Gordon Lamphere, J.D., of Van Vlissingen and Co. sits down with Dr. Carey Chronis, MD, a board-certified pediatrician with more than 25 years in private practice in Ventura, California and author of the forthcoming book Connection Rethink: Team Culture from Home to Boardroom, to discuss why family misalignment sinks more real estate portfolios than bad deals ever do. This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
Gordon Lamphere (00:00): Hi, and welcome to The Real Finds Podcast. On today’s episode, we have Dr. Carey Chronis. He’s a medical expert as well as an author, and we have a conversation that’s a little different than we usually do, and arguably one of our most important. The thing that’s unique about Dr. Carey is he goes into how important it is for professionals to find a balanced life in the workforce, particularly professionals who are family members and spouses. One of the things we see consistently in the real estate business is the dissolution of portfolios based on poor family structure, poor family communication, and general issues in the lives of some of our most successful professionals. If you’re a family office, a real estate professional, or a professional in general, I think you’re going to get a tremendous amount of information and a tremendous amount of power out of today’s episode. This is a must listen.
Gordon Lamphere (01:08): Dr. Carey, thanks for hopping on the podcast today.
Dr. Carey Chronis (01:11): Thank you for having me. This is great.
Gordon Lamphere (01:13): So what got you into the world of medicine, and why did you decide to write a book?
Dr. Carey Chronis (01:20): Boy, those are two separate questions altogether. I’ve always wanted to be a physician, since the earliest time I can remember. I asked a family friend when I was in about ninth grade if I could watch an operation. I thought I wanted to be a surgeon, and he was an orthopedic surgeon, so he let me in to see the surgery. I stood there, he cut open the leg, I saw the glistening bone, and I hit the ground immediately. I did see the second surgery, though. Then I went on to undergraduate at Berkeley and then to medical school. During my surgery rotation, it really didn’t appeal to me. I found it like glorified sewing; it was not my pace. I was much faster paced than that. Then I did a pediatric rotation, and it was just fun. The kids were fun, the parents were fun. It was a blast. That’s really what got me toward pediatrics.
Gordon Lamphere (02:18): So what got you toward becoming an author? I loved your book. Can you give us an idea of what inspired you to sit down and write it?
Dr. Carey Chronis (02:32): Before I got to Connection Rethink, which is my book, it really came from running my own pediatric office. I’ve spent over 25 years now in private practice, and anyone who’s run their own business probably has a similar feeling. I spent the first 10 years sort of getting it wrong and not sure what I was doing, five years trying to figure it out, and the last 10 years really honing it in. Really understanding what building a team was about, getting my whole team to function well, and how to translate that into a much better customer experience.
It was during this time that I was speaking to a lot of parents, a lot of business leaders who bring their children to me, and asking them: what is it that you regret most, or haven’t really spent enough time on? Usually, as their children get older, a lot of these leaders say, “Boy, I really didn’t connect with my family. I didn’t really connect with my children very well.” And it dawned on me, as I was going through all of this, that the connection with the children and the family was really no different than the connection at work with my team and the whole business.
Gordon Lamphere (03:57): How is that connection similar?
Dr. Carey Chronis (04:01): On so many levels. It’s hard to know where to begin. We can take some simple examples. Part of building an office team is to really listen to them, really hear what’s going on. Have a weekly meeting or a daily huddle, some type of regular event where you have a chance to listen and not to solve, not to answer questions or give answers immediately, but to really understand where the frustration is, where the problems are with your team, and what they’re dealing with in the customer service business.
And then you go home and realize that these are a lot of the same issues you’ve got. There’s a tendency to want to head home and try to disconnect, to put away the tensions and pressures of work. And yet they’re really the same skills. You still need to learn to listen to your family, listen to your children, give them time to express themselves. With little kids, really not be there to solve problems immediately, but help them as they navigate through things. They’re a lot of the same skills.
Gordon Lamphere (05:22): How do you think family stress plays into some of the stress we’re seeing in the workplace today? I can tell you from my personal experience, what I tend to see is that employees who are spiraling at home are almost always spiraling in the workforce as well, and you can pick it up in a day or two that something’s wrong. Is that something you’ve seen in your practice?
Dr. Carey Chronis (05:46): You’d better believe it. I see it all the time. You feel the tension when you walk into the office and someone is having a difficult day. As a business owner, I really work at taking a moment before I even walk in: close my eyes, take a deep breath, think of the positive, and walk in with a positive attitude. Because I know very well that if I walk in and my mood isn’t there from the get-go, the whole office changes. The whole mood changes. It’s a real cooldown.
