00:00 How do we raise self-reliant kids who have initiative, who are resilient, and who could be problem solvers? Kids who have the skills and the courage to step outside of their comfort zone and take advantage of what life has to offer.00:20 I’m a mom to these three boys. And if you’re a parent like me, you’ve probably asked yourself those very same questions. And while I’m sure that every caring parent wants those same things for their children, I think we’re going about it the wrong way.00:40 We want our kids to be happy and successful. So our instinct is to shield them from hurt and disappointment. We worry about their self-esteem, so we praise them for everything. We are concerned about whether or not they fit in, so we indulge them. And we don’t want them to fail, so we step in and take over. And we do all of this in an attempt to curate a perfect life for them.01:17 But what we’re really doing is raising kids who are afraid to take risks because they fear failure; kids who lack the confidence in their ability to figure things out; and then young people who are afraid to launch into adulthood.01:37 More young adults are living at home and for longer stretches. And this was occurring even before the pandemic. A Pew Research study found that 52 percent of young adults are living at home, which is the highest percentage since the Great Depression. And what we’re finding is that young adults are stuck between adolescence and adulthood. And that’s the generation of people that we’re raising. And in fact, we hear this in the language that young adults even use when they have to make responsible adult decisions. There’s a term for it. Who knows what that is? Adulting, yes. The practice of behaving in a characteristic of a responsible adult.02:34 So I am convinced that as parents and caregivers, we are missing out on a great opportunity to raise kids who are resilient and can take hold of their future, kids who can step outside of their comfort zone and do amazing things. Now, these are skills that are necessary not only for them to lead fulfilling lives and live out their potential, but those are skills that are also necessary for our changing world.03:12 So back to my original question. How do we raise self-reliant kids who have initiative, are resilient and can be problem solvers?03:23 I believe we do that by raising kids who can think and act entrepreneurially. Kids who have the opportunity or have the skill set to view the world from an entrepreneurial mindset.03:41 So let me tell you how I came to this conclusion. So for more than 20 years, my work was centered around supporting adult entrepreneurs. Providing them with training and technical assistance and resources to help them start and grow their businesses. And something I would observe. We’d have two individuals come into our office seeking assistance. And on the surface, it appeared that those individuals were at the same level in terms of resources, capabilities, skills and business acumen. But what we would find is that one individual would take that information and go with it, and then the other individual would just seem to have trouble really getting traction and getting going. And what I realized was that it had nothing to do with skill or capability. What it came down to was the mindset of that individual. And observing this got me thinking: How might I raise my children such that they can view the world like an entrepreneur? That they would have the courage to step out and to change the world with an entrepreneurial lens.05:07 So that set us out, my husband and I, on a 15-year journey to raise entrepreneurial kids. And we really saw this come together when my eldest son, Silas, was nine years old. We had been living here in Maryland for about two years, and my husband was planning to travel back to Colorado to visit his mother. And so Silas asked me, he said, “Hey, mom, can me and my brothers also go with Dad to visit grandma?”05:37 And I said, “Well, you know, Silas, four airline tickets were not in the budget, but you can go if you can buy your own ticket.”05:46 So he paused for a moment, and he said, “OK, well, how much are airline tickets?”05:51 And I said, “About 300 dollars.”05:54 And so his next question, I have to say, it literally blew my mind. So he said, “OK. Can I find free stuff on Craigslist and then resell it?”06:07 Yeah, I was like, “Yeah, you can.”06:12 And so then, over the course of that summer, that’s exactly what he did. You know, he would get online and research Craigslist. My husband would take him to go pick up those things, and then I would help him take pictures and post them online. But then he also did some other things that summer, he hustled. So he baked and sold cookies. And then he also washed cars. And throughout that entire process, my husband and I, we guided him along. We were there to coach and encourage him, but we allowed him to take the lead. When it was time for him to make his sales pitch, you know, we coached him on how to make the pitch, but when it was time to knock on the doors, he stood forward, and we stepped back.06:59 And that summer he raised the money. He earned the money to purchase his airline ticket. And he made a little bit more. And he bought me a gift. But, you know, I’m like, I don’t know really who he was thinking about when he bought that gift. If it was, like, me or him, I don’t know.07:17 (Laughter)07:19 But think about the confidence that this put in him