This week, on the Babies & Business podcast, Rachel and Avram sum up the six things they’ve learned in Lincoln’s first six months of life that are making them more effective business people. From communicating what you need quickly and often so you don’t go insane from lack of sleep to the grace that comes with understanding the “Window of Tolerance” Avram and Rachel are taking notes and taking them back to the biz.

 

SHOW NOTES

1:35 If you don’t plan, you plan to fail

2:36 How planning ahead in their personal life has helped  A+R plan ahead in their business

3:00 Having a 6-month old makes Avram realize most of what he thought was important—just isn’t!

5:16 A Lincoln anecdote provides insight on the power of showing versus telling

9:13 Being new parents illuminates the need to communicate early and often 

11:11 What is the window of tolerance and why is it important?

MENTIONS & RESOURCES

Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (book)

EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION

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

Avram Gonzales: Welcome to the Babies and Business Podcast. This is Avram Gonzales, joined by Rachel Gonzales, and today we’re talking about the six ways our six month old has made us more effective business people. We just crossed that six month half birthday for our son Lincoln, and we are reflecting back on all the things, the blessings and what’s transpired in our lives that has made a big impact on our business and that we believe would be helpful for some of you out there who are navigating this new world as parents, entrepreneurs at the same exact time. So we got these six ways that we’re gonna get into today and there’s a lot of content here, so I think we just better jump into it.

Rachel Gonzales: Yeah.

Avram Gonzales: The first one I know is gonna be, one that Rachel just is so good at doing, and executing on in our household and the business.

This first point, I’d love for you to talk about it. If you don’t plan, you plan to fail. What does that mean to you? Why has this been important for us these first six months?

Rachel Gonzales: Yeah, so if we aren’t aware of the things that are going on during the week, then we can’t actually make things happen that we want to happen.

So it ends up being that maybe we don’t take a shower and we don’t go grocery shopping, or we don’t go get a chiropractic adjustment or something like that. So if we’re not actually paying attention to the things that we want to do and plan for them. They don’t actually happen.

Avram Gonzales: It’s true. This has been like so tough for me personally because I’ve just been a, like a free spirit kind of person and you can afford that when you don’t have a child. And now we’re having to, like on Sundays we’re looking at the calendar for the whole week and figuring out, so what’s gonna go where both business and personal. I love it. Like I said, we have a lot to get through here today. Some of these points are bigger than others.

Let’s jump to number two here. Most of what oh, really quick. This has also made us look ahead on our business.

Rachel Gonzales: Yeah.

Avram Gonzales: We’ve been good at setting monthly goals. We’ve been okay at setting quarterly goals and we have never in our lives really set yearly goals for the business, and that’s something that now we’re being trained to do and having more fun with.

I just wanted to touch on that point

Rachel Gonzales: We’re also being able to stretch our muscles in that.

Avram Gonzales: Yeah.

Rachel Gonzales: That planning muscle and learning the benefits of it and how to do it right.

Avram Gonzales: The personal is influencing the business in a big way here.

Rachel Gonzales: Yeah.

Avram Gonzales: Our second point today is, most of what you think is important just isn’t, and I know this is like super easy.

I think every business owner can relate to this. The day-to-day stuff somehow consumes your day on a regular basis unless you protect it. And you’ve probably read or heard of Steven Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. One of them is all about time management and the urgency versus the important tasks.

Like we’re getting really clear on what is actually important and what is not right in that sense.

Rachel Gonzales: Yeah. And it’s easy to get just into your business and do the things that need to be done, but you look back at the day and you’re like, what did I do? And you actually can’t quantify it because you didn’t actually do anything substantial.

Avram Gonzales: It didn’t move. It didn’t move the the business for the business needs you to move it forward.

Rachel Gonzales: Yeah.

Avram Gonzales: And if you’re busy with all the minutia, none of the quote, important stuff actually happens.

Rachel Gonzales: And I think having our son has really helped us to find out what is important in life and in business.

Avram Gonzales: Yeah.

Rachel Gonzales: We need more time for family. It doesn’t need to all be consumed by business and planning makes that possible. So these things all just tie in together.

Avram Gonzales: Yeah. You have a child and you start to realize all these things that you would’ve never thought of that are important. And we’re seeing it on both ends here.

Rachel Gonzales: Yep.

Avram Gonzales: Number three, this one was a big one for me and I couldn’t think of a better example to explain it. I’ll jump into this one. Number three is modeling the behavior that you expect. I think as business owners and leaders who have teams, it’s one thing to tell, instruct, or delegate what needs to be done in the business.

But it’s another thing to show and be the example and the model for the way you want your culture to be. There’s business owners that’ll say one thing and do another, and obviously that’s confusing for your team members. When you have a child, you realize really quickly how much they are watching every single thing that you do. And one day Rachel was away at a business meeting. I was in the kitchen doing some dishes, and I hear this like smacking noise right around the corner. And so Lincoln was in one of those walker, j umper, play things and around the corner, but I’m like, that’s not a noise that comes from the jumper, the walker.

