How to Consciously Build Relationships That Transform Your Life w/ Parker Harris

Although this interview was originally recorded for SoloMoms! Talk podcast, there are enough actionable tips and wisdom in this episode to re-publish so listeners of Tools of the Podcast Trade can find useful as well.

This is a very insightful conversation with entrepreneur Parker Harris. He shares his life-altering experience of consciously choosing to walk people out of his life, an act that carved out room for new beginnings and significant change. He also reveals how he carefully selects his inner circle and the impact it has had on his entrepreneurial journey.

Parker also talks about the necessary mindset shifts for pursuing your entrepreneurial dreams. We discussed the importance of finding joy in the work, exhibiting patience, learning to detach from failure, and thinking long-term.

We also throw a spotlight on the inadequacy of modern education in preparing individuals for entrepreneurship, stressing the necessity of relationship building and developing a positive relationship with failure.

Lastly, we discussed the importance of personal growth in business success with Parker's illuminating insights on decision-making, customer service, and the reality of plans not working out.

Balancing work-life, personal growth, and enjoying the process took precedence as we discussed managing noise, making fewer decisions, and thinking long-term. We also cover self-care and mindfulness through journaling, meditation, and adventure.

Connect w/Parker: IG: @Zach_Parker_Harris | website: Junta.Global

Books mentioned in this episode:

•  The Greatest Salesman in the World by Og Mandino
• The Growth Mindset by Joshua Moore
• The Infinite Game by Simon Sinek

Transcript

J. Rosemarie Francis: 0:00

My guest today is Parker Harris, who started his first company at 17 years old. Parker also was recruited by the president of the United States to speak at leadership conferences across the country and, at 20 years old, he almost died in a car accident and made the choice to walk people out of his life who were taking advantage of him and started fresh. Although this podcast was specifically created for solo moms and to curate the stories of solo moms globally, I also wanted to include helpful tips and strategies for solo moms to live more joyful lives, and it's for that reason that I interview experts like today's guests, whose personal experiences and wisdom can help you in your everyday life. Welcome, parker.

Parker Harris: 1:58

Thank you, Rosemarie.

J. Rosemarie Francis: 2:01

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.

Parker Harris: 2:16

I have a number of calls scheduled after this so video as long as OK, I appreciate you.

J. Rosemarie Francis: 2:24

All right, so before we get into it, tell us who is Parker Harris.

Parker Harris: 2:30

Who is Parker Harris? So I really think of myself first and foremost as a leader. 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. 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. 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: 4:29

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.

Parker Harris: 4:59

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 Solomom myself.

J. Rosemarie Francis: 5:56

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.

Parker Harris: 6:13

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. 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. 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: 8:54

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.

Parker Harris: 9:36

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?

Parker Harris: 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.

Parker Harris: 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: 12:03

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

Parker Harris: 12:09

Yeah right, so it almost created. I feel like there's this almost personal development lineage that I think really started with scripture and then different philosophers came along and basically tried to democratize these ideas more and more, and then they just get set in different ways now, and I think the most challenging thing is to really get to know ourselves, because it's almost easy to talk about doing growth work and this work, but to almost do it superficially more than really digging deep, and so I think that for me, where I get the most breakthrough around, that is actually putting myself in different experiences, and those experiences are either some sort of personal development experience or something that's more of an adventure that I've started to learn a lot about myself as an adult when I'm in these different experiences.

J. Rosemarie Francis: 13:19

OK, all right, yeah, thank you. So I'm going to switch gears now. And entrepreneurship and side hustle, working from home all buzzwords that we sometimes have in this space, especially when you're a mom working and trying to juggle kids. So tell us how someone can prepare for becoming their own boss, entrepreneurship, that kind of thing.

Parker Harris: 13:53

Yeah, I think that's a great question, because I ended up going into more of a corporate role early on in my career. I worked for a large Fortune 100 technology company and ended up creating some habits that didn't support me as an entrepreneur. 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

Yeah, that's an interesting concept, because when we think of being an entrepreneur, we think of I have an idea or a passion, and we think about banking, and we think about income and revenue and expenses, and we seldom think about what you just talk about how to prepare as a person and your mindset, your mindset as the chef, which I think is why a lot of entrepreneurs fail Because of not doing what you are talking about. So I do appreciate that and I wanted you to touch on the mindset change that we need, particularly, apart from all the other stuff that we need to do, tangible things that we need to do what one mindset, chef, that you think could improve our success as entrepreneurs?

