Share Your Unique Story

Speaker 5 · 0:00

Welcome to The Leader Assistant Podcast, Episode 11.

Speaker 4 · 0:04

What does a nosy pepper do? It gets jalapeno business.

Speaker 2 · 0:11

The Leader Assistant Podcast exists to encourage and challenge assistance to become irreplaceable, game-changing leader assistants.

Speaker 3 · 0:22

And here's your host, my son, Jeremy.

Jeremy · 0:24

Thanks, Dad. Appreciate the intro. That was my brother, Jacob, intro-ing the episode at the beginning, and my son, Weston, and then my wife doing the voiceover for the bumper music. So I thought I'd have a lot of my family involved in this episode because it's about my story. I've kind of written out a bullet list of my story so that I can hopefully quickly run through it. I wanted to give you a little bit of context because I realized I've released 10 or so episodes and not given my backstory at all. But I also wanted to do it as an example for something that I think you all should do with your friends and your family, other assistants, even your boss in certain settings. I think it's just good to remember that we're all human, that we all have unique stories, and that we all come from different places. And in this day and age of technology and artificial intelligence and social media, I think this could be a really good exercise to bring us back to the humanity of life and the genuine, authentic, and uniqueness that we each bring to the table. So I'm going to jump right in. I'd love to hear from you. You can email me at podcast at leaderassistant.com, or you can join the Facebook community at facebook.leaderassistant.com and share your story there. I will be posting the outline to my story, the bullet list of my story in that Facebook group. So again, facebook.leaderassistant.com. All right, let's jump right in. So I was born in Virginia in 1984 on the first day of summer, June 21st. My parents met in college at Liberty University out there, and we moved to Pennsylvania for a little bit. But then when I was one, we moved to Kansas City, Missouri, which is where my dad is from. And then in 1985, my brother Kyle was born. In 1986, my brother Jacob was born. And in 1989, my sister Paige was born. So I am one of four. I'm the oldest. We fight sometimes, but mostly we have a lot of fun. Unfortunately, I don't get to see them a ton because they are not in the same city as me. But if you're listening, Kyle, Jacob, and Paige, hi, I love you. All right. And then we were homeschooled. So my mom homeschooled us. I was homeschooled all the way through high school. So you can blame my homeschooling on my genius if you think I'm smart, or you can blame my homeschooling on my geekiness if you think I'm geeky. I was a very, very quiet homeschooled kid. My dad was a pastor, so I was a preacher's kid. So I was a homeschooled, quiet preacher's kid, tall and skinny. Back in the 90s, we wore baggy clothes. So I was very thin looking. Let's just leave it at that. I was raised to be a hard worker, mowing the yard since I was eight years old. I remember the first time I mowed the yard, I went up to my dad and said, hey, I mowed the yard. And he's like, hey, great job. So I said, well, aren't you going to pay me? He's like, why would I pay you? And I said, well, all my friends get paid when they mow their yard. And he said, well, that's not how we do it around here. You're part of this family, and that's part of our responsibility is to take care of our house and our yard. And why would I pay you? So I was pretty upset. So he kind of, you know, being a good dad and having a soft part, at least a small soft part in his heart, decided to pay me one dollar for that first mow. But he said, listen, this is the last time I'm ever going to pay you to mow our yard. So anyway, that was an interesting lesson about responsibility and family ownership. So anyway, I grew up in, you know, again, homeschooled in high school. I got a job at Walmart, working in the pet department, never had a pet in my life. And there I was selling cat litter and dog food and scooping out dead goldfish out of the fish tanks. But I loved helping people. And I've kind of always loved helping people, helping people move, shoveling snow for people. I was always doing entrepreneurial things like mowing people's yards for money or selling baseball cards at the garage sale. Or when I got a little bit older, I sold fireworks out of a semi truck trailer. So I'd sleep in this semi full of gunpowder for a week and sell fireworks. That was one of my first entrepreneurial managerial jobs. I ended up started to play guitar at the age of 17. And I led music at my youth group and thought I was going to be doing music ministry for the rest of my life. So I moved to St. Louis in 2004 and I was an intern at a church. And I realized after a couple of years that while I was enjoying the music and really excited about the music, there were a lot of talented musicians that were had a much better voice, were much better guitar players and just generally just better musicians. And I was like, you know what, I'm getting I think this talent pool is outgrowing my talent in this area. So what am I going to do? Like, what's my what's the what's the gift or the skill that I have that is better than most people? And I started realizing pretty quickly that details and organization were something that I was much better than everyone else around me at the time. So I ended up taking a pastor's assistant job as my first assistant job. Did that for about