In this episode, I share the 12 minute version of my life story as an example of how you can share your unique story with others.
In fact, I challenge you to tell your story to one person this week, and ask them to do the same. This exercise is a great way to remind us we’re human and help us have empathy toward others.
An artificial intelligence software program will never have a story like yours, let alone understand and relate to it, so be human and share your story!
Join the Leader Assistant FB Community to see my story outline.
Connect with me on LinkedIn. I would love to hear from you!
Here’s a fun picture of me helping my brother take a call (apparently I was born to be an assistant)…
SUBSCRIBE
Subscribe to The Leader Assistant Podcast so you don’t miss a new episode!
You can find the show on iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts, and Stitcher.
Join my email list here if you want to get an email when a new episode goes live.
JOIN THE COMMUNITY
Join the Leader Assistant Facebook Group here for bonus content and to network with other assistants who are committed to becoming leaders!
LEAVE A REVIEW
If you’re enjoying the podcast, please take 2 minutes to rate and review the show on iTunes here. Each review helps me stay motivated to keep the show going – and helps the podcast rank on iTunes!
HELP ME, HELP YOU (MAKE THE PODCAST BETTER)
Do you have questions you’d like me to answer, guests you think I should interview, or suggested topics you’d like me to address on the show? Or maybe you have some constructive feedback? Either way, I’d love to hear from you! You can email me at podcast@leaderassistant.com.
—
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
00:00:00.520 –> 00:00:03.900
<v SPEAKER_5>Welcome to The Leader Assistant Podcast, Episode 11.
00:00:04.400 –> 00:00:06.160
<v SPEAKER_4>What does a nosy pepper do?
00:00:07.000 –> 00:00:08.680
<v SPEAKER_4>It gets jalapeno business.
00:00:11.660 –> 00:00:19.340
<v SPEAKER_2>The Leader Assistant Podcast exists to encourage and challenge assistance to become irreplaceable, game-changing leader assistants.
00:00:22.180 –> 00:00:24.860
<v SPEAKER_3>And here’s your host, my son, Jeremy.
00:00:24.880 –> 00:00:26.720
JEREMY: Thanks, Dad.
00:00:26.780 –> 00:00:27.960
JEREMY: Appreciate the intro.
00:00:28.200 –> 00:00:38.740
JEREMY: 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.
00:00:39.060 –> 00:00:44.580
JEREMY: So I thought I’d have a lot of my family involved in this episode because it’s about my story.
00:00:44.940 –> 00:00:50.100
JEREMY: I’ve kind of written out a bullet list of my story so that I can hopefully quickly run through it.
00:00:50.660 –> 00:01:00.500
JEREMY: 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.
00:01:00.960 –> 00:01:12.080
JEREMY: 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.
00:01:12.620 –> 00:01:20.720
JEREMY: 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.
00:01:21.780 –> 00:01:39.960
JEREMY: 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.
00:01:40.440 –> 00:01:41.540
JEREMY: So I’m going to jump right in.
00:01:42.300 –> 00:01:43.300
JEREMY: I’d love to hear from you.
00:01:43.380 –> 00:01:54.580
JEREMY: 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.
00:01:55.200 –> 00:02:02.780
JEREMY: I will be posting the outline to my story, the bullet list of my story in that Facebook group.
00:02:02.920 –> 00:02:05.500
JEREMY: So again, facebook.leaderassistant.com.
00:02:06.460 –> 00:02:07.520
JEREMY: All right, let’s jump right in.
00:02:07.540 –> 00:02:13.320
JEREMY: So I was born in Virginia in 1984 on the first day of summer, June 21st.
00:02:14.120 –> 00:02:21.700
JEREMY: My parents met in college at Liberty University out there, and we moved to Pennsylvania for a little bit.
00:02:21.720 –> 00:02:26.820
JEREMY: But then when I was one, we moved to Kansas City, Missouri, which is where my dad is from.
00:02:27.680 –> 00:02:32.600
JEREMY: And then in 1985, my brother Kyle was born.
00:02:33.020 –> 00:02:35.940
JEREMY: In 1986, my brother Jacob was born.
00:02:35.980 –> 00:02:39.600
JEREMY: And in 1989, my sister Paige was born.
00:02:40.040 –> 00:02:41.340
JEREMY: So I am one of four.
00:02:41.780 –> 00:02:42.520
JEREMY: I’m the oldest.
00:02:42.960 –> 00:02:45.440
JEREMY: We fight sometimes, but mostly we have a lot of fun.
