My 3 Tips For Parenthood And Life

Just over a year ago, I was asked to speak at a summit for lawyers about being a parent in BigLaw, in particular, being a father.

 I was on a panel with two other women who were mothers and it was a really good discussion.  From that, I  was recently invited by one of the other speakers to provide coaching to new and expectant fathers as part of a retainer her company has with a law firm which I was so happy to do because I've been there. 

As I was thinking about the upcoming sessions and looking back on my time as an expectant father in BigLaw, 
I asked myself what I wish I'd known back then.

That transpired into a post that I made on LinkedIn, which was my three tips for parenthood. 

But I realised as I read back through the tips, that although I was writing them from the viewpoint of a parent, these tips were universal. 

These same tips applied to me in business and in changing the way that I live my life. 

 So, although these started out as 3 tips for Parenthood, they're 3 tips that are useful for anyone, who is thinking of changing where they are, changing their situation, to do something different from the norm, different than what they're expected to do. 

So, whether you're a parent or not, I hope you find these 3 tips helpful. They're going to give you a different way of thinking about things, thinking about change, thinking about doing things differently. 

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Transcript

Ryan Spence: 0:00

I've been through that process of being an expectant father, a new father and then a father of two young boys, and looking at the career that I was in and thinking I don't want to be here. This is not going to be conducive to being the type of father that I want to be. You're listening to the Triple C Project. Welcome to the Triple C Project, the podcast that helps you gain clarity, use confidence and courage so you can live life lit. I'm your host, ryan Spence, the big law dropout, life coach, author, speaker, lover of hoodies, hip hop and big, hairy, abacious goals. If you're tired of living the life you think you should want and ready to start living the life you do want, this podcast will help you get from where you are to where you really want to be. So now, with friends, I invite you to grab a drink, take a seat and allow me to guide you towards living a life that's lit. Hey, welcome to episode 82 of the Triple C Project. The fact that I'm here means that I survived. I survived the 10K race I've been talking about for the last few episodes. But not only did I survive, I thrived. So I wanted ideally to do the race in under an hour. But given my late start to training that I've talked about, and the issues with my back, which I'd also talked about, I was kind of happy if I did it in below an hour or 10. But what actually happened is it was perfect conditions for race day. It was a little bit overcast, there was a little bit of rain coming down, it's a little bit cloudy, not too hot, and the course was flatter than I expected, given that Sheffield is full of a load of hills, as, again, I've spoken about some of the hills I encountered on my last training run. But I finished in under an hour, 58 minutes 37 seconds, to be exact, which I was very, very pleased about. And not only that, I felt great afterwards and in fact I felt so great that I've now signed up for not only for next year's race but another one in November, a trail race here as well, another 10K. So I'm really pleased with that. So that's my update. And I'm back, I'm here, I'm ready to go, I'm feeling good.

Ryan Spence: 2:23

So before we dive into today's episode, I wanted to just shout out a couple of things, a couple of ways that you can support the show. So if you've been listening to the show. You get value from the show, you feel that what you're hearing here is helpful for you, for people around you. You're sharing it, you're talking about it. I thank you for that, and I just wanted to give you three additional ways that you could also support the show. So one is by leaving a review. A review it just helps me know what's driving with you, what you like, what you get out of it, and it kind of really helps anyone who's a creator as much as they create for themselves and to put their thoughts and their ideas and experiences out into the world. It's always nice to kind of hear how those thoughts and experiences land with other people, and reviews are a good way of doing that. So you can head to ratethispodcastcom slash triple C and you can leave a review there. It doesn't matter what platform you listen to the show on. You can leave a review there and I will get to check it out, and that's free.

Ryan Spence: 3:28

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Ryan Spence: 4:00

And finally, the book. If you have not already got your copy of the triple C method, you go ahead and grab yourself a copy and you can do that for all the usual places, including the place where you could support the rich billionaire to take another trip to the moon. But if you don't want to do that and you want to make sure that the money that you spent on that book is going to do something that's a little bit more useful to life, to humans, to people that are building rockets to the moon, you can head to payhipcom slash Ryan Spence books or just head to ironrinespencecom slash book and you can buy the book directly from me. We get the paperback, the ebook and the audio book. So thank you, thank you for your support, thank you for listening, and those are just some additional ways that you can support the show.