So I come around the corner and he looks up at me and he is he is smacking his lips, his mouth is open and closing. And we had never seen him do that before and I realized that is literally one of the exercises that we had a myofunctional specialist tell us and teach us that would help him with his breathing, his airways and things like that.

We’ve been doing this for months and didn’t see any result from it, and suddenly one day he’s doing it and I thought, wow, that is a great example of showing versus telling.

And I think

Rachel Gonzales: it’s also really indicative of the fact that we do small things and we think they have no impact but they actually have monumental impact because he’d been watching us this whole time.

When we would smack our lips at him, he would look at us and he’s just absolutely enthralled in what we’re doing. We think it’s such a small thing and it is, but it eventually, Resulted in something like that.

Avram Gonzales: He was watching.

Rachel Gonzales: Yeah.

Avram Gonzales: Your team members are watching. Your customers are watching.

These are all things to be mindful of.

Rachel Gonzales: Yeah.

Avram Gonzales: Fourth lesson, fourth way that Lincoln has changed us in his first six months of life is one I’d love for you to talk about, Rachel. It’s communicating your needs early and often. So what does that mean for you? Because I know you grew up a certain way.

Also, it’s an influence. this particular note, but I would love you to share what this means.

Yeah.

Rachel Gonzales: Just from my past and how I grew up and how I felt about my situation, not necessarily from any one person doing any one thing. I felt like a burden and I felt like I needed to just make myself smaller in the world so that I wouldn’t be that burden.

And so what I found in this first six months with you, Avram and Lincoln is that I do have specific needs, huh, number one being sleep . And I didn’t communicate that to Aram quickly and often enough in the beginning. It actually got to a pretty dire situation where I just couldn’t even function.

And then I let you know, I need you to sleep really well at night. So that because I’m not going to sleep well at night cuz I’m up taking care of Lincoln. Then I’m able to take a nap that day or maybe on the weekends. But talking about the need for me having sleep and having that conversation so that you knew how your sleep contributed to my sleep as well, instead of thinking that you were taking away from me by getting good sleep.

You felt like you were then made aware that you were actually benefiting me by sleeping well.

Avram Gonzales: This was like my contribution in that moment. That would be the most helpful.

Rachel Gonzales: Yeah.

Avram Gonzales: There’s a lot of self-discovery that’s been involved in this too. It’s like when it’s just you or just you and your partner you might go a period of time without recognizing that you have a need maybe that thing reaches the surface at a certain point and then you communicate those needs with a baby, you reach that point a lot faster.

Rachel Gonzales: Yeah.

Avram Gonzales: And I think this has been an inspiration for us to look at things that maybe aren’t working for us in business, in a relationship and running a household.

All the things that are involved in doing what we’re doing to get more clear on when those things are being, not being met. First of all, recognizing them, and then secondly, like what you said is you’re not a burden or an inconvenience by telling somebody else what you need. That’s been a hard part for me as a business owner over time is even though I’m paying team members to do the thing, sometimes I felt like I couldn’t ask them to do the thing because It was some kind of inconvenience for them.

It’s a weird kind of, Hey look, it’s a weird thing. I get you. Maybe you can’t relate to that, but I know there’s some business owners that definitely can.

Rachel Gonzales: I think also the communicate early and often is also. being willing to look at the things that you’re doing to see if they still work.

Avram Gonzales: That’s true, sometimes reevaluate.

Rachel Gonzales: Yeah, sometimes we get into the rut of business or life or relationships, whatever it is, there’s a rut. And when something changes, it gives us that permission to look at it and see that it doesn’t work. Because sometimes when we don’t look at things, that’s when things stagnate and that’s when things become not okay with each other and we grow apart.

So Lincoln has really afforded us the ability to really inventory what works for us, because if we’re really hones t, what we were doing before didn’t actually work for us, but we didn’t get confronted with it.

Yeah, it’s true. Absolutely. man,

Avram Gonzales: I’ve gotta sit with that for a minute. But we can’t , we gotta record this podcast before he wakes back up friends. All right, number five. This is something that you learned by going and seeing a counselor. Yeah. Is this term that you’ve made so popular in our verbiage now, which is the window of tolerance. Number five is don’t make decisions outside of your window of tolerance. So I’ll speak to this and then you can say, what is, so the window of tolerance is this like zone where inside of it you’re a happy, normal, well functioning, in touch with yourself person, right? You have your full capacities available to you. If you add a stressor to the mix, you can handle it. That’s the window of tolerance when you go beyond the window of tolerance and then you add yet another stressor, that’s where you get people that are doing these dysfunctional things like lashing out, saying mean things generally doing and being a dysfunctional human being.

So you had some very specific experience with this.

Rachel Gonzales: Yeah. I’ve just become more aware through my counseling with my therapist just about certain things. I, my goal in going to therapy was I wanted tools to help me overcome things that I’ve experienced and things that I will experience and to help me maybe gain perspective of things, but, and also to connect with family.

