Ellen Twomey: You are listening to the You Are Techy podcast, episode number 71.

Voiceover: Welcome to the You Are Techy podcast, where it’s all about growing in your techy-ness so you can find the tech job of your dreams. And now your host, technology learning coach Ellen Twomey.

Ellen Twomey: I know you’ve been thinking about it. I know that very techy you is ready to come out and find the tech job of her dreams this year. Who do you turn to for the support you need to move from learning to getting hired in tech? Well, I’ve got some great news for you. I’ve got you covered with the You are techY coaching membership. We listened to our audience and we heard you ask for UX design and full stack developer options in your course content, not to mention the getting hired strategies that have worked for so many women before you. The trifecta of courses, coaching and community with the mentor support you need to keep moving forward into your tech career is like no other membership program out there. We have the exact skills employers are looking for. You’ll learn how to maximize your income with portfolio ready skills that hiring managers are seeking not to mention the steps you can skip so you don’t find yourself down that endless tech learning rabbit hole. Join me as we walk you step-by-step through the getting hired process in tech. Sign up at youaretechy.com. That’s Y-O-U-A-R-E-T-E-C-H-Y dot com. I can’t wait to see you in our membership.

Ellen Twomey: So I know you’re going to find this conversation intriguing if not surprising. So Kevin, welcome to the show.

Kevin Twomey: Thanks for having me. I’m really, really excited. I hear her every week go through and do these interviews. It just seems like the timing is right.

Ellen Twomey: We’re going to talk about some things that are little bit different, but I think it’s going to help you. First question I have for you, what’s it like being married to me? And he doesn’t know these questions ahead of time, and he’s a total preparer. We’re going to have to give him some time.

Kevin Twomey: It is fun and challenging. I wouldn’t have married you if you’re easy to be married to, we always have something new in our lives. And to a large extent, that is because of your insatiable thirst for being better and achieving more. And so we, we have a lot of fun trying new things, seeing new things. And so that there’s a bit of an adventure just like this interview without knowing the interview questions ahead of time. 

Ellen Twomey: So let’s be really specific. And then I will go into the challenge. When we talk about new things, consider it a challenge.

Kevin Twomey: I think it’s living life to its fullest. We brought our marriage. We’ve gotten new jobs, had babies, moved houses or states nearly every year, almost every, almost every year for 19 years. And so it’s, it’s an adventure, but, and you say challenge and I don’t, I sure, I guess it’s a challenge in some way, but it’s a challenge worth pursuing because it makes life better. I’m fun and challenging.

Ellen Twomey: That was for new and challenging. Okay. What’s the challenge of being

Kevin Twomey: Well, just that the constant, constant and consistent change is somewhat antithetical to who I am as a human being. I like a little more stability in my life on a daily basis, but it makes me better. And so that, that challenge, hopefully I improve as, as we go along. 

Ellen Twomey: Okay. Interesting. Are you tired? So let’s, set the context a little bit, cause I mean, what if we listened to this a year from now?

Kevin Twomey: Well, last night, our now one-month-old today, she’s one month old today — how exciting — decided that, that she wanted to be awake in the middle of the night. And so you were a wonderful mother and breastfed her for about an hour and then Gwen or our beautiful daughter here decided that it wasn’t time to go to sleep. So I held her and rocked her and tried to get her to go back to sleep. And eventually she did, but only because I laid down in bed with her and held her, which is a great position for her to sleep in, but not so much,

Ellen Twomey: Not at all what we should be much tougher, right? Because we have five kids and Catholic schools we should be really like, or,

Kevin Twomey: Or much older, the path of least resistance right now, which is kind of the way I feel some book.

Ellen Twomey: On to the topic at hand do you believe the world needs more women in technology. Why or why not? And then what advice would you give to a mom thinking about getting into tech?

Kevin Twomey: So first question, do I think we need more and I’ll borrow a little bit from the work that I do to answer this question. Okay, well maybe it’ll be a nice lead in to that is I, when I see teams in action every day, as part of my job, I coach teams, work teams to be better. And so often they are missing components to make really great decisions. And when we don’t have enough diverse perspectives on teams, we don’t make the best decisions. We have blind spots as a team. And I can’t tell you how many technology companies I’ve worked with over the last six years.

