[INTRODUCTION]

Hal Elrod: If you are a parent, you are not going to want to miss this episode with my good friends and co-authors of The Miracle Morning for Parents and Families, Mike and Lindsay McCarthy. I’ve known Mike and Lindsay for over a decade. We co-authored this book. We were neighbors for many years, and they’re two of my favorite people because they’re two of the most intentional human beings on the planet, specifically when it comes to parenting. You’re about to learn how creating family values, operating family meetings, and other rituals that are taught in the Miracle Morning for Parents and Families Playbook.

These systems and rhythms enable you to create a culture in your family that not only creates love and connection, that not only instills values in your children that you want them to have, but creates a lasting effect so that long after they’re adults and they’re out of the house, they want to keep coming back and they’re living their lives in a way that is consistent with the values that you instilled. And the reality is most of us parents are unintentional, myself included, and then we look back with regret going, “Oh, man, I really wish I would’ve done this or that.” No matter what age your kids are, if you are a parent, this episode will help you be the intentional parent that your kids deserve.

[INTERVIEW]

Hal Elrod: Mike McCarthy, Lindsay, so good to be with you.

Lindsay McCarthy: You too, Hal.

Hal Elrod: That was such a formal introduction. We were talking about like we do life together for those that don’t know like we vacation together. We do dinners. We used to be neighbors. Sadly, I moved out of the neighborhood, so that’s a bummer.

Mike McCarthy: Regrets it too.

Hal Elrod: I know. Yeah, a little bit every time I see you guys. But then I see some of our other neighbors, and I’m like, “Ah, that was a good move.” We all know. You know who you are.

Mike McCarthy: It averages out.

Hal Elrod: Yeah, it averages out.

Lindsay McCarthy: Didn’t want to deal with the HOA.

Hal Elrod: Yeah. So, again, you’ve been on the podcast. I don’t even know. I didn’t check the episode. It’s been probably a couple of years since y’all were on. But I was talking about our book together, The Miracle Morning for Parents and Families. This is the revised and updated edition that y’all came to me and you’re like, “Hey, we’ve learned so much as a family. We want to update the book,” which was cool. So, we did that, and then y’all came up with this and this to me like they go together so well. But this is the Miracle Morning for Parents and Families Playbook, the Companion Guide to the Miracle Morning for Parents and Families. And I just want to start here because this is kind of the work that we’ve done together in the world.

And I want to say this before we transition into what you all are up to right now, which is the reason that we did this book together is because, Lindsay, you approached me with Tyler, who was like six or seven at the time.

Lindsay McCarthy: Yeah.

Hal Elrod: Just little. And you’re like, “Hey, Hal,” I was speaking at an event. Was it 1Life Fully Lived that I was speaking at?

Mike McCarthy: Yeah.

Lindsay McCarthy: Yep.

Hal Elrod: Like, my son wants to read you his affirmations. They were like arranged by the alphabet, right? And I was like, “This is amazing.” And you’re like, “Yeah, we do like our Miracle Morning, but we adjusted the SAVERS into a new acronym called CHARMS. You know, creativity is the C.” And I was just so blown away. I was like, “Do you guys want to write the, like, you’re literally the embodiment. And at that point, and even since then, my kids don’t do the Miracle Morning.” So, I wasn’t even qualified to write the book from that stance. So, with all of that, I want to, I guess, where to start, how did… Let’s actually start here. How did y’all start doing the Miracle Morning with your kids? Where did that come about?

Lindsay McCarthy: I guess I could take that one. So, when our kids were young, we homeschooled them, and our mornings were a little messy. And so, the CHARMS, as we came to call them, they really anchored our day. And as a homeschool mom, like if I only got through the CHARMS, it was a successful day.

Hal Elrod: It was a win. Nice. Run through the CHARMS real quick for those that don’t know.

Lindsay McCarthy: Yeah. So, CHARMS is creativity, health, affirmations, reading, meditation, and service. And so, like, service was the one we kind of really added. The other ones are kind of adaptations of the SAVERS, but one of our personal family values is to be servant leaders. So, we’re like, “Why don’t we bake that into our everyday morning ritual?”

Hal Elrod: Yes. I love that. Yeah. And creativity is also new and different in that it’s not part of the SAVERS, and it just makes sense for when you’re having kids do it, right?

Lindsay McCarthy: Yeah. It was part of scribing, but the kids didn’t know how to write. Ember was two, Tyler was six. Like, they were just learning letters. So, we expanded it to be creativity, and they could…

Hal Elrod: And so, what would they do? Play? Draw?

Lindsay McCarthy: Color. Yeah. We’d give them. They had like a whole little art studio in our kitchen, and they had paper and scissors and crayons and markers.

