Gretchen Roe: 00:00:04.588
Welcome to The Demme Learning Show. Our mission here is to help families stay in the learning journey wherever it takes them. This bonus episode was previously recorded as a webinar and was not created with the audio listener in mind. We hope you will find value in today’s episode. Welcome, everyone. My name is Gretchen Roe. And it is my very great pleasure to have the opportunity to welcome Jonathan Brush this afternoon from Unbound. I have looked forward to this conversation for a very long time, well over a year. It took me a little while to have the courage to ask Jonathan to join me. Jonathan, welcome. Thank you so much for joining us. And let’s get to the meat of this conversation because I’m so excited to have it.

Jonathan Brush: 00:00:50.229
Absolutely. Well, thanks so much for having me. I’m delighted to be doing anything with Demme education. We’ve had really good associations there. I’m not sure what may be so intimidating, Gretchen. You could have asked any time and I would have been delighted to show up here. So always fun to talk to you. We’ve had some pretty fun conversations in some pretty different locations over the last couple of years. And looking forward to our conversation today.

Gretchen Roe: 00:01:09.897
Tell me a little bit– the one thing I didn’t know about you, despite the fact that we’ve had a couple of meals together over the past couple of years is I didn’t realize you were homeschooled. So let’s start there. And I think that’s pretty cool.

Jonathan Brush: 00:01:22.838
Yeah. I’m at the kind of age range where that’s a little bit odd. So I was homeschooled, I tell people back when we were required to memorize the HSLDA’s number and we had truant officer drills. So there’s a place to hide in the house if they came, we were home and a place to hide in the woods if they came, we’re outside. And so to me, I still kind of pinch myself when I sort of look around the homeschool world now. I have no idea how my mom found out about homeschooling. With no internet and back in the ’80s, I don’t know how she came across it. But I didn’t know anybody else that was homeschooled through most of my educational experience. I met a few people as I got closer into high school. And then when I got ready to go to college, the college had never heard of homeschool students. And so those of you who are homeschool parents will appreciate this. My mom helped them write the admissions requirements for homeschool students, but that wasn’t good enough because we were homeschooled. So she helped them write the scholarship requirements for homeschool students. And I ended up being the first college student admitted to my college and– homeschool student admitted to my college. And then as I tell everybody, the second one that got admitted was a 4.0 student and was incredibly beautiful. So I married her when I graduated. So as far as I was concerned, college was a smashing success. And yeah, it was an interesting kind of time because I then went on to become the director of admissions at that college. And it was at a time when all the homeschool stuff was happening. And I was a really strange anomaly. People couldn’t believe that– and I have a lot of really funny stories about people’s expectations of homeschoolers and then finding out that I was homeschooled. There was some really fun business meeting-type experiences with that, so.

Gretchen Roe: 00:02:56.407
I remember back in the day when there was no block to check on the SAT that said you were homeschooled. And it was mind-blowing to the people at the college board that we wanted a block to check, so.

Jonathan Brush: 00:03:09.545
Yep. No, there’s all kinds of really strange things that you had to do and say, and yeah, lots of that whole socialization thing. Gretchen, I’ll tell you a really fast story. But through a whole series of strange convoluted things that were more God’s blessing than anything else, I ended up becoming the director of admissions for this college two years after I graduated. So I was noticeably younger than I ought to be. And so it was not obvious that I should be the director of admissions. So I was at this business mixer, where everybody except me is drinking because I never picked that habit up. And so we’re all walking around. This guy walked over to me. And we had just had a session about homeschooling, which I was in the audience, but I was not a panel presenter. And he was basically like, “Can you believe these homeschoolers? They think that they can learn stuff at home and then go to school.” Like they would have any idea what they were doing and they’re socially inept and academically– and they’ll never be able to be for the real world and all this stuff and I’m sitting there. And you ever had that thing where you see the softball come across the plate and just hover and you’re going to crush this thing. And then it just– the whole way you could just see it coming. And so finally he turns to me and he says, “Where did you grow up?” And I said, “Culpeper.” And he said, “Oh, did you go to Culpeper High School?” I said, “No.” Oh, no. And he asked me so what I did. And I told him. He says, “You’re director of admissions. That’s incredible. I’ve been in this business for 12 years and I’m still just this.” And so we had this kind of thing back and forth. And that’s where the softball hovering came in.

Jonathan Brush: 00:04:26.305
Finally, he said, “Did you go to Culpeper?” “Yeah.” “Did you go to Culpeper High School?” I said, “No.” So then he named their private school. I said, “No, I didn’t go there either.” He says, ‘Where did you go to school?” And I could just– I just teed up. And I said, “I was homeschooled.” And he just took his beer and he just tilted it to me, and he said– and then he just walked away. And I never talked to him again for the rest of the conference. But it was just one of those– is like, you could see it coming a mile away. And that was kind of the world that was happening when I graduated with people were still like, “I can’t believe this thing’s real.”

Gretchen Roe: 00:04:55.612
That was pretty epic mic drop. That’s awesome.

Jonathan Brush: 00:04:58.059
Yeah, it was. But I mean, like I said, from the beginning of the conversation, I knew where it was going to end up. And the whole time you’re just like, “I can’t believe this is happening. This is going to– yep, there it is,” so. Anyhow.