And I was a part of a technology company, a leader in a technology company before then, where we would be in a room having a discussion and we would be missing the female perspective on how that product impacts people, what kinds of design decisions we should make, or just general kinds of decisions that we should make. And so there’s this group thing that becomes very obvious very quickly, and it’s so hard to make the best decision necessary and the best teams that I’ve seen have these great diverse perspectives, where they feel comfortable honoring those diverse perspectives and talking it through and coming up with the best decision possible. From this standpoint, yes, we need way more women in technology because women are, can provide a huge amount of value and in the process feel fulfilled themselves by doing something good and difficult back to that challenge thing.

When we do things that are challenging in and technology can be challenging when we do things that are challenging, we feel more alive, more fulfilled as humans. So the women that are involved in that feel more fulfilled the teams get the blessing of that diverse perspective. So yes, more women in technology plates. I mean, I’ll throw out there the U S how hard is it to design technology when you yourself don’t have that perspective. That’s right. So that is nearly impossible. And that’s the self fulfilling prophecy of not enough women in tech and they go into tech and it’s not designed for them. So they think they’re not good at it. Right? So that’s the, but in the hiring process, if the person sitting across the table from you is not a secure person, and they’re talking to you and I’ll use you as an example, like if I’m a hiring manager and I’m talking to you and I’m a bit insecure myself, I’m looking to connect with you and meet in an interview.

And we might connect about things that don’t actually create diversity of perspective. I’m going to connect with you in the interview. And now I hire you because we connected. And now we have this group thing because you like me, I like you were pretty similar. And if I’m a hiring manager, I want to look for people that make me a little uncomfortable in my, in my interviews. Not that I want them so far out of their company culture, that they don’t fit, but, but that they think a little differently so that when we create and shape this team, a really great right.

Ellen Twomey: And here in lies, some of the diversity challenges is that it’s totally unintentional people. Don’t because they’re not trying to exclude diverse perspectives. They just are more comfortable on perspectives like their own, all of us. So the more we can get outside of that, that’s one of the reasons I love personal growth.

If you aren’t committed to personal growth, you aren’t going to be willing to look at diverse perspectives, ones that, and also if you’re not a secure person, it’s really hard to hear someone else’s perspective. Absolutely. What advice would you give to a mom thinking about getting hired in tech and I’m going to, while you think about it, I’m going to add this caveat that, you know, something, we talk about a lot, right? Cause it’s problem that I’m passionate about. And I tell you about my audience all the time, and you hear a lot of what they say and you work with a different audience, but sometimes we see completely, you know, similar concepts. So, but what advice would you, would you give to a mom specifically.

Kevin Twomey: Number one, be comfortable in your value, just what we’re talking about here. You’re bringing something to that team that is highly valued. And if you are looking to pursue a career in anything tech or otherwise, if you know your value, you will show up to that interview, to that job in an entirely different way. That’s kind of the, I think the main thing, and it relates to confidence, having the confidence to know that when you’re in, when you’re in a room with your team or you’re doing the job that you’ve been assigned to do, it’s not always going to go perfectly well, all of these, all of these jobs and technology require a certain amount of critical thinking, your personal confidence and energy might go up and down depending on the day, depending on the task, depending on the team environment and learning to work through that think through that is, I guess, part two of know your value and know that it’s not, you’re not going to feel so valuable every single day, but being able to be confident enough to work through that, the fruit on the other side is that’s good.

Ellen Twomey: That’s good advice. Okay. Now let’s maybe go into your, like the work that you do specifically. So what do you do for a living and then actually, how did you get started in that? Was it easy? And then I want to take us back to the backstory of like when you started, because, so for context, we, I have a business and Kevin has a business. We have to explain that a lot. People always think we’re in business together, but now we actually have two separate businesses there. They’re not related. Although we both do some type of coaching, there’s a coaching component. But other than that, they’re pretty, pretty different. So what do you do? And then, and then, you know, yes, in a broad spectrum.