Ryan Spence: 4:53

All of those links are in the show description and yeah, I just needed to not talk about that more. I have not mentioned those things, even though they've been around for quite some time now, so I just kind of wanted to drop that in here. Okay, let's get to the show. So just over a year ago I was asked to speak at a summit for lawyers and one of the things I was asked to speak about was about being a parent and being a lawyer, so in particular, being a father. So I was on a panel with two other women who were mothers and I was on there as a father as well and it was a really good discussion that we had a really good round table and from that I actually got invited by one of the other speakers to do some coaching. So she runs a company that basically goes into law firms and talks about how law firms can support parents and why supporting parents is a good thing, because there is a lot of lawyers who, once you become a parent, particularly in big law, it's not really a conducive environment supporting being a parent and the unpredictability of being a parent. Mother's all fathers. So the work that they're doing is fantastic and they say recently they say they've got a retainer for a firm to give coaching to expect some fathers and they asked me if I wanted to be a part of that, which I was so happy to do, partly because before I became a father, when I was in that process of knowing I was going to be and not really knowing what to expect having all those things, and that transpired into a post that I did, which was my three tips for parenthood, which I'm going to share with you today.

Ryan Spence: 6:44

But think about these three tips as I was writing them. As I read back through them, I realized that actually, although I was writing them from the viewpoint of a parent becoming a parent, these are actually universal. These actually have applied to me in business and in changing the way that I live my life and selling up my own mission, away from big law and going in a whole new direction. So, although these are called three tips for parenthood, they're actually three tips that are useful for anyone, particularly anyone who is thinking of changing where they are changing their situation, who is thinking of making a pivot, getting a new job, taking a new direction, just doing something different from the norm, different than what they are expected to do. So, whether you're a parent or not, I hope that these three tips are going to be valuable to you. They're going to give you a different way of thinking about things, thinking about change, thinking about doing things differently. So three tips for parenthood and for life.

Ryan Spence: 7:52

So the number one tip I've got and this will be no surprise to you if you've been listening to the show, you've read the book be clear on your core values. So you'll know that I'm big on clarity. Clarity is the, is the foundation, because until you're clear about what it is that you want, you can't know which direction you're going to head. You can't know the steps that you need to take, the people you need to speak to. And that starts with values. It starts with that GPS system that allows you to make decisions easier, because you are making them based upon something that you Fundamentally believing that is really important to you, because you're gonna have to make difficult decisions as a parent.

Ryan Spence: 8:34

I mean, how do you take care of your kid? How do you interact with your in-laws or your own parents when they're not doing things the way you want them to do? Where do you send your child to school? What vaccinations do you do you get them to have? I mean, who do you hang out with? Where do you live? So many decisions you're gonna have to make.

Ryan Spence: 8:52

If you're in big law or your corporate job and you're miserable and you're happy and you're unfulfilled, you're gonna have to make decisions about you mean do I quit, do I move to a different department? Do I find a way that I can manage being in this world, in this environment, or is it just all too much? Do I need to get out? Do I change careers completely? Do I go off and travel around the world for a year and try to find myself? There are lots of decisions, I guess. So, again, core values. Being clear on those core values is going to help you to make those decisions. It's going to make making those decisions easier not easy, but easier. So that's the number one tip be clear on your core values. Tip number two Accept.

Ryan Spence: 9:41

Nobody has the answers. Everybody's winging it. Now, this is really apparent when you're a parent. There are all of the books out there that you can buy and you can read, and there are all of these people Parents, in-laws, aunts, uncles, friends all well meaning who all have their own opinions on how you should raise your children, how you should be, how you should discipline your child, what you should feed them, how you should dress them, where you should send them, but nobody knows. Everybody's giving you information based upon their own experience and that doesn't mean that you just discount it. But what it means is that you have to look at it through your own filter, through your own lens. You've got to look at it through going back to the first tip your own values.

Ryan Spence: 10:26

How do you want to do it? Because people can have all the experience of the world, they can have written all the books in the world, but ultimately they're not you and they have done things the way that they thought that they should be done, probably the way that their parents or their grandparents told them, or society told them how to do things at the time. But nobody has the perfect blueprint for anything. No one has the perfect blueprint blueprint for raising children. No one has the perfect blueprint for what to do if you really hate your job and you're miserable. No one has the perfect blueprint for what to do if you realize the career that you chose is no longer the career that you want and it's not going to give you the life that you want Nobody, even I don't. But what I can do is I can share my experiences with you and you can take from that what serves you and leave what doesn't.

Ryan Spence: 11:19

But you have to use your own critical thinking and look at it through your own lens. Don't look to other people to be the expert and Look. This is not. I'm not talking about dismissing science, for example, for climate change, but I'm talking about you and your life and how you want to live it. And look at other people to be the expert of your life. You are the expert of your life. You just need to gather in the information and then filter it through your own lens, through filter it through your own filter system, your own values, to figure out what it is that you want to do and how you want to Try things, and also know that you can change course if that's not working. So Tip number two except nobody has the answers, everybody else is ringing it, so don't compare. And Tip number three recognize you're doing the best you can. Now you will be the only one who knows if you're doing the best that you can.