Parker Harris: 16:39

Yeah, there's two that really come to mind that I think are. You know, I think there's a lot of different conversations around this that are really powerful and it's almost like a sequence like everybody has like a very complicated you know, like seriously, you know that. So so it's it's not like a one size fits fit all thing, but I think we can't go wrong if we learn to love doing the work, like learn to love actually like doing the things that create the success versus the success itself, like not not being so focused on like the money or the outcome, but actually the process, because entrepreneurship is is probably the hardest game and you know it's. It's such a hard game in that the problems never stop. It's almost like a it's this thing that creates problems and we're paid to solve, you know, solve those problems. And so I think you know just just it's knowing, knowing that and being patient, because it's like it's almost like being a, being an athlete maybe maybe the dynamics are a little bit different and that becoming a professional athlete, the failure rate is a bit higher. Right, it's like one in 100,000 or one in you know, 10. Like it's just it's it's so competitive and in business, is is also really kids like it also being an artist, right. So it's like an artist, an athlete, an entrepreneur all understand rejection and failure in a very visceral way, because there's just no way to go on that path without experiencing that a number of times. And usually, like you know, we always hear Michael Jordan got a cut from his high school basketball team when he was, you know, a sophomore, and I think there's just so many examples of greatness where there was a very made you know, a major failure or a series of major failures. That creates a certain relationship with pain that allows it to almost become like not personal, like depersonalizing it, and I think if we take things so personally in business and in life, it can create some tension. Yeah, you know it can create a tension that maybe doesn't allow for like the longevity of, like thinking long term. And I think that's one thing that entrepreneurs also, you know people have to do is think long term. And where that really relates in business and in life is in relationships, right, and you know, with treating a customer like not just for a transaction in a single day but over a long term period. And I think school doesn't, you know, like I was, I spent a lot of time in summer camps and and growing up and I would meet new people every week and it wasn't just like it was. So it was always forming new relationships really quickly and then having those go away really fast. Yeah, and just school itself like I think it doesn't prepare people to be an entrepreneur very well, because it really does not promote failure like a good relationship with failure. Failure is so frowned upon and the goal is to get 100% and the best we're going to do as an entrepreneur is like 300, you know, 30% Right, like it's like we're going to be right 30% of the time. So we have to be wrong 70% of the time. And how many people want to sign up for that? Most people want to be right 90% of the time. So you know, entrepreneurship it's just. It would probably cause someone just to not make decisions because they didn't want to be wrong, and as an entrepreneur, we have to be wrong and just learn to hone our decision making process and that can. There's a whole rabbit hole that that unloads on, but I don't.

J. Rosemarie Francis: 20:39

Yeah, it's okay. Yeah, thank you very much. I think the longevity will probably come. You know more, if we focus on the two things you talk about is serving your customer Right, and I forgot the other one, sorry. But if you serve your customer and you know, let's focus on you. Know, I got to make money, I got to make money, I got to make money, then it's, it's better, it's a better way to go and to achieve success. I believe from what you're saying, yeah, it's a competitive advantage.

Parker Harris: 21:19

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.

Parker Harris: 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: 21:54

Yeah, because you think you failed, because it didn't go exactly as planned.

Parker Harris: 21:59

Yeah, yeah, I mean, and what you know, what is failure? Right? What is failure is? Is it not going the way that we didn't want it to go? But the more that we try to like, the more I try to hold on to that, versus just learning to flow with the universe of it. Yes, I think there's. You know, people that I've seen that have failed like in, I think, the way that you meant it. They always, it always led them to something that was better.

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?

Parker Harris: 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.

Parker Harris: 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?

Parker Harris: 23:53

Yeah, I think it's foundational. The way that I look at you know, my framework for this is essentially there's different aspects of life for an entrepreneur there's their business aspect, there's their relationships, there's their health. There's also their fun, and I think that's a part that sometimes gets lost in this whole. Personal development and these conversations is like with a role of fun in our life and, ideally, trying to make business fun, trying to make these different, obviously bring fun into our relationships. Sometimes we're able to bring fun into our health as well, like find things that we enjoy doing, that are fun, that are also good exercise. But to me, what I keep on seeing is that the core is personal development. Like at the center of that is personal development and sometimes mental health, like I think there's an interesting conversation and relationship between mental health and this bigger picture. But personal development to me is my language for it as well, and the more that we invest into our personal development and what I mean vest is like energy, time, even money into our personal development, it increases the success that we can have in the other areas of our life.

J. Rosemarie Francis: 25:17

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?