Kevin Twomey: I am a coach for executives and that coaching involves two components. There’s a smart component of that. Think of like helping them with their strategy helping them come up with the right objectives to do.

And there’s a healthy component that it is to come up with the right strategy, come up with the right objectives for their business. They have to have right relationship with one another. They have to be able to work well together. And so we help them reduce politics and confusion on their team so that they can make the best decisions possible. And so my job is to kind of be in it with the team and facilitate their way through, through those discussions, not passively, but kind of sometimes even telling as a, as a coach, sometimes I, I use Socratic approaches and sometimes I tell, because I see some habits that I don’t like, or I see something that seems obvious. And so that’s what I do every day. I work with work with teams sometimes face to face sometimes virtually. Yeah. I mean, virtually, you know, mostly you would be in a room with people it’s funny when you say smart and healthy, then actually that sounds a lot like what I do, but really we don’t do as much as them well, on it’s on it’s.

So break it down to the principle of law. W you’re working with human beings, I’m working with human beings in the successes, the same principally, the healthy part. We just talked about. You’re right. My recommendation to them, it’s like, that’s the confidence that’s knowing, knowing how to show up well every day and work through those challenges. I do that with teams and you also have to have, as in technology, you have to know, yeah. Are you a full stack developer? Well, then you have to know a certain level of code or are you a UX designer? You have to know the design principles behind what you’re doing. So that’s, there’s a smart and healthy component to that. We just apply the smart and healthy. Yeah. You really like working with teens. I work in a community environment, but it’s more individual based. Right. Okay. So how did you get into that? And then take us back. So we even doing this was year secure, give you the like the two minute story and then we’ll see if you have follow-up questions to it. But, the, the short story is I was, I was, a leader, an executive at a technology company, and I was not a very good leader in education technology, education technology.

And my training before them was I was a CPA and a banker. And so I find myself in this manager role, I’m managing about 50 people. I’m 30 years old. I was 30 years old. We had so many kids and I had no idea what I was doing. And your cousin gave me a book read. Yes. Sam gave me a book called the five dysfunctions of the team.

Ellen Twomey: Right.

Kevin Twomey: We were talking about the Microsoft interviewing process And he gave me this book and he’s like, Hey, this really helps me. We’re on your parents’ back deck. Actually. I totally forgot that. And so I picked up this book and it’s a fable. It’s not like my background is a CPA and a banker. Like I expected a textbook on how to manage. And this is a fable written by this man named Patrick Lencioni. And he lays out the story about this, this really super executive named Katherine. Like she’s a super hero lover, she’s a super hero. And he walks through, walks the story through how she learns to lead. And I thought about all of the five dysfunctions on my team, that I was leading at the time. And I thought, Oh my gosh, I am a train wreck of a leader. Like I just, I didn’t know how to do it.

And so I started to work these concepts into my management. Well, divine Providence comes into play here. The startup that I was working for and managing was purchased by Patrick Lencioni’s publisher. And at some point I was because of a strategic initiative that we had it at the publisher the CEO of the publisher said, Hey, you like Pat, you read his books, go meet Pat and talk to him about the strategic initiative that we want to do. Well, the rest is history because I did the strategic initiative with him. And then I ended up going to work for this firm called the table group, right. Like a decade before it is. I can’t remember that.

It seems made up. It’s like, I go through the like, Hey, like it’s it’s, it seems made up, but it is the whole truth and nothing, but one of my questions is so well, you worked for pathogen. You’re what a fast blast consultant. That’s how that works. And so he just started, so he started doing it. So I never been a consultant before. And, and so the only thing I had was learning experiences from making my own mistakes as a manager and learning to overcome those mistakes. And professionally, the hardest thing about that transition was professionally. The hardest thing I’d ever done in my life. I went from being in a role that I’d been in for many years in an environment that I’ve been in for many years, with people that I’ve worked with for many years into this new environment where I had no salary, I never done the job before in my life. Most of the job is done alone. So I didn’t, it’s not like I had this team of people around me to go and work with these clients. And so I just had to figure it out.