And the same happens at home. You have a stressful day at work and you bring that home, and the whole mood changes. It’s about learning to step aside, put that aside, and really focus on the other person. Take it away from how you’re feeling and really sense what’s happening in the room: what’s happening with your team, with the people around you, with your children, with your significant other. The moment you’re able to put aside the stresses you’re having and focus on the other person, suddenly the mood lifts, and it becomes a much more pleasant experience both at home and at work.
Gordon Lamphere (07:09): How do we get to that pleasant experience and improve that connection when there’s a problem?
Dr. Carey Chronis (07:15): Primarily listening. Learning not to solve, not to jump in. Listening long enough that the other person knows you’re listening. Taking the time to really connect, taking the time to see what’s going on. It doesn’t matter what business you’re in. You walk into a business that’s running really well and you feel the energy the moment you walk in the place. I’ll walk into a restaurant and everyone, from the person busing to the head waiter to the maitre d’, greets you with a smile and says hello. And there are other places you walk in and you feel as if there’s a complete disconnect, and they have no sense of what’s going on with anyone around them.
Gordon Lamphere (08:01): There’s always a sense that it’s listening, right? But how do we go from a disjointed workforce or a disjointed family and start to apply techniques to improve them?
Dr. Carey Chronis (08:25): It comes down to catching yourself on what you’re really doing. I’ll walk into the office in the morning and greet everyone, ask how they’re doing, what’s going on, how was the weekend, and really try to feel what their experience was. Was it a good time? Was it a bad time? You know when an employee is having difficulty, and if they feel like venting for a few minutes, that’s completely fine. If they really want a little time to themselves, you notice that and give them that space. You really need to be in tune with your surroundings, and that’s what’s going to make a huge difference.
At home with little kids, it’s just a matter of letting them be little kids and having fun with it. Put down your phone, put aside everything else, and really try to understand their world. Teenagers are a whole other issue. They’re figuring out where they are in this world, what authority they have, and where they can push buttons. They like to challenge and see what’s going on. And we have a tendency to want to correct. I really would like for us to step back and not feel the need to constantly correct, but to listen and understand more. You may not always agree, but that doesn’t matter. We don’t always agree with other people on a whole host of issues, but we can understand, we can connect, and we can try to see things through their lens. The more we’re able to spend time doing that with everyone, the easier it is to foster a relationship and find areas of agreement and learning. With teens, they’re sometimes pushing boundaries simply to push boundaries and see where they are. It may be that down the road, their mindset will change. We also deal with adults on a daily basis whose opinions and views are completely different, but there’s still a lot of common ground.
Gordon Lamphere (10:26): That’s definitely true. Anybody who’s sat across from a relative they disagree with at the Thanksgiving dinner table has experienced that. In terms of things a lot of our listeners have experienced: we have a lot of high performers who listen to this podcast, and I think there’s a sense sometimes that you can put things off, be it home, family, or a relationship with your spouse. But I don’t think you can put them off forever, and it always catches up. How can high performers take lessons they use in the workforce, or conversely in their family, and apply them? If there’s one lesson besides listening, which I know is a great lesson, is there anything else they should be applying on a daily basis?
Dr. Carey Chronis (11:23): Absolutely. One of the areas where high performers often get caught up is micromanaging. This can be a huge problem. We tend not to allow the other person to figure things out or solve a problem. Oftentimes, employees will come to you and express something, and they’re really coming to you because they need to vent and express it. They have the ability to figure out the solution, and they know which direction they want to go.
But the high performer in us is the one who wants to immediately solve and give an answer: “Hey, do this, do that.” And you’ll find that if you keep doing that with your employees, soon they’re not going to come to you. They just don’t want to hear it. They really want an avenue to express their emotions and feelings. It’s really no different at home with the helicopter parent who solves every single problem, who constantly hovers and doesn’t let their child do things. It can be as young as a four-year-old trying to buckle themselves into their car seat, or a middle schooler trying to solve a math problem, and we jump in. Obviously we know how to do it, and we can do it much faster, but that’s not the point. They need to try to figure it out, and we can assist. We need to give the right tools, the right environment, and make sure they have everything they need to solve the problem. But we don’t necessarily need to be the one solving it. We may not solve the problem the way they solve the problem, but that doesn’t mean they did it wrong. It’s just different. High achievers need to learn to step back and let other people do things the way they do things.
Gordon Lamphere (13:12): One of the things I saw you write about was that you should treat family relationships and connection as infrastructure, more than a personal afterthought. Can you explain how you see the resource that is our connection?
