#181 How to Stay Close as a Family When Life Gets Busy with Jeremy Hill Transcript

THIS IS AN AUTOMATED TRANSCRIPT… PLEASE FORGIVE THE TYPOS & GRAMMAR! xo-Lisa.

Lisa Marker-Robbins 0:46
How do you raise connected, confident kids while growing a successful business and navigating what is undeniably one of the busiest stages of life for many parents, the push and pull between work and family can feel like a constant struggle. Jeremy Hill knows that challenge very well, and he’s sharing the intentional ways he stayed deeply connected to his wife and three kids through the very busy years of building JB capital. In this inspiring conversation, Jeremy opens up about the small but mighty habits that make a big difference, like showing up for each other’s events and playing his questions game to build deeper relationships with each child. He’s going to share about that on this episode. He also shares how faith and family serve as his compass, guiding both his professional and his personal choices. You’ll be encouraged by Jeremy’s honesty around guilt grace and the myth of perfect parenting, and you’ll walk away with ideas you can implement right now to nurture stronger family bonds while pursuing meaningful work. I’m Lisa marker Robbins, and I want to welcome you to College and Career Clarity a flourish coaching production. Let’s dive right into a great conversation.

Lisa Marker-Robbins 2:02
Jeremy Hill, welcome to the show. It is a pleasure to have

Jeremy Hill 2:06
you one and Lisa, great to see you. So I’m excited

Lisa Marker-Robbins 2:09
because this is not our usual episode, but I think it’s going to resonate broadly with our audience. Our listeners are moms and dads who like you and me, they’re busy working and raising families, and they some of them might be entrepreneurs like you and I are, and that brings us a special set of challenges. Or, you know, if you’re in the C suite, that does too, but regardless, everybody’s feeling the demands on their life when they’re busy raising teenagers. And I think that what we’re going to talk about staying connected as a family through raising kids and launching kids is going to be insightful for everybody. So welcome.

Jeremy Hill 2:54
That was easy when you say it doesn’t

Lisa Marker-Robbins 2:56
it? No, exactly. So I mean, we need to hear about your family first, right? So tell us a little bit about your family. Got three kiddos, right?

Jeremy Hill 3:05
Yeah. So my wife and I’ve been together a little bit better than 30 years. We’ve been married 29 years, coming up here in a couple of months, she’s normally a tremendous judge of character. Outside of her decision to marry me is still, you know, a little squishy. I just but she’s, see my wife is amazing, so I’ll get our 29th wedding anniversary coming up, we got three kids, boy, girl, boy, so as we record this podcast, they are 2421 and 18 and a motley crew, you know, just, just wonderful kids. So my eldest just graduated business school about six months ago or so and is out getting his grown up on and doing all that kind of stuff. And my daughter is just finishing her sophomore year in business school and still trying to figure out what grown up looks like. Yeah. And then my youngest son, who’s just an adjective unto himself, is a junior in high school and getting ready to go into his senior year, and, you know, doing all the things that crazy teenage boys do. Hey,

Lisa Marker-Robbins 4:05
you know, we talk a lot on the show about, what does it mean to be a grown up? What does it mean to launch right? And, like you said, like figuring it out. And I watched our kids figure it out, each in their own ways, and it’s fun to watch and support them through that.

Jeremy Hill 4:21
So, yeah, sure. No, I was gonna say, you know, it it is interesting to see your kids grow up and see how it is that their their thought patterns change, and how their decision making changes, and how they start to take a little bit more independence of thought, and what it is that they’re going to do or be or become, or go, or all these other kinds of things. And reality is, is that all of us you know as parents, it is you, you you love on your kids and you want the absolute best for them, and no matter if they’re 10 years old or 30 years old before you go to bed, that’s what you’re worried about. You know, you’re always worried about praying about your kids and loving on your kids and hoping. Best for them and helping they figure it out to a certain degree, though, I think that that’s a part of life. It is for everybody. Like I’m 50 years old, half of the people it is that I know still don’t have their shit figured out. I mean, they’re still wrestling with issues and problems and not necessarily trying to be what you know, figure out what you want to be when you grow up, necessarily, but still going through the life changes. It is that says I don’t know if I’m going to go down this path. Go down this path or this path. So, you know, I guess all that goes to show it is that when your kids are five years old, or whatever it is, you know, or not, five years old, but 18 years old, give them a little grace. We’re all still figuring