Ellen Twomey: We just moved here and I will say this though, very humble. I have had a lot of success with these, with his strategy. He had been in an organization. You were also very successful in your organization. You had grown to have 50 people working for you and brought in a ton of revenue for the organization. So you really believe in these principles and you didn’t just believe we’re gonna talk about how we both really believe in them and they’ve worked for us, but tell everyone what you did when you had four kids. This is when I was returning to the workforce. So I was asking for that $45 an hour, that we might’ve been, that, that might’ve been one of the pushes where you’re like, yeah, that’s what you need to make. And you were going to leave a salary job. And what did you do to make that happen?

I worked day and night trying to figure out how to make the, make the job work for us. And I took free or low paying client gigs at the very beginning so I could learn. So I will always remember my first, my first gig was with the church. I remember that my first engagement was a pastor and the pastor’s leadership team. If you want to break down the hourly rate, I probably got paid about $8 so much time and effort into it. I worked with some friends for free just to get the experience under my belt to say, here’s what I’ve done. Here’s how I’ve done it here. I’ve seen this, I’ve seen this before. So I needed to really build up my personal confidence, but I also needed to build up my portfolio of work to say that I had actually done some of it.

And so I did that in low risk with friends or with low paying clients that were okay with me not being the best consultant in the world. They were up, they were happy to just have the help. And so as I started to build up that portfolio of work, it gave me the confidence to then go into an executive team of a bigger organization or a higher paying client and ask for that higher pay and comfortably deliver on the experience that I was promising. And so, as I built up that kind of freebie or low pay portfolio, it, it might my, my business just really blossomed because back to the point I made earlier about confidence, I was confident enough to go in front of anyone at that point, that, and say, this really works. Here’s a story. Here’s an example of something that I’ve done for. And I promise you, it works here, your it, and from a family standpoint, we saved six months of expenses. And then you worked both jobs. Let’s try that.

Ellen Twomey: Like, I just want to make it really tangible for people. And then the other part is like, was it easy? Your wife could have been more supportive. So we had changed a lot of jobs and I was just finishing my master’s and going back to work. And it was like, I don’t know if I can stomach another transition for you because you are not the greatest transition or so I knew that it would be a ton of you feeling like you, you know, putting, putting in hours and hours and hours when we had these young kids that were finally, it was sending them off to preschool. And I was getting my career kind of back on track and off the ground, which is helpful because your first year you didn’t make, you didn’t replace your salary. So, but this is where we’ve always did. She had a really good balance, like,

Kevin Twomey: Oh, this is where we evolved. She was really good balance. It’s not like we’ve always worked through like, okay, what do we need to do for the family? Right? And because we both believe in this table groups thing that concepts behind it, like, we felt it as a calling, you got over your discomfort, your feet or your trepidation,

Ellen Twomey: And you’re never changing jobs again, if you’re wondering you’re never leaving.

Kevin Twomey: So we, we, we built up, we built up the savings. I worked both jobs. So I did my publishing job during the day. And I did business development at night or vacation days to go and consult. So I like, I didn’t, I don’t think I took a vacation for a year, for sure, just to build up my portfolio and this other job so that when it was time to really press it go, we were, we were ready. Like I had a, I had a book of business that I could turn to that could replace a little bit of my publisher salary, not all of it, but thankfully you had ramped up, you had graduated from grad school and you had ramped up your work. And so you had a, you had a nice gig, a UX gig. And I was in allowed me a little bit of flexibility to take some risks and that risk paid off. And it’s been, it’s been growth ever since. So we’ve been really grateful for both of us, but it wasn’t, it wasn’t, it was not easy. And it wasn’t an easy decision.

Ellen Twomey: So speaking of what you do for a living, this next question is funny. The question is, what are your two secret weapon interview questions? And I say that to you because I know you work with a lot of leaders and you’ve done your own interviews, but actually you have one employee. I picked her. She’s amazing interviewed people for your own company because you talked to so many leaders and because you’ve done this, I do want to know what do you think our audience, what are two secret welcome questions, our audience, like most stressful, most stressful part of that process. What would you, what would you say are two really good questions to two questions that I love and they’re fairly simple questions. Okay. First one is, tell me about the favorite, your favorite product.