Hal Elrod: Got it. So, which is for a kid, like, so they’re getting to play. It could have been a P. If it was P, it’d be play. And then service, what did that look like every day?

Lindsay McCarthy: I mean, basically, chores, but it was…

Hal Elrod: So, contributing to the family.

Lindsay McCarthy: Yeah. Family contribution is what we like to call it. So, they were picking up their toys, but every day they would kind of come to me and say, “Mommy, what can I do for service today?” So, it was really just like getting them in the mindset of it’s not all about me. We’re a family. We work together. It’s teamwork.

Hal Elrod: Beautiful. Love that. So, it’s instilling values plus personal development, like there are so many layers to the benefits that the kids and the family as a unit experience. Mike, so you’re a founder of GoBundance, one of the co-founders, and is that where we met? You remember?

Mike McCarthy: Yeah. Well, actually, I first saw you at 1Life.

Hal Elrod: Okay. Okay. Got it.

Mike McCarthy: Speak there. And then later, I spoke at GoBundance and then became friends.

Hal Elrod: And then, yes, we have become very good friends. Oh, by the way, dude, thank you for this, this bracelet that I got in the mail. I was like, “This is big. I don’t know that I’d wear this,” but now I told Ursula, I put it on, I was like, “I’m kind of getting used to this. I think I’m going to keep it on.”

Mike McCarthy: You always wear it when you’re going to see me, at least.

Hal Elrod: I literally said that. I’m like, “Sweetie, I’m like, I don’t know if I’m going to wear this every day, but I’m definitely going to wear it. I’m going out to dinner with Mike and Lindsay tomorrow and having on the podcast.” So, who brought the Miracle Morning in? Like, who read the book first?

Mike McCarthy: I think we saw you speak first. And then we read your book, or we saw you speak, went to a Tony Robbins event together, and then read the book. And then we’re like on fire, on fire, and just sort of like momentum with our family wanting to do personal development and not wanting to let the fact that we had young children get in the way of that. Because I think a lot of us that’d be our biggest excuse, like, “Oh, I’m too busy. I don’t have time to carve out for myself,” when really that’s the best thing you can do for yourself as a father or a mother who’s overworked and tired and stressed, is to take time for yourself. And when you really get to the bottom of it, the SAVERS, the CHARMS, they’re really about carving out time for yourself for self-care.

Hal Elrod: Yeah. That’s how I often explain it is like the Miracle Morning when I first did it, I didn’t have kids, and it was just my selfish pursuit of like I’ve got to overcome my obstacles. But then it’s like, now I do it to be the dad and to be the husband that my wife deserves, right? It’s like to show up at your best for the people, not just for yourself, but the people that you love. Mike, you’re a high-level entrepreneur, extremely intentional. So, it would seem that this would fit into you being like you’ve got a ton of structure, you’re very intentional in your business. Talk about some of the things, obviously, Miracle Morning, Charms is a big one. What are some of the things that you guys have done as a family in terms of intentional parenting that you now lead other people you founded?

Fambundance, which we’ll talk about that in a sec, or bring it in whenever you want. But yeah, what are some of the things that you teach in the playbook and things that you do at, I know you have a live event coming up in July at the Lake Event for Families. Talk about some of the intentional things that you do as a family. If you go to your house, and I know I’m not letting you answer the question, I’m interrupting, but you go to your house, right? You’ve got the McCarthy family values are on the wall, and it’s not like a printout from a home printer. It’s like an etched in stone, like gorgeous. Like, every time you do it, they get bigger and better, and they’re up on the wall. So, talk about some of the intentional parenting that y’all have integrated into your family.

Mike McCarthy: Well, I think the first thing to say, which brings us kind of full circle, is the reason that we did a second edition and did a playbook to begin with is because we had learned so much about parenting in the five years between publishing the first edition and publishing the second edition, and we realized that the first edition was great. It did a lot for parents, but what we learned was that there was a lot of work that needed to be done with the family that was really like exercises and things where we needed to have conversations and really get together and make decisions together, compromise, conflict, and have it be healthy and done in a way that was good for teaching our children how to do it in the future, but also good for us as a family in the present.

And so, we started to do more and more with our family meetings. That became really crucial. We started to do more and more with like our family goals. Those are two of the crucial, I think, elements of the Miracle Morning for Parents and Families Playbook that we teach. And when we moved to write the latest playbook or workbook that we’re working through right now, it’s not released. It’s not for public consumption. It’s something that you just get if you come to our Fambundance events. But it got a couple of similar exercises to the Miracle Morning for Parents and Families, but it’s very different. And it’s almost like the first Miracle Morning lays the foundation.