Lisa Marker-Robbins 5:34
it out. Well, I think, you know, I know one of the things that you’re really passionate about is mentorship. And, you know, I we had kind of talked about that beforehand, and that’s something that’s near and dear to you. And like, mentoring starts in our own homes. I believe, Oh, without a doubt, and it doesn’t even need to be like a real person, like I consider some mentors, people who I follow, who I voraciously read or listen to everything that they do, right? And one of the things that I was I was on somebody’s YouTube show we just recorded yesterday, and we were talking about this topic of mentorship and launching, and it was really aimed at like, kids who are newly graduating from college. So you have one of those. I have one of those. My youngest is the same age as your oldest, and with that, the idea that normalizing you’re you’re still going to feel scared even I’m 56 so even in your 50s, you and I can sit here and say, like you show up scared, you’re still going to have uncertainty. You aren’t going to have everything figured out. And to kind of normalize that with others. I mean, sure that you have had, as I have had, like, there’s lots of up and down, especially with recessions and COVID when we’re an entrepreneur. And what are some of the greatest lessons, ways that you’ve been able to tell your own teach your own kids, that or even those that you’re mentoring,

Jeremy Hill 7:02
you know, I think I’m a positive. And come back to what it is that you said a minute ago, to where some of your mentors have not necessarily been somebody it is that you sit down with on a one on one coaching basis. Yeah, we’d all whoever it is that you admire or hope to emulate, from, you know, Tony Robbins and Sarah Blakely at Ed mylett to Kobe Bryant, who you know, whoever your person is, you know that you look to more often than not. It is you’re not going to be fortunate enough to be able to sit down one on one and break down life and all your problems and stresses. It is, you know, directly with Tony Robbins or whoever it is that you want it to be. But whoever that person is, you know there can be an extraordinary degree of kind of mentorship and learning and kind of just soaking that in, like you said, through a podcast, through a book, through, you know, the seminar that they go to, to any of these other kinds of things, it is to be able to capture that for the betterment of yourself and kind of the advancement of your thought. I’m a huge proponent of that, and so I’m just now to a point to where it is that, like, I’m really, really good at the absorption of podcasts and books and all the other stuff. It is that everybody does, right? And you can do that till your brain explodes, right? But at some point there needs to be some degree of kind of one on one fellowship. And I’m interviewing right now coaches for myself. And so I love that aspect of what it is that you’re doing, and the world has become so proliferate or so available of information right now is that anybody should be like spending time there, diving in, into whatever medium, books or podcasts or audio books or whatever you want to do, that kind of stuff for me and my own kids, and how it is that we’re guiding, I think A lot of the the mentorship or leadership that’s effective, necessarily, because we, we’ve gotten into this world right now because turn on social media, right? Like, everybody’s a coach, right? And then you have coaches who coach, coaches about coaching, other coaches about coaching. And you’re like, so what do you do? Right? What are you coaching me on? If you’re a coach of coaches, coaches like, please be quiet, right? Exactly. A lot of the ability it is for you, and what it is that you do, Lisa, and what it is that I do your your coaching or your mentorship, comes from, candidly, the experiences it is that you’ve had in life, good and bad, right? And my ability to be able to either transform or lead or guide somebody else’s honestly through a lot of the decisions and experiences it is that I’ve made as a husband and a father and a business person and that kind of things. And I’d love to say it is that you become a better leader or mentor or advisor. It is to people by your good experiences. But often we learn more from getting kicked in the teeth and having hard times than we do the good stuff. So my ability, it is to lead my kids has become extraordinary, and my wife and I go through this a lot, to where it is that if you’re if you Everybody loves their kids, right? That’s, that’s the easy part, but if you’re loving your children without leading your children, you’re kind of maybe falling down a little bit as a father, and so you. But the biggest things it is, is that if I have enough of a relationship, it is with my children to be able to lead them through decisions. That’s the best way that I can love them. And I think that we’ve just, we’ve candidly done a pretty good job of that over the last, you know, eight or 10 years,

Lisa Marker-Robbins 10:14
I love that, you know, I used to, we always talk about like, when the childhood brain, the adolescent brain finally fully matures. And you know, when

Jeremy Hill 10:24
is that, by the way, and

Lisa Marker-Robbins 10:26
exactly should I need to talk to your wife after this, right? And so as we think about that, you know, we’re always told like, 2526 boys, it’s going to be a little bit longer