Kevin Twomey: It is a fairly simple question. People get a little bit overwhelmed by, wow. I have to pick my favorite. It’s like picking my favorite child. I’m not sure, but here, but here’s the thing. Here’s what I, here’s what I’m looking for. When I, when I ask a question like that, your favorite product, I’m looking for specifics. I want to know exactly what they’ve done. And oftentimes people in an interview, they talk in huge generalities. Well, you know, I’ve worked on this big fun project and we did these few things and we accomplished this thing, right? And so when I look for that as an opportunity to continue to get deeper and deeper into what role they played specifically, what did they accomplish? And as I’m asking questions about them individually, I’m looking for, we kinds of pronouns, plural pronouns in their answer, because what I want to hear from them is that they didn’t do it alone.

Kevin Twomey: They have hearts to play, and I want to hear the specifics of the part that they play. But I also want to hear how they worked with others and how they look at it as an accomplishment of a team of people over a group of people, not as a, as an individual, because for me work gets done always, almost always in teams or with others. We, you couldn’t do this podcast today without me. And so when we talk later at dinner with the kids, we’ll say, we did this podcast today, and here’s how we did it. And then you can talk about your role in it, my role in it. And so I’m looking for those kinds of specifics. So as we dive deeper into that, into those questions, we start to learn exactly what skills behavioral grown, or smart and healthy, the smart skills that this person has and the healthy skills that this person has.

And so I take that opportunity to ask deeper and deeper questions. Second thing I ask in every interview is what do you do when you’re not getting paid? Because I want to know what they do for fun, what their passions are. And depending on the role, if, if I’m, if, if I’m hiring for a highly demanding role, I want to know that part of their, what they do when they’re not getting paid, relates to that, or how they’re taking care of themselves outside of work is to start to hear, I’ll give you a prime example. I interviewed someone once and all of the examples they gave me outside of life outside of work were things they did individually. I go for runs. I do scrapbooking, all of these, all of these individual examples. And so it gave me a crack. It gave me an opportunity to ask a deeper question because they were going to be a part of the team and I’d say, okay, so you knew those things, why?

And they express that they needed, they need to gave them time to think their life is very busy and filled with people in their introvert. And it gave them time to be a way. It’s not that they don’t like people. They just need a time to recharge. And I think, wow, that person’s thoughtful that the person understands what it takes to recharge. They’re not just an individual, which you can draw a conclusion is that they’re very individually focused. No, they did that so that they could recharge to be productive in the environments that they were at. So I was like, Oh my gosh, they did this for others. Right? Exactly. Challenging about raising our children. I think. So we have five.

Ellen Twomey: We keep saying that. So we’ll like, remember,

Kevin Twomey: Well, I, I have to, I have to, it’s not the remembering part is the, we have five, right?

Ellen Twomey: Like that is our reality. And like, to come to terms with that.

Kevin Twomey: And I, to me, the hardest thing is to balance creating a consistent family culture. What do we want our family to be about? But also giving our kids the individual attention they need. So is the challenge. That is the, that is a huge challenge. Like how do you show, maybe that’s not a challenge for you. So when I, when I think about like, okay, we’re at the dinner table, we’re all there. And we’re all talking and it’s complete chaos. And like, what are we talking about? How are we talking about it? Like, I want our kids to like, let’s talk about something that matters. Are we talking about the right way? Are we talking about people in, in ways that are unkind? Like, what’s that family dynamic, but then like is our eight year old getting a chance to speak. And when he does, what does he speaking about?

Kevin Twomey: Are we showing him, showing him individual attention? And it’s in that, that balance is really, really difficult because otherwise they won’t feel loved. And that’s our, our primary job as parents is to, is to make sure that they are loved. And they know that they are locked every morning, every day, every day.