So there are a couple of different reasons that I went. But during all of this, one of the things that I was taught was about the window of tolerance and how when we live in our window of tolerance, we’re more able to make rational decisions and things like that, like Avram already said. And the way that I practice this in our household is if I’m just existing during the day and I go into the kitchen and I’m stressed by the amount of dishes that we have that are piling up, or I look around the house and I’m thinking, oh my gosh, I just can’t do this anymore. Or I look at the pile of clean unfolded, un put away laundry , then I actually have made the decision.

If that’s stressing me out, my first question is, have I had enough sleep? If I have not had enough sleep, then I actually choose to not even look at that, not think about it, not stress about it, not do anything about it, just move on with my day. My therapist and I came up with the I guess compromise of if you’ve not had sleep and you are working on a deficit, then don’t add anything to your day other than just taking care of yourself and Lincoln and the bare minimum things.

And so I fall back on that a lot because, I know that I am not equipped to make decisions beyond the basics. I know how to take care of Lincoln and I know how to take care of myself. That takes no thought, , but beyond that, it’s just not something that I am willing to do at the time. So I set it off for another time, and that’s a huge thing for me because normally everything is an emergency and I want to do it now.

Yeah.

Avram Gonzales: Whereas on the opposite, I’m like, if I can push it off just a little bit to think about it, that’s gonna be good for me. You’ll look at running any kind of business. There’s gonna be emergencies and things that come up. Some things do need to be dealt with immediately on the spot. You don’t have that ability to wait or sit on it.

But somebody comes to you with a problem or an issue. Even one of your customers, you can. Can I get back to you on this in X amount of time? So if you could take a step back, find your happy place, and then come back to the situation with a fresh head and the ability to make a more rational, founded decision I think that’s the big learning piece here. Yeah. Last and finally. number six. Here is something that I never thought I would hear myself say. It’s something that if my dad listens to this podcast, he is going to have a whole story to tell you about it. it’s structure creates freedom. My dad used to poke fun at me growing up.

I hated planning. I just, and I let it be known. And if he hears these words, he’s never gonna let me let it down. So let’s talk about it. Structure creating freedom.

Rachel Gonzales: Yeah. So we have worked really hard to create a structure for Lincoln in feeding him and putting him to bed and his wake times. And I know anybody that has a baby is probably laughing at this point because they’re like, what structure?

Schedule with a baby? So just hear me out. Okay. So we have certain times that we feed him during. We lay him down for a nap and it works really well. But the whole philosophy is if he eats really good, he will sleep really good. If he sleeps really good, he will eat really good. And then it’s a cycle and we’ve seen this cycle play out over and over and it has actually allowed us to find out. If he’s not feeling well, we spot it right away because things aren’t as they normally are, because while he doesn’t always eat at the very same times and sleep at the very same times, there is some form of normalcy. So with that normalcy, it allows us to go out to lunch during the middle of the day when he would normally be napping because he does have a schedule.

It allows us a little bit of flexibility in knowing, okay, so when we’re done with lunch, he may need a little bit extra help to get down for that nap.

Avram Gonzales: And that’s what happened today. It’s so he’s gonna be asleep probably another 30 to 45 minutes here, and he’s gonna be literally back on his initial schedule.

And we’re using schedule here as just one example. But you think about your business and the structure that you put in place for team members to thrive within, or the processes that you put in place in order to render the service the same way every time. So it’s consistent. There are many structures that we put in place that allow for freedom. So when an emergency pops up or something is demanding your attention, you actually have the ability and the flexibility to handle it and stride. And that’s really the whole point of this sixth point in structure creating a freedom, is we think of structure as a pretty rigid thing.

That’s the opposite of freedom and flexibility, but it’s actually something that creates more freedom and flexibility and maybe that’s something that we’ll talk more about in a future podcast.

Rachel Gonzales: Yeah.

Avram Gonzales: Do you have any closing thoughts here, Rachel, as we wrap up these six ways that our six month old has changed our lives and made us more effective business people?

Rachel Gonzales: Just overall arching thing that I think about when I think about Lincoln is how grateful I am for him. And I think that when we can approach anything that we’re doing w ith gratitude, that we see a different side of the coin. We can choose to see the negative side or the positive side. I’m not saying lie about how you’re feeling or don’t really be honest about those things because we’ve already talked about how we need to say when we need some support, but we can choose to see and be positive about things as opposed to negative, and it really does change.

Avram Gonzales: It changes everything. And you know how hard it can be at times. You know how much pressure you can feel at times, and it’s that pressure and that challenge that oftentimes leads to these great blessings. So we really appreciate you tuning in to today’s podcast. If you found something special from today, please let us know.

Comment, share this, subscribe to the podcast wherever you’re listening, Spotify, iTunes or whatever. And hey, if you got an idea for a future topic, certainly drop us a line. You can reach us at hello@babiesandbiz.com. Send us an email, hit us up on social media. Love to hear from you, and until next time, we’ll catch you on the flip side.

Bye for now.