Dr. Carey Chronis (13:38): A lot of the same things we do at work are the same things we do at home. One of the things I really enjoyed as a child was our dinners on weeknights. Most weeknights, we would sit down at the dinner table, and it really was a family discussion. It was a matter of: how was your day, what’s going on, what can I help you with, and what does tomorrow look like? A planning session and a chance to rewind and replay the day. It’s really no different than a regular meeting at the office with your team, asking what’s going on. As far as making a connection between the two, you can’t get much more similar than that.
Gordon Lamphere (14:35): One of the things I saw you touch on in the book was the role technology plays in all of this. I’ll say this: I think I have three addictions in life. They are sugar, coffee, and my phone. Those are the three things I don’t know if I can get through life without. The first two, I think I could survive and live a pretty meaningful life being addicted to sugar and coffee. But my phone can be pretty detrimental sometimes, not only to my connection with my spouse, but my connection to my children, and even sometimes at work. How do you talk through balancing our sometimes need for the phone and sometimes our want for the phone?
Dr. Carey Chronis (15:45): It’s a wonderful, necessary tool for most of us. It helps solve some of the efficiency problems, it answers questions, it can do a lot of things we wouldn’t do otherwise. But it’s no different than asking the teenager, “Hey, do you really need to play four hours of video games a day?” Whenever I walk by a table at a restaurant with four seniors all staring at their phones, I will sometimes say, “You teenagers, always on your phones,” because we tend to be glued to these things.
It really comes down to setting your priorities and deciding: when am I going to actually put it down and connect with the person in front of me? Yes, there are times when we’re on our phones, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But when we’re with other people, we really need to learn to put them first. And remember that what’s going to move us forward in the long run is the human connection. It doesn’t matter whether it’s at home, at work with coworkers, or with customers. It’s the human connection. If you have a customer in front of you and you’re staring at your phone, that’s not going to look very good. Your coworkers aren’t going to be thrilled either if they’re trying to ask a question and you’re too busy stuck on your phone. And then you go home and it’s the same. They deserve your attention, and you should be able to give them your attention. It’s a matter of putting our priorities in order.
Gordon Lamphere (17:21): With regard to the phone, is it blocking apps? Is it just personal accountability? What’s the method you would suggest individuals take to try to reduce phone addiction?
Dr. Carey Chronis (17:40): A couple of items. I really think that when it comes down to it, it’s self-discipline. When out at a restaurant or a public space, or together with your significant other, literally putting your phone on vibrate and popping it in your pocket or somewhere aside is best. I really feel we get better quality sleep if we can disconnect from electronics an hour before bedtime. If we can just get those two areas locked in, and learn that mealtime is not a time when the phone should be around at all, and an hour before bedtime is not a time when the phone should be part of our life at all, and accept that it has a purpose and a time and also a point where it really should be set aside, we’re doing really great.
With teenagers and video games, it comes down to having a conversation. I see a lot of teenagers who struggle with classes, and their grades are not always the best. I’ll ask, “How many hours a day are you playing video games?” And they’ll tell me four or five hours per day. You don’t realize how much time they’re playing until you ask. Then I’ll ask them how much time is reasonable per day on a weekday, and they’ll usually give me an answer between an hour or two. That lets me start a conversation with them about setting their own limits for how much time they can play, and then ask what consequence they would have if they don’t meet that. Usually it’s taking away the video games the next day completely. The point of all of this isn’t for me to be setting rules, but to help them set their own rules, figure out what’s going on, and get them to be part of the solution instead of feeling as if you’re nagging at them. They enjoy the video games; you enjoy your phone. They’re both addictive. People enjoy slot machines. They enjoy things that bring instant satisfaction, and we’re wired toward that. These items are designed to create that feeling in us. We just need a little bit of self-control to help limit it, and we need to see that, to a certain extent, it’s a problem if we don’t.
Gordon Lamphere (20:11): Talking about limiting things: quite often, for many of the executives, entrepreneurs, and young professionals who listen to this podcast, one of the things we limit a lot is our exercise and our energy. I know at the point in my career when I was starting to become the most successful, I was going up the stairs at a showing, and for the first time in my life I felt myself breathing hard, and I realized: dear Lord, I haven’t been treating my body well. How do you go about balancing not just career success, but holistic health success?