Ellen Twomey: Yeah. It’s, it’s a big challenge. I, we have five, so we can say it’s so overwhelming, but I’m sure it’s really hard. If you have to like to make that child feel loved. Sometimes, sometimes they just don’t, you know, they’re in a fog or, or sometimes they’re flustered.

Kevin Twomey: It presents a different, every family dynamic presents a different challenge. I’m taking my art, taking my, taking our 13 year old to volleyball and we’re alone in the car. It’s a different dynamic. Am I, am I paying attention to her? Am I not? Am I paying too much attention to her? Am I asking her such invasive questions that she just takes out her phone and texts her friends? Like that’s a, that’s an entirely different, yeah. Okay. How do we, you and I stay connected and do we do a good job of that recency bias? The answer is no of doing that.

We do. So we, we, in our, in our, in our recent past, prior to having a newborn in our life, we have a number of things that we do. This may be the most important thing that we do is stay connected because of all of the, you haven’t, do you have a demanding schedule with your work? I have a demanding schedule with my work, and then we have kids and the primacy of that. And so we prioritize time, family time. It’s one of, it’s one of the things that we check in on every week. So Sunday nights, you and I, we get together. So, yeah. So talk about this. So, so yeah. Do the whole thing. Sunday nights, we get together and we have a, this is going to sound really nerdy. We have a family scoreboard. There’s a, there’s a book about the frantic family, three questions, three questions for frantic family. And it, and it lays out a way to the premise behind the book is, well, we’ve run our work lives in a certain way. And then we’re just Willy nilly with our family. But our family is actually the most important organization. We’re part of like that my far will be our biggest legacy and impact in the world. And so we take the concept of in this book as you come up with

Ellen Twomey: Patrick Lencioni books. So this is where I say, like, we on the work that you do, because we have just, so if you’re watching the video, the video we’ve got, we’ve got seven years and we have to take like this doesn’t show everything. He had to take it out.

Kevin Twomey: But we did, like, for example, before I was born, we came up with family scoreboard and it was get ready for Glen. And we had, we had one, two, three, four, five, six things that we monitored as we were getting ready for. What do we have? The supplies that we need? Do we have a manageable calendar? Is that house ready? Did we secure daycare? Are we helping the other kids transition? And are we taking care of mom, like Elle? And I would get together every Sunday night, we would go over these things. It takes a long time. It doesn’t, it’s like five minutes or so of kind of the conversation that we would create a battle plan for the next week. Like, what are the things that we’re not doing well and how do we need to change ourselves for the next week? And then we have a calendar review.

So we go over our calendar for the week and who does, what? So are you driving the kids? Am I driving the kids? Oh, I’ve got a meeting at one o’clock on Tuesday. Can you take care of Glen? Like, we kind of try to talk through our week and bounce, bounce all out. And w e have a way to have a visual whiteboard in our kitchen so the kids can see it. We can see it. If the grandparents come and help out, we can show them, we can show them the board. Right. So that’s, those are like kind of more structural ways that we stay connected, but we’ve also always done a walk at least once a week, Friday morning, because we would cause people didn’t want to meet on Friday morning.

So we drop off the kids at school and then go for a walk and talk about the kids. We have to talk about Austin, our relationship that has, we actually increased the frequency of that over the last year during COVID because so many things were changing and we would take a walk every night. And then once we got to a certain point in your pregnancy where you weren’t feeling that well, we didn’t walk as much Connected by walking and talking and not talking about the kids, which is super hard. And then we have our calendar. So we know where the time,

Ellen Twomey: Right. I want to talk more, a little bit more about three questions. So we don’t have

For sure, because we would just give it away to people who kept giving it away. That’s the thing. But the other piece

To it is that we would have, we had our standard objectives, which is like, what are we always taken care of? So those are things like our faith and our house and our marriage is one of those things. Yes. Three weeks. Right. And we changed this. So this is like our that’s kind of the official.

Kevin Twomey: The rallying cry was the get ready for Glen. And then there are the standard things that we look after every week. Like how’s our faith, how’s our marriage. How’s our health that we talk about. How’s our house, the standard things that kind of get in the way of getting cared for one, the big takeaway from that I would say is that we are, we do certain, we’ve put certain tasks on there. And the red, yellow, green is like, we have to say no to other things in order to make progress on that.