The playbook lays another foundation, and is for, I would say, for when you have younger kids, it works really well, like, I would say, like the 4 to 12 range is when we kind of wrote that. We had like a lot of wisdom. It’s like every time you master one level of parenting…

Hal Elrod: Then they get older, and you’re like…

Mike McCarthy: You’re like, “Sh*t, now I’m on…”

Hal Elrod: “I don’t know how to handle a 16-year-old.”

Mike McCarthy: “I don’t know this model, this version. Where’s the instruction manual?” So, what we ended up doing is creating a blueprint that was really to start to create culture within the family. So, it goes beyond just our rituals and our rhythms related to personal development and carving space and time out, but actually how we behave, how we interact, how we agree to do life together. And so, we created sort of a three-pronged framework in our latest work, which is dream, define, and do. And so, when you look at what a family does together, it’s much like what a team does. They’re dreaming about something they want to create or, individually, get out of their role in the job, in the company, in the team, or they’re thinking about, collectively, what are our goals? What are our dreams?

And then define is all about our identity, who we are, what our mission is, what our beliefs are, and what our values are. And then the do part is the interesting thing, it’s the operating system for a family. And so, now we’re creating an operating system for a family that looks a little different than when we had younger kids. So, now we have a kid.

Hal Elrod: How old are your kids now?

Mike McCarthy: Seventeen and thirteen. And the 17-year-old might as well be 27. So, he’s super independent. He knows what he wants, knows what he is into. He’s very intelligent. So, it requires very little, like he thinks he already knows everything. So, we’re in a different stage of parenting where we’re now trying to build an adult relationship with our kids, and we’re trying to leave a legacy that’s really about keeping the family together and making sure that our kids come back to us. I love Jim and Jamie Shiels, and they talk about 18 Summers.

Hal Elrod: They wrote the foreword for this. Yeah.

Mike McCarthy: And I agree. We need to cherish that because that’s when we can tell them, “This is where we’re going, and you’re coming with us.” And we lose that sort of control, so I get their paradigm. But I like the paradigm of, if you do it right, there’s the 19th, 20th, 21st summer.

Hal Elrod: What are the next 80 summers after the first 18, right?

Mike McCarthy: Yeah. What do those look like? Can we have adult relationships where they come back? And so, the Family Legacy Blueprint, which is what we’ve been working on now, and this really consists of all the exercises that we’ve been doing over time with families in Fambundance. And Fambundance is what you mentioned, is the events that we do where we bring families together, where they get facilitated through define, dream, and do. Because sitting around the dinner table where one parent has to be the prodder or the go-getter, that’s like pushing everyone forward, which can be a challenge. Even if you’re the greatest leader in the world, it might even make it more difficult because they’re just tired of hearing it all the time.

Hal Elrod: Being led.

Mike McCarthy: Yeah, being led. They’re like exhausted of all the leading already going on. And so, if you can sit down and do this workbook, though, I think it really, and Lindsay can talk to like her perspective of it. If you do it in an environment where there are other families, we really make it fun and really accessible, so that it’s really like in quick 30-minute increments, you’re having like pretty serious conversations about stuff that matters a whole lot when it comes to like efficiency, things being smooth and easy at home. Like, a lot of that is just a matter of how intentional we are on the front end. And you mentioned that I bring a lot of my intentionality and business into the way that we lead and run our family, and I think that’s true.

I always want a system for how we do things. I’m very system-focused. That’s what’s made me successful in business, and I think I’ve tried to really bring that home into the family so that we can be as systematized as possible. And so, we run the plays and, to be honest, we’re 75% sure out a hundred. We’re not perfect at any of this stuff, so I don’t want to profess or come across as like…

Hal Elrod: I’ve hung out with you enough to know you’re not perfect. She’s closer to perfect.

Mike McCarthy: I almost had the audience convinced. They were believing me for a minute that I had it all figured out, but no, I don’t. It is very difficult, and this really, the work we do lays the foundation for a legacy to be built. A lot of people think the legacy is about the financial structures and the wealth and the IRAs and the retirements, the 401(k)s, the things we do with all of the money that we make and the wealth. But the legacy really is about the values, traditions, things, the ways that you treat each other, and even the ways that we treat milestones in our lives is like there’s a lack of sort of rites of passage that we’ve lost in our world where I think it’s important to really celebrate.

And some of them are rites of passage that they didn’t have back in the day, like when you get your first cell phone or your first debit card. There are these certain times when we want to memorialize them. But if we don’t get intentional and write down what we’re going to do, then we’ll never do it. Like, we might like, “Oh, I remembered we were going to do this thing,” and you might squeeze it in. But if you’re intentionally like, “Hey, this is how we want to do this for this part of our child’s milestone,” and we have so many of them that memorializing those is another thing that I think is really important to a family legacy, like remembering those moments where you move from one stage to the next.