Jeremy Hill 10:38
than boys. It’s about 60. I think

Lisa Marker-Robbins 10:40
exactly 51 I heard so I spayed, almost rising for almost there, yes, yes, good news, right? And so going back to, like, what you said about staying connected, I remember when my oldest was, you know, was like, what Hill Am I gonna die on? Right? With some of these things that can happen with teenagers and college students, right? And they’re tough, it’s hard to know. And I used to always ping ahead to well when he’s 26 because I and I think I subconsciously, I did not consciously choose that milestone, going like, well, his brain will be mature by then. I think it was a subconscious thing because of the work I do, and I’ve worked with this age group for a very long time, and so I would always think to myself, how important is this going to be, and is this worth dying on this hill if it impacts the relationship and the connection and the voice I want to be able to have in his life when he gets there? And it was just like, that was just kind of my thing always ping to and then I remember when he turned 26 it dawned on me that I used to always think about that, and I didn’t really have to think about that too much in those years, right? Yeah, he got closer to 26 it was less and less late to think about like, hills to die on, and conversations that have that he may not want to have. And I thought, oh, and we’re so positively connected at that, as he hit that, right? And because it’s tough when they’re teenagers, you

Jeremy Hill 12:10
know? Yeah, even, even if you’ve got great kids, like, even if you don’t have the big challenges that you see some families run into their alcohol or pregnancy, and even if it’s just normal

Lisa Marker-Robbins 12:21
teenagers, right? It’s tough. It is tough. It’s a challenge. And you know, so as you’re doing this, and you were you, you know, you’re talking about, like, okay, talking to the kids, and being really intentional, and you guys have done a great job staying connected. How much do you share? Because you said some of the greatest lessons we can give as mentors, and I agree with that is like, learn from my mistakes, right? And let me share. I would say, let’s not always share when it’s an open wound, but when we’re in the messy middle of it, but like when we’ve got some healing around it. So how much do you choose to share and keep to yourself, whether it be your own kids or young adults, maybe that you’re mentoring through business and things like that.

Jeremy Hill 13:05
Yeah, I think, you know, everybody loves to, you know, talk about, you know, radical candor and that kind of thing. And it, you know, is cool for a hashtag or a meme or something, but there’s a degree of discretion that’s got to come with that, either for the the person, the relationship, the environment, or otherwise, you can’t just go on around saying, Oh my God, you’re ugly and you’re fat and the world’s horrible, and people be like, might take offense to that. Probably not the right context. Yeah, I think when it, when it comes specifically to our children, one of the things that is that, you know, we found is as they get older, right? Like, obviously you, your relationship changes, but your degree of kind of communication and vulnerability and and how much you share with your children is different when they’re 10 than when they’re 20 than when they’re 25 and as they get older, right? That that relationship, the dynamic necessarily of parent and child doesn’t change, but it’s not necessarily peers, but it’s close, right? And so one of the just kind of weirdo, impromptu things it is that happened with our family that we never would have thought of or planned or anything else that’s been great for about 10 years now is our kids play, you know, Premiere sports, and we traveled, and we did all the, you know, psychotic things that you do when you’re going to every tournament and, you know, giving blood to pay for whatever next year’s dues, and all the stuff that you do, right? Joshua and I my eldest, so I think my wife and I had, like, a divide and Cocker weekend, right? Like she’s chasing them over here and I’m chasing them over here, right? But Joshua and I were in Las Vegas at the time, we had gone through, you know, we had had the game for the day, and done the team dinner, and done all the stuff that you do. And now it’s kind of like, okay, well, it’s, you know, eight or nine o’clock, and we don’t have a game early in the morning, and I’m not tired. Are you tired? No, I’m not tired. Are you tired? Are you tired? No, okay, but what do you want to do? I don’t know. What do you want to do. I don’t know what do you want to do, right? It was kind of like that we’re sitting here. You don’t want to, like, go hang out with

Lisa Marker-Robbins 15:01
your kids. That’s a really unfamiliar feeling of like, I don’t have something to do,

