301: Balancing Fatherhood and Entrepreneurship

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Hello.

Hello. Welcome to session 301 of Selling the Couch.

I hope that you're doing well, having a good day.

So I'm recording this just a couple.

Of weeks early at the end of January, beginning of February, and we got hit with an arrester. It could have been a lot worse, but we ended up with about 8 inches of snow. Now, my friends that are down south or not in areas where it gets a lot of snow, I know that feels like a lot, and I honestly would have never said this about 10 years ago, but that actually does not feel like a terrible amount of snow. But I did have to take out the snow blower, AKA Mel's snow or lawnmower for snow. And I'm getting like much better at this. And yeah, it's. But we are surviving and I'm grateful for heat and just all of those different things. Today's podcast is a topic that I have a lot of interest and passion for, which is parenthood and specifically fatherhood and entrepreneurship. You know, just being as you guys know, if you've heard stc, we have a little one. She's three now. And one of the things that I think a lot about is how to build a a business that allows me to spend a lot of time with my partner and with our little one and our friends and our family. And because I realized that those things, as much as I love business and I genuinely love this stuff, but I realized just from a holistic perspective, it's nice to have those other parts of your life and focus on those as well. And one of you know, for me, being a great dad and spending all of these time with Chloe, especially as she's young, being able to take her to museums and parks and Reading and playing. You know, the other day we were down in the basement and we made like a, like a mock maze where she had to be. She was a superhero and she had to go make. She had to go find like I called it like something really dumb like the hand of justice or something, right? And she had to go like she had these headlights on that I use sometimes for hiking. And so I outfitted her with the headlights and I had her like go through the tunnel and find these like hand of justice or whatever. She gets so excited. And I realized like, we won't have all of these moments forever. And my guest today is Ryan Spence. Ryan is a dad and he is a former corporate lawyer turned entrepreneur. And Ryan and I actually met through Rachel Rogers the club, which is Rachel Rogers membership. And there was just something really connecting about Ryan. I felt like one of the things I most respected about him was his ability to think intentionally about entrepreneurship and also intentionally about fatherhood and what does life look like and how do you sort of line up life, right, in a way that both of those, that you can do a really good job in both of those realms. Ryan will share this on the interview. But his oldest child is also neurodivergent and so there brings sort of its own unique challenges and the things that he has to consider. I wanted to have Ryan on just to have an open and honest conversation about this because I feel like we don't often talk about the gradations or the nuances of fatherhood and balancing entrepreneurship. Some of the questions that going to be asking Ryan are, you know, I feel like parenthood changes so many of us as entrepreneurs. How has it changed you? How do you handle the day to day disruptions that are inevitable with kiddos? Like sort of the practical kind of things and. And then we wrap up with, you know, some of the real practical things like that Ryan is doing in order to balance those two. I think you're going to really like this conversation.

Hey friends, we are on sabbatical from the STC podcast. This is my first sabbatical in seven years, but we will be back in April with brand new episodes of the STC podcast.

In the meantime, there are a lot.

Of things happening still with stc. Among them is a brand new workshop that we put together for you that you can sign up at a date and time that works for you. If you are a successful private practitioner.

And interested in launching an online course.

You can check out that workshop over at sellingthecouch.com onlinecourseworkshop. Again that's sellingthecouch.com.

Hey, Ryan.

Welcome to Selling the couch.

Great to be here. Thanks for having me, Melvin.

I'm so grateful that we connected. We were talking about this right before, but we connected in Rachel Rogers membership, community, the club. And I don't know, there was just like a kinship or a connection. I think we felt because we're both parents and trying to do the entrepreneur thing. Parents of young ones and wanting to. I think one of the things that I most respected about you when you've posted is, like, how mindful you are in terms of being an awesome dad and being an awesome entrepreneur. And I feel like, man, that is something I definitely struggle with. So I'm really excited and humbled to have our conversation.