Hal Elrod: I agree. And I mentioned how intentional you guys are at parenting, and just hearing you say that, Mike, like that’s like, “Whoa, most parents aren’t thinking about any of that.” And I love what you’re saying in terms of like when the kids are like, there’s these stages of life, the whole 18 Summers concept, as our friend Jim Sheils wrote that book. But after the 18 summers, yeah, how about the next 50 plus after that? And that you’re thinking down the road in terms of legacy, not just leaving money to the kids and set them financially, like that’s not what brings happiness and fulfillment. It’s like it’s culture. It’s values. It’s who they are, as you said, how they relate to each other.

I want to go to you, Lindsay, and Mike, you’d mentioned that y’all have a family meeting. And that’s detailed in the book. I’d love for you to walk us through what is a family meeting like, what does that look like? How often do you have them? Are you perfect at them?

Lindsay McCarthy: We’re not perfect at them. Our goal right now is to do two a month.

Hal Elrod: Back up, like talk about the evolution. So, talk about how old were the kids when you started family meetings, and then you can kind of lead us up to like what it is. Now, it’s two. What was it like before when they were younger, and how has that evolved?

Lindsay McCarthy: Yeah. So, we probably started family meetings when the kids were like four and eight?

Mike McCarthy: Yep.

Lindsay McCarthy: And we used…

Mike McCarthy: We did them weekly.

Lindsay McCarthy: Yeah, we did them weekly, and we literally had a whiteboard painted on the wall in our kitchen, and we would write up. We had like little balance sheets for the kids.

Mike McCarthy: Calendar dates.

Lindsay McCarthy: And, yeah, we wrote up the calendar. We had like a quote for the week. But the whole design is just to keep us on the same page.

Hal Elrod: So, what types of things are you talking about?

Lindsay McCarthy: Yeah. So, something that’s been very consistent. We always start with gratitude. We do something we call a gratitude shower. So, each person in the family will say why they’re grateful for dad, and we’ll go around, and each person gets gratitude.

Mike McCarthy: And then they say why they’re grateful for themselves. And then we go to the next version.

Hal Elrod: Okay. So, you start with gratitude, and then what’s another thing?

Lindsay McCarthy: Always start with gratitude to kick it off. And then it really depends on what we’re working on, but we always go over the calendar if we have like a vacation or something coming up, or a milestone like Mike was talking about, a rite of passage or…

Hal Elrod: You mentioned goals, family goals. What are some family goals that you guys have together?

Lindsay McCarthy: To visit grandparents a certain amount of times, to travel together. The kids each have individual goals. Everybody’s working on a hard goal and a fun goal.

Hal Elrod: Nice. Okay.

Lindsay McCarthy: So, like I think Ember’s hard goal right now is to finish seventh grade.

Hal Elrod: Okay. She’s 13, right?

Lindsay McCarthy: She’s 13.

Hal Elrod: So, that’s her hard goal. Okay. And then there’s a fun goal.

Lindsay McCarthy: And her fun goal. Do you remember her fun goal?

Mike McCarthy: To volunteer at the animal shelter once a month.

Hal Elrod: And that, by the way, shows how you guys have instilled the value of service. Like her fun goal is volunteering, right, which, yeah, it’s incredible. So, family goals. And then what was the other one you talked about? You said family goals.

Mike McCarthy: So, we do. We also do peak experiences. So, we’ll talk about like what are all of the highlight moments that we’ve had. What’s the highlight reel since our last meeting? So, we will call out in that time, “When did you see somebody living the values?” So, that’s a place where we’ll actually bring our values to life and be like, “Yeah, Ember was really a resilient warrior at the dentist this week. She got a tooth pulled or whatever.”

Lindsay McCarthy: That was Tyler this week.

Hal Elrod: So, you recognizing the kids and calling out what they did. And then, what was I just going to ask you?

Lindsay McCarthy: We’re calling them up as we like to say.

Hal Elrod: Okay. Yeah. Oh yeah, versus calling them out. Calling out when you’re in trouble, right? Calling up. Okay. And so, the Fambundance, let’s talk about that. So, you co-founded GoBundance with our David Osborn, another Miracle Morning co-author, Miracle Morning Millionaires, Pat Hiban.

Lindsay McCarthy: Tim Rhode who did 1Life Fully Lived where we met.

Hal Elrod: Right? Yeah. Everybody’s got their own things and then integrates together. So, you founded GoBundance. And then didn’t you seem like weren’t you the person or you were the couple that decided to do Fambundance? Talk about that. Because you were leaving this men’s mastermind for wealthy men who wanted to build legacies and have this great family, but it was all integrated and success more than it seems than, and fulfillment. What was the branch off to Fambundance?

