EP #33
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Trey Sheneman: [00:00:00] When my son Bear was born, I thought I understood leadership. I've been building businesses for 15, 16 years. Uh, at the time he was born, I had been in leadership for seven years, even before that. And the truth is there is nothing that prepares you for leadership like the crash course of being a special needs parent.
You can't read your way into it. You definitely can't outsource it. You just have to live it. And living with Bear is one of the most joy giving experiences of my life. And so today I wanna talk to you about the three lessons I've learned from being Bear's Dad. And I think they're gonna matter for you, whether you're building a business or just trying to be a better human.
Let's jump in.
Welcome to 10 Minute Masterclass, your weekly mic drop [00:01:00] for Business breakthrough. I'm your host, Tre Sheneman, and it's our goal each week on this show to teach you timeless business principles that we think are gonna help you solve today's business problems. Now we do that by going through one of the core four drivers of growth each week, marketing, sales, ops, and leadership.
And in today's episode we're gonna talk about leadership. We're gonna continue our series on the greatest leadership lessons that I've ever learned. But today we're gonna talk about a very special leader in my life, my 14-year-old son Bear. Bear has had a one of one kind of life. He's a bit of a medical enigma.
He's got some challenges that even now at, at 14 and a half, almost 15 years of age are just now getting a diagnosis. And so we've had to live and navigate a lot of unknowns with our son Bear for a very long time. And so. I will tell you that being an entrepreneur, especially these last three years of entrepreneurship, a Bear's life, you know, I, I find myself in the day to day of my business life being obsessed with speed.
Just, just wishing things would go faster. Um, you know, the old adage of move fast and break things. But I will tell [00:02:00] you these last three years for me have really taught me, especially with Bear, to learn to just slow down that rushing might not just break things, it might break people. And breaking people is an outcome that none of us should ever want.
And so in this. Today's content, I kind of want to talk to you about lessons I had to learn the hard way of, uh, of, of trying to go too fast with Bear and learning to just live at Bear's pace sometimes and what that might mean for my own development. And I think you're gonna find that there's a timeless nature to some of these principles that are gonna work in the day-to-day of leading a team with you as well.
And so the first one that I would say the first leadership lesson that I've learned from my son Bear, is that patience isn't passive. It's actually strategic. See, when you're parenting a special needs kid, their milestone development is quote unquote atypical. Um. Since, like I said earlier, most business owners tend to be assessed with speed.
I've really just learned that slowing down even, even when it's in the [00:03:00] small skills, just like slowing down and appreciating the moment, living at a melodic three quarters time instead of halftime, you know, just, just, uh, slowing down a little bit is actually where things. Come alive in our household. And so I think back to early on with Bear, we were working on a really small skill, like him learning how to tie his shoes.
And I was getting really frustrated because, you know, I can tie shoes in like three or four seconds. Hartley, his younger sister had learned how to tie her shoes and we really learned, we let him slow down, we let him try, let him fail. We would just cheer him on the more he would get it. And we weren't being.
Just like passive in our waiting, we were being strategic. We were trying to let him get the win himself of learning. Now, tie his shoes. Now the funny thing is about Bear is now he loves to have shoes that look tied, but you just slide on because they're just an easier thing to do. So there's some sort of a business hack in there too.
But I will tell you, learning to be patient with Bear taught me that patience can be a strategy when you can see the light come on in somebody's eyes whenever they get to a win. And that might be the same thing that you need to do with some of your team members. [00:04:00] Patients might need to be a strategy.
The second lesson that I've learned from being a special needs dad to Bear. Is that it's really, really important to celebrate micro wins, like their championships. Most companies, mine included, we tend to really celebrate when we hit big quarterly goals or annual revenue. Um, and you know, I. Those things are good, but with with Bear and the way he receives appreciation and affection and admonition, we learned that the tiny victories are actually worth celebrating too, because that's actually where you could build momentum in your relationship and the ability for things to move forward.
Like I remember the first time he started learning how to like button his own shirts, put his own outfits together. You know, he comes down the stairs from where his second floor bedroom is and he's got this outfit on and you kind of just give him that look like, hmm. I don't know. So I don't, I don't know if that shirt goes with that, or even just earlier today, he was getting dressed and showed me what he was wearing and he had like 19 stains on the front of his shirt.