Parker Harris: 25:56

Yeah, I think this even relates to your last question around personal development and I wanted to kind of add a little bit to kind of that. That, to be more specific and I think, on what your question was, so you might have to ask me the question you just ask me again but I think some of this, like a foundational piece to this, also involves something called like having a growth mindset. There's a book called Growth Mindset that was, you know, very, I think, a best seller and was very popular, and it essentially outlines this. It's a binary principle, which is, I think, very few things in life that are specifically like a binary principle or binary options. But to me this is do you have a growth mindset or a static mindset? And so I think, if you know, part of entrepreneurship and personal development and this whole kind of game is the willingness to grow and evolve as a person, and that sounds all fine and good, but usually that requires pain and discomfort, like that's the part of growth and evolution that doesn't get talked about, I think as much as like this is a really uncomfortable process, and so we have to become comfortable in that discomfort to personally develop and evolve as well as to grow a business and lead a team and I think even you know, probably leading a family like it's probably. I think it's very challenging and probably painful and there's some punches in the guts, but it's like rewarding and worth it. So that growth mindset piece, I think is essential. And then one thing that I'm learning more about that I think is like that I use a lot is turning negative emotions into useful, like into power for myself. There's so much energy in the negative emotion and rather than hiding from that, escaping or numbing like, using that negative emotion to help me to create what I want to create, to create change. And I think it goes back to the story piece is like usually that negative emotion is because there's a story, like we're telling ourselves a story, we're triggered, and there's this larger story that we're maybe not even aware of. And so I think learning to harness negative emotions for our own benefit is something that there's a lot of opportunity and leveraging from a personal development conversation. That's pretty cool.

J. Rosemarie Francis: 28:45

I'm really glad we got together to do this interview. I'm continuing, I'm sorry, no.

Parker Harris: 28:52

I appreciate that. Likewise, I can nerd about out on this stuff Like I've. I think one of the most powerful ideas is like the power of accurate thinking. One of my favorite books says that the biggest enemy to evil is the power of accurate thought, and that really struck me, and so, through my work, I've really tried to like think accurately about what personal development means and, as a result, we've created a framework that creates a way of looking at personal development and like a sequence to grow within and a way to identify the bottleneck Cause. That's one of the things that I think is relevant maybe for this discussion is the importance of being able to identify like the bottleneck, like what is the challenge? Is the challenge in business? Is this a marketing issue? Is this a sales issue? Is this a strategy issue? Is this a product issue? Like, is this a team issue? Is this like? There's a lot of different issues that can come up in a business, but it's the same on the personal development side as this. 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? 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. 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? 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: 34:26

Yeah, oh, wow, thank you. You know a lot of what you say is relatable to business and entrepreneurship, but so much of it is it resonates with someone who's been through divorce or you know about relationship. So I appreciate your, your knowledge and your skill in delivering. You know some real good juicy benefits to our audience now because of that pleasure. Yeah, sure, I understand you have. You have a business, and so tell us about your business, tell us how we can reach you, including you know your social handles.

Parker Harris: 35:06

Yeah, so I run a mastermind for entrepreneurs and executives called Junto global. Our website is Junto dot global. It's an application or invitation only community when we create a confidential space for people to talk about opportunity. You know the things that I mentioned earlier, and If we could be of service to any of your audience, I would. I would be honored or a view. You know it'd be my pleasure. Also, I'm I'm sharing more information on on social media, and so you can also find me on on Instagram as well.

J. Rosemarie Francis: 35:46

Okay, and what's your handle on Instagram?

Parker Harris: 35:48

It's Zach underscore Parker, underscore Harris.

J. Rosemarie Francis: 35:52

Okay, and we'll put those links in the show notes. So thank you very much. I appreciate you, parker, for coming and talking to us today and so long I'm stuck and before I let you go, I Want you to frame one piece of advice for a solo mom. How can solo moms manage the noise in their lives?