Mike McCarthy: So, I ended up becoming the CEO of GoBundance. I was a co-founder and then became CEO in 2015. And the reason I did was because I had just replaced myself in my real estate business, and I was like, “Oh, I have some free time.” And I immediately filled it with something else to do, just like any entrepreneur would do. So, I take this other role on, and I immediately had this like sense of regret because I realized that I had just traded like time with my family for this opportunity to lead another company. And I’m like, “Dude, why am I doing this, really?” And when I looked at what I was trying to do was transform men’s lives. Because the reason I took the CEO role was because I really believed that I could give back to GoBundance members what it had given to me because it had transformed my life.

I had David as a mentor. We did all of the things that we teach in GoBundance we did and our lives flourished with abundance. And so, I felt this duty, this call, being the youngest of the elders to take the reins and make sure that we steward this thing forward into a place where it would service other people beyond just myself. And so, in that time, I thought through it and realized that actually, the best thing we could do for these men was to serve their families. Like one of the things we would hear more often than not was that there was trouble with their children, challenges with their wife, or something related to family. They would all have hot buttons. Some of them were overweight, so there was a lot of that health challenges that we’ve addressed. We’ve had guys go from overweight to losing hundreds of pounds.

And we’ve created transformation. We’ve helped guys restore their marriages. We’ve helped guys repair their relationships with their children. But we were doing events where, no matter how I sliced it, I was taking them away from their families. And no matter how I could justify it in my brain, they were using their families as the excuse to go out of town. I’m doing it for them. And the reality is, if I was being honest with myself on behalf of them, they were really doing it for themselves because they liked what they got out of being in the room with a bunch of other high achievers. They liked what they felt when they closed a big deal.

And the truth is, in some cases, that’s true. But in a lot of cases, what we found out was that they would close big deals and not feel as good as they thought they should. And they would be in the room and they would not be talking about the biggest deals that they did, but they’d be talking about how they were troubled by something in their marriage or something with their kids, and so…

Hal Elrod: Or because they’re doing the big deals, right, they’re thriving there, and then they’re struggling at home, yeah.

Mike McCarthy: Yeah. And just like, if things aren’t right at home, it’s hard to enjoy anything, right? If you could be closing billion-dollar deals, but if your kids are sick, money matter is zero. So, when I realized that, we started throwing family events, and the first one was in our backyard. We had no idea what we were doing. Jeremy Reisig, who works with you as well in the Miracle Morning App and has worked with you for many years…

Hal Elrod: I just talked to him right before we walked in.

Mike McCarthy: Good friend of ours, but he facilitates our Fambundance events. He has for over a decade now. I love having his energy at our events, his music, but we make it fun like, and so, this heavy thing, which is legacy and it’s really like for the entrepreneur, they also have to look into the depths of their soul and know that they’re not going to live forever. There’s another part of it of why they avoid that. It’s easy to just go do business and not worry about the fact that someday, we’re not going to be here anymore and focus there.

So, I think I found it to be my role within GoBundance to sort of lead the charge around families to make sure we do family events. So, twice a year, we bring families together. We work for the mornings a little bit, 30 to 45 minutes values on the family values, family rhythms, family goals. Basically, we create, if you come to our events, you get the playbook that will help you create your entire family legacy blueprint, which would be a family constitution would actually have a mission, vision, values. beliefs, the perspectives. It would have a more in-depth conflict agreement, like resolution agreements. It would have deeper, I guess, content than your standard sort of books. The Miracle Morning for Parents and Families Playbook that we did, this would take you to…

Hal Elrod: Well, it’s twice as thick, so three times as thick.

Mike McCarthy: Yeah. But to get through it, when you go through it, you end up with the family constitution and it’s basically, this is how we operate in our family.

Hal Elrod: What I love about doing, because I’ve done Fambundance events, obviously, Front Row Dads events, it’s like, it’s stuff that I know I will not do on my own. You guys are rare and that you actually are some of those intentional parents that I know. But for most of us, like, or it’s like, it’s getting your kids to do it is like pulling teeth sometimes or you just, for me, I think it’s a lack of confidence in my ability to lead. I’m like, I don’t know what I’m doing. And I think this definitely, or I know the Miracle Morning for Parents and Families in the playbook have helped, but I know, like when I go to Fambundance event, especially if the kids are there, it’s like, hey, we’re all doing this together, right?

It’s not, mom and dad. It’s like, oh, oh, everybody’s doing it and they’re playing music and we’re all having fun. Okay. Right. So, it’s this safe environment. It’s this container where you connect, collaborate with your family, create the family constitution. And then when you go home, literally, you leave a different family, you leave with, and you now have the structure, right? That’s the most important part of being intentional. It starts with the front-end work, and then now you go home and you’ve got the legacy blueprint and you’re like, hey, guys, right? Remember we’re starting our first family meeting this week, and they’re bought in because they got bought in, not just by mom and dad, but by this entire Fambundance community that’s like together to doing it and deciding it’s a positive thing.

