Nick Shaw, Mirrorbox Leadership Lab | 'My Teacher, My Son: Lessons on Life, Loss, and Love'

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So today we have a deep and, for me, profoundly enlightening and mindset-changing episode. We're talking with my friend Nick Shaw, who is one of the top executive coaches, trusted by the best of the best executives and an author. Nick and I are going to be talking about a tragedy that Nina's family experienced, involving Nick's son William. And how this ultimately led to profound revelations about the hamster wheel of life. The power of choice, empathy, change, looking forward and making your one shot your best shot. His recently released book, called My Teacher. My Son, has already had an incredibly meaningful impact on how I view the first days of the rest of my life. And I'm extremely honored to have Nick here with us. I know this episode will not only cause our core business audience here to become better business leaders, but, more importantly, to become better humans.

So Nick, thank you so much for joining.

I studied business administration undergrad there, and then, after graduating from college, I jumped into my first professional experience. I was a consultant for Ernst Young for a couple of years, did that, and then that was right around the late 90s. And then eventually followed the gold rush out west, the dot-com boom, and joined a startup out there for a couple of years. It was a new experience.

It was a historic moment, right? The dot-com days, and then, as we all know, what happened to that saga? About two years into it, the bubble burst and everybody lost their jobs, and me as well. And after that, I decided to go back to business school, get my MBA at the University of Southern California. Spent two years there and then eventually went into the corporate world, worked for Staples out in Massachusetts, their corporate headquarters.

And I was more of a business process improvement, supply chain guy. Did that for a couple of years and eventually joined another company, Otis Spunkmeyer Cookie Company, in the Bay Area. Yeah, the best, exactly. So, spent a couple years, three years there as a director of business process, and that was about the time when my first son, William, was born.

And right about that time, I kind of felt like I needed to make a change in my career. I wasn't as fulfilled as I wanted to be and something about having a son for me was sort of life-changing. Because in that moment, when I held him and started to process what it meant to be. As a father, I had this deep sense that he was going to look to me for what it meant to be a man, I was going to be his role model.

And I couldn't role model for him that I was doing something that I wasn't fully vested in or fully passionate about. So I did a lot of soul-searching in that moment and reflecting on what I want to do with my life. And that's when I made the transition to become an executive coach and been doing that, for I'll call it, the last 10, 11 years now.

I'm just going to bite the bullet, take a leap of faith. And then, through some soul-searching, I just started thinking, Well, what are the things I'm good at? what are things I enjoy? And one of the things that came to me is that I was always someone that people could approach and talk to and give advice to people. And so that's when I got this idea of doing coaching.

And then I just experimented with it. I got certified as a coach and then sort of one thing led to another, and I found my way into the executive coaching world.

Difficult, but ultimately incredibly encouraging and enlightening topics in a way that people can grasp and understand, at least to improvement. And so I can see, just after reading your book, how what you do in front of the business world translates into how you've articulated these profound life lessons.

We would go out West ski somewhere in the Rockies.

And we started the day like any other day, a beautiful day. Kids were going to attend ski school in the morning and I was going to join them, and William and I were going to ski to the top of the mountain. Which is something that he was sort of had aspired to do, and he was a good skier, he skied on the local ski team here.

He was nine years old at the time and he was strong. He was a good skier. I had no concerns about taking him to the top of the mountain, and so we did that, we went to the top of the mountain.

We skied at the top of the mountain, it's called Lone Peak, and William had the run of his life. He was skiing. I've never seen him ski before.

I actually have the whole thing on video. I had a GoPro camera on my chest. Had a magical, magical day, magical runs. He was top of his game. You can just imagine me as a lifetime skier.

I was bursting with pride at seeing my son just crush it. And then there came a time where we had to go to the bottom of the mountain. Because we were going to join my wife and my younger son, Ty. And ski sort of the easier slopes in the mountains and ski as a family. And so William and I decided to make our way to the bottom. We somehow got lost and ended up on a catwalk. A catwalk is basically a winding road.

It's effectively almost a flat road that sort of winds its way down the mountain to get you to the bottom. And as we were skiing to the bottom, I was maybe 10 15 feet in front of William. Because my weight increased my momentum and just caused me to go faster. Which is the way it always happened on those slopes and I never thought anything about it. And I was skiing down and all of a sudden there was a curve in the road and I made the curve.

And a skier came whizzing past me and he said, Hey, was that your kid who went into the woods? Because off the side of these catwalks there's a steep embankment and there's powder, snow and trees. And that kind of stunned me. So I stopped, took off my skis and quickly made my way back up the slope.