a year or so. Then I was kind of a departmental project manager assistant. Then I was a project manager in a creative department doing video editing and audio editing and graphic design and just kind of managing that that process. And then I got married to my lovely wife, Megan, in 2010. One of the craziest transitions in my life was I was currently a project manager and I was bored. It was just not interesting. It was not challenging enough. And so I told my wife, I said, you know, it'd be kind of fun to be the lead minister, the lead pastor's assistant. And so we kind of thought about it, prayed about it. And then the next morning, totally separate, this happened the next morning, the pastor and my current boss at the time said, hey, we want to have a meeting with you. So we had a meeting and they said, we want you to be the lead pastor's assistant, executive assistant. And I said, that's funny. I just told my wife yesterday that I wanted to be your assistant. So it was just kind of crazy how that all came together. So I was his assistant for, that was my first probably executive assistant role. The other roles were probably more like administrative assistant and not as demanding, but that was a pretty demanding role. I was there for six years with him as his executive assistant. He was the chaplain of the St. Louis Cardinals. He was vice president of a global organization. He went around and spoke at all these conferences all over the world. And then he published a few books as well. And so I project managed and kind of ran point on a lot of the process for publishing books. So I got to learn a lot about, oh, we also had a podcast at the time too. So pretty crazy how, you know, just a lot of you EAs out there, you learn a ton and you don't even realize how much you learn until down the road. At least that's how it was for me. Down the road, I ended up realizing, wow, I've actually, oh, yeah, we, I've done a podcast before. And, oh, I've done audio editing before. Oh, I've done graphic design before. Oh, yeah, I've worked with a publisher to publish a book, and I've worked with a literary agent. And, oh, yeah, I've dealt with Major League Baseball teams and working with high profile celebrities. And so anyway, it just all kind of came together. But then, as I talked about a couple episodes ago, I burned out. I worked too much. My boss and I, we did not have good boundaries. He worked too much, to be frank, and he would tell you that. I'm actually going to interview him on a future episode. But, yeah, he burned out. I burned out. He ended up getting fired. That's a story for a different episode. And so I was in between jobs. I decided to leave the organization and tried to do something new. Sold my house, sold a lot of our stuff, gave away a lot of our stuff, put the bare minimum in a storage unit, and took my wife and our two boys, Weston and Silas. We took them across the country for a few months, and we just drove to Colorado, Montana. We went to DC. We went to North Carolina, went to Kansas City for a little bit. So we just kind of traveled and saw all our friends and family and explored the country and just enjoyed each other for a while. And I think one thing that I realized in that time is like, I'm never going to let that happen again. I never want to burn out again. But the other thing that I thought of was, I want to help executives avoid burnout as well. I don't want my boss to burn out like my former boss did. So I started goburrows.com with the goal of helping as many leaders as possible accomplish their goals and avoid burnout. And kind of my little tagline is more time, more energy, and more success. So I'm really impassionate about helping leaders, leader assistants, and executive leaders to accomplish their goals by reclaiming their time and reclaiming their energy. And then that will help them have more success and accomplish their goals and avoid burnout. So that's kind of where I am. Quick note, I did, after about eight months in between jobs, I took a job as EA to the CEO of a new artificial intelligence software company here in St. Louis. My CEO is the former CEO of answers.com, which was at one point one of the top 10 most visited websites in the world. So pretty crazy shift from nonprofit church world to corporate for-profit software world and then now artificial intelligence. So anyway, I've been doing that for a couple years now since 2017. And GoBurrows has kind of evolved into a little bit of speaking, a little bit of writing, a little bit of coaching, and now the podcast. So I'm so glad you've listened to my story. This is kind of where I am today. I'm doing this podcast. I'd love to hear your suggestions on topics and guests for the show. I hope you enjoyed my story, a little bit of backstory. Reach out on the Facebook group at facebook.leaderassistant.com. And I just want to encourage you to share your story with one person this week. So take that as a challenge. Find one person, whether it's a friend, a coworker, heck, even your boss. Find somebody that you know a little bit or maybe an acquaintance that maybe you don't know that well, and share your story with them and ask them to share their story. And just get to know each other, be human, empathize with each other, and encourage each other and listen to each other. So thanks again for listening. I will talk to you in the next episode, and have a great, great day. Help my dad out and leave a review on iTunes.

Speaker 4 · 12:34

My dad is ticklish. goburrows.com