00:02:45.720 –> 00:02:51.600
JEREMY: Unfortunately, I don’t get to see them a ton because they are not in the same city as me.
00:02:51.700 –> 00:02:57.260
JEREMY: But if you’re listening, Kyle, Jacob, and Paige, hi, I love you.
00:02:58.160 –> 00:02:58.500
JEREMY: All right.
00:02:58.600 –> 00:03:00.280
JEREMY: And then we were homeschooled.
00:03:00.340 –> 00:03:01.760
JEREMY: So my mom homeschooled us.
00:03:02.920 –> 00:03:05.180
JEREMY: I was homeschooled all the way through high school.
00:03:05.880 –> 00:03:16.280
JEREMY: 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.
00:03:16.680 –> 00:03:19.720
JEREMY: I was a very, very quiet homeschooled kid.
00:03:20.400 –> 00:03:22.500
JEREMY: My dad was a pastor, so I was a preacher’s kid.
00:03:22.520 –> 00:03:26.180
JEREMY: So I was a homeschooled, quiet preacher’s kid, tall and skinny.
00:03:26.840 –> 00:03:29.480
JEREMY: Back in the 90s, we wore baggy clothes.
00:03:29.500 –> 00:03:30.680
JEREMY: So I was very thin looking.
00:03:30.680 –> 00:03:31.620
JEREMY: Let’s just leave it at that.
00:03:33.060 –> 00:03:38.920
JEREMY: I was raised to be a hard worker, mowing the yard since I was eight years old.
00:03:40.620 –> 00:03:45.400
JEREMY: I remember the first time I mowed the yard, I went up to my dad and said, hey, I mowed the yard.
00:03:45.420 –> 00:03:46.640
JEREMY: And he’s like, hey, great job.
00:03:46.900 –> 00:03:48.540
JEREMY: So I said, well, aren’t you going to pay me?
00:03:48.680 –> 00:03:49.820
JEREMY: He’s like, why would I pay you?
00:03:50.080 –> 00:03:53.120
JEREMY: And I said, well, all my friends get paid when they mow their yard.
00:03:53.140 –> 00:03:55.560
JEREMY: And he said, well, that’s not how we do it around here.
00:03:55.580 –> 00:04:00.800
JEREMY: You’re part of this family, and that’s part of our responsibility is to take care of our house and our yard.
00:04:00.860 –> 00:04:02.140
JEREMY: And why would I pay you?
00:04:02.300 –> 00:04:03.420
JEREMY: So I was pretty upset.
00:04:03.800 –> 00:04:13.300
JEREMY: 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.
00:04:13.320 –> 00:04:17.600
JEREMY: But he said, listen, this is the last time I’m ever going to pay you to mow our yard.
00:04:18.160 –> 00:04:22.500
JEREMY: So anyway, that was an interesting lesson about responsibility and family ownership.
00:04:23.200 –> 00:04:27.500
JEREMY: So anyway, I grew up in, you know, again, homeschooled in high school.
00:04:27.520 –> 00:04:31.800
JEREMY: I got a job at Walmart, working in the pet department, never had a pet in my life.
00:04:32.280 –> 00:04:38.040
JEREMY: And there I was selling cat litter and dog food and scooping out dead goldfish out of the fish tanks.
00:04:39.260 –> 00:04:40.720
JEREMY: But I loved helping people.
00:04:41.480 –> 00:04:46.500
JEREMY: And I’ve kind of always loved helping people, helping people move, shoveling snow for people.
00:04:46.520 –> 00:04:54.920
JEREMY: I was always doing entrepreneurial things like mowing people’s yards for money or selling baseball cards at the garage sale.
00:04:55.300 –> 00:05:00.460
JEREMY: Or when I got a little bit older, I sold fireworks out of a semi truck trailer.
00:05:00.580 –> 00:05:08.320
JEREMY: So I’d sleep in this semi full of gunpowder for a week and sell fireworks.
00:05:08.880 –> 00:05:12.700
JEREMY: That was one of my first entrepreneurial managerial jobs.
00:05:13.060 –> 00:05:16.480
JEREMY: I ended up started to play guitar at the age of 17.
00:05:16.960 –> 00:05:23.460
JEREMY: And I led music at my youth group and thought I was going to be doing music ministry for the rest of my life.
00:05:23.880 –> 00:05:25.280
JEREMY: So I moved to St.
00:05:25.300 –> 00:05:30.140
JEREMY: Louis in 2004 and I was an intern at a church.
00:05:30.780 –> 00:05:46.780
JEREMY: 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.
