The Power of Walking People Out of Your Life w/Parker Harris

J. Rosemarie Francis 02:01 OK, so I really appreciate you coming and talking to me. For me it's the middle of my day, but I understand it's the end of your day, so we'll make this snappy while giving value to our audience yeah, OK. I have a number of calls scheduled after this so video as long as OK, I appreciate you. J. Rosemarie Francis 02:24 All right, so before we get into it, tell us who is Parker Harris. 02:30 Who is Parker Harris. 02:33 So I really think of myself first and foremost as a leader. 02:37 That's something that I've always valued and I'm someone that likes to create value for other people and I started doing that in a nonprofit at an early age. 02:47 I was really involved with the YMCA and some after school programs and just different nonprofits and then I started getting really interested in politics and then I found out business was the place where I could add the most value and I sort of tried to solve different problems in health initially was the company that I started in 17 was a nutrition and health company, and over time I invested a lot into different personal development experiences, professional development experiences, and I noticed a lot of return from those investments of that time and that experience. 03:33 But I think at the end of the day, the most valuable thing I got from those putting myself in those different spaces or different experiences was the people that I met and I was fortunate enough over time to really be careful to curate who I brought into my life and made part of my inner circle and that has been a really good decision for me and it's something that I now do full time is create a mastermind for entrepreneurs and executives to come together in a confidential environment to share different ideas, opportunities and challenges and get support and also be challenged by the other peers around the table, and so that's what I facilitate and lead is my main focus professionally. J. Rosemarie Francis 04:29 OK, all right, thank you for sharing and we will get into more about your work and what you can do for someone in our audience. So thank you for sharing that personal stuff. Now, when I first started SoloMoms! Talk, I hesitated to interview men because I'm like what do they have to offer women? But I've learned from experience that we're all human beings and our human experience is what connects us. 04:59 So my first question to you yeah, I don't mean interrupted- at all, but I think it's also like we all had a mother too and I think we realized potentially how important that relationship is and I think for the most part, want to support and it's probably the biggest responsibility in society is raising the next generation and so I think it's important to add value and have dialogue and have conversations with a variety of ideas and experiences and backgrounds, and so I appreciate you having me on and I'm hopeful that I can talk to the Solomoms out there without necessarily being a solo mom myself. J. Rosemarie Francis 05:56 Yes, of course we're not in a silo. So, yes, of course, thank you for coming. Ok, so my first question for you today is tell us about the importance of walking people out of your life. 06:13 Yeah, this was something that wasn't natural to me Growing up. I was an only child and I was always looking for friends and that cliche best friend and even brothers and sisters that I could have that familial bond with. And I switched schools a few times and for a variety of reasons. It was more challenging to find this in different environments and especially within school. It wasn't a great experience for me. But outside of school I found different avenues for it, but this was before social media, so it was more challenging to stay connected. 06:53 Yes, and eventually, over time, I found myself in relationships that really were not healthy, were not serving me and, looking back, I was being taken advantage of in a variety of different ways and I decided, after that car accident that you mentioned and different experiences that happened, that I needed to make a shift and these people weren't going to be part of that shift and to confront that. 07:33 And in the situations that I was doing it, it was more like friendships or just different relationships where I would literally go on a walk and tell the person like, hey, I'm going to be making some changes and that's going to require me to be spending less time with you and I'm making a choice to walk you out of your life, and I think in those conversations I probably cried more than they did. It was definitely an emotional conversation and for the most part it was safe and healthy, which I'm grateful for, and I noticed several of those people ended up making changes in their life later on over some timeline and re-entered my life at some point. But it was a period of time of creating space and new standards for myself and over time I think it's again part of that leadership thing. Right. It's like when you're leading, you have to make decisions, sometimes that are unpopular but they're authentic, and sometimes that has a way of coming around, especially if we have our own best interests at heart and other people's best interests at heart. J. Rosemarie Francis 08:54 Yeah, yeah for sure, and I like that idea. I like the concept because it's something we struggle with as solar moms and I think it's something we struggle with as humans. As you say, when you're, if you come from a big family and there are always a lot of people around, you want to run away to quiet. But if you're not used to it and you're alone all the time, you seek out relationships, and sometimes those relationships aren't necessarily good for you and we have to learn, like you did, to how to extract ourselves from them so we can grow as people. So, thank you. 09:36 Yeah, I think there's this element too of like what are we really fearing? Like what is the fear around the choice of walking someone out? And I think it's almost like deprimitive, like primal around, like it's like tribal right, where it's like no one wanted to be thrown out of the tribe. But I think it can be. You know, it's a path less traveled in a way, but there's so much power in surrounding ourselves with people that add value to different parts of our lives, even if it's just making us laugh or there's like a joy component. And for me, I'm realizing, looking you know, even I'm 36 right now and that I'm just starting to realize who I enjoy being around. I wasn't even like aware of that for most of my life. J. Rosemarie Francis 10:32 Wow, yeah, OK. So during the time you discovered that you probably need to make some changes in your relationships, did you have to? Did you do some kind of work on self-awareness? Did you work on who you are as a person before you came to that decision? 10:56 Yes, I started getting really interested in personal development. So I was raised in Catholic schools and so I was in religion classes my entire life and then, as I started getting older 15, 16, 17, I started actually reading scripture and I feel like I got a lot of wisdom and personal development from scripture, particularly like proverbs and ecclesiastes, like Solomon's writings. J. Rosemarie Francis 11:29 Wisdom yeah. 11:31 Yeah, right and yeah. So that one I think that's been part of my journey was seeking wisdom more than gold, which is something that he describes and just resonated with me or at least I program myself and then I started finding it in. There's actually a book that's under Christian, inspirational as well, called the Greatest Salesman in the World, by a guy named Ag Mandino, and he also wrote Grismirical in the World. Are you familiar with it?

