This week on the podcast, Rachel interviews Avram, asking him about how things have changed since they’ve had Lincoln. Avram has four main thoughts about what is different now, the summary of which, is that business isn’t a race anymore now that he has the perspective of becoming a dad.

Show Notes

1:20 Avram dives into how business doesn’t feel like a race anymore after Lincoln was born

3:20 The focus that having less time brings Avram is a revelation

6:22 How does comparison come into play with your business after becoming a parent

9:40 An analogy to running on the treadmill shows how some things get easier after having kids

12:56 Rachel asks Avram about how fitness has played a role in the transition of becoming a dad

Episode Transcription

Below you will find a transcript of this entire podcast episode. Enjoy!

Avram Gonzales: Welcome back to the episode of the Babies and Business Podcast. I’m your host, Avram Gonzales. I’m joined by

Rachel Gonzales: Rachel Gonzales, co-host.

Avram Gonzales: Hey, yo, and in today’s episode, we’re gonna be talking about Business Isn’t a Race When You Have Perspective. Rachel’s gonna ask me a couple different questions. Things have changed a lot in each of our lives since the birth of our son. Encountered some lessons that we probably wouldn’t have had the perspective we wouldn’t have had without him. Things that I know that might be a contribution to you listening right now. Let’s get into it.

Rachel Gonzales: Great. Okay. So like you said, we’re gonna talk about how perspective can really change things from feeling like a race in our business. To being totally different. So tell me about a typical day before Lincoln was born in the business and then how is different than now.

Avram Gonzales: Yeah, that’s been a big change. As having a child has a lot of unpredictability when it comes to managing your day-to-day schedule. Suddenly you have all these things that you didn’t have to manage before popping up. Life was simpler before Lincoln was born. And I found that I would spend entire days that upon the conclusion of the day, I would ask myself, “what did I actually accomplish?” It was difficult to pinpoint anything that felt significant as a contribution at the end of the day, and I felt like I spent a lot of time drifting. I wasn’t very focused. There also wasn’t the pressure of time to get things done. So things that today take me 20-25 minutes, thinking about that task that I did this morning before we started the day, those things would take me hours before. Why? Because I would get up and I would take breaks.

I’d be farting around on my phone. All kinds of stuff.

Rachel Gonzales: And if you hear this little snurching in the background, this is Zuna. She’s sitting on my lap visiting here with us. But I do wanna bring some perspective to our life as an entrepreneur and having kids.

We have chosen to not put Lincoln into daycare. We have him with us.

Avram Gonzales: That’s right.

Rachel Gonzales: We have your parents watch him oftentimes on Tuesday and Friday. But that’s not always the case. Things come up. So we do have him at home most of the time. So the times that we find to work are when he’s napping.

Avram Gonzales: It’s true. It’s true. And so now I would say I’m way more focused.

Rachel Gonzales: Yeah, absolutely.

Avram Gonzales: Way more focused. And I also feel quite fulfilled as a result of the focus. Because some days I might get two hours to work and that’s it. But what I have extracted from those two hours I know is enough. That’s something else I also struggled with through this transition—that I was not putting in the hours, feeling like whether that was enough or not. Maybe that’s a guy thing. I’m not sure what it is, but I feel a lot more fulfilled through the focus now because even like recording this podcast today, this is like the fourth or fifth one we recorded today. Yeah. And I just feel incredibly accomplished as a result of being so hyper-focused and in charge of the schedule that we have.

So before I was just wandering around and now because of Lincoln, I have these time constraints that are very real, but they’ve just made me better.

Rachel Gonzales: Yeah. Like you said before a day was wandering and not really knowing, but we filled the time we worked the whole day and now it’s maybe an hour here or there, or two hours at a time, and you really do get the things done. And I think if you’ve been listening to this podcast, you know that we try to do things that gets our time back and prioritizing things and having things that are important, doing those important things. I think that’s maybe why you felt so fulfilled with the focus is because you have had so much focus on what’s important.