And he was just like, [00:05:00] yeah, but dad, I like this shirt. And it's like, you know, sometimes you gotta just like, Hey, he's putting an outfit together. It somewhat matches. He's excited. He feels comfortable in his own skin. Let's celebrate that. Let's celebrate the level of responsibility that he's taken in his own life instead of being so commandeering about things having to go a certain way. So I would just encourage you, it doesn't have to be a Super Bowl level celebration when the small wins happen, but just a, you know, a handwritten note to a team member in need or a calling somebody into your office or doing a special call where you just tell 'em, Hey, we were in a meeting last week.
And you did this thing, and I just really appreciate it the way that you did that. And I wanted to tell you thank you. Little things like that, like the little moments with Bear, they're gonna go a long way in the ability for you to build culture inside of your company and strong relationships with your team members.
Sure, celebrate hitting year end numbers. Um, but celebrate hitting daily numbers too. Celebrate, you know, people having a strong work ethic, so on and so forth. The third lesson that I've learned from Bear is to adapt the [00:06:00] plan, not the goal. Um. One of our big goals with Bear was for him to find his thing.
Uh, you know, if you put yourself in our shoes, Bear's condition. It doesn't allow him to play team sports. It doesn't allow him to be a part of those communities. It, it means, I can think about, I, I think in 15 years of life he might, he might have been invited to three birthday parties or four birthday parties his entire life.
But those kinds of things frustrate me more than they frustrate Bear. But even so, we as a family started realizing you Bear loves to spend time at home. Some of it is related to his be, he's on the spectrum. He loves routine, but. We also wanted him to find an outlet, find something that he could put his Bear joy into, and we felt like it could be music, which just is a whole crazy story if you actually know more about Bear and one of his other conditions related to his hearing.
And it would just be amazing if this kid was actually great at music and the way we decided to take on music was to take on. The piano. It was something Bear started being interested in. Now, [00:07:00] the early days of piano was a lot of like shoulder shrugging and frustration around having, I gotta go take lessons, who am I gonna be taking lessons from?
Thankfully we ended up finding this really amazing instructor named Mr. Leroy, and they became really good friends. And when we're meeting Mr. Leroy, Mr. Leroy has a suggestion. He's like, Hey, some teachers want to teach people theory. I don't think Bear is gonna be a theory kind of player. I think Bear's gonna be a feel kind of player and if we let him be a feel kind of player, I think we're gonna see him shine.
So what that meant was Mr. Leroy started coaching Bear into playing songs. He loved songs from video games or movies or stories that he knew and man did this kid thrive, starting to learn how to play stuff he was interested in. So practices went from being a battle to now not only can Bear play the piano.
Really, really well guys. It's so moving when you get to hear him play. But this same way of playing stuff you love has now taken, uh, its impact on his little sister who's five years younger than him, and now she's playing the piano and [00:08:00] she's learned how to play things she loves, and it just makes our house so vibrant and so alive.
You know, I'll go downstairs for lunch and hear Bear playing the theme song to Jurassic Park, or he'll be playing the entertainer. That song, it's a rag time kind of a song. There's just so much interesting things that happen in our house because we didn't force a lesson plan. We just forced people into the things that they loved.
So I would say with your team when you're, when you're really wanting to develop somebody, figure out if there's a. Some area of their job that they really love and let them use that le as leverage in their path. So there's some powerful takeaways here. Um, you don't always have to lead, see leadership as commanding from the front.
Sometimes good leadership is meeting people where they are and, and actually coming beside them instead of in front of them and helping them learn to step into their own potential in a fresh way. It's less like a factory good leadership and more like a garden where you're planting seeds and you're watering the soil and you're.
Taking the time to appreciate what's gonna grow. [00:09:00] And that's the impact that Bear has had on me. And I hope these lessons that I've learned from being Bear's Dad can have an impact on you and your business. Um, as always, I'm so grateful you would take 10 minutes of your life. Everybody's busy to join us here on this podcast.
I hope you got something powerful out of this episode, and I hope we can get connected. So follow me on LinkedIn or sign up for our newsletter on 10 minute mc.com, the link's in the show notes. Either way, I hope you'll come back and tune in next time. So until then, I'll see you on the flip side.