00:05:46.820 –> 00:05:53.060
JEREMY: And I was like, you know what, I’m getting I think this talent pool is outgrowing my talent in this area.
00:05:53.080 –> 00:05:54.460
JEREMY: So what am I going to do?
00:05:54.480 –> 00:06:02.060
JEREMY: Like, what’s my what’s the what’s the gift or the skill that I have that is better than most people?
00:06:02.600 –> 00:06:11.960
JEREMY: 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.
00:06:13.040 –> 00:06:19.140
JEREMY: So I ended up taking a pastor’s assistant job as my first assistant job.
00:06:20.060 –> 00:06:21.420
JEREMY: Did that for about a year or so.
00:06:21.920 –> 00:06:25.340
JEREMY: Then I was kind of a departmental project manager assistant.
00:06:25.700 –> 00:06:34.860
JEREMY: 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.
00:06:35.400 –> 00:06:40.420
JEREMY: And then I got married to my lovely wife, Megan, in 2010.
00:06:40.680 –> 00:06:49.140
JEREMY: One of the craziest transitions in my life was I was currently a project manager and I was bored.
00:06:49.640 –> 00:06:50.940
JEREMY: It was just not interesting.
00:06:50.960 –> 00:06:52.680
JEREMY: It was not challenging enough.
00:06:53.280 –> 00:06:59.460
JEREMY: 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.
00:07:00.360 –> 00:07:02.560
JEREMY: And so we kind of thought about it, prayed about it.
00:07:02.680 –> 00:07:11.880
JEREMY: 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.
00:07:11.920 –> 00:07:18.260
JEREMY: So we had a meeting and they said, we want you to be the lead pastor’s assistant, executive assistant.
00:07:19.180 –> 00:07:20.000
JEREMY: And I said, that’s funny.
00:07:20.020 –> 00:07:22.380
JEREMY: I just told my wife yesterday that I wanted to be your assistant.
00:07:22.720 –> 00:07:25.340
JEREMY: So it was just kind of crazy how that all came together.
00:07:26.360 –> 00:07:33.480
JEREMY: So I was his assistant for, that was my first probably executive assistant role.
00:07:33.560 –> 00:07:40.980
JEREMY: The other roles were probably more like administrative assistant and not as demanding, but that was a pretty demanding role.
00:07:41.360 –> 00:07:45.200
JEREMY: I was there for six years with him as his executive assistant.
00:07:45.680 –> 00:07:47.240
JEREMY: He was the chaplain of the St.
00:07:47.260 –> 00:07:48.060
JEREMY: Louis Cardinals.
00:07:48.800 –> 00:07:51.360
JEREMY: He was vice president of a global organization.
00:07:52.680 –> 00:07:56.220
JEREMY: He went around and spoke at all these conferences all over the world.
00:07:56.760 –> 00:07:59.180
JEREMY: And then he published a few books as well.
00:07:59.360 –> 00:08:05.860
JEREMY: And so I project managed and kind of ran point on a lot of the process for publishing books.
00:08:05.880 –> 00:08:10.360
JEREMY: So I got to learn a lot about, oh, we also had a podcast at the time too.
00:08:10.380 –> 00:08:20.000
JEREMY: 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.
00:08:20.220 –> 00:08:21.460
JEREMY: At least that’s how it was for me.
00:08:21.460 –> 00:08:27.000
JEREMY: Down the road, I ended up realizing, wow, I’ve actually, oh, yeah, we, I’ve done a podcast before.
00:08:27.020 –> 00:08:29.360
JEREMY: And, oh, I’ve done audio editing before.
00:08:29.380 –> 00:08:30.820
JEREMY: Oh, I’ve done graphic design before.
00:08:31.160 –> 00:08:35.520
JEREMY: Oh, yeah, I’ve worked with a publisher to publish a book, and I’ve worked with a literary agent.
00:08:35.520 –> 00:08:44.160
JEREMY: And, oh, yeah, I’ve dealt with Major League Baseball teams and working with high profile celebrities.
00:08:44.180 –> 00:08:47.020
JEREMY: And so anyway, it just all kind of came together.
00:08:47.500 –> 00:08:52.120
JEREMY: But then, as I talked about a couple episodes ago, I burned out.
00:08:52.520 –> 00:08:53.460
JEREMY: I worked too much.
00:08:54.000 –> 00:08:56.640
JEREMY: My boss and I, we did not have good boundaries.
00:08:56.980 –> 00:08:59.500
JEREMY: He worked too much, to be frank, and he would tell you that.