at nine years old. That he can have a big goal, and that he could persevere to achieve that goal. Amazing.07:35 But when I share that story with other parents, many of them shake their head and say, “You know what? My kid could never do that because my kids don’t have the entrepreneurial gene.” Well, being entrepreneurial is not genetic. It is a set of behaviors that can be learned when given the opportunity. Entrepreneurs are not born. The skills and the experiences that cause a person to be entrepreneurial can be taught, and they can be nurtured.08:15 Now, raising entrepreneurial kids is more than just teaching them how to start a business so they can earn money. Raising entrepreneurial kids is really about preparing kids for life. Equipping them with everything that they need, with the confidence, with the ability to speak up, to persevere, to have tenacity, to bounce back from fear and rejection. Those are the things that are required in our world to live to one’s potential.08:51 So in order for me to learn as much as I could about raising entrepreneurial kids, I interviewed dozens of parents and kids to find out what they were doing. And so I want to share with you what I learned, and I want to share with you five strategies that I’m actually doing with my children and that honestly, I think every parent should be doing with their children to disrupt our conventional way of parenting.09:24 So, number one, don’t give them an allowance.09:28 (Applause)09:30 That’s what I’m talking about, too, yes. Don’t give them an allowance. Instead, challenge them to start a business to earn their spending money. So this is my boys, and this is one of the ways that they’ve earned money, their own spending money, is they make bracelets. And there is no better lesson around the value of a dollar than when you have to work hard to earn each one of them. And through this process, our kids will learn confidence, financial literacy, public speaking, how to convince people, all skills that are valuable for the world that we live in. So don’t give them an allowance.10:13 The next thing is make them pay for their wants. You know, key to entrepreneurship is about personal responsibility and ownership. And it is amazing how, when you put the responsibility on someone else to buy that thing that they said they really wanted, kind of shifts a little bit, right? It really, really does. It’s no different with the kids. And so we actually started this quite early with our children. So when Silas was about four years old, I created “daddy dollars.”10:50 (Laughter)10:51 And the boys would earn daddy dollars for doing things such as chores, for exhibiting positive behavior and for also reading books. And Silas actually purchased his first bike from using daddy dollars. He had to earn 250 daddy dollars, and that allowed him to purchase his first bike. Now, yeah, you know, these are not real dollars. But to Silas, that experience of working hard to earn that money and to buy that bike was a very real experience for him. Also, in 2019, our family decided to take a trip to Tanzania. And so, you know, the boys were really excited about it. And I said, “Now, if you want to go to Tanzania — your dad and I are going — but if you want to go to Tanzania, you know what you got to do?” What do you think I told them? They’re going to have to buy their own airline ticket, yes. Now, the tickets to Tanzania were not cheap. They were 900 dollars apiece. Yeah. But check this out. This is what I just loved, was when I told the boys that they were going to have to buy their own ticket, Silas, remembering back to what he had done when he was about nine years old, he said to his brothers, “That’s easy, don’t worry about it. I’ll show you how to do it.”12:19 (Laughter)12:20 Yes. And sure enough, they worked hard over several months, and they did just that. They were able to earn enough money by selling their bracelets that I showed you earlier, and they all were able to go with their parents to Tanzania. So I would encourage you to make your kids pay for the things that they say they want.12:46 The next is to reduce their prosperity. Now let’s admit it, kids today have a lot of stuff, right? And when you think about it, I understand this need and this desire as parents to want to give our kids experiences and things that maybe we did not have when we were children. But when we choose a parenting style of overindulging our children by providing them with too much, too soon, for too long, with no effort on their part, what we do is actually raise young people who are self-centered and entitled. And so when we, instead … In the [1800s], it’s interesting because Frederick Douglass made a statement that I thought was profound even in the [1800s], because we’re dealing with it today. And he said, “If you wish to make your son helpless, you need not cripple him with a bullet or a bludgeon, but simply place him beyond the reach of necessity and surround him with luxury and ease.” Still true today. Steve Jobs in a graduation speech, told the graduates to stay hungry. And what we love about entrepreneurs is their hustle. And oftentimes that hustle is rooted in a hunger for something. But if our kids never want for anything, what’s going to motivate them to take action? So I encourage you to reduce your kids’ prosperity.14:36 Next is to let them be delight-directed. Entrepreneurs are lifelong learners. They learn to do, not simply to know. And when