What My 10-Year-Old Knows About Leadership That Most Adults Don't
We were on a walk.
Cameron is ten. He had been talking about one of his friends, whose family had been living in a cardboard box on the side of the road when they were younger. Cameron had noticed at school that something was off with him, and he had made a choice. He would play with him every single day until his friend felt less alone. Not because anyone told him to. Just because he could see it.
I asked him what he wanted to do when he grows up.
He wants to start a business that goes to kids in foster care, kids who are having a hard time, and plays with them. Sports, activities, company. Whatever they need. He said he wants to go to them because that is the important part, you have to show up where they are. He talked about finding sponsors, about budgeting, about putting the revenue back into the programs instead of paying himself because the goal is the impact, not the income.
He is ten.
I pulled out my phone and hit record. And when he realized I was recording, he did not slow down or get self-conscious. He looked at me and said: yes, put that on the podcast.
What He Said About Leadership
I asked him what he thinks makes a good leader.
He said honesty. Kindness. Self-respect. A good mindset. And the ability to help people understand each other.
He said good leaders tell the truth even when it is hard. That making someone feel good in the moment is not the same as helping them. That a coach who only tells you what you want to hear is not serving you well. He used sports as the example because it is the world he knows, but the principle was exactly right.
I have clients who are afraid to have the hard conversation with a team member. Who soften the feedback until it disappears. Who give someone three chances past where one would have sufficed, because the confrontation feels harder than the problem. And here is my son, ten years old, saying: tell the truth even when it is hard. That is what good leaders do.
He also said you have to have self-respect to lead well. That you have to feel okay inside before you can help someone else feel okay. He was talking about coaching, but I heard it the same way I hear it when I am sitting with a client who has been pouring everything out to her team and her clients and her family and has nothing left for herself. You have to feel okay yourself first. You cannot give what you do not have.
Nobody taught him that. He just knew.
What He Has Absorbed from Watching
Cameron has not sat in on my advisory calls. He has not read my book or listened to the podcast or attended City Girls. He has watched me build a business for most of his life. And somewhere in that watching, he absorbed things I did not know I was teaching.
He knows that impact matters more than income. He knows that you show up where people are instead of expecting them to come to you. He knows that reinvesting in the thing you care about is different from extracting from it. He knows that honesty is an act of respect, not cruelty. He knows that your own wellbeing is not separate from your ability to lead, it is the foundation of it.
He is ten.
I am not writing this to take credit for what Cameron figured out. But I am writing it because every mom founder reading this has a version of this happening in her house, and she probably does not realize it.
Your kids are watching how you handle a hard day. Whether you close the laptop when you said you would. Whether you talk about your clients with respect or with frustration. Whether you take the walk or skip it because there is one more thing to finish. Whether you are present in the room with them or somewhere else entirely even when you are sitting right there.
They are forming their ideas about what it means to lead, what it means to work hard, what it means to build something, from watching you do it. Not from what you tell them. From what they see.
What He Said to the Moms Listening
Near the end of the walk, I asked Cameron if he had a message for the moms who listen to my podcast.
He did not hesitate.
Find time in between work to spend time with your kids. Even if you just have a few minutes before a call. Even if it is just a walk. They notice. They always notice.
He said it simply, the way kids say things before they learn to qualify and hedge and make things more complicated than they are. And it landed on me the way simple true things land, which is harder than the complicated ones because you cannot argue your way around them.
Cameron already knows that those two hours matter. He has felt it when they were full and when they were not.
The Thing Under the Thing
He was a few steps ahead of me on the path when he said it. I had stopped walking to write something down on my phone and he just kept going, still talking, like the idea needed to keep moving too.
I have been thinking about that image since.
Most of the women I work with are building their businesses because they want more for their families. More financial stability. More time. More freedom. More proof that it is possible to do both. And somewhere in the building, the more gets complicated, and the business starts demanding more than the freedom it was supposed to create.
Cameron is building his business for the kid who is sitting in a foster care group home feeling like nobody is coming. He wants to be the person who shows up. He wants to give the thing he gave to his friend, which was just his presence, his attention, his willingness to show up every day until the other person felt less alone.
That is the whole thing, right there.
You do not have to build something enormous for it to matter. You have to show up. Consistently. For the people you said you would show up for.
That includes the small ones at home who are watching everything you do.
If You Are Ready to Build the Business That Lets You Take the Walk
The moms I work with are not bad moms. They are not choosing work over their kids. They are trying to be everything at once inside a business that, if the infrastructure is right, does not have to cost them everything. The whole reason we redesign the operations, the team, the offers, is so that the business holds without requiring the founder to be in every moment of it. So she can take the walk. So she can be present for the two hours between school pickup and bedtime without her brain still running the business.
If you want to talk about what that looks like for your specific situation, I would love to hear from you.
My private advisory work is for established founders, the ones with real revenue and real teams who are still somehow in every decision and cannot figure out how to change it. If that is you, fill out the inquiry form and tell me where you are.
And if you want to be in a room with women who are doing this work in person, City Girls is the dinner and half-day workshop I run for established founders across the country. Twenty seats. The next events are in Atlanta in October and at my house in DFW in December.