J. Rosemarie Francis

Host

12:03

Yes, I am. Yes, I'm a Tony Robbins fan, so I hear about all the books.

Speaker 3

Host

12:09

14:02 I worked for a large Fortune 100 technology company and ended up creating some habits that didn't support me as an entrepreneur. 14:15 And so I think there are some things that we can do before becoming an entrepreneur that will help set us up for success, and I think two of them that come to mind right away is around our beliefs, and I think particularly the belief is finding joy and adding value to other people is a really powerful belief to have as an entrepreneur, because essentially what it's really about is solving someone else's problem and adding value to a person is the basic premise of entrepreneurship. And then another foundational piece, and it kind of involves the identity conversation, like who is Parker Harris, who is Rosemary Francis, the identity that we have for ourselves and the story that we're telling ourselves and I think many people are unconscious about that story that they're telling themselves and it was almost written when they were like five to seven years old, when they weren't really choosing that story and potentially that story doesn't serve them and basically doing the work to identify what that story is and to rewrite that story. J. Rosemarie Francis 15:35

Yes, it's a competitive advantage to actually want to, like you know, because there's always going to be a place for someone that wants to solve someone else's pain. Yeah, there's always an opportunity there. J. Rosemarie Francis 21:31 Yes. 21:32 Sometimes it can be hard to listen, to, really understand A lot of times, like me myself, like I had a vision of how I thought things were going to go and it went way different than that, and me trying to hold on to how I wanted to go versus just really embracing reality and like accepting reality for what it was like, held me back a lot.

J. Rosemarie Francis 22:29 Yes, it's true, and I can relate to that with prayer. When we pray for something, it doesn't always, we don't always get the answer we were expecting, but the answer we get is usually better and lead us to better things. So, yeah, thank you for sharing all of that and leading into that. What is Parker grateful for today? 22:53 What am I grateful for today? My wife and I right now are on an adventure where we're able to travel, where we're doing some traveling, looking for home, looking to see where we find home and grow our business. And so I'm just. I spent most, I spent in my entire life, living in one city until about six months ago and I'm really grateful for the journey and the adventure and the choice that my wife and I made and the opportunity to do this. J. Rosemarie Francis 23:30 Awesome. I love that. I really do love that, and it's good that you have a partner you could travel with. That makes it more fun, right. 23:39 Yes, it's an incredible, incredible gift. J. Rosemarie Francis 23:43 Yeah, pretty cool, yeah. So, okay, we talked about personal development. How does personal development relate to business success? 23:53 Yeah, I think it's foundational.