Ellen Twomey: So when we do it, when we look through the lens, you’re being a fussy surgeons, aren’t you? Yeah. When we, when we look at those tasks or the, with the objectives, it necessarily requires that we say no to other things. And I feel like that was really, that’s what I love. That’s, what’s freeing for me because I remember in three questions, the book when Pat writes about, and he says that you it’s, again, a fable in this family, the wife is like, I just want to run away to an Island. And I’m like, yeah, that’s totally me. I watched Caribbean life on Saturday mornings. I want to run away to an Island and then nobody will text me or call me, or there won’t be any more carpools. And then that will solve it all. But really what’s so great is that it’s almost like, I mean, you don’t need permission up. I don’t think saying no. Is that hard for you? But for me, it was for me.

Kevin Twomey: For me, it’s different. It is. I’m not, I’m not a great communicator, natural introvert to a lot of things on my own always have. And for me, this is an opportunity that I don’t, I don’t miss telling you things like the walks and the scoreboard. It brings a level of kind of accountability for me to make sure that I’m saying like, Hey, the plumber is coming on Tuesday, or gosh, you know, we went through this during the week and I forgot to tell you some things during the week. And so we’re red on marriage and, you know, there’s a reason why I slept on the couch. So it just allows us for a little bit of a sounds like a weird word in the family. For me, it helps me to be a better husband.

Ellen Twomey: For me being the extrovert. And I just see you, and I want to tell you everything. I’ll just tell you every single thing. And then you’re totally overwhelmed. I can say, okay, is this okay? Is this the most important thing that we’re focused on? And then I can, and then I can filter, like you were making jokes about sleeping on the couch. I mean, I think the point is, But also this is not a perfect science. It’s totally messy. Like Wednesday. I mean, it’s a messy process, but I think it’s also enabled us. I dunno, give ourselves permission to do different things. Focus on your health, focus on your business, focus on my business. And it’s mostly on me, especially when I’m pregnant and all that stuff, but we would pick, we would do focus on Glen, focus on the child, but design one of us As a parent of five. Like, I think it’s really hard to pick, Hey, we’re going to focus on one person for four to six weeks. I feel like without that, I wouldn’t do that.

Kevin Twomey: Right. So the point is here on the rally cry is that it is temporary. And it helps. I can’t imagine going through some of the life transitions that we’ve gone through, moving from Illinois to North Carolina, buying a house in North Carolina, having a baby, sending a child off to high school. All of these things have been rally cries for us. And it helps, helps us name the things that are challenging about our transitions and work through them together.

Ellen Twomey: So that’s the thing when you’re talking about balance, you know, some people are like, Oh, I hate the work-life balance. There’s no balance, Whatever. I mean, we are so not perfect.I’m not coming. We’re not coming to you. Like we are totally, but I love these tools because I, they bring me some peace. The walk. The rallying cry. There’s some amount of peace that’s going on to know I getting everything done is not the goal.

Ellen Twomey: And now it will all get done. And that’s the, that’s really, what I want to say is like, I just want to share those tools. And I wanted you to share those tools because that’s been really impactful in our life.

Kevin Twomey: You can see per just real quick for your audience. Like you can see like, okay, maybe a rally for you as moms going back to work. And so the rally cry is support mom and going back to work. So one of the things that a family needs to do and mom needs to do to help make this transitional snowed and just talk through five or six big things that make the most impact.

Ellen Twomey: Like you are totally that you were a good girl. You did a great job. Okay. All right. Is there anything else you want to say?

And it’ll be interesting to see if this is a popular episode, but I hope it was helpful to you guys, and we really appreciate your being with the three of us.

Ellen Twomey: Hey, if you enjoyed listening to this podcast, you have to sign up for the You are techY email list. Imagine being in the tech job of your dreams, join me to get the strategies, training, and never ending support to get hired. Sign up at youaretechy.com. That’s Y O U A R E T E C H Y dot com. I’ll see you next time.