So, now, they’re like, okay, yeah, we’re doing it. Like, you literally, they’re agreeing at the event and then it’s like, all right, hey, we’re headed home. Our first family meeting’s tomorrow, Sunday, right? Like, okay, great. So, talk about, for anybody that might not listen to the whole podcast for some reason, when is that event? What is that event? Because I know, I can’t go. I’m speaking that week with my daughter at an event, but it’s going to be a summer event.

Mike McCarthy: July 13th to the 19th. And it’s in Lake Devlin. It’s in Wisconsin. It’s at Lake Lawn Resort, a beautiful resort that’s right next to a lake. So, we’ll be doing tunnel lake activities. That part of the country, if you haven’t been there that time of year, is absolutely beautiful. We chose it specifically for the climate and to have access to water and to also not be where it’s 114 degrees.

Lindsay McCarthy: And it’s also close to three different airports.

Hal Elrod: Oh, nice.

Mike McCarthy: Yeah. And basically, it’s a full week, but really, the meat of the event happens in the first three days. So, the 13th, 14th, 15th, in the morning of the 16th are when we actually facilitate, not only the work the families do together, but I forgot to mention that we do break out the teens and the kids into their own separate groups.

Hal Elrod: I was going to ask, what are the age ranges?

Mike McCarthy: Yeah. So, usually, a kid can start participating around five. And we do offer babysitting if you have a lot of kids that are above five or you have one kid that is under, they’re welcome in the room, but if they’re disruptive, then we would ask that we find a babysitting solution or a daycare solution. But we welcome families of all ages and sizes. We actually have had a family of 10 at one of our Fambundance event, believe it or not.

But it’s a mix of like doing the work and then play in the morning. And then actually, the afternoon is totally free for play. And then in the evening, we get back together for lunch and then some more work. We usually do like a Shark Tank where the kids actually work together in groups to present a product that they design on the fly to the parents. And then the final night at dinner, we do a little work, and then we have a talent show. So, the kids actually tell jokes. They do dances. They lip sync sing. We’ve had some pretty good pianists play, like some Coldplay that I was like…

Hal Elrod: Wow, that’s pretty good. And Jeremy Reisig, who’s one of our collective best friends, formerly Brotha James, now known as J Hobbs, the musician, he did the Miracle Morning song and many of his own. Do you have a favorite J Hobbs song, by the way? You’re next, Lindsay. Think of what yours is going to be.

Mike McCarthy: I like Evolve a lot.

Hal Elrod: That’s a good one. I was wearing a shirt earlier, Evolve.

Mike McCarthy: Gratitude is always a fave.

Hal Elrod: Grateful.

Mike McCarthy: There you go, Grateful.

Hal Elrod: I think that’s my favorite, because I helped him…

Lindsay McCarthy: Animal is the one too. The kids always love that one.

Hal Elrod: Abracadabra is fun too. Shout-out to, if you don’t know, go to Spotify. Listen, look up J Hobbs. You can listen to the Miracle Morning song, Grateful, Evolve. So many great songs. So, yeah, he’s there leading, singing, performing. He’s a great facilitator, right?

Mike McCarthy: Yeah, he helps design the events. So, I co-design with him, but then I get to be in the audience because I’m designing this event just as much for myself to be able to do the work with my family as anyone else. The other thing that’s interesting is this is the first time ever that we’ve opened the event to non-GoBundance members. So, we’re trying to help more families and spread the love and create a bigger community of families that really want to do this work together. So, I think that’s a big thing to mention is that, if you’ve not been a part of GoBundance or you thought that you had to be a part of GoBundance to come to Fambundance, or you were interested, you’ve heard of and wanted to check out GoBundance, this would be a good chance to bring the family.

Hal Elrod: What’s the website to get the details?

Mike McCarthy: So, if you go to Fambundance.com, there’s a couple of things. One, you could register for the event. There’s a short, like three or four-question survey, and then we would set up an interview just to screen to make sure it’s a match and good fit. I’m also doing a podcast next Wednesday, I think the day…

Hal Elrod: It will be the day this comes out.

Mike McCarthy: The day this podcast drops. A webinar at 12 p.m. Central, and there’ll be a registration link for that on Fambundance.com as well.

Hal Elrod: Spell Fambundance for…

Mike McCarthy: F-A-M-B-U-N-D-A-N-C-E, Fambundance.com.

Hal Elrod: Where did that name come from, by the way? So, GoBundance, it’s abundance.

Mike McCarthy: So, David Came up with GoBundance, which was to go towards abundance.

Hal Elrod: Okay, got it.