Thanks very much for saying that. And I think as we were talking about before we came on air, it's all a work in progress. None of us have it all figured out. So I try to be as mindful as I can, but I always feel I'm fading somewhere.

Well, I think that bring. You do bring up a really good point, which is I think parenthood has taught me humility and so much grace for myself. Right. And I think kind of curious, like, maybe we'll start here. But one of the hardest things for me is, you know, like, pre becoming a parent, I would have these sort of entrepreneurial goals and I would sort of be able to reach them in a time period that I thought was reasonable. But I think since becoming a parent, it's been a little bit of shift. Like, I can't do things as fast. Right. Because there's just other things. And so how do you navigate that?

Well, for me, it's all I've known. So I came to entrepreneurship when I already had children, and children were part of the catalyst for becoming an entrepreneur. I was in big law, so, you know, the big international law firms, long hours, stressful, big deals and all of that stuff. And when I had my first child, I looked up the ladder and I was like, I don't think I want to do this for the rest of my life. I want to be able to see my kids grow up, be able to take them to the park, be able to go on holiday and be present and not checking my emails. So that was kind of the motivation for me. But then, yes, entrepreneurship was a. I knew it would be tough, but it. No one can really prepare you for it. There's a really good quote from Reid hoffman, who started LinkedIn, and he compares it to jumping off a cliff and building the parachute as you go down. And it's very apt. There is no playbook, and there certainly is no playbook for being an entrepreneur and being a parent, particularly being a father and taking an active role in the life of your children. So I left the law to kind of have a bit more of a chilled out existence to a bit more autonomy. And in the beginning I got very stressed out because my children wouldn't do what they were supposed to and give me that space to kind of get things done. So I really relate to what you're saying when you're trying to do a POD interview or you're trying to write something and your kids are bursting in the room or they won't go to sleep or, you know, I mean, they work to their own rhythm and in a sense, you almost have to try and work around them. And I think, as I said to you before, it forces you to become a lot more focused and a lot more efficient and to do more with less time.

Yeah, it's such a good way of putting it. You said so many really wonderful things there. And so you said your kids were the catalyst, right, to this shift. I feel like when you're in like a very prestigious position like that, like big law, right, there's this sort of like prestige that comes with it. And then at your sort of gut level or heart level, you felt like this wasn't sustainable. How did you break out of that sort of thing of, hey, I'm going to follow my heart, even though externally there's all of these sort of things that I might even miss out on or lose?

Well, I'd like to say to you that it was very easy. I woke up one day, thought, I don't want to do this anymore, and I left. But I didn't. It took me five years, really, to eventually get out. And you make a good point, is that there's a lot of prestige, a lot of status attached to a role in a large organization. When you're working in an organization that is headline news, where you're dealing with deals that are sort of broadcast across the globe and people look at you from the outside as being successful, you kind of feel like you're enclosed in this box and you have to stay there. And so the biggest challenge for me was first I realized, okay, I don't think I want to do this anymore. And I kept suppressing that voice inside of me because the alternative was, well, what do I do instead? I'd done this for so long, I got paid well, as I said, it had the prestige and the status. My identity was attached to being a lawyer. You know, when you go to the networking events and people ask you, oh, who are you and what do you do? It was always, my name is Ryan and I'm a lawyer at X law firm. You know, it was very much intertwined. And so one of the questions I asked, which I know a lot of people ask, is, who am I without this job, without this firm? You know, I mean, without the title of lawyer Act. And so I had to navigate that. And that's kind of what set me on my personal development journey. December 2018 was the trigger for me where having sort of played around with this for so long. I was on holiday in Bali with the family, a deal came in. I had to work over Christmas, and I decided I just didn't want to do this anymore. And I said on the plane back to Singapore, where I was living at the time, I need to do something else. Know what, don't know how, but I need to get out. And it was through personal development, through yoga, which I kind of went back to, and starting to look inwards and ask myself these questions. Who am I? What do I value? What do I want out of life? How do I want my life to be? That's what eventually got me to the position where I could walk away and feel good about walking away. But it was a process. It definitely wasn't overnight. And I think in hindsight, I would have started doing this work from the very first moment that voice spoke to me, rather than years down the line feeling like I'd lost so much time.