we encourage our children to seek out learning for the things that they are most interested in, they become learners who seek to learn to do because they’re teaching themselves as opposed to just simply pouring in information, which is sometimes what we get in our education system. And so this is my my son Isaiah. His delight is drawing. And so he spends hours drawing, and he seeks out classes [that] teach him how to draw. And he was recently awarded an award by the Smithsonian Museum of African Art for creating —15:28 (Applause)15:30 this superhero, from looking at a piece of art in the museum. And he designed this. But now Isaiah is designing logos for people. Yeah, yeah, I love it. So give them room and space to follow their delights. And then lastly, let them solve their own problems.15:53 Entrepreneurs are problem solvers, and as parents it is our natural instinct to want to step in and help our kids solve their problems. But when we do that all of the time, we kind of squelch the potential that they have to discover new things about themselves new capabilities that they might have. It squelches their ability to go out and find the answers for themselves.16:21 So I want you to think about those five things as you begin to raise up young people. And yeah, you know what? It’s very likely that my boys may not choose business ownership when they grow up. And that’s OK. Because whether a child chooses to build a company or become an employee, it doesn’t matter, because every kid needs to learn how to think like an entrepreneur. And the sooner we do this as parents, create an environment at home where they have the opportunity and multiple occasions to challenge their beliefs about what’s possible within them, to step outside of their comfort zone, to take risks, to learn from failure, to bounce back from rejection, then the sooner we’ll put them on the path of living out their potential to lead very fulfilling and successful lives.17:23 Thank you.17:24 (Applause)

00:01 “We’re like family.” This is a phrase that’s become quite popular in our places of work to try to make work feel a little less like this and a little bit more like this. It’s a phrase that started in the last decade or two to try to elicit feelings of warmth and belonging and really that “cool culture” vibe. The laid-back break rooms with beanbag chairs and the beer on tap and those tight-knit teams that got through everything together like a family. It’s a phrase that started with positive intent and has had positive outcome. However, what’s gone far less recognized and discussed is how calling work our family can actually be quite detrimental to our mental and emotional health without our knowing it. Which is why I’m here today to offer the reminder that work is not your family. And to explore how this “cool culture” catchphrase often ends up breeding burnout instead.00:58 My name is Gloria Chan Packer. I am a mental wellness educator and an experienced corporate leader. In 2018, I founded a company called “Recalibrate” to try to deliver workplace mental wellness services that were more modern, accessible and science-backed. Since that time, I and my team have gotten to work with almost 20,000 employees all over the world. Now, the reason this topic, exploring how calling work our family can be problematic and breed burnout, the reason it’s important to me is because I’ve personally lived it.01:31 Before we get into that, though, let’s first baseline by understanding why calling work our family at its core can be problematic. Doing so, psychologically infers a really big blur and betrayal in our boundaries. Work and family are different entities with different goals, expectations and responsibilities, and therefore should be separated and boundaried. For example, I’m not going to be in the shower one day and notice a really weird mole on my pregnant belly and roll into my boss’s office like I would my mom and be like, “Hey, can you can you get in here and look at this? This looks kind of weird. I’m freaked out.” A few of us are giggling or laughing, but I’m sure a few of us, too, in our heads are like, “Oh, have I done something weird like that at work? Have I crossed a boundary before?”02:19 Boundaries are hard for a lot of us because many of us never learned boundaries. It’s kind of a newer, buzzy phrase that not many of us really have learned or defined before. So let’s start by defining what boundaries are and why they’re so important to our mental health. I like to think of boundaries as our ability to identify, communicate and take action on our needs. Being able to say, “I need to eat,” “I need to rest,” “I need some space right now.” Survival speaking, boundaries are critical for us as humans to be able to say, “I need something,” to be able to find safety and resourcing. However, it can also be advantageous in certain situations to delay or deprioritize our needs too. For example, if I’m a human back in the day, running away from a tiger, if I happen to be hungry, it will, of course, be beneficial to delay that need for hunger until I’m safe again. However, if, after the tiger has left and I’m safe, I keep staying stuck and being scared of the tiger and delaying my hunger and not eating, that becomes unhealthy too. This shift of delaying our needs into the unhealthy without knowing it is where a lot of us find ourselves unknowingly stuck today. Somewhere in our lives we learned and adapted that repressing or