Jeremy Hill 15:05
right? But we’re stuck in a hotel room in Vegas. And I was like, let’s play the questions game. And he goes, Okay, what’s the questions game? It’s like, I don’t know. I’m making it up as we go. And he’s like, okay. And I was like, I can ask you any five questions. It is that I want. You can ask me any five questions. It is that you want. There is nothing off limits. You have to 100% tell the truth, and nothing ever leaves this room. Are you in? Wow. And Joshua is 16 or 17 at the time, and you see that little cheeky smile like I want to say yes, but I’m scared, you know, get everything. And so ultimately, it was, yeah, let’s do it. And so, you know, your first questions are okay, well, you know, what’s your biggest mistake, or what are you scared of, or what do you whatever it is. And then it’s like, Hey, have you ever cheated on mom? Wow, have you ever, you know, done that, right? Like, just on and on and on. And five questions turned into 20. And then it was like, that was cool. Let’s go for a walk. But what that did is it allowed me to get to know Joshua as Joshua and not Joshua as my son, and it allowed him to get to know me as as a Jeremy and not me as his dad. Because, you know, Joshua and Kaylin and Tristan, they’re there. They’re my children and my wife and I will do anything it is that we can for them. But you also learn the fact that is that your child is still an individual, as well as being your child. And so how do you get to know them there from a more personal level? And so that kind of manifested into something. It is that we started to play as a family and started to go on, and it just is has turned into something really cool.

Lisa Marker-Robbins 16:49
Sounds like, I mean, it’s we do a conversation queue in our newsletter every week, okay? And ours is a little bit more. So that’s when we send out the podcast episode to our to our listeners. And it’s more centered on having intentional conversations around future planning and supporting them, but helping build self awareness in the in your child, regardless of how old they are, those types of questions different, you know, but still taking advantage of those times to have those those deep conversations. Okay, so the five questions game that there’s 100 questions or whatever. So what age do you think that that’s appropriate to do?

Jeremy Hill 17:32
I think you can do it at any age, but I think the depth of the questions change. Yeah, right. Like if my, if, when I and so we started that, and it kind of did cool. And then we did for the family, and then I would do like, little dates with my kids to where it would just be my me and my daughter, and we’d go get a cup of coffee or go get ice cream, and we’d play well, the questions it is that I’d ask her, she’d asked me, were different. She was, you know, three or three years younger than my son at the time, right? And so her mind works different. She thinks different. She asked different questions. And then my younger son the same, but as they’ve gotten older, and now we’re 2421 or whatever, like, the questions are a little bit more pure. And, you know, I think that you can probably play at any age. Ish, you know, by the way, this is not, you know, this is going to be a board game available

Lisa Marker-Robbins 18:19
to everybody say there. So we’re introducing, so this is a DUI DIY, my

Jeremy Hill 18:27
friends, totally, totally, but it’s, I think, the the idea of there of of just really allowing your family to get to know the individual behind the the role of husband, father, mother, son, whatever it is, unconsciously turned out to be really cool. And now my kids are playing that with their friends. My daughter’s got a serious boyfriend.

Lisa Marker-Robbins 18:49
They’re like, let me play that with you. Yeah. Friend

Jeremy Hill 18:53
that’s like, no, and we have Yeah, and we have right. And it’s, it’s just that that for us, for some reason, has just turned out to be a really cool little thing. So

Lisa Marker-Robbins 19:04
it reminds me of and this goes back to my second podcast episode ever, which, like you’re this episodes, we don’t pre plan what number they’re going to be, but you’ll be like in the 180s Okay, so podcast number two was how the author of How to raise an adult, and she was a former dean of freshman students at Stanford, and she saw that a lot of parents were not raising an adult, they were raising children without a doubt. And it’s a fantastic book that she wrote, but that kind of goes along with the idea of seeing your child as an individual, seeing them as an adult, right? You’re raising an adult. You’re raising an individual. They’re going to have their own set of values. We need to validate that. They don’t need to be a mirror of you. So I love that idea of of the question game. So I heard in there like it was very rare. In, I think this is universal, that you’re, you know, you’re looking at each other in this Vegas room, waiting for the game tomorrow or whatever, and you’re like, oh my gosh, we don’t have anything to do right now, right? And it’s life is so busy. So as a very successful entrepreneur, and, you know, I, I know some of our people have seen you on CNBC and Bloomberg and all the things and a lot of demands on your time for someone who’s been very successful, how do you make time for the connected family that you’ve built? Like, what are some strategies if you could go back, like, let’s say we have a listener who their oldest is a freshman or sophomore, and they’ve got multiple kids after that, like you, you and I had. What advice would you give them?