Yeah, I mean, I would imagine most people would struggle with that. Right. Like, when we first hear that voice, or like, ah, it's kind of a small voice. There's like, you know, there's so much other big stuff I'm doing, but, I mean, I think. But what you did is so beautiful, Right. Because I actually think the time, even though, like, it felt really long, I would imagine it helped you to know yourself at such a deeper level. And so when you were actually ready to make that leap, to put in that, like, resignation slip. Right. You were at a place where you trusted your sort of inner wisdom. And it wasn't fear. Right. That was guiding things.

Yes, exactly. I think, although I can go back and say I wish I'd done it sooner, I think those first few years were good in cementing for me that this really wasn't something I wanted to do. We all have bad days or bad weeks or bad months, but it really solidified for me that no, this isn't where I want to be. And so therefore I could then start to do that inner work that you just mentioned and start to ask myself those questions and develop this deeper self awareness, this deeper knowing of who I am and what I value. And it's something that not enough of us do because particularly in life today, there's so many distractions, everything moves so quickly and we were all expected to play a certain role. And so we play that role without taking the time to question whether we actually do want to play that role. And as we grow, we evolve and we change. And I think that, at least for me, I'd started as a lawyer, being a particular person, I had changed throughout that process, lost pieces of who I was. And actually there was this whole process when I left of effectively shedding all the layers of law, unlearning a lot of that and reconnecting with who I'd been before. So, for example, I was very creative when I was younger. I was into music. I was always dreamed I was going to be a pop star. I wrote, I did all of these things. But through 11 years in law, that side of me slowly, slowly, slowly got dampened. And then when I left, it just started to just out of me. And now I can't stop being creative. But without having done that inner work to question myself and find out who I am, I never would have got to that point and I would still be effectively living a life that wasn't mine. I would be living a life that somebody else thought or said that I should live. And that's what I try and help people to do, is to think, what do you want? Like, you can do this, you can go along on this train and you can quite happily just cruise and go through the motions, but are you really living or are you just surviving? And I think that that's the question. And when you know what you want or why you're doing something, it becomes a lot easier to just do it and see the fear, feel the discomfort and continue. But if you don't have anything bigger than yourself to hold onto, then you're always going to default to the place of comfort, to the thing that's easy, whether it's working for you or not, because you don't want to jump into the unknown because it's just too scary for you.

Yeah, well, and then I think at a societal level as well, right, if we're not fully aware of what we want, society sort of has these expectations and norms of what we should do. And so it'll kind of just continue to push us toward that sort of mold, Right, exactly. It's so interesting, like, you speak about this because this is like, almost parallel to my experience. Right. Like, I, you know, I went through undergrad and five years of grad school, internship, a postdoc. Right. And was doing clinical work. Loved the work. But I felt like in some ways, the therapy room was confining me. And a lot of what you said about your own childhood really resonated with me too, because, like, I was like, a builder, right. I remember, like, crafting different things. I took a lot of art classes. And it is really interesting as we get older. Right. And as we sort of get. If we're not careful, as we get into sort of jobs. Right. How those parts can, as you said, like, kind of dissipate. Right. Or dull. But I don't know. I feel. I know for a lot of folks listening, they've kind of shed that. And I feel like for both of us, that is really cool to rediscover, like, the inner child within us. Right. And to now. To now lead life. Right. With that. Right. As opposed to what society says or what I think I should do.