That's for sure, absolutely. Thank you, all right, so I have one more question. Well, I have two more questions for you, but before you share with us how you can help someone like share your work, I also wanted to ask you, moving on from the personal development, how can someone develop proper work-life balance, because it's one of those buzzwords that we're throwing around quite a bit and then it was poo pooed, but we know it's real, so tell us about that and how can someone create that work-life balance? 25:56

30:12 Simon Sinek's really popular as this idea of like start with why right, and so like understanding our why as part of it and I think single moms can probably this really know why they're doing the game of entrepreneurship, and so you know, that would really resonate with me and, I think, also just getting really clear, like, for me, space is a really critical part of personal development that I don't think it's talked about and I think space in this world is so like there's different elements of space. Our environment matters a lot, so that's like the first iteration of it is the physical environment, but also our internal environments. You know our digital environment. There's so much noise and so many things that we can let in and really taking ownership of our time, our calendar, like those pieces. One of the biggest, you know, one of the one of the most important habits that I do regularly for my personal development is reflecting on a period of time, usually a week, but it's it's almost like building a rhythm for reflection and planning so that we can learn from mistakes, from failures, to also learn from what's working and to improve. You know, improve the plan, improve the operations, improve the system, just improve the way things are done so we can, you know, trend towards what it is we really want and who we really are, versus you know the noise and what marketers want us to be and what other people want us to be and and so that's something I think is is like creating that space for ourselves and then, from there, like our beliefs, like really looking at, like what are the beliefs that we have? 32:09 And and which one of those like like is there beliefs that don't serve us? Because I think one of the things that doesn't get enough attention is like the unknown, unknown, like there's things that that are just like we, like are the unknown for us, that we can't eat. It's like this unconscious incompetence, and and so we need to be around other people that can help us see what that might be for us, what is holding us back, and share that with us in a way, you know that that we can, we can hear it and use it for our benefit, versus being, you know, upset or like like Defensive around that because it's like it's like biblical right, like it's it's it's Solomon, like don't cast pearls before swine and you know when it's. It's often very challenging to Accept feedback because it doesn't always feel good. It goes back to like growth and evolution is like it doesn't feel good to do that. So that's one of the things that I think it can be a real challenge to like Understand what is true and what isn't true, because sometimes people are gonna say things that aren't true, that to manipulate us or for their own agenda, and so that's why one of the most important things I think with, with kind of this whole game too, is like buyer beware, because there's a lot of you know, a lot of things in life that that you know Isn't what it seems, maybe right, or that person doesn't have our best interests at heart, and so I think we need to like trust but verify and really, you know, do do research to try to solve our your own problems first, and then, you know, find people that can help and be willing to invest and make some mistakes. 34:02 But I think, at the end of the day, like, one of the hardest things to figure out is, like, what is truly the, the question that we need answered? Like what is the question that you would invest a hundred thousand dollars to answer? 34:14 Yeah you know, I or ten thousand, like what's the question you'd invest ten thousand dollars to answer. Like, if we don't, if we don't have those questions, then it's very difficult to answer them or get them answered. J. Rosemarie Francis

J. Rosemarie Francis 45:13 Yeah, I really appreciate it. I enjoyed this conversation and I really think that it's going. It's a big benefit to our audience and I thank you, parker Harris, for coming and spending so much time with us. I appreciate you. 45:28 Rosemarie, my pleasure. Again, thank you for the great questions and the preparation and let me know if there's anything I can do to support your community or add value to your community. I appreciate what you're doing.