So you know that when you do sit down to do something, that it is the most important thing and the most impactful thing as well.

Avram Gonzales: It’s true.

Rachel Gonzales: So would you agree with that?

Avram Gonzales: I would totally agree with that.

Rachel Gonzales: Okay. I would love to hear more about this morphing of how you felt in this journey. So I’d love to know. How has your perspective on business changed?

Avram Gonzales: I would say that I started very frustrated after he arrived because there were all these things that I wanted to do. And I had to put them all on pause. We’ve recorded other episodes talking about really simplifying your business in your life to get more out of it. And that was something that we couldn’t do early on because there just wasn’t time to do it. We’d also set aside the time to be with him and be present. That’s not what I’m talking about. The time that we dedicated towards being present with him after he was born. That’s different. It was after that trying to get back to where we were before.

That left me pretty frustrated.

Rachel Gonzales: Yeah. And the transition from, yeah from taking the time off to how do we transition back into normal working schedule.

Avram Gonzales: Exactly. And so the thing that has really helped me exercise more patience is no longer comparing our business and our growth to those of peers in our industry. I think it’s like really easy to get caught up in the hype and the accolades and the recognition that you might feel hitting certain revenue goals and being able to share that or be celebrated on that by your peers, whether that’s masterminds or different groups that you might be in.

Rachel Gonzales: Yeah. And you’re super, super competitive.

Avram Gonzales: I am pretty competitive.

Rachel Gonzales: So it’s hard to see that and not be like, wow, I can really do better than that.

Avram Gonzales: And the thing that I realize is if you’re chasing money, it’s always gonna be a race. How fast can you get it? How efficiently can you get it? All that stuff.

Rachel Gonzales: Sure.

Avram Gonzales: And whose dream is that? That was the other thing that I, that came full circle for me was like, what goals do I have right now? It’s like a question I ask myself, what goals do I have right now that aren’t even mine?

Rachel Gonzales: I love that question. I love that question. What goals do I have right now that aren’t even mine? I think we need to ask that question.

Avram Gonzales: It’s true. And so it was through asking a lot of those questions that I got clear on what I wanted and we talk about a lot of the podcast, now it’s more about I wouldn’t say necessarily balance as much as just having fulfillment in every area and tending to the things that matter most. And family really wasn’t a thing before in now it is.

Rachel Gonzales: Yeah. Because now that the family has become, not just you and me, but you and me plus. It really does take a lot of planning to keep that in mind and to make sure that there is time for it. I love those insights. I think that I hope that this is helping you as this as a listener to maybe change perspective, give yourself some time reflect on what is or isn’t working for you. And so I’d love to hear we have two more questions for you that I’d love to hear more about your journey here. How do you tackle challenges now versus before?

Avram Gonzales: Perspective changes everything. I think about my time at the gym and when you’re running on that treadmill at an incline and you’re working your butt off and then you lower the incline. It suddenly feels —you’re moving just as fast— like you’re flying. But the only thing that changes is the incline. And I think that’s like what life has felt like since Lincoln’s birth. Business challenges now feel pretty small.

Rachel Gonzales: Okay.

Avram Gonzales: Like a client that needs something or is being demanding, it’s just such a small thing. You might have a challenge with a meeting, a particular objective, or a deadline. It doesn’t matter. Oftentimes there’s obstacles that come up in the household that impact our ability to perform in the business. That’s the instant plot going off in the background that they just seem so easily surmountable.

And I think the reason is because with a child in the home, it’s all unpredictable. And there’s very little that’s in your power to manage your time or manage, like you can’t like manage your kids’ day. Sure, you can help guide them, but if they’re not feeling good or just something is off or they’re going through a growth spurt, or they’re teething, these are all things that you cannot control and you have to get better at rolling with the punches.

So I remember when you, Rachel, when you left for the first time, coming back from maternity leave. You went back to your regularly scheduled BNI meeting middle of the day, middle of the week on a Wednesday, and that was the first time that I was gonna be a hundred percent solo for three hours.