Mike McCarthy: And then Fambundance, I was going to call it Go Families. But by the time, Tracy knew that I was already doing this family event, and by the time, I…

Lindsay McCarthy: David’s wife.

Mike McCarthy: By the time I got to tell her like, oh, I’m going to call it Go Family, she had already called it Fambundance and created a logo and stuff. So, I was like, okay, I guess that’s Fambundance.

Hal Elrod: So, Fambundance.com. The event is July 13th through 19th.

Mike McCarthy: Yep. And also, just to mention is, the first three to four days are when we do the work, and then the last four days, so basically, the 16th, 17th, 18th, and 19^th, we’re just going to play.

Hal Elrod: Ah, interesting.

Mike McCarthy: So, it’s just family vacation.

Hal Elrod: So, this is a vacation.

Mike McCarthy: It’s a family vacation where you’re going to leave with some meaningful work being created. And it’ll be a way easier lift than you think, and maybe Lindsay could just speak for the wive’s sake because anyone who’s familiar with GoBundance knows it’s a bunch of hard charging guys. And like, they might think like Fambundance is like, we’re going to try to fix the wives and fix all the problems at home and that it’s going to be intense. But it’s not really like that. I don’t know if…

Lindsay McCarthy: It’s not intense. It’s actually really fun. And right off the bat, J Hobbs is up there playing his guitar and there’s like a conga line, and something we do throughout the event too is these family Olympic games and you win fam box. So, you win like fake hundred-dollar bills. And we’ll give them out for people dancing, for people raising their hand to answer a question. So, you might get these really shy kids coming in, they don’t know anybody, shy wives too who don’t know anybody.

Hal Elrod: You can be a shy wife sometimes.

Lindsay McCarthy: Yeah. By the end of day one, they’re all raising their hands to get the mic, running around, like, it’s magical.

Hal Elrod: How many years? I mean, you guys are pros. You’ve been doing this for how many years now?

Mike McCarthy: Over a decade.

Hal Elrod: Wow.

Mike McCarthy: That long. I think we did our first one in…

Lindsay McCarthy: In 2016, I think.

Mike McCarthy: Yeah, really.

Hal Elrod: So, now, I want to circle back to the stage that your kids are at right now and all the work that you do for other families, like how that’s being integrated into your family. So, you talk about legacy, what that looks like. So, what does family life look like right now, challenges included, right? But what does it look like and what’s the future look like for you and for the family and as we have one turning 18 in the next year and one turning 14?

Lindsay McCarthy: I think as they’ve gotten older, in my opinion, it’s gotten more fruitful because we started when they were little. So, now it’s like not weird for us to call a family meeting or be talking about goals, talking about a five-year vision. Like these are things…

Hal Elrod: You’ve been talking about since they were…

Lindsay McCarthy: Exactly.

Hal Elrod: It’s part of their vocabulary.

Lindsay McCarthy: It is part of their vocabulary. And I think that’s the cool thing about Fambundance too. It kind of creates this shared language, not only with our family, but the other families who come and participate. So, it’s not so out there anymore.

Mike McCarthy: I mean, I just want to be totally transparent in that. A year ago, Lindsay and I were going through hell with our son, like he was suicidal. I share that, knowing that he would be okay because of where he is now and also, because of how proud I am of how he went to seek help. He really raised his hand and asked for help through his counselor and was willing to be admitted into a hospital in order to get the treatment that he wanted. But it was interesting because in the middle of it all, there was sort of this tension around like, I hate all that values, family culture bullsh*t that you do.

So, there was this little part of him that was sort of like rebelling against all these structures we had created. I think though, after he went through some treatment and he talked to some counselors and he spent some time with people in the hospital that were far worse off than he was…

Hal Elrod: And had far worse family lives, I’d imagine, yeah.

Mike Mccarthy: He came back with a different perspective. And then what I’ve done in the last year is to connect with him, really leaned into what he loves. He loves cars. So, in the last year, I’ve joined a car club, bought an expensive car to join said car club.

Lindsay McCarthy: Bought a car condo to store all the cars.

Mike McCarthy: But also, decided that I wanted to, that I could see that he had such passion in the automotive space and he was probably going to do this for the rest of his life. And I was sort of looking for some business opportunities. And so, I was like, hey, why don’t I try to start some businesses in the auto space? So, Tyler’s actually going to work all summer in an autobody shop that he actually is going to get to own 2.5% of, equity-wise. And he’ll use money that his grandfather left him in trust to buy the two and a half percent. And it’s actually two and a half percent of two different body shops. And then he’ll go work ground floor, ground up, and learn and have this opportunity.

