Episode 3-26: Parenting A World Changer

Hey, what’s going on podcast family? Alex Branning here, your marketing coach. Today I’m going to talk about one of the most common questions that I get in my emails and over Instagram messages. And that is how I’m raising my daughter. I get a lot of parenting questions and I get it. It’s one of those things that as entrepreneurs we often find it hard work-life balance and it’s hard raising kids. Let’s talk about it. And as an entrepreneur, I think, I know for me, I’m not going to say all parents. I know for me, I want to see my little girl grow up and want to be like her parents. And both Kathy and I are entrepreneurs. For those of you that don’t know our full story, I’ve had my own business since I was 17.

Kathy started an online bakery and then together we bought a coffee shop and ran it for a while and we just, we have entrepreneur-ism and our blood, right? So, Ali has started a couple businesses, which has been fun. So she makes chokers. She makes some custom like custom jewelry for those, for the guys that don’t know what those are. And she’s done other things in the past that have been fun. My favorite story to tell is when she was six. We gave her 20 bucks allowance and she wanted to buy a toy that was I think, like $60. And she came to us and was like, Hey, I want 60 bucks, I want to get this toy, it’s 60 bucks and I have got 20, can you give me the other 40? And we were like, no.

All right. And so she’s like, hmm, okay. And so we wanted to see what she would do. And so she came back and she said, okay, how about this? How about I take this $20 and I go to the store and I get some cups and some lemonade and I do a lemonade stand outside to get the 60 bucks. I love that. I love that she got resourceful, it’s so hard to teach. And so she did it. She got her 60 bucks and she was able to buy the toy that she wanted. So, it was fun. It was really cool to see her embrace entrepreneurial-ism at that young age. But, one of the things that, again, I get asked about a lot is parenting. And a part of it comes from this balance that entrepreneurs try to have. I think between trying to build the biggest business that we can so that we can provide financial security and give our families the life that we want them to have. But at the same time, we struggle with having enough time to spend with our wife and our kids. And, it’s hard. It’s a very difficult work-life balance.

And those of you that have nine to five jobs, I by no means am I trying to compare the two. It’s hard raising kids when you have a nine to five or when you have an entrepreneur. I can only speak from an entrepreneur because that’s the life that I lead. So, one of the questions that was asked to me was, Alex, how do you find, not only the time, but also the patience to raise a kid amongst the never ending chatter inside of your mind. And I thought that was just a brilliant way to put the question. And so I’m going to share just what I do. I was sharing this to encourage you. And so for me, I do two things to really help me try to be as best of a parent as I can be while also being the best entrepreneur that I can. And the first thing is having a strict set schedule for myself. So in the morning, and this is part of my ideal day.

If you go back a few podcast episodes, I talk about my ideal day, but in the morning I don’t start working until Ali goes to school. And after that, that’s when I actually dive in. And so what that does is that it gives me designated time in the morning to spend time with her, just talk with her. I like taking her to school in the morning. And just encouraging her, giving her that positive push out the door so to speak. And then I stop work every night at the same time right before dinner. That way I can spend dinner with the family and we can enjoy the evening together. And at first it was very difficult for me to have that kind of a schedule because I wasn’t used to that. I was doing the Gary Vaynerchuk grind, which was working from the time I woke up until the time I went to bed. I was getting burnt out. My family wasn’t seeing me and it was not creating a healthy environment. So I put those boundaries around me and it helped. So that’s the first thing.

The second thing that I do is for myself and the way that I raise my daughter is I want my daughter to be loved lavishly, given an unconditional open door, no matter what she can always come in and talk to me. And I want to create a place where she feels safe. And so, my daughter is 10 years old. So the worst thing I think she’s possibly done is probably lie to us and maybe not clean her room. Right? So, low level stuff. But for me, what I do is I try to let her know that she has absolutely no, I want her to know that she can do anything. At the same time, I want to be a realistic for what she can and can’t accomplish, right? So I remember the story of my dad when we were about, I was about 12 years old and we had a basketball hoop out in the front yard and we were playing basketball together and I just loved it. I loved the game of basketball.

And I said, you know dad, to I want to be an NBA player. And he pulled me aside and he said, you know Alex, you can do that. He’s like, I believe that you could become an NBA player, but you’re not going to get much taller than me. And he was 6’2, I ended up being 6’3. He’s like, you’re not going to be much taller than me. And so you’re going to have to play the guard position. You’re going to have to get really, really, really good at dribbling and you’re going to have to, if you want to do this, you were going to have to have your coaches stop putting you as the center and start putting you as a guard so you can get practice. And so with that, so stop being a center in the games, be a guard. And you need to come out of here and practice three to four hours a day.

You really got to love the game, get better at your dribbling and get better at your shots. And if you want to do this, you can. But you got to put the work in. And I realized after a couple of days that I did not want to put the work in. So being an NBA player sounded cool, but I wasn’t willing to put the work in for it. It wasn’t my passion. A couple episodes ago I talked about finding your passion. It wasn’t my passion. But I did find my passion a few years later when I started programming. And so that was what became, I experimented with a lot of things, sports and different activities, and then I found programming and fell in love with it. And I worked on perfecting the craft and becoming a master at it. And that’s where I found my passion and I’m blessed to be paid for my passion. In the last five years, my business turned from being a programming development house to a marketing agency. But I just loved it for the 12 years. That’s all I did. I just coded and I had the best time.

So anyways, so for my daughter, Ali, I want her to know that she can do anything. She just has to put the work in it, and I have to be realistic with her. So one of the things that she came to Kathy and I about, she said, I really want to be an actress. We were like, that’s great. You can do it, but you got to work for it. Nothing’s handed to you. And so she went out there and she did it. She was in as many places she could get into. She loves it. She loves the art of it. She loves perfecting her craft. When she is in a place, she loves studying your life. She just digs it. And even if she doesn’t get the part that she wanted, she just goes all into it. And so there’s potential there. I love it. I love seeing her do it and she wants to be an entrepreneur. Like when she started her own businesses, I said, you can do anything you want, but you’ve got to really work for it. You got to dive in. And she does that to a certain degree.

But there was also a time when she came to us and said, I want to be a model. And we were like, okay, well you can do that. It’s going to take some work though. You got to, we kind of laid out the steps and when she looked at what she had to do, she was like, man, I don’t really want to do that. So, she’s 10, she’s going to have a lot of things that she wants to do in life and a lot of different directions she wants to go, things to try. She tried hip hop dance, she tried ballet. She didn’t like those things. So we wanted her to experiment with it, see if she digs it, if not, she can back out. So I want to raise a world changer and to do that, I don’t have a preference in what she does for a career, what kind of life she wants. I want her to choose the path that’s right for her, but I want her to know that she can do anything she puts her mind to.

I want her to feel confident in giving a try. I want her to feel okay with giving something a try and then backing out of it. And I want her to know she could always come and talk to me. I also need her to believe that her parents are on her team and that we’re pushing her and we want the best for her regardless of what direction she wants to go because it’s not about my goals, it’s about her goals and it’s about what she wants. So that’s how I am raising a world changer. I’d love to hear your thoughts on it. Please send me an email, alex@brenninggroup.com and I’ll post some resources on the podcast link so you can check those out and a couple of books that I’ve read that have really inspired me. So you guys are awesome. Thank you. Please share this episode. I’d love to hear some thoughts on this from parents around the world.

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