sacrificing our needs for others was beneficial. But that became so auto-piloted in our subconscious that it goes past the point of diminishing returns and becomes unhealthy. To where maybe we land into a workplace and we hear “we’re like family” and our brain just triggers into “give it everything no matter what.” We sacrifice our boundaries, our time, our relationships, and we start living life in these big swings of overworking to burnout. And maybe we rationally know that it’s not the healthiest pattern in our life, but we feel stuck. I get that. I’ve lived through that and sometimes still feel challenged with it.04:18 You see, before I worked in mental wellness, you could argue that I worked in the opposite of mental wellness. I started my career in management and technology consulting, spending almost a decade giving it my all. I did the 80 to 100 hour billing weeks, the 100-plus fights a year, for years on end, the early promotion chase and didn’t scale back on other parts of my life either. Still volunteered, went to my SoulCycle classes did brunch and late nights with my friends until my completely overscoped life turned into burnout cycle after burnout cycle. In 2017, my brain and body hit a wall. I started struggling with debilitating, chronic migraines that, for me, meant that after months of no change and no medication or treatment working, I knew I had to take at least a leave from work. And that was devastating for me because work had really become my everything.05:18 There is a memory that haunts me from that time. And it was the night before I was about to go on leave, and I was just grabbing dinner with a friend and my husband. And I said to my friend, “Work is my entire worth and my identity. I don’t know what I’m going to do without it.” And my husband’s body language and face dropped in a way that I had never seen it. And after my friend left, I remember him saying to me, “I can’t believe that you think that work is your only worth when I see so much more. And I can’t believe you can’t see that either.” It’s a poignant memory for me because I remember it feeling so true. And now I know it’s not. But it was a really rough period. It’s such an important one in my life because it gave me the opportunity to do my own mental health work and understand where these burnout behaviors had come from for me, so that now I could grow into being able to discern when those behaviors are healthy or unhealthy. For me, where those behaviors started and were adopted is that I grew up learning that I needed to be perfect and to people please and be the best at everything so that I could get myself out of a situation that I felt like I otherwise wouldn’t be able to make it through. For me, that perfectionism and people-pleasing was so critical to that point in my life. But then when I just put it on autopilot, it went way past the point of diminishing returns and often became unhealthy for me.06:53 That’s my story. Let’s spend some time getting to know yours. I’m going to invite you to do a little bit of reflection activity with me as you’re comfortable, if you can all just close your eyes wherever you are. And with your eyes closed, I’m going to ask you to start to bring to mind a part of you that tends to overwork, to be a perfectionist or a people-pleaser, struggles to set boundaries. When I ask what it would be like if you tone that part of you back a little. Just let that go a little. For the piece of you that pops up with some tension or resistance, let’s lean into that and ask, why not? What would happen? What would go wrong? Would things go wrong, the other shoe would finally drop, and it’d be all your fault? Would you lose success? Would you not have anything to talk about in conversation to feel worthy anymore? Then let’s practice some curiosity around where you might have first adapted or learned this. When it might have helped or protected you in life. Did you learn early on you had to be perfect to avoid shame or discipline? Or when you were young, did you learn you had to be overly self-reliant, you had to take care of everything and everyone because your caretaker couldn’t. Or maybe later in life, in college, did you learn it was worth sacrificing whatever you needed to get that win or accolade, maybe to make up for not feeling accepted earlier in life? See what it would be to speak to that part of yourself and say, “Thank you so much for making this adaptation. You helped me through such an important time, but right now, I don’t need you to be on the clock all the time anymore. I have a beautiful life that I’ve built with safety and stability, and I have people in my life that love me for who I am and not what I do. You can take a breather so I can to.”09:10 As you’re ready, just gently opening your eyes back up and coming back into the room with me. Welcome back.09:20 So part of that reflection activity is an example of what we would technically call identifying our cognitive schemas. Our cognitive schemas are essentially how our brain forms all of our subconscious behaviors, patterns, thoughts and emotions which our brain largely learns based on past experiences we’ve had. A majority of our subconscious schemas, our behaviors, are formed and adapted early on in life, especially in childhood, because our brains are kind of blank slates. We haven’t experienced much of life yet, so out of safety and efficiency, our brain takes each big experience and wants to say, OK, this