we're not going to hire a lactation consultant for a coach or whatever, 2 hours a day, ten days week, seven days a week. No, but stop stepping over dollars to pick up pennies because your time and your brain space is valuable. I don't care. My friend Kristen, she signed her series a paperwork literally in the hospital having her third kid. Okay, I got it. Sometimes we're going to have business and life and family stuff coming together. But generally speaking, let's just be smart about how we spend our time and our energy and coaches are just a big roi.
[00:48:12] Speaker A: So if you're a CEO or a startup founder or somewhere in the C suite or a director and you're looking to take your career to the next level, I'm going to plug Brad. He is a CEO coach extraordinaire. So you guys should reach out to delta awesome and chat with him. But anyway, that's not what this is about.
Brad, I think this.
[00:48:32] Speaker B: I get to flatter you, too. If you're a leader, a founder, a CEO, or a smart person, and you need to know better people reach out to rob because he is better people. I've known him for almost a decade and I've just loved watching you mature and grow because I think you and I have this shared harmony. You believe that entrepreneurship and leadership, they change the world for the better. And so you may not be a coach at delta awesome yet, but you're also good people to reach out to and you know more about capital raising than I do. And I know a lot.
[00:49:09] Speaker A: Appreciate that. Brad. Yeah. If anyone wants to connect with me, come find me. I'm on LinkedIn. I'm on the socials. Email us at
[email protected] but I think this is a good time to wrap up. Brad, unless you've got any final thoughts about our coaches, let's wrap it up here. We'll take a quick break and we'll come back for dad wins and dad fails for the week.
All right. Welcome back. Thanks for sticking around.
Time for some dad wins and some dad fails. Brad, I'm going to put it on you first this week. Talk to me. What's your win for the week? And what's your fail for the week?
[00:49:46] Speaker B: Yeah, so they're both today and they're related, which is funny. So sleep consultant told us kind of this, pay me now, pay me later. And Sarah Beth and I were looking at it and we said the best practice we could have going forward is when I, Brad, get up in the morning to walk the dog. If I force theo to wake up at that time. So we're setting a time in the morning when he's used to waking up and he might already be awake rare or we might be waking him up early normal.
And we agreed to this last night. It was smart. We wrote it down, we thought about it, and literally, this morning was the first time in like a year that I slept in naturally. Like, I wake up on my own anyway. And waking up for me between 545 and 615 is like super duper natural. 636 45 is this time zone. I woke up this morning, went, what happened? It's seven. And so the plan we put in place yesterday, I shot right in the head, shot myself in the foot. Done. Dad, fail, brad, fail. Didn't do it right.
The win is my best friend from grad school happened to be in town, and his son, his name is Louie, his son's name is Louie. And Theodore's middle name is Bradley, same as mine. So we got to have Louis, Louis, Brad and Brad, we got to have breakfast together, the wives got to meet, and we just got to feel this society of wow. When we were in grad school, we used to drink beer and run the res and talk about who we would be as men, as fathers, as life, as economics.
And he made partner in his law firm. I'm doing okay. You and I are doing this. Rob and I just got to just have this wonderful moment where as a father, I got to hold theo, the Brad, I got to be with Louie, holding Louie. We got that photo. I tell you, that is a dad win that you couldn't buy. You can only do.
[00:51:54] Speaker A: It. Sounds awesome. And I tell you what, I'm like hearing your dad wins and fail, even the dad fails. And I'm so excited.
I feel like it was important for me to start this podcast before I actually became a dad. But man, it's going to come so quick. But I'm like counting down the days. I really want to get there.
[00:52:16] Speaker B: Your wins and fails though, you're coming into it, you're coming onto it. And let's get used to putting those words out there. You're not perfect and wrong sometimes.
[00:52:28] Speaker A: Oh, yeah. Oh, God. So I'm trying to think of probably a lot of little fails. A lot of little things. The wins this week were know, on the more serious side, kind of like taking care of Laura and helping her get through her uti and getting that done. That felt like was really.
Then, you know, on the sleep side, we somehow nailed the knock on wood, the jet lag. Coming back to the UK, we've slept through the night. It's been really good for Laura. We haven't had any disruptions. We're staying fit.
And I feel like that could have been a disaster and we just kind of sailed right through it. So that's the super win.
On the fail side, I was debating about whether to talk about this, but I'm going to, even though it's not particularly funny or fun and not kind of in the spirit of. I think this is supposed to be a little bit self deprecating, but I'll say it anyway. My grandmother is 96 years old and she is rocking. She is coming on strong and she is hanging on tight for March when we'll be back in Ohio next, and she wants to meet her first great grandchild.
But unfortunately, well, fortunately, unfortunately. So she broke her hip last week, which for a 96 year old is incredibly dangerous. But she's up and walking again. She got surgery. She's an incredibly fit woman. She's still as sharp as ever. It's totally inspiring. And in the crush of life, I wanted to bring her some pictures of the baby set up here and if she was the one who was kind enough to buy us our stroller, kind of quote unquote for the baby shower, even though she bought it over here for us and things like that. And this is more of a grandson fail than a dad fail. I just didn't bring enough stuff. And she was happy to see all of it. She didn't say a single word about it. But as I was visiting her going, oh, man, I should have brought like ten times as much stuff to show her and pictures and all this stuff. And in all the craziness, I just didn't quite do it. So that's something I'm regretful of. That's a word. And definitely need to remember to step up on the grandson front because someday.
[00:54:41] Speaker B: I'll be in that position.
[00:54:42] Speaker A: Hopefully.
[00:54:44] Speaker B: I'm just going to give you the reflection you need to learn to forgive yourself for these fails, not try to stop failing or be better at not.
[00:54:50] Speaker A: That's true.
[00:54:51] Speaker B: I appreciate that the failure rate as kid comes and baby comes and nesting, but also just like this coach, forgiving yourself for the fails is way more important, post baby than what we live in, in our daily lives, which is let's not fail, minimize them, or let's do them less or fix them.
Part of the reason I love ending the pod with this is just owning.
[00:55:19] Speaker A: It done and putting it out there in the world because the world can hear it and we're, none of us are perfect. No such thing as a perfect dad.
[00:55:27] Speaker B: Not even close. Well, in my best.
[00:55:30] Speaker A: All right, Blade. Well, this has been a pleasure.
Anything else?
[00:55:34] Speaker B: No, I was just going to ask you to sign off.
[00:55:38] Speaker A: Yeah. Well, thanks, everyone. Who's made it this far. We so deeply appreciate you for listening. Hopefully this is helpful. If this is helpful and you're learning, share this with other dads. Share this with your friends. Post it if you can. Please, like us, subscribe, write a review, whatever it is you do to podcasts these days, I don't even know, but it really helps us out. It's really valuable. And then if you have a dad winner of dad fail, if you have a subject you want us to talk about, if you have a question you want answered and we can help you find an expert, email us at
[email protected] um, and we will read them all, and we'll use, we'll incorporate as much as we can into our future episodes.
But thanks, everyone, for listening and have a good day. Bye, everybody.