And you make a great point. This is one of the beauties of having children. We talked a bit about the annoyances. But one of the beauties is that when you see your children and they do things instinctively, they gravitate to what they love and they'll ask questions, and they won't just be satisfied with the answer that you give them. They'll keep pushing. If you tell them, oh, well, this works this way because. Or you can't do this because they're curious as to why and they don't always take it as given. And so I think children can teach us a lot about who we were and reconnecting with that person, who we were, because as we get older, it gets squeezed out of us. We get told, this is what's realistic and this is what you need to do. As you said, you go, you get your good grades, you progress through the educational ranks, then you get your job, your career, and you progress through that. That's what's expected. There isn't, or there rarely is presented to you an alternative path. The alternative path is always something that's a little bit scary, a little bit uncertain, but particularly in the corporate world. This whole narrative that the corporate world is safe, it's secure, and you should strive to. That is continuously being turned on its head. You can look at the recession in 2008, you can look at the pandemic now and the upheaval that that causes. That's not true. I mean, it's safe for as long as your interests align with the company's interests. But if you're not profitable, the company's not profitable, they want to go in a different direction. You're out. So although entrepreneurship is painted as this scary other world, which it is in a sense, it's no more scary because at least you're in control of your own fate. And I think one of the things for me, the big value for me was autonomy. And so leaving a huge organization where I felt I had little autonomy, but got paid very well and had great benefits, to move over to a path where I have complete autonomy and particularly in the beginning, little money and no benefits, but the capacity for generating, generating wealth, generating creativity, creating a life that I actually want to live for myself and my family, I have far more control over that. It's far greater on entrepreneurship than it is staying in the corporate world. So I think everyone has to make the decision of what works for them. Where's your risk appetite? And connect to that inner child to answer that question for you, look at the world with curiosity, look at it with a sense of playfulness, a sense of fun, and be prepared to try new things and not be afraid of falling down, failing. Because all that is, is data. It's going to tell you, okay, don't do this again, but maybe do it this way this time and you can keep going.

Yeah, I mean, I love that approach as well. Just seeing it more as data as opposed to this is a indication of like my competence or this is a thing on my self worth, you know, which is something I've definitely struggled with. But I love the way that you're articulating that because I think I'm starting.

Very slowly to, to look at it that way.

Right. And yeah, it is very liberating. Ryan, I wanted to shift a little bit and ask you a couple of like, kind of practical things. So you've got kiddos at home. How do you handle the day to day disruptions that are inevitable with kiddos? Like. Right. So you might be working on, I don't know, working on something for, for your business. Right. Maybe it's a big project. Right. How like at a practical level, like do you always work from home? Do you work in, you know, like in a co working space? Yeah, anything like that.

So I try to split between working from home and working at the co working space because I like to have that change of environment and because, I mean, as anyone who works from home knows, even if you have a separate space, the fact that you're there means you'll get bothered. Whether it's my wife calling me to help with something or my kid bursting in in the middle of a podcast interview, like he did a couple of weeks ago to show me a picture. It happens. So I think practically you can only take the steps that you can take. And I think one of the issues that I have with a lot of the personal development speakers out there, I don't think enough is said about how you navigate when you have young children at home. There is always this sort of narrative that, I mean, train your kids to respect your boundaries and that when daddy or mommy is working, that you're working. But that doesn't always work, you know, I mean, it's not always practical to think in those. In those terms. My eldest child is neurodivergent, and, you know, he doesn't always do what he needs to do in that moment because something may be affecting him in a particular way that he needs to deal with. And so sometimes it is a case of, yeah, if I have to go out, I have to go out, and if I'm not out and one of the kids comes in, then I have to kind of deal with it as a parent, you know what I mean? Give them some grace and allow them that time. And sometimes allowing them that time to say what they need to say can actually create that space a lot quicker than consistently trying to shun them out of the room, and they keep coming back. And again, I think if you're an entrepreneur, one of the things that you probably went into entrepreneurship for is to have that space, to have that freedom, to have that autonomy. And so for me, it's remembering that and remembering that, look, I went into it for my children. They were the catalyst. I went into it to create this space. So if they are coming in, sometimes I just have to give them that space. And generally people are quite understanding of that if you are on a call with somebody else. And another practical way I deal with it is by meditating every morning. It allows me to be a little bit calmer and to detach and to realize that whatever I was doing, it's not life or death. And in the grand scheme of things, everything will be okay sometimes. Easier said than done, but having that practice daily does definitely help with that.