Parker Harris: 36:13

Yeah, I Maybe this is not always possible, but I think to to to shut it off, like to shut it off as much as possible and Be very careful on the noise that you do bring in or the information that you do bring in, like those signals because it's called programming for a reason right, like the stuff that we, you know, the stuff on TV and the start you know, the news and radio and even music, like there's just so much Programming that's like subconscious, we sometimes we don't even know, and For me, like I haven't seen a commercial in like six years, seven years at least, like you know, one one on television and and it's interesting to like even jump in like an uber or like a cab when they're listening to the radio and hearing ads and just feeling how manic that energy is, so like it almost, like you know, gets me into like fight-or-flight state versus like arresting state, where I can actually like think, like with my prefrontal cortex and like think long-term. So, more and more I think there's so much more value in just breathing and and just like learning to connect with our own thoughts. Journaling, you know meta, you know. Meditating, going, you know going on an experience, you know it doesn't need to be expensive, like it can be a hike or like a walk or jumping in the water, something that you know it gets us, it gets me out of my head. Like I think, the more that we get out of our head and just like make less decisions, which I think you know, for I see, for like a Solo mom, like there's probably a lot of decisions that need to be made, a lot of like micro decisions and also you know bigger, you know big decisions and probably medium decisions and so limiting the, the other stuff that comes up, because it's amazing what happens when there's silence, like when I'm just in silence and like that question that I'm asking myself, usually the answer pops out of nowhere. Yeah, so I'm not dogmatic about it. Like I do, you know, watch, like shows and I have, I do watch movies and there are different messages, but I try to find the lesson in them and like apply that lesson into my life. And I think, the more that we just like keep it simple and like remove things and like create space for ourself to just to just sit and be and and think about, like who we are and where we're at and where we're going and and you know what would really be the best use of our energy is something like that we can get a lot of value from and a lot of leverage from. Because, like I think I, like Warren Buffett recently wrote this letter where essentially he outlined the 60 to like over the last 60 years, his company has had this like insane return on that investment. It's like I don't remember, it's like 250,000 or 2 million or some crazy number like percent in, like return on investment and he he basically yeah, but like what's? It's like it's all based on 12 decisions that were made over a 60 year period and so it's like you know it's making like one good decision every you know five years. That's really like how how success is done, versus trying to just make a bunch of decisions and and and being you know being wrong. So obviously that applies more to like investments, but I think there's also an element in life to that too. Right is like slowing things down, not needing to make decisions quickly. A lot of, a lot of timelines are very forced by salespeople, you know, and there's not really like you know things that are good today, who should be good in a year, you know it's like it shouldn't be going anywhere and you know something you know, my wife and I have known each other for 10 years now and we got married like nine months ago. We're coming up on our one year wedding anniversary. So we were, you know, we're dating for a long time and in a relationship for a long time and really got to know each other and and we're still getting. It's amazing, you know, 10 years later we're on this adventure and we're getting together, getting to know each other in new ways, and so I don't think that ever ends. But you know, I think most of the time it's easy to be in such a hurry to want that instant gratification. But if we can like think long term, be patient, that's, that's, that's how business, you know, success, is done, that's how good personal relationships are built. That's the same with health, too, right. It's like it's not about looking good for the summer, it's about being able to, you know, be healthy for our grandchildren and great grandchildren, like for that long term. So I think that could be a real challenge, just like shift from instant gratification to like long term thinking.

J. Rosemarie Francis: 41:32

Yeah, yeah, thank you, and it's one of those things we can get carried away doing, because when we're in a crisis, we'll want to make decisions fast, and sometimes those are the times we kind of mess up a little bit. So thank you.

Parker Harris: 41:50

Thank you for that advice. Anything else, yeah, I mean, I'll just like. I think the reason why it almost feels like we're in a crisis all the time, if we watch, you know, if we watch the news or watch, like, like, if we, if we let in, you know, different, like, you know, if we let in that you know, these different stories that are meant to, you know, create, I think, create fear and to, like, make it feel like there is this crisis. And it's interesting to be traveling right now and traveling the world and realizing, you know, people all over want the same things and and they're generally like, really good and things aren't on fire everywhere. You know, as an American, you know, as an American, there's a lot of stuff. You know there's a lot of stories around like what's going on in Europe and energy crisis and these protests in Paris and all this stuff and and we're here and it's, we're not really, you know, we're not really experiencing a lot of that, and so you know, maybe we're, we're lucky or to be in, you know, in spaces or environments where that's not happening. But I think, you know most people, you know, just want to, just want to have a better life and the things that were happening today are a lot like things that have been happening in the past. That's Ecclesiastes, right, like nothing new under the sun, and and so you know, a lot of this stuff is just just old games that are just replaying and and I think we have to really decide the game that we want to play. And Simon Sinek wrote a book called the Infinite Game and I I really would recommend it. It's something that hit me hard was it's again like this is a game that doesn't have a start, it doesn't have an end, it doesn't have any rules and there's an infinite amount of players, and that's very complicated, but it's. It allows for a long term thinking versus, like you know, a football game or a basketball game or baseball games, like it's a finite game, we know what the rules are, we know when it's over, when you know, we know when it's beginning. If we can really show up in relationships to to add value to other people, then it creates this really interesting like give and take that can create some really cool rewards and so, like that's one thing that I've I'm learning as I'm reflecting back on how I could be very short-sighted in the past and and how I really want to learn to think about what other people's point of view and what they need and I think single moms might be really naturally good at that and I think there's a lot of power in that mindset. But we have to balance it again with our own like our own needs and our own self-interest, and and learning how to communicate what we need, because I think that's one challenge that I even have is like I don't, I'm not going to communicating. You know my needs and therefore it's very difficult for anyone to even know what they are to help me solve them. So I find truth is often paradoxical and like two conflicting ideas that are coming together and we need to be able to like stand in that paradox versus you know, lean too hard on one side of that, or like judge one side of it, because that's that's really easy to do. It's hard to see both of those point of views and like understand where truth is.

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.

Parker Harris: 45:28

Rosemary, 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.

J. Rosemarie Francis: 45:39

Sure, absolutely. Thank you.