And I was terrified and it was literally the most challenging thing because I wasn’t as comfortable like putting him down for a nap. He was less comfortable with me doing it versus mom not being home. There were all these like challenges around that and so I think that perspective. Of something as simple for me as putting the baby down for a nap was so challenging versus the business stuff.

I just feel like we have so much more control over. So yeah. Now I feel like things that come up are just easier to handle.

Rachel Gonzales: I love it.

Avram Gonzales: Yeah, so being challenged has been a really difficult thing. But such an empowering thing in the journey.

Rachel Gonzales: Yeah, absolutely. I think that’s really important also to bring voice to the things that were hard and to recognize where we’ve come from, how far you’ve come with Lincoln you’re an expert, is putting him down now. You have a lot of fun when I go to BNI and that’s yours and his day. So that also gets some morph and become different but I love that you brought up perspective that it’s just different. We can change our perspective. We do have power over that. We don’t always have power over the circumstances around us. So I love that.

I wanna move on to this here. So I really love this question because I know you have a lot to say about it. What or why is fitness important to you now?

Avram Gonzales: Yeah, I grew up playing a lot of sports soccer, volleyball. Those were two big ones for me, TaeKwonDo. But those were all sports that I was actively engaged in high school, and then a little bit in college.

When you leave that environment, the opportunities for that aren’t just sitting right in front of you. So for me, The fitness ended up taking a backseat because it wasn’t, in my mind, it wasn’t accessible. It wasn’t top of mind. It wasn’t it didn’t feel easy for me to go out and join a volleyball team with people that I’ve never met before.

Like all those things just became a little overwhelming and daunting for me. They also took a backseat because, I just started my business, so we’re talking like 10 years ago, 13 years ago, and that was my priority. I had to figure out a way to make enough money to sustain myself or get a job. There’s no way in hell I wanted to get a job, so it was like, do or die.

But then years went by and fitness was no longer a part of my life, so I didn’t identify with that. I didn’t think that, I didn’t think of myself as a runner. Or somebody who could lift weights I don’t know. You just don’t have this picture of yourself when you’re so far removed. Sure. What I loved about this transition for me in the last six months is that firstly, you came to bat for me.

Rachel recognized that I just wasn’t feeling myself. I didn’t realize how much of my own self-confidence I had lost. Because when you’re in it, you don’t see it. And going back to the gym and getting fit again and on this journey has been so helpful for my confidence, my energy levels, all these obvious things that people talk about, but I didn’t have something that was just for me. You helped make that a priority and make it happen. There’s a whole story behind this, and I just love you to death for what you did for me in pushing me and helping me make it happen. The reason it’s important for me now though, is because I think as entrepreneurs we’re used to, and I’m not saying this is everybody, but I think we’re used to treating our bodies as secondary to the mission rather than the mission.

So what I mean by that is, without our bodies, we can’t run a business. Without our health, we can’t run a business. Without our health, we can’t be a mother, father, we can’t be there for our family. And this didn’t hit me the same way. Until now and having this be a part of my life now, I just can’t think of a time in the future where I would ever give it up again or not have that as a high priority in my life.

Rachel Gonzales: Yeah. So I think this is great. A lot of what you’ve been talking about today is perfective. And how things can change just by simple changes that we make and then we view from a different point of view and our perspective has completely changed. And I love that. So thank you for helping us understand more about your journey and instead of seeing it as a race, seeing it more as the journey.

So loving the journey and being present in the journey and really asking those questions to see, are you on your own journey or somebody else’s journey. I really love that.

And if you’ve loved hearing about this topic. We’d love to hear more about maybe what you’d like to hear us talk about.

What are the struggles that you’re having in your business? What are some of the perspective changes you’ve had with children, with business things like that. We would love to hear about those things.

Avram Gonzales: Connect with us on social media, @BabiesAndBizPod on all the major social platforms. Send us a note, subscribe to the podcast. We’d love to hear from you. We’ll catch you on the next one.

Rachel Gonzales: Bye for now.