And as I walked back up the slope, I couldn't find him anywhere. I eventually tried to go into the woods and find him, but the snow was so deep and heavy that I got stuck. And it was actually quite risky for me because I didn't want to put myself into a precarious situation. I eventually clawed my way out and was able to find somebody who worked at the mountain. And that's when we alerted the ski patrol and a search ensued.

I guess that search probably lasted anywhere from an hour to an hour and a half. Eventually, they found William brought him to the Ski Patrol clinic, where I was waiting for him. And after trying to treat him, the head doctor came out and gave me the awful news that my son had died.

For me, as I was processing everything, I had this sort of intense, visceral need to try to make meaning out of this event. That seemed so random and senseless. I couldn't just let it be. My son was here one minute and gone the next. There had to be some meaning that came from it, and I was sort of obsessed with that.

And for me, meaning meant learning from it, learning from it, so I could live my life differently. Because when you lose your child, mortality stares you in the face, right? Most of us conveniently push our mortality to the side. Because we can, because it's far into the distance, but when you lose your child, you can't do that anymore. And so I just had this need to say, Well, how can I live my life differently?

What can I learn from this? how do I make meaning from this? And so every morning, for about four or five months, the first thing I would do is go into William's room. I would sit and meditate, and in my meditation, I would pose the question, What can I learn from this?

And when I was done meditating, I would have my journal next to me. I would capture any lessons I learned, I would capture how I was feeling, so where I was in my own process of grieving. And then I'd write a letter to William, and I did that every day for four or five or even six months.

And that really helped me to make sense out of it and to make different choices in how I want to live my life.

And it was about efficiency. How can I do, how can I cram as much as possible into this very limited resource that we have called time? And fine? That worked, right, I mean, it was, it worked to a point, but I was definitely. It was exhausting. And actually, ironically, at the end of 2018, just two months before William died. I had a really good year as a partner in the firm I was working for.

And I was exhausted and I needed a break, and I was thinking about that. I get two weeks off for the Christmas holidays and then the clock would start all over again. And that just seemed so tragic, you know, and I had this sense that something was amiss.

But I, you know, at the time I just kind of brushed it off, and then literally two months later, my son William died, and so when he died, I had no other option but to pause. Because if I was going to be any use to myself, to my family, I was going to need to just step away from my career and just try to figure out how we're going to survive this thing. And honestly, as a coach, I wasn't going to be of any use to my clients.

I was just going to too much and so I was forced to pause, which is not something, you know, I'd been used to my whole life. I'd been sort of on a career path driven, trying to keep moving up the whatever ladder I was on, and so it was uncomfortable. At first, you know, my days were devoid of activity.

I didn't have a schedule, I had to actually be with myself for the first time in a very long time and it was very difficult at first. But eventually, as you sort of settle into the new rhythm of things. I started to find value in just this notion of pausing, this notion of asking myself profound questions that perhaps I thought about, but never actually get anything about. And I think it's only when we do pause that we're able to do that.

And so I took a six-month leave of absence. And that enabled me to learn to confront things that I need, to confront about who I was as a person. And get on a path towards greater happiness and fulfillment.

And how do you incorporate that?

I would have done differently. I did everything that I would normally do to protect my child, and circumstances occur that caused him to die that day. So we don't have a lot of control.

And and to Viktor Frankl's quote the only thing we actually really do have control is how we, how we respond, how we react. What our attitude is to all the different things that may come our way through the course of our lives. I, I'm, I'm a self-proclaimed control freak. I love to figure out and try to, you know, put plans in place to try to control outcomes. But that's an illusion. And the sooner we let go of that, I think the more we can realize that there are so many other things that could be possible.

And not to forget that, yes, we can control how we respond, so you can control. Even if something terrible happens to you, it's fine. You may be disappointed, dejected, angry, whatever, and that's. You're allowed to have those emotions. But at some point, you have to choose a response that's better for you and better for those around you.

Everything, everything that happens to us is an opportunity for learning to to live our lives differently, to live our lives in a better way. And if that's, you know, that's that's the true growth mindset. And if we can really step into that, then everything that happens to us is in service of us.

We're all different, we all have different things that we need to learn and grow on. And to do that well, you have to have compassion for yourself, you have to just accept where you are today, you are who you are.

It is what it is. And and and just make that where you your jump off point.

