Executive Perspectives On Letting Go of Perfect #052

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You want to be the person that your team counts on. You want to be there for your kids at the same time. So what happens when you expect yourself to be perfect at both?
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It's almost like setting myself up for a burnout.
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You're just going to work all weekend. And it was that moment where it was like, things change right now I
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was really stressed, 100% is not good enough. I can't do it all.
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I thought it was going to be through step one, two, three. And it's actually not even numerical.
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There's 20% of the time where it has to be 100% perfect.
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I could have done this better. You become very, very self critical.
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You spent years being the person that figures it out. So how do you actually keep doing the work and being there for your family without running yourself into the ground? Welcome to CEOs and ABCs. Real stories from execs who lead at work and show up at home. Career moves, parenting wins and fails and everything in between. I'm your host, Kevin Rice. Here's today's episode. We've all heard the phrase good is the enemy of great. But when you've got a high pressure job, it's. And kids, I think great can actually become the enemy of good. I've been there myself trying to get everything perfect. It just left me burnt out and struggling to show up in both places. So what happens when you let go of perfect? Welcome back to CEOs and ABCs. I'm Kevin Rice. The people I talk to on the show have a lot of responsibilities at work and the people at home need them too. To today we're looking at what happens when you expect yourself to be perfect at both. Nancy Rowe told me about a work trip where she tried to fit her son's birthday between two meetings in Europe. Looking back, she questioned what she put herself through to make it all happen.
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Looking back on all the things I did to try and be super mom, but at the same time try and be super career woman and to try and be super wife also. Some of it, Kevin, I don't know if you feel this way. Some of it was unnecessary because it is. It's almost like setting myself up for burnout, for failure. When you try to carry all the things, try to carry all the titles all the time. Do you know like you were asking about even the holidays, like, how do you. So now I'm in a rhythm where I know like when I have to start holiday planning versus work. But even in raising my children, there were times I did Crazy things to try to keep up, keep juggling all the balls, which is just. If I had to go back, there are definitely different choices I would have made. I'll give you the story. So my son's birthday is May 10th. And Kevin, I was working in a dream job and my boss had set up a meeting in the uk so we had to go to London, me and a few other colleagues. So it wasn't just a my trip, it was me and some other colleagues. This was, we have a work trip, we have a meeting in London on a Friday. And then my boss also set up a meeting on Monday in Paris.
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And of course you took red eyes back and forth.
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Yes, Kevin, I did. I did do that for my son's birthday that he will never remember that I did that. So who did I do that for? I don't know. Maybe he was turning 6, 7 or 8. It's somewhere in that he will never. While the rest of the team stayed there and had the best time in London and then to Paris, I came back and forth and I wish somebody would have told me he won't even know it's his birthday. And you can celebrate it like the following weekend, it would be fine. But sometimes those are the things where we are over sacrificing. We need a wake up call where we need to care for ourselves as Lee, as all the roles that we play. And so sometimes it's not doing the red eye back and forth because then you're going to end up being burnt out.
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That's a lot of effort to keep everybody happy. Your boss, your family and your own idea of what you should be able to handle. Jeff Jenkins was leading a Turnaround as a CMO when his 5 year old son sent something to him that made him really question how he was spending his time.
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Yeah, no, I think we all have those watershed moments where you're like, okay, I've got to, I've got to get this under control for me. I was cmo. I was doing a private equity turnaround sort of job. My wife was taking my daughter out of town for the weekend. She was the troop leader for the Girl Scouts and she was taking my daughter on a girl Scout trip. And my son, as we were, my wife was packing up to go with my daughter. We're all sort of, you know, putzing around the house trying to figure out what we're doing. My son looks at my wife and goes, mom, who's going to take care of me this weekend? And she looks at me and she goes, well, Your dad's going to take care of me. She's like, your dad will take care of you. And he goes, well, he's just going to work all weekend. And I was like, oh. And I was like, well, we're going to go over, see Mr. Jason. Who was the time, you know, someone I was working with. And he goes, you're just going to work all weekend. And it was that moment where it was like the stab in the heart. You know, even my son didn't have faith that I could do the dad job because I clearly wasn't doing a good enough job. And he at the time was five. So he had the awareness at five years old. And that was the moment right then and there that I was like, okay, things change right now.