Dr. Carey Chronis (21:01): That’s a whole topic unto itself. But again, one needs to, like you say, carve out time to make that a priority. I like to set limits that are achievable and then work up from there. If you’re not exercising at all, then promise yourself you’re going to put in twice a week at a half hour each. But don’t fail at it. Say, “This is where I’m going to go,” and then consistently do that until it really becomes part of you, part of your pattern. Then, when you’re comfortable with that, see if you can bump it up a little bit.
Everyone’s going to find their own level of how much exercise and how much time for personal space they need. But they’re all important. Family is important, but time by ourselves is also important. Exercise is important. Watching our diet, and realizing that we have access to pretty much anything we want to eat or drink, means we really have to put ourselves in check, whether it’s what we’re eating or portion sizes. It’s really easy in this day and age to go to an extreme. We’re going to get it wrong at times, and that’s okay. But we need to reel ourselves back in and get it right again.
Gordon Lamphere (22:21): So you’re telling me I can’t eat endless deep-fried Oreos at the state fair.
Dr. Carey Chronis (22:28): On one day, I’ll give you that. But if it becomes a daily habit, we have a problem.
Gordon Lamphere (22:34): In terms of daily habits, one of the habits you discussed in the book that’s a little different than how we sometimes think about things is developing daily trust, both at home and at work. That’s one of the things we put a tremendous amount of emphasis on here, particularly with our property management team, where they have to make daily decisions on their own, and we want to build up that trust. How do you build trust with both employees and spouses?
Dr. Carey Chronis (23:11): That becomes an issue of learning to listen, empowering them, and letting them know that they can share their thoughts, they can share their views, they can make mistakes, and that’s okay. That we will work through it. When a problem arises at work and something goes wrong, my first question is usually along the lines of: okay, that didn’t work out. What should we have done differently? How could this have been set up differently so that situation didn’t arise? Not “What did you do wrong?” but “What was the overarching problem with the system that led to that?” And then work backwards from there.
It’s really the same at home. Going back to a teenage example: they’ll snap at you wanting something, and the instant reaction is to say, “I can’t stand your tone, go to your room, I don’t want to talk to you.” Our reaction becomes about the same as their reaction, and we really aren’t helping the situation. I do something I call a take two. I’ll say, “Hmm, that didn’t really sound right. Why don’t we try saying that again?” and give them an opportunity to self-correct. When they feel comfortable knowing they’re not going to be spoken down to, chastised, or made to feel terrible when they do something inappropriate, you start to create a much better relationship with that person. And that works both at home and at work. When you, as the boss or leader, say something in an inappropriate way, and your team can say, “Hmm, that didn’t really sound right. Can you say that again?” then you really know you have a two-way connection that’s valuable.
Gordon Lamphere (25:20): One of the big practical connections I think is valuable for our listeners: we have a lot of family offices and multi-generational real estate families who listen to this podcast. The biggest problem you often see in real estate, where portfolios collapse, isn’t necessarily poor management or poor deployment of capital. It’s often family stress and family misalignment. So how do we, as professionals, investors, or just families, maintain strong family alignment and strong family bonds when we have all these things pulling us apart?
Dr. Carey Chronis (26:16): By utilizing that family meeting at home just as well as you do at work. We all have three areas of stressors in our life, generally speaking. For adults, it’s home, work, and friends. For kids, it’s home, school, and friends. Our stress level in each one can vary, and I usually grade each on a zero-to-ten basis and ask: where are you with home? Where are you with work or school? Where are you with friends? Try to identify where the tension is, and then really start to have a conversation at that point to try to bring down that area. A lot of family offices are probably feeling a lot of stress both at home and at work. The more of those three areas that have stress, the more difficult it is to cope. In fact, when you have all three areas stressed, it’s time to maybe speak to someone and try to bring down the tension in your own mind, because you’re not going to be able to function well if you don’t have any place to run to as a shelter.
Gordon Lamphere (27:25): One of the ways we like to wrap things up on this podcast is our Real Finds Final Four. Four quick questions. They’re a great way to learn a little bit more about you and about where things are going. So I’m curious: what’s one thing you don’t think we’re talking enough about?
Dr. Carey Chronis (27:53): It still goes back to listening. I don’t think we’re talking about really putting down our phones, putting down our distractions, and really trying to understand what the other person is saying. Not jumping in and solving, but really just being in the moment. You see it constantly. You see it at concerts and events where everyone’s so busy filming and putting up their phone to capture the moment that they’re not really capturing the moment for themselves. I don’t think they spend much time watching that video, personally. But they’re really not in the moment. Learning to be in the moment, whether it’s at home or work or wherever you are, is really a key to succeeding long term.