I mean, for for most men who are grew up in the seventies, eighties and nineties, I know I'm certainly a font of that category. We didn't have the best role model for what it means to be empathetic. Because I think we grew up in a world where showing emotion, being vulnerable, was looked down on as a man. And I think to to. To be truly empathetic, you have to be willing to be vulnerable, because to be empathetic, you have to. Number one, try to put yourself in the other person's shoes and let yourself feel what they might be feeling. And when you do feel that, you have to emote it right, you have to actually let them know that it's impacting you emotionally.

And that is what empathy is all about. I share a story in the book about an EMT who, essentially this is the EMT who was in the room when my wife and I saw William's body for the first time. And as you can imagine, we were, you know, just totally shattered and in a highly emotional state. And as we were with William, I stepped away for a minute, I noticed this EMT in the room and I was crying.

And as I as I looked at him, I saw that he was crying and this complete stranger gave me this unbelievable bear hug. And I could feel without a, without a shadow of doubt, that he was feeling what I was feeling. I just could feel it. And that's because he was willing to just be there in the moment and and let the emotion flow through him. And that's what empathy is all about.

It's got to be genuine, it's got to be real, and you have to allow yourself to do it.

Kind of raised your whole life not to, and and finding your words is is, you know, it's personally challenging for me. But the ability to put yourself in someone else's shoes is also so powerful. Not only as a business leader, but also a parent, as a human, as a, as a.

And I think empathy. I think the trap for many of us is that we have to. We want to try to find the right words. There's no such a thing, it's not what you say, it's how you say it, and sometimes less is more.

You know, when I came up with that mantra, I was I was in a very dark place and for whatever reason, through the darkness, that notion emerged. And I just, I just grabbed onto it. Because one of the things I certainly had never thought about before this event is that the choices you make after someone you love dies can either honor or dishonor them. Right? And so for me, that was a super important thing, how I was going to go through this, the choices I was going to make. I wanted to do in a way that would honor William and also honor what happened, and so, yeah, what would Willie want?

It's just a question I always ask, What would he want me to do? would he want me to do something stupid? Would he want me to not have a happy life? No, he would want me to live my life to its fullest.

To, to to live my life in a way that perhaps he couldn't because his life was cut short. And so it's, it's, that's, that's been my positive reframe. It's taking this love that I know my son had for me and and just I. I kind of use him as my own coach, he's always sort of cheerleading me on.

I came up with this karma school, in this case of business, there's a karma school of life. And mostly it's just like, you know what, just do good things with and for good people. And the world tends to be so much easier and spend on its own access. And you know something to point, there is something that you know, it's 100 part of that and more.

And I was always saying, we had as kids like first day of the rest of your life. And in some ways, that's what also put me on this. Like hamster wheel.

And then life passes by, and oftentimes, that leads to some form of regret.

And the reception has been great and that's been a whole new learning experience for me. In addition to writing a book, I also started my own executive coaching and leadership development firm called Mirrorbox Leadership Lab, with a dear partner and colleague of mine. That's just getting underway and we're looking to serve clients in businesses of all shapes and sizes. And really bring in a lot of the concepts in my book to life.

We use the metaphor the mirror right, as a metaphor for reflection, because if we don't reflect, then again, we just stay on the hamster wheel and life passes us by. That's a bit of the type of work we're looking to do with my firm on the family front. So when William died for a moment, we were a family of three. We had our then younger son, Kai was an only child.

But a year and a half after William died, we were fortunate to be able to bring into the world our third son, Bodhi, who is now three years old. Three and a half years old. And so I'm back in that stage of life with a toddler and then also an 11-year-old, but both are doing great. They're fighting like cats and dogs, which sometimes annoys the hell out of me. But I'm actually very, very grateful for it. Because it just means that my son Kai has a sibling and they will always be a presence for each other in that way.

And then my wife is doing really well, too. She started a non-for-profit organization called the Williams Be Yourself Challenge, which the mission of that organization is to empower children to find the courage to be themselves. Be yourself was a big mantra of William, so we're trying to just honor him and his ethos with that non-for-profit.

And there you could find everything, learn everything about the company, our philosophy and the work we do. And then, if you are interested in the non-for-profit that we created, it's called the.

Org.

In this case, it'll be a really good way to start as well. And so it's an incredibly uplifting, encouraging poem.

I say this to my clients all the time this ain't no dress rehearsal, this is it. And so, you know, be intentional about the choices you make for you, your loved ones and everybody you interact with.

It really helps us when you do this, so thank you in advance. In the meantime, if you need to be connected with the world's best in class private equity grade professional service providers, independent consultants, interim executives, or anything else, give us a call. Or visit our website at bluewave..net. B-l-u-w-a-v-e..net and we'll support your success onward.