Today was a full Lawline work day. Spent a couple hours reviewing Lawline’s Q2 marketing performance put together by our one and only Richard Hernandez. It is transparent and thorough documents like this that makes my job easier 4000 miles from our home office in NYC. From there I went straight into my weekly coaching call with Sigalle Barness, Lawline’s COO, and the designated Integrator for the company. In chapter 9 of The Fast Forward Mindset, I shared how the Visionary/ Integrator relationship we took from the book Rocket Fuel has helped accelerate our company over the past 18 months.
It is still a trip when it is 4pm for me and just the beginning of the day to my team in NYC. The twins arrived at school at 2pm for a scavenger hunt with their buddies. We met them there at 6pm to do a barbecue with all the new parents.
It took some warming up to start conversations with others, but once we did each couple was more interesting then the next. It was a very international crowd to say the least. The first couple was from UK and Scottland, but they have lived in different locations that past several years. The next couple just came from living in Morocco for 3 years. She is french, he is British. Before that the lived in France and this was their second stint here. I met a businessman who just came from living in China the past 9 years but originally is from Europe. I felt so boring. “I am from Brooklyn and I came from Brooklyn.”
The dean of the school gave a quick speech and shared two important things that fit well to how you should approach life. He said being new to Barcelona you are going to be invited to a lot of new opportunities with others, you have one job and that is to say YES. Explore new things. Meet new people. As I share in the book, saying YES to more things is the quickest way to fast forward your experience. In fact, saying, yes to new things is how we ended up living in Spain for the year.
Second, he said, the school does not look at it as just their job to educate the kids, but the communities job. They want and expect parents to contribute to the school community. Join a committee. Be part of the education process. I like that mentality. Too often parents drop their kids off at 9am and pick them up at 4pm with very little other involvement in the school.
The kids made some new friends and in fact because of the 4 person limit in the taxi’s Kelli and Leila got a ride home with one of them while I took a cab with the boys. As we got home, everyone was exhausted, we once again had a glass of wine on our terrace as we reflected on the day.