Cameron Herold shares how parenting taught him to apologize to his kids, manage his own stress through exercise and decompression, and show up calmer. He argues leaders should do the same: recognize employees are human, respond instead of react, and practice what he calls "love bombing" with empathy.
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So I wanted to share something with you, and it's something that I've struggled with, not as a business person, but as a dad. Raising kids is really effing hard. Super enjoyable, but it's really effing hard. But not only did I struggle with it, I also learned from some of my struggles and how to bring those into the business world. And let me share with you one of the biggest struggles that I had in business, or with my kids, and how I even brought that into the business world. It's really hard to show up on a day-to-day basis and love bomb your kids. They piss you off, they drive you crazy, Maybe you just had a tough day at work, tough day running your company. You're stressed. You're thinking about all the problems of being an adult, like paying a mortgage and spending time with your spouse and having some hobbies and time for yourself. And these kids that are just taking up all this time and don't seem that grateful. It's kind of sometimes a little bit easy to get super stressed with them, maybe to yell at them, maybe to get super frustrated with them, maybe to kind of take out your normal day-to-day stress on them. I'm guilty of that as a dad. I would love to take back some of those days when I was too hard on my kids than I really needed to be, because it really had nothing to do with them. Now, I've apologized to them Since I've, I've talked to them about situations and said, hey, you probably don't remember the specifics, but there were days where I got upset or days where I got angry or days when I maybe took out my stress on you. And, and I apologize. What I learned from that over the years was I need to be able to have a space to decompress. So what I learned to do was towards the end of the day, go to the gym, go play tennis, go play paddle, go for a hike, go for a walk, drive a route from the office back to my home through a nice area and not through busy traffic and give myself a way And the chance to decompress so that I wouldn't react at my kids, I would respond to my kids. Or I wouldn't need to react or respond at all. I would remember they're just being kids. Well, in the business world, we need to do that more as leaders as well. Sometimes the people inside of our company that piss us off are just trying their best. They're just struggling. Maybe they're dealing with stuff at home as well. Maybe we get angry about a project they've missed or a deadline they've missed or a core value that we've broken. We just need to remember that they're humans going through this human experience as well. They're trying their best or they wouldn't be here anymore. They'd have quit and gone somewhere else. And our job is to love bomb them and de-stress ourselves as a leader so that we can show up in a better space to take care of the people that are taking care of us.
