Hello and welcome back to Franklin Covey's twice weekly podcast on leadership with Scott Miller. That's me, I'm your host. Twice weekly on Tuesdays and Fridays, where I've had the privilege now for nearly seven years and almost 500 episodes to have conversations with many of the most influential people of our lifetime. They often join as entrepreneurs, solopreneurs, CEOs, leaders at all levels, scientists, academics, artists, philanthropists, people that have done something remarkable and in many cases discovered something along the way that can help each of you become a better leader. This podcast of course is sponsored by the Franklin Covey Company, known as the world's most trusted leadership firm, founded in part by Stephen Covey, the author of the seminal book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Our guest today is Melinda French Gates. You of course know her as a renowned philanthropist and investor in people and solutions through of course the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Her new book is out called The Next Day. The tagline is transitions, you've had a few, change and moving forward. Melinda French Gates, welcome to On Leadership.
Thanks for having me, Scott.
Great to have you here, Melinda. I don't know that you need an introduction beyond what I have done. Of course everyone knows you and the philanthropy that you and your former husband and Warren Buffett and others have put together to have remarkable impact on humanity, where you have helped people and their families and their life-saving vaccinations and work is well documented. I'd love to have a start and say you've spent the last 30 plus years very much in the public eye. Can you update our listeners and viewers on where your current passions are focused, including your philanthropy?
Thanks. Yes, well I'm really focused these days on women and making sure we reach equality in society and making sure that women have their full power. And so it's, I don't think it's news to anybody that I left the Gates Foundation last year in June, and I made a billion dollar commitment about women through a company I run called Pivotal Ventures. And that billion dollar commitment is to really further women in society because what I know to be true is that when women are healthy, have their voice, their decision-making and full decision-making and resources, they change society for the better. And I believe we need to support more women in getting there.
Melinda, your new book is titled The Next Day. It's an extremely vulnerable review of your life. I learned a lot about you in terms of how you were raised, where you went to school, how you chose certain career paths and education. And a recurring theme in the book is the role that your father played in your life, not just your early life but later life as well. The advice he gave you, the lessons you learned from him. Would you pick a couple of ubiquitous lessons that your father taught you that you think are relevant and replicable in everybody's lives that are listening and watching today?
Sure. So I was really fortunate to grow up in a household with very loving parents, both my mom and my dad, who told us we could be anybody we wanted to be in society. And the one requirement they had is that we would go to college and they would figure out how to pay for it so we'd come out debt-free. And the thing that my parents did for me, and my father I think in particular, that I think really affected me because I was a girl, is he believed in me every single step of the way. And so I use an analogy in the book from Ram Dass called the big wave and the small wave. The big wave is, you know, thinking it's going to die, and the small wave says no you're not, it's okay. And the waves as they crash to the shore, what the small wave can see is a perspective on the big wave that they're just water and they're just going to transform into something different. My father always played that role for me. He believed that my sister and I could be good in science and math, and guess what, we were. He believed that we needed to have great teachers and he made sure we were in schools where we did. He advocated for me at key times. He even said to me one summer, I was walking with my parents around a part of Dallas, Texas where I grew up, and he said it was an IBM building. He said, Melinda, you should paste your resume on the door, they should want to hire you. And so he could see who I was becoming and where I was going even before I could myself. And having a father's belief in me, especially when I got to hard times in life, just really kept me going.
If I'm not mistaken, in the book you talk about a conversation you had with former First Lady Michelle Obama and some lessons I think that she even had learned from her mother, who I think recently passed. Can you recap part of that? Because I had to stop in the book. My wife and I, Stephanie, are the parents of three young boys, 10, 13, and 14. You know what that's like because you had some similar ages clustered around it. My wife just wants one woman in the house because our dog is even a boy. She's like, I just need a woman in my life. Would you maybe recap some of the insights that you took away from First Lady Michelle Obama and her mother about parenting? Because much of this book actually is also a parenting book.
Yes, because you learn a lot when you're parenting young children and children even my young adult children. So my adult children are now 23, 26, and 29, girl, boy, girl. And if you are purposeful about your parenting and reflective along the way about the mistakes you made, how you want to raise your children, then I think you raise your children in a good way, a sound way. And so one of the things that deeply impacted me too, and Michelle said it to me in this video series that we were doing, she said that her mother, Marian Robinson, taught her that you're not raising little friends, you're raising your girls, in her case her two young girls, to become independent young women in the world. And your job as a mother is to give them all the tools they need, make them resilient, help them along the way, but to give them the tools they need to launch as independent adults. And so one of the specific examples Michelle uses in the book is about boundaries. And I have to say I had reflected on this a lot in my parenting because it's hard to set boundaries with kids and then open the guardrails. But the example she uses is she says, you know, I would have loved to have my girls sleep in bed with me much longer than they did at an older age, right? But she said that would have been selfish, that would have been for me. What they needed to do was to learn how to self-regulate, self-soothe, and have a good bedtime routine. And I thought that is a perfect example because our job is to launch our kids into the world so they can become who they're meant to be.
That passage kind of stopped me in my tracks because there's nothing we've liked more than to have our boys come and snuggle with us or sleep with us, age appropriate. And I had to reflect on that. It was great advice. You talk about this concept in the book called good enough parent. You gave me permission to kind of lower my frequency and relax a little bit. Who knew that I was going to get great parenting advice from Melinda French Gates, but I did, and thank you for that. And so will all the readers as well. Talk about what it means to have good enough parenting and the impact that that had on you when you sort of embraced that mindset.
Yes, I wish I had learned that mindset much earlier. It wasn't until one of my children was in middle school that I learned it. And I think at least for me, and I've heard this from many women in society in particular, that we have these ideals of perfectionism in our head. Sometimes they're from society, sometimes they're from our family growing up, sometimes they're from other people who put these things on us. There is no such thing as a perfect parent. There just isn't. What does a perfect parent look like? And once you embrace that you are imperfect but you're doing your best job and you are going to make mistakes along the way, my gosh, I've made mistakes and I've had to apologize in the moment to my kids or later. They've had to apologize to me when they got hot-tempered, let's say. If you embrace that you're a good enough parent for your child, I think you just put the temperature down on yourself and you're allowed to be more who you are. And so for one thing, once I finally learned to drop some of that perfectionism and I did make some mistakes parenting where I didn't open the guardrails soon enough or I put a boundary too tight on one of my children, I could also then teach them rupture and repair, which is I made a mistake here, I need to own up to it, have responsibility, but I can repair with you. That is also a great thing for children to learn as they become young adults and then adults in the world, is that we all have rupture and repair in relationships, friendships, intimate partnerships, business relationships, and those are important lessons.
Melinda, this is an interesting concept, rupture and repair. Where did you learn that?