Gordon Lamphere (28:45): We’re not going to stay in this moment forever, but we are going to go forward. One of the ways we like to learn is to ask individuals on the podcast to look ten years ahead. So, ten years from now, what do you think is going to change the most about the world?
Dr. Carey Chronis (29:02): The world, or real estate in general, or where?
Gordon Lamphere (29:05): Either or.
Dr. Carey Chronis (29:08): The shift is pretty clear, and it’s been happening for 200 years. We’ve seen a change from efficiency, trying to make things more efficient, which we’ve really conquered to a great extent, to much more of a human connection, which is what we’re after. My stepfather worked on the design of a little-known building in Hollywood. You may have heard of the Capitol Records Building. When it was designed, a lot of the shape came about because they were trying to make things more efficient for the workers inside who were communicating together. The center was a core for wires to go up and down. A lot of that has changed now. We don’t need a building to do that the same way, because we’re connected in a much different way.
Instead, what we’re leaning toward is the human connection: trying to create spaces where people can connect, be together, communicate, and solve problems as a group. Think of L.A. Think of Caruso’s use of the Grove, next to the Farmers Market. And you could say Walt Disney did the same thing, trying to create environments that fostered human connection and brought people together. You go to an amusement park like Six Flags, and there are a bunch of rides scattered around, and kids have fun. But it’s not quite the same experience as going to Disneyland, where you really don’t even need to go on a ride. You walk around and you feel connected. I think more and more of the places that are designed and built, the places we go to, are going to rely on that human connection, because we’ve really dealt with the efficiency part already. It’s the one-on-one connection we’re after.
Gordon Lamphere (31:13): There’s something truly magical, and we don’t even have to use magical in the sense of the Magic Kingdom, about the connection that comes with a flowing space where humans can easily interact with each other. One of the ways we like to interact with our guests, and this is part of the flow of the podcast, is to learn a little more about what our younger selves could have done differently. We have a lot of listeners under 30, and many even younger than that. If you could go back to the start of your career and give one minute of advice, what would it be?
Dr. Carey Chronis (32:01): Wow. It comes down to the first 10 years of running the office. There’s a tendency to think you know more about all of the interactions than you really do. One of the fun things over the course of time was meeting people, seeing how they do things right or wrong, learning about different places, and listening to advice from others who had done it right and trying to problem-solve in advance. As much as one has to be cautious of our AI world, it does give you the opportunity to ask questions that you may not have been able to ask someone else. The answers may not always be right, because you don’t know quite how they’re generated, but it gets you to think a little bit more. And then it gives you an opportunity to reach out to someone who really does know, ask intelligently, and listen based on an intelligent question.
Gordon Lamphere (33:11): I would say one of our most intelligent questions is this: who do you think is influencing the world that we should have on next? I’m a firm believer in the idea that the men and women in the arena tend to know the best voices to reach out to, at least in their domain. So who should that next guest be?
Dr. Carey Chronis (33:37): I don’t know if I have a name per se, but I would really lean toward the people who are seeing spaces as a place for community to get together, for outreach, and who really understand how spaces and areas are transformed. I’m not entrenched in the real estate world well enough to know who that person is, but I know they’re out there. It’s the people who are thinking ahead in those terms who are really going to define the future of what our environment looks like down the road.
Gordon Lamphere (34:21): We definitely have a couple of folks doing some really cool things with the built environment coming on the podcast in the next few weeks. But if somebody wants to reach out to you after this episode, what’s the best way to get in contact?
Dr. Carey Chronis (34:35): The best way would be to go to my website, CareyChronisMD.com. I have information there about my upcoming book, Connection Rethink: Team Culture from Home to Boardroom, and about the possibility of speaking engagements and a really great keynote talk. The sizzle reel should be up soon, if it isn’t by the time this podcast is out. And there are a lot of fun things coming down the road. I also connect through LinkedIn, and I always respond. I really think it’s important to reach out and connect. When someone reaches out to me, I take it very seriously, and I appreciate the fact that they’re reaching out. I always respond.
Gordon Lamphere (35:26): Dr. Carey, thank you so very much for helping out the podcast today. We have to have you on again in the future.
Dr. Carey Chronis (35:30): Gordon, thank you so much. I really appreciated this.
Gordon Lamphere (35:33): Thanks again to Dr. Carey. We appreciate his insights. If you enjoyed the podcast, please give us a like and a five-star review. Every comment and interaction truly matters and helps us continue to get quality guests. You can find us on YouTube, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. I’m Gordon Lamphere with The Real Finds Podcast from Van Vlissingen and Co., and thank you for listening.