Jeremy Hill 20:45
You know, I’ve done an exceptional job with that of late, but all and of late, meaning the last 10 years. But if we’ve been married 30 and my kids are 25 that means for 15 I kind of screwed things up. Yeah. So everybody gets falls victim of the fact of the of the guilt factor from job and professional life versus kids, and if I work too much, I’m not there for my kids. And if I’m at every baseball game and all this kind of stuff, then I’m not performing at my job. And, you know, I’m failing one way or another, you know, just depending upon how things go. You know, the simplest way, I think it is to look at that as that idea of the big rocks, right? Like we’ve all heard the the example of the professor, it is that, you know, has the rocks and the little rocks and the little rocks and the sands and the water and this kind of a thing. And so we constantly go back to that for not only our own lives, but as we’re, you know, kind of coaching and guiding and leading our kids is that there is, there is room for everything, so long as your priorities are in line, right? You know when, when you know we’ve gone through this with our kids, when they have girlfriends and soccer and kids in school and homework, and you know you still got stuff with the family, your brother and sister and going to church and on and on. It’s like this big plate of spaghetti of life, and you’re kind of trying to figure things out, and the constant reminder is going back to okay, what are the two or three things it is that are the most important? I know you love your girlfriend or your boyfriend or whatever it is. I know you love soccer and your friends are really cool, and blah, blah, blah, and all this other kind of thing. But it comes down first. It first it is to the cornerstones of what it is that our standards are as a family, which is, you got to make sure it is that your faith is right. And so I don’t care if you were late last night or you have lots of homework, you know, we’re still going to hold hands and pray over dinner, and we’re still going to go to church on Sunday, and we’re still going to make sure that, you know, our family is thinking the right way this week, right? And so that’s there. And then our family dynamic of what’s going on there, and then your commitments, it is to school. You know, when they’re in that kind of teenage, schools are a job, right? Yeah, school is your job, right? As a teenager, right? And once the core of those kind of three big rocks are there, of course, you got time for your boyfriend or girlfriend, everybody’s your friends or your party or soccer or whatever it is, right? And then you have all that kind of stuff. And then, well, I want to play video games. Well, cool, you can play, I don’t care. You want to play Xbox and Call of Duty, and, you know, shoot the bad guys and all the stuff you want to do cool, do that, so long as it’s in kind of the priority in the pecking order of what’s important. And so I think for the kids, really is going back to those kind of big rocks things. The same thing true for us as, you know, parents, right? I mean, every day I have a little bit of guilt of something before I go to bed about, you know, I could have been more patient here. I could have maybe been more loving here. I could have, you know, instead of taking five minutes to handle this, I could have taken 10 minutes to do this with the kids or one thing or another. And a part of me goes back to, you know, the best of the best of the best, whether it is, you know, Michael Jordan or Kobe Bryant, you know, it’s definitely not LeBron, but it’s Michael Jordan or Kobe Bryant. Like, you know, they, they miss some shots too, right? Like you’re, you’re not going to be perfect, and you need to to allow yourself a little bit of grace to not be perfect. So

Lisa Marker-Robbins 23:58
that is a great piece of advice to end on, like, be gentle with yourself. Yeah, right, yeah. Well, this has been fantastic. I enjoyed it, yeah. Thanks for exploring family and raising kids and balancing it all. It sounds like you guys have a beautiful family.

Jeremy Hill 24:17
We do. Thank God for my wife so well tell her. We

Lisa Marker-Robbins 24:20
said, thank you.

Jeremy Hill 24:22
I will absolutely do so. Thanks. Jeremy enjoyed it. Thanks, Lisa.

Lisa Marker-Robbins 24:31
Thank you to Jeremy for sharing a story. If this conversation has you thinking about how to deepen your connection while also preparing your child for the future, we’ve got something to help each week in our flourish coaching newsletter, we include a simple but powerful conversation cue you can use as a family. With these conversation cues, we found that your conversations don’t have to lead to stress. They can lead to deepening connection, and it is absolutely possible to move from constant. Nudging your team forward to confidently cheering them on as they take ownership of their future. To get started on a better conversation, sign up at flourish, coachingco.com, forward slash newsletter, and start having the kinds of conversations that build clarity and connection. I’m sure you have some friends that want to do the same, and so if you do, please share this episode with them, sharing, following, the podcast, rating and reviewing helps us resource more families to launch students into successful futures. Thank you for listening to College and Career Clarity.