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I think that's what makes this so hard, is that the work does matter. You have a team that's depending on you and real problems to solve, but at the same time, your kids need you, too. I've been physically present with my kids while I was still thinking about work. And I've also had the stress at home affect how I showed up at work. You know, you carry it with you. Cameron Herold was dealing with some major changes at work and at home, along with his mom's illness. So when I asked him about burnout and how it showed up for him, he told me about a moment in an elevator.
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It's interesting. I was in an elevator with somebody
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from the Internet company. He tapped me on the shoulder and
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he goes, you okay? I turned around to say yes.
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I collapsed on the floor of the
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elevator and I was crying.
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I was really stressed. And suddenly I just went home and
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had a couple drinks, smoked a couple
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cigarettes like I did 20 years ago,
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and got up the next day and kept.
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Kept charging. I really relate to him saying that he was fine. I always thought I was fine. And then again, I burned out. I've talked about how I could still work really hard while feeling very disconnected from myself, my family, and my team. So I had to pay attention to how I was actually showing up for people. So how do you actually keep doing the work you care about and being there for your family without running yourself into the ground. Jenny McGarra and I were talking about how she went through IVF while continuing on with her career. And she shared something that helped her rethink what she was asking of herself.
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I think I read. I read an article a long time ago by Ann Marie Slaughter. I think it was in the Atlantic called why Women can't have It. All. And it said, sounds like it's like this very negative, debity, downer, pessimistic way to. To look at the world. But it was actually super inspiring and uplifting to me. It was saying that there's some advice out there that says women can have it all. Like, you can work the perfect job, be the perfect this, and be the perfect mother and go through IVF and do all the things. And this article says, actually you can't, and that's okay. And to make peace with that and to, like, say, this is what I prioritize and this is what I decide to do, I'm going to do that as best I can, and then I'm going to come over here and do this as best I can. But I might not be 100% in both places. And I think once, and I'm the product of an East Asian culture where it's like, 100% is not good enough. You have to get extra credit. I got to get that quote, unquote, Asian A on everything. And so the idea of not being perfect in every aspect of my life was so difficult for me to wrap my head around. But once I accepted that and I was like, I. I can't do it all, so I'm gonna do this, and this is what's important to me right now, and then I'll come back over here and see what I can do. It was number one freeing, but it allowed me to be better in both in all arenas. I did. I wasn't perfect. I didn't have it all, but I took out a lot of that, like, mental tax I was putting on myself.
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She said letting go actually made her better at both. And I think that's the part a lot of us have a hard time believing. Hi, Kevin here. If you're enjoying this conversation and you know someone else who's working to grow in their career while staying present at home, I'd really love it if you could share this episode with them. It's one of the best ways you can help us and help more leaders build their careers in a way that they're proud of without missing the moments that matter most. You spent years being the person that figures it out, puts in the extra hours, and makes sure that it's perfect. And then you have kids and you expect yourself to bring that same level of attention and perfectionism to every part of their lives. Melissa Grady Diaz had a very specific idea about how she wanted to feed her son. And I like what she learned when it didn't go the way she expected.
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The things that I'm learning from being a mom are like, it's interesting that you just really start to realize how little control you have of things, which is probably a good, maybe a good, maybe a bad thing. I think it's been very interesting. An example of this is I'm very careful about what I eat. And in my head, my son was going to have all organic raw foods and was going to eat, and I was gonna, you know, it's the palate. It's how you train the palate. And like, in my head, I really believe that I could affect that. And I'm very picky about what goes into his mouth. But, like, let me tell you, there's a lot of French toast, which I never would have thought. Now the bread is the, like, hundred out of 100 on the app of, like, organic best ingredients. The eggs are like farm rice, but it's French toast. I'm like, please eat it. What can I do? And so I think understanding that, which gives you an interesting perspective of realizing that you maybe can't control the process, but that you have to focus more on the outcome. And what am I trying to achieve? A healthy individual. So, like, that's not going to. I thought it was going to be through step one, two, three, and it's actually like, not even numerical. It's adc. Here we go. Like, let's figure out. And having that flexibility and focusing on the outcome I think is a. Is a good lesson for me as a human being.