Yeah, I've been getting a lot more into breath work and practically to just Better my podcasting skills, but practically. Also, just to be, like, fully aware of this, because I noticed the same thing. And this, I mean, just being brutally honest, like, this is something I really struggle with because I'm so. I mean, I tend to be, like, really organized, but then I also, like, once I want to do something, like, I can be almost like, a little rigid, right? And so when our little one comes in, some, like, sometimes, like, irritated. And so this is the thing I'm working on, right? It's like noticing that anger and irritation coming up, but then also, like you said, why. You know, for both of us, right? Why do we do this? Right? It's ultimately, like, because we want to spend more time with our kids. We want to be, like, very active fathers, right? And so I love the way you've said that, because if you can sort of tie into that deeper why, right, the end goal, right, of why we're doing this, the end goal of why we do podcast interviews, maybe to some degree, right? All of these different things, right? Is to build this life around our kids and to make sure we're present. Right? And I don't know, for me, it's like, yeah, if you. It's this really hard in the moment still, but if you tap into that deeper thing, right, like, it does make a difference. And, yeah, I like the way you said that. Yeah, I think it's something I'm definitely reflecting on. So.

And I think from what you said, like, most things, awareness is the first step. I think when you're aware that, oh, I was a bit off with my child then, or I got a bit irritated or whatever, Once you've got that awareness and you can just sit with that and work it through, I mean, you're part of the way there. No one is perfect all the time. You know, I mean, I get to the end of day sometimes I think I really could have handled that situation better, but at least I'm thinking about it, I'm reflecting on it. And so next time when something similar happens, hopefully a little bit of that reflection will pop into my mind and I'll deal with it a little bit better. Maybe not perfect, but the idea is they very much like the idea. And I'm not sure who was the proponent when I first heard from James Clear in Atomic Habits of just trying to be 1% better each day. And if we just try and be better in each interaction with our kids, I mean, we'll get to the point where, you know, we will fall off at times, but we'll get to the point where generally someone will burst into the room and you'll be like, okay, you're here again. Okay, I'll give you a couple of minutes. What do you want to talk about? And you'll be present for those two minutes so that for the next 15 or half an hour they're not continuously coming in and you're having to keep distracting yourself. But it's all a practice. And I think we all have to give ourselves grace and not beat ourselves up because we're all trying to do the best we can with what we have. And as long as we continue to do the best we can and to continue to improve on a daily basis and to build the habits that allow us to deal with these interactions, with these disruptions, then that's living, that's life and we're doing what we can do.

Yeah, absolutely. And then I think the piece that I wanted to kind of pees out a little bit more also is there are so many nuances to all of our lives, right? And I think one of the challenges of like social media or like even like self help books, right, it sometimes it can paint something sort of at a macro level, right? And if you don't run that filter through the lens of like your life, I think you can get you really stuck. And so I appreciate you saying that like that. It is about understanding where we are in seasons of life. And it's not going to, you know, like our kiddos aren't going to be young forever, right? There's going to be days where, you know, times where maybe they don't want their dads anymore. Right? And then I do feel like we'll look back and we'll be like, you know, yeah, I mean, we'll want that, right? And so then realizing, yeah, now we have that now, you know, yeah, there's those two minutes.