is what I did, these were the factors around, this is what happened and therefore is how I should predict, I should feel, think and act from here on out.” And it puts that on autopilot into our subconscious. This can be very beneficial, and it does keep us safe and efficient. However, it can also become very outdated and unhealthy for us too, which is why it’s so important to do this work. Now, doing such work is not about saying, because a lot of our subconscious behaviors were formed in the past, that they’re all invalid or wrong. What it is about doing is making sure we each do our own due diligence to understand where the blueprint of our behaviors came from and ensure they’re still relevant and productive to our current lives. We update everything else important in our lives, from our homes to our technology to our education. Why aren’t we doing the same with our behaviors that affect our everyday?10:51 Now I’m sure some of y’all might be asking, “OK, I thought we were talking about workplace burnout. Why aren’t we talking more about our workplaces and our employers?” Which is where I’ll offer a little bit of a plot twist. Yes, when it comes to burnout, our workplaces and employers do own a big part of the equation. However, what I find to be somewhat of an overlooked part of the equation today is what piece of the problem we individually own ourselves, too. If I inherently have a tendency or a pattern to overwork or not be able to set boundaries no matter what workplace or organization I change. If I never take accountability to drive my own internal change, then no matter what external change I make, I will likely keep suffering from the same patterns over and over again.11:41 Now, all that being sad and all that being something I strongly believe in, I am also a realist and I know that not all of us will be ready to do our own deep personal work yet. So where else can we start on this topic? What else can we do? I’ll offer three smaller steps. First, when you find yourself wanting to say “we’re like family” around work or organizations, try to get clearer in your communication and use language that has better boundaries. As Brené Brown says, “Clear is kind. Unclear is unkind.” So if you find yourself wanting to say “We’re like family,” but you’re really kind of asking for a favor, clarify that, say, “Hey, you know, we actually need this deliverable a week sooner. What can we do to achieve that?” Or if you’re just trying to communicate a value about your organization, again, clarify the language and use boundaries. Say, “It’s a priority for our teams to feel trust and connection.” Or, as my friend Trey, the CEO of Kronologic, says to his team, he says, “We’re not like a family; we’re like a professional sports team.” It still infers that same warmth and camaraderie, but within the boundaries of a workplace. Now, when it comes to this topic, it’s not to say that you can’t have deep, meaningful relationships from work, but it is to point out that we need to practice healthy boundaries so that we can sustain healthy workplaces and relationships.13:04 The second tip I’ll offer is to actually do the work to learn and model healthy boundaries for one another. If you are a people-pleaser who tends to overscope and overcommit, try buying some time before you respond and commit. Say, “Hey, I need to evaluate this against my other priorities. Can I get back to you by the end of the day?” Give yourself some time for that behavioral change instead of getting stuck in the same repetitive pattern. When you’re communicating boundaries, clarify what you need and what the impact will be if you don’t get that need met. Say, “If we need this product a month sooner, I’m going to need the help of two other people. Otherwise, the quality is really going to be at risk, and we might either lose team members or customers.” Remember that when you’re communicating boundaries, that’s not a “me versus you” fight, but it’s what we need to do to collectively come together to resource ourselves, to sustain our organizations, workplaces and relationships.14:01 Last tip I will offer is to see if you can find one way to empower mental health for yourself or others this year. I will recognize that just when it comes to talking about mental, emotional health, our behaviors and our past, that can feel tender, personal. But it can especially feel a little scary or stigmatized when we are talking about working with experts like psychologist or psychotherapist. I’ll close here by offering a reframe in that thinking, a reframe in that stigma. When it comes to any other important part of our lives, we seek out experts. When it comes to our physical health, we seek out doctors. Financial health, we seek out financial advisors. Why is it that when it comes to our mental health, we think we should take care of it on our own? We would never look at a friend who’s having a heart attack and be like, “You should really take care of that yourself, otherwise you’re kind of weak. You should not need to go to the hospital.” Why is it that we think we can grow or develop our mental health when most of us don’t have the tools or education to do so?15:04 So today, whether it is your propensity to burn out, your struggle with setting boundaries or something different, I hope you can feel a little bit more free and empowered to start building more meaning and sustainability into your life.15:20 Thank you for your time.15:22 (Applause)