My job is to turn it into 20 body shops. And his job is to just learn how to really run one really well, and then we’ll see where that goes. But I say that all because it’s really about the integration of like, I’m not giving Tyler a free ride anywhere. He has to go work all summer long in a hot automobile shop, sweaty, dirty, in order to earn. And yes, he’s getting to invest, but he could lose his money too. Like, we could fail at what we’re trying to do here. And then he’ll learn a whole set of lessons there.

But this season of life for me is a season that I’ve really followed this rule of like 10% correction and 90% connection. And that is to make sure that 90% of my interactions and conversations and even reasons for us to be dialoguing are all around things that he cares about that are all positive and uplifting that he wants to talk about and that I make sure that I try to limit it to 10% of the sh*t that he does not want to talk to me about. I do have to talk to him about that 10%. I can’t just let him show bad behavior and not address it. But my goal right now is to make sure that our wealth and my success doesn’t ruin him and make him think that he can just…

Lindsay McCarthy: Do whatever he wants.

Mike McCarthy: Send it in, and he’s going to…

Hal Elrod: Be taken care of, yeah.

Mike McCarthy: And he knows that that’s not true. We’ve been very clear with him, and I really think that the latest work that we’ve done with the blueprint, it’s all about creating a family constitution and a legacy letter so that, in the future, when you leave, you can perpetuate and hope and wish and share with future generations that they would continue to do certain things if they choose, if they’re still effective, like we’re not trying to pigeonhole them and control them from the grave with our money or anything like that. We’re just putting together a set of documents that say like, hey, if your son is interested or somebody’s interested in a certain business, maybe we should look at, can we get into that business, instead of can you work in that business?

Maybe there’s an opportunity for me as a business entrepreneur, a serial entrepreneur and an opportunity for you as a ground floor employee. And so, we found that with my son, which happened in lightning, like fast, like it manifested so fast that I almost got whiplash. Like, it all feels right. And I was very clear that I wasn’t going to go chase it and it all sort of is coming to me.

Hal Elrod: Yeah. That’s a whole ‘nother podcast on manifesting.

Mike McCarthy: I’ve been doing my visualization.

Hal Elrod: Really? There you go.

Mike McCarthy: I love that.

Hal Elrod: Yeah. It is interesting like not to go off topic, but with manifestation, right? It’s like my logical brain is like, no, you got to do the things. And then I have enough examples in my life where you’re like, I just set the intention and maintain faith in it and it magically happened.

Lindsay McCarthy: Fell into my lap.

Hal Elrod: Yeah. I don’t know how that works, but there’s something to it for sure.

Lindsay McCarthy: Yeah. So, hopefully, the same will happen with Emmy. She wants to be a hairdresser and follow a bunch of salons for…

Hal Elrod: There you go, yeah, yeah.

Mike McCarthy: Whatever she wants to do, our job is to give them the flint and kindling and not give them the fire.

Hal Elrod: I really want to just highlight what you just said, which is the 90% connection, 10% correction. And really, I think that, if anybody, like, if that’s the one lesson people walk away with from this is like, I think it applies to all relationships, right? And I know I’ve been guilty in the past of being the opposite with my kids. And with teenagers, that’s the thing it does, you lose– if you go 90% correction as you know, right, you’ve probably all learned the hard way, you lose that relationship, use that connection. They can’t wait to get out of the house and never see you again. You know what I mean?

And I think, even as a spouse, being married sometimes, it’s like, oh, you’re this, you’re seeing all the things that are being done wrong. And usually, it’s just projection of how you are treating yourself, right?

Mike McCarthy: It’s 99 in 1 with spouses.

Hal Elrod: There you go. Cool. Well, so Fambundance.com is where people can get, because I really think that if you can make it to that event, if you’re looking for a vacation this summer and something that is proactive for your family, it’s not just the kids on their screens all day, which as you have teenagers, that’s like the constant battle is as soon as you put that screen in their hand, it’s real hard to get them off the devices.

Lindsay McCarthy: This resort has human foosball.

Hal Elrod: Well, I saw. I looked at the website. The lake looks gorgeous.

Mike McCarthy: Yeah, it’s going to be a lot of fun. If anyone can make it, we highly suggest it and we plan to keep opening up some future events in the future too. But this is the first one and we’re looking forward to meeting some cool families.

Hal Elrod: Nice. All right, well, Miracle Morning for Parents and Families, Miracle Morning for Parents and Families Playbook, Fambundance.com to join the Lake Summer Family Adventure. Mike and Lindsay, I love you guys.

Lindsay McCarthy: Love you too.

Hal Elrod: I can’t wait to go have dinner together as we wrap this thing up.

Mike McCarthy: All right.

Hal Elrod: All right, goal achievers, I love you. Have a great week. Check out Fambundance.com. If you can bring your family there, you’ll be happy that you did. And I’ll talk to you next week.

[END]