We give those two minutes now, you know, I mean, that could go a long way. You want me looking back and think, what if I just given those two minutes in that moment, what would that have changed about our relationship, about my child's life? And it sounds trite, but it is these little things that we remember as we get older. If we think back to our own childhoods and the things that we remember that at the forefront in our mind. Sometimes they're not the big splashy things. It's tiny little things like when a parent sort of sat down and had a certain conversation with us or an elder relative gave us a lollipop or whatever it is. Sometimes it's those tiny moments that we remember and that shape us. And so it's remembering that really when we can, but also remembering that we're only human.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, even a practical example is this morning I was giving milk to our little one and she insists on me now reading to her while she drinks her milk. Right. And initially I was like, what? This is a new routine. We weren't doing this before. But then you're like, you know what? She loves to read and get these little moments to cuddle together while she drinks her milk. Right. And I'm not going to have that forever. Ryan, I'm so grateful for you. Grateful we got to connect and looking forward to, you know, continued friendship. You're doing some pretty awesome stuff in the world. Where can we learn more about that stuff and let us know what you got going on.

Yeah, I always, I'm always doing stuff. People say, what have you been doing? And I'm like, not that much. And then I start to say things. And this morning somebody referred to me as a tornado. So that gives you some idea of what happens. But yeah, I. You can find me on the website, which is iamryanspence.com and I'm most active in social media on Instagram. You can find me at iamryanspence. And the main project at the moment for me is my book, which should be out early April. So it's called the Triple C Method. And the subtitle is Gaining Clarity, Boost confidence and build courage so you can live life lit. And it's all about finding the life that works for you, where those moments of joy become the norm rather than the exception. And I think, as you said about some self help books, where sometimes it can be all very macro and very general. And I think that there's a certain reason for that, because sometimes you're writing from your own, your own perspective. So I think for me and for my book, because I come from the big law world, from the corporate world, I think particularly people who are in that world or who are thinking of exiting that world, they may find more parallels in the stories that I share and in how I had to navigate leaving that world and see some of themselves in it. But as I always say, you have to read things with your own filter, as you said, and you have to take what works for you and leave what doesn't. But the idea is it will be practical, it will give you real actions that you can take to start to build those three things. Clarity, confidence and courage. And getting you to start thinking about connecting with that inner child and creating the life that you want to live, not the life that you think you should live.

Awesome. Well said, Ryan. Thank you again for doing this and have a great rest of your day.

Naimo. Thank you, Melvin. And yeah, thank you for having me.

You're so welcome. Bye. Hey there. Hope you enjoyed my conversation with Ryan. And especially if you are a dad that's listening today's podcast session. I hope that today's session has just been helpful for you. And more than anything, I hope it just gives you a new inspiration and a new motivation to parent well, but then also to navigate this world of entrepreneurship, whether it's private practice or you're doing coaching or whatever you might be doing in this world. You know, I was reflecting a lot on this conversation with Ryan and I'm still, like, a lot of the ideas are still percolating in my mind, but you know, one of the things I just, the word that Ryan kept saying, you know, grace and just kindness towards yourself, I think that really resonated with me. I'm still doing a lot of the inner work on this, and so I'm not quite, quite there yet. And we're all arriving. Right. But I think that was just really helpful to hear because I think it's so easy to look externally at circumstances or what people are doing and then feel like, man, I have so many, like, complications in my life that makes me not be able to do those things as fast that I would like as an entrepreneur. And I think today's podcast session was just a great reminder of that and just to be, just to be gentle. And then I think as parents, right, when we model that in ourselves, our kids see that as well. This is something that I'm constantly learning, which is how our actions have so much more impact than our words. Ryan's website is again over at iamryanspence, and he's got a pretty awesome website and he's doing some pretty, pretty neat stuff. And I encourage you to definitely check that out.

Hey, friends, we are on sabbatical from the STC podcast. This is my first sabbatical in seven years, but we will be back in April with brand new episodes of the STC podcast.

In the meantime, there are a lot.

Of things happening still with stc. Among them is a brand new workshop that we put together for you that you can sign up at a date and time that works for you. If you are a successful private practitioner.

And interested in launching an online course.

You can check out that workshop over at sellingthecouch.com OnlineCourseWorkshop. Again, that's sellingthecouch.com onlinecourseworkshop.

Have a great rest of your day and I'll see you next time. Bye.

Thanks for listening to the Selling the Couch podcast. For more great content and to stay up to date, visit www.sellingthecouch.com.

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