00:08:59.520 –> 00:09:01.660
JEREMY: I’m actually going to interview him on a future episode.
00:09:02.300 –> 00:09:03.300
JEREMY: But, yeah, he burned out.
00:09:03.380 –> 00:09:04.040
JEREMY: I burned out.
00:09:04.220 –> 00:09:05.340
JEREMY: He ended up getting fired.
00:09:05.420 –> 00:09:07.120
JEREMY: That’s a story for a different episode.
00:09:07.740 –> 00:09:09.600
JEREMY: And so I was in between jobs.
00:09:09.620 –> 00:09:12.700
JEREMY: I decided to leave the organization and tried to do something new.
00:09:13.400 –> 00:09:24.000
JEREMY: 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.
00:09:24.560 –> 00:09:30.540
JEREMY: We took them across the country for a few months, and we just drove to Colorado, Montana.
00:09:31.440 –> 00:09:32.720
JEREMY: We went to DC.
00:09:33.560 –> 00:09:37.020
JEREMY: We went to North Carolina, went to Kansas City for a little bit.
00:09:37.040 –> 00:09:44.700
JEREMY: 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.
00:09:45.500 –> 00:09:49.800
JEREMY: And I think one thing that I realized in that time is like, I’m never going to let that happen again.
00:09:49.820 –> 00:09:51.500
JEREMY: I never want to burn out again.
00:09:51.880 –> 00:09:57.060
JEREMY: But the other thing that I thought of was, I want to help executives avoid burnout as well.
00:09:57.080 –> 00:10:01.580
JEREMY: I don’t want my boss to burn out like my former boss did.
00:10:02.120 –> 00:10:10.680
JEREMY: So I started goburrows.com with the goal of helping as many leaders as possible accomplish their goals and avoid burnout.
00:10:11.420 –> 00:10:15.740
JEREMY: And kind of my little tagline is more time, more energy, and more success.
00:10:15.760 –> 00:10:28.380
JEREMY: 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.
00:10:28.840 –> 00:10:33.640
JEREMY: And then that will help them have more success and accomplish their goals and avoid burnout.
00:10:33.680 –> 00:10:36.360
JEREMY: So that’s kind of where I am.
00:10:36.660 –> 00:10:46.660
JEREMY: 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.
00:10:46.680 –> 00:10:46.980
JEREMY: Louis.
00:10:47.480 –> 00:10:58.480
JEREMY: 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.
00:10:59.020 –> 00:11:07.940
JEREMY: So pretty crazy shift from nonprofit church world to corporate for-profit software world and then now artificial intelligence.
00:11:07.960 –> 00:11:12.480
JEREMY: So anyway, I’ve been doing that for a couple years now since 2017.
00:11:13.220 –> 00:11:21.020
JEREMY: 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.
00:11:21.040 –> 00:11:24.160
JEREMY: So I’m so glad you’ve listened to my story.
00:11:24.520 –> 00:11:25.760
JEREMY: This is kind of where I am today.
00:11:25.780 –> 00:11:26.860
JEREMY: I’m doing this podcast.
00:11:27.020 –> 00:11:31.800
JEREMY: I’d love to hear your suggestions on topics and guests for the show.
00:11:32.360 –> 00:11:34.680
JEREMY: I hope you enjoyed my story, a little bit of backstory.
00:11:34.920 –> 00:11:39.620
JEREMY: Reach out on the Facebook group at facebook.leaderassistant.com.
00:11:40.280 –> 00:11:43.720
JEREMY: And I just want to encourage you to share your story with one person this week.
00:11:44.500 –> 00:11:45.680
JEREMY: So take that as a challenge.
00:11:46.120 –> 00:11:51.640
JEREMY: Find one person, whether it’s a friend, a coworker, heck, even your boss.
00:11:52.260 –> 00:12:02.620
JEREMY: 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.
00:12:03.060 –> 00:12:10.600
JEREMY: And just get to know each other, be human, empathize with each other, and encourage each other and listen to each other.
00:12:11.260 –> 00:12:12.380
JEREMY: So thanks again for listening.
00:12:12.800 –> 00:12:17.340
JEREMY: I will talk to you in the next episode, and have a great, great day.
00:12:18.000 –> 00:12:21.260
JEREMY: Help my dad out and leave a review on iTunes.
00:12:34.157 –> 00:12:36.017
<v SPEAKER_4> My dad is ticklish.
00:12:37.197 –> 00:12:38.997
<v SPEAKER_4> goburrows.com