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I think that question works in a lot of places. How much do you care? At work, you might have a presentation that's really ready, but you're still fine tuning it and changing the slides up until the last minute. At home, you're trying to make dinner just the way you pictured it or the way you saw it in the recipe book. Well, your kids just need to eat something, and what they really need is to spend that time with you. So how much time are you going to keep putting into it when something else actually needs you more? When I asked Doug Zarkin about what fatherhood had taught him about leadership, he talks about how he makes decisions at work and at home.
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Yeah, the 80, 20 rule. 80% of the time, if something's at the 80% level of completion or perfection, it goes. And I'm thinking like, in particular, creative. You're looking at a piece of creative 80% of the time. If that piece of creative is 80% in your mind, perfect, you let it go. But it equally taught me that there's 20% of the time where it has to be 100% perfect. And I think with my kids I learned that lesson. If my 16 year old wants to be what I like to call a bag of dumb on a 30 degree day and wear hooded sweatshirt and shorts to school, so as long as he's not going to come down with pneumonia, fine.
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Okay.
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And yes, is it gratifying that when I pull up and drop him off, all the rest of the dumb 16 year old boys are wearing hooded sweatshirts and shorts at a 35 degree day? Sure. I think the idea of proportionality is something that as a parent you are forced to, especially when you have more than one. With the first kid, everything was a major issue. Every cough, every sneeze, every cut, every whatever. With the second one you're just like, all right, he's going to eat chicken fingers and that's all he's going to eat for the next month. Okay, he'll survive, they'll be okay, he'll be okay.
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As a leader, you have to decide what actually deserves your attention and what your team can handle on their own. At home, you make those decisions too. Your kids need to help with some things and they need the room to figure out others themselves. That takes some trust and you're still going to have moments where you'd wish you'd handled something differently. Brent Cook talks about how hard he was on himself as an executive.
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I'll share my own therapy story that I was very, as I think of many people who are aspiring executives, you're very self critical, right? Like I could have done this better or I'm not handling enough, or I'm not moving fast enough or you become very, very self critical. And my therapist, early on this was when I was going through my divorce and trying to figure out how to, how to cope with not just what was happening in my family, but what about me was driving a lot of that and what was my level of accountability in it? And my therapist said, I'm going to ask you some questions about your daughter. She said, what would you say if I said your daughter comes to you and says I'm a failure? What would you say if your daughter comes to you and says I'm not good enough? And I'm like, oh my God, I'd be appalled. And she's like, why don't you believe that somebody wants that for you? And I'm like, you know, you weren't supposed to say that.
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I think about how quickly I'd reassure one of my kids if they told me they felt like a failure and then I think about how hard I can actually be on myself. I've had to go back to my son and apologize for how I've reacted when he fell out of a tree. I've had to call a client partner and apologize for the way I gave feedback because stress at home was affecting how I showed up at work and stress at work was affecting how I showed up at home. But in both cases, I could go back, take responsibility, and try to handle it better the next time. So think about one thing at work and one thing at home where you're asking yourself to get everything right. What would actually be enough? What could somebody else handle and what could you let go of? I want to do good work as much as the next person. I want to be a good father and I want to have the energy and attention to keep doing both. So I think letting go of perfect gives us better chance at doing just that. If any one of these conversations connected with you, the full episodes are linked below. And if you know somebody who's trying to keep up with a demanding job and raising kids, I'd appreciate if you send this episode to them. Thanks for spending some time with me. I'm Kevin Rice and I'll see you next time. If you've enjoyed this conversation, make sure to hit subscribe so you don't miss future episodes. CEOs and ABCs is all about helping you grow in your career and show up at home. We have many more amazing guests coming up, so tap, follow and stay tuned.