Ryan Spence: 12:16

But typically we are. We're trying to navigate uncharted waters with the information that we have and the experience that we have, not knowing really what we are doing so. You get home from the hospital with this new baby and it's kind of like okay, what the fuck? Now, what do I do? Because you realize that you may have forgotten to change your snappy on time, or you forgot to feed it, or they get a bit older and you take your charter school on the day when there's a teacher training day. I may or may not have done that, or you know, you send them to school in the wrong uniform or whatever it is. There are all of these balls in the air that you're trying to juggle and you're always going to feel like that amateur juggler who can't juggle, who just drops things. That's going to happen, and I want you to know that. That doesn't make you a bad person, it just makes you human. We're all trying to juggle all of these balls in the air.

Ryan Spence: 13:13

And for all the talk of finding balance, finding work-life balance, as I've said on the earlier episode, balance is an illusion. Balance isn't a destination. It's fine to strive for balance, but if you're going to keep beating yourself up because you're not in a state of balance, then you're going to be beating yourself up for the rest of your life. So give yourself some grace. Recognize that there's a lot on. There's a lot in life that's going on. There's a lot of demands, a lot of distractions, a lot of shards, and you've got to kind of figure out okay, I can't do everything, so what is it I need to do right now? And recognize that at times when you do drop the ball because you will drop the ball, you may drop multiple balls at the same time but recognize doing the best that I can, evaluate the situation and maybe ask yourself is there a way I could have done things differently? But don't beat yourself up about it, because you just keep beating yourself down to the point where you won't want to get up and do anything and everything will just fall by the wayside. So I just want you to, as I said, give yourself some grace, recognize you're doing the best that you can and you're going to feel like you're dropping things, but you're human. That's what's going to happen.

Ryan Spence: 14:40

So, to recap on the three tips for parenthood and for life, number one be clear on your core values. You will have many difficult decisions to make and knowing your core values will make them easier, but not easy. So accept that nobody has all the answers. Everybody else is winging it. So don't compare yourself to where other people are. Run your own race. And, number three, recognize you're doing the best you can. You'll always feel like that amateur juggler who can't juggle and drops the balls. This doesn't make you a bad person, it makes you human.

Ryan Spence: 15:21

So then, the three tips I want to show you today. There are many, many more, I'm sure, but those three really hit me as I was thinking about getting into coaching some of these new dads that I'm going to be working with. I'd love to hear which of those tips really hit you, really made a change for you, really created a shift in your thinking. And I'd also like to know what would you add to that list? Whether you're a parent or not, it doesn't matter. As they say, these are three tips for parenthood and for life. So I'm really intrigued and interested to kind of hear what you would add to the list, what you found useful as you progress on your own quest through your life.

Ryan Spence: 16:02

Whatever it is that you're doing, wherever it is that you are heading, send me an email, hey. At. I am Ryan Spencecom. Hit me up on Instagram. At I am, underscore, ryan Spence. Oh, over on LinkedIn, find me at Ryan Spence and let me know, always great to hear from you and hear what you think and what you take away from these episodes.

Ryan Spence: 16:25

And don't forget to share. Share the episode with anyone that you find think would be helpful. It could be an expectant parent, a new parent, it could be somebody who's in a tricky situation, is just trying to decide which way to go. If you think these tips would help them, send them. Share the show with them. Okay, that's it for me. This week you could probably hear, as my allergies are kicking in again, which is really frustrating. But I hope you've got everything you need from this episode. I look forward to hear from you. See you next week for another episode of the Triple C project. Until then, stop living a life of lethargy, start living life. Thanks for tuning in to the Triple C project.

Ryan Spence: 17:07

In the spirit of the triple C is three things that you can do to support the show. Head to rate this podcastcom, slash triple C or over to your favorite podcast app and leave a review. Reviews really help people checking out shows to see what they can expect and how this show can help them. Second thing you can do share. Share this episode, share a previous episode with a friend, someone who you feel could benefit from what I'm throwing down on this show. And number three, head to imryanspentercom. Get on the main list. I'll be sharing news about the show, news about what I'm up to my new book Start writing soon. So to be the first to be in the know, you need to get yourself on the list. Really appreciate you being here and, until next week, stop living a life of lethargy, living life lit. Thank you, have a great week. Bye.