Gretchen Roe: 00:05:07.264
Yep. And I remember back in the days when I would take all of my kids out at the same time. And people would say, “Why aren’t you guys in school?” And they were trained, “Field trip.”

Jonathan Brush: 00:05:19.508
We don’t need to have this conversation now. Yeah.

Gretchen Roe: 00:05:21.283
We didn’t disclose that. And now homeschooling has really moved mainstream. And so it has become a different world. And it gives parents so much more options. So tell us how you got from where you were the director of admissions to Unbound.

Jonathan Brush: 00:05:39.292
Yeah, so I did graduate from college. I had a really good experience at the college I attended. I went to work for them because I was engaged to be married. Didn’t have a job. So that seemed like a good idea in terms of next steps. Then they had a fit of institutional insanity, and made me the director of admissions. And I did that for about 12 years. And I had a really good experience in terms of I had a phenomenal staff. I had a great colleague, a great administration. But I was really getting increasingly concerned that I was making a living asking people to make bad financial decisions.

Jonathan Brush: 00:06:06.326
So I was primarily initially worried about the debt in higher education. But I got to tell you, Gretchen, that that changed pretty rapidly. I was worried about the debt and that then it was kind of one of those house of cards things. Once I started to question that, then I started to really lean in because it was like, “Well, maybe I’m just working for a school that’s too expensive. And so maybe I should do something else.” And I was sort of trying to figure these things out.

Jonathan Brush: 00:06:27.381
And as I kind of scratched the surface, I was like, “I don’t like the anti-Christian rhetoric that is becoming standard on these campuses, including my own,” which it wasn’t there when I was a student. And now just a few short years later, it’s a really big deal. But then the thing that actually ended up being the most influential in my decision was that I just was not convinced that the degree that people was– that they were getting, the education they were getting, actually prepared them for the world they were entering. I thought there was a major mismatch. So I thought, we’ve got this kind of weird thing where people think college is an adult-making factory. And they’re sending their kids here. They’re taking on gobs of debt. And it’s destroying their faith. And it’s giving them a period of extended adolescence. And it’s making them think that they’re prepared for real life. And they actually aren’t like the job market has changed. Technology is changing the entire way that everything works. And the colleges are still 50 years in the past.

Jonathan Brush: 00:07:19.075
And so I had a flyer come and something I ordered and it told me about this company. And I called them up. I thought they were a scam. And in the next 24 hours, I talked to all three of the co-founders and I told my wife, “I still know what they do, but I don’t think they’re a scam.” And I went to work for that company. It was a precursor to Unbound. And then I just kind of– through there, I started doing some admissions work for them. And then we had these students all over the country. And you guys can appreciate this. They were your students. And I was meeting them and thinking, “These people are amazing.” I’ve been working in youth ministry before I learned better and college stuff and the college world. And now I’m seeing these students and they’re phenomenal. The stuff they can do and the way that they act is just really amazing. So I I told the guys, I said, “Hey, we really need to put these folks together in the same place.” And they really weren’t interested in that initially. And then I said, “Look, I think it’s so important that if I get a conference together and something goes wrong, I’ll take responsibility and resign.” And they said, “Okay.” And I was like, “Oh, I wasn’t expecting you to agree to it.” But we did that and it worked really well. And so I ran the student life operations for that company for a while. And then Gretchen threw a whole series of miracles. Eventually I wound up owning and running that company, which is now Unbound. And so I came out of non-traditional kind of high school, elementary school as my own experience, then went to traditional higher education, and then went to really non-traditional higher education. And so I’ve had a chance to kind of put a foot in all those camps, and it’s been a fun journey. It’s been really a neat career. But boy, I got to tell you that the students I work with now, and the people I work with now, the things we get to do, I just find endlessly fascinating, endlessly exciting in terms of the potential, the possibilities, and the flexibility. And it’s totally changed my life. It’s changed the life of my family. It’s changed the life of my own children, and it’s just been a really, really fun ride. So that’s the Jonathan Brush bio. Mostly, you’ll notice that that started with some really intense planning. I’m married and need a job, and then it kind of led to here. So for those of you who are not sure what to do next, God looks after fools and silly people, and I was one of those, and it still works out, so.

Gretchen Roe: 00:09:21.846
Yeah, but you know what? I think the takeaway from that is we only know what the next step is. We don’t know the path. And could you imagine that you would be sitting here doing what you’re doing now when you were that high school senior whose mother said, “We’ll make this happen for you”?

Jonathan Brush: 00:09:42.438
Well, and this is an important point, Gretchen. So I tell this people a lot. I said, “When I graduated from college, I went to work in a position that I didn’t know existed prior to coming to college. And then I left that to go work for a company that didn’t exist and couldn’t have existed when I graduated from college.” So just catch that detail. I didn’t know there was a job called admissions counselor until I went to college, and so then I ended up doing that. I didn’t even know that was a thing. And so that was brand new. But then when I left that job and I went to the next job, the company I went to work for couldn’t have existed when I graduated from college. And then every position from then on has been a new position that was just formed at that point. Now, not everybody’s career looks just like that, but that is a little bit more than norm. And so yes, we actually teach a course called Navigate for students where we tell them– it’s a course about teaching you how to make good, wise decisions. And the reason it’s titled that is that I don’t want people to think it’s a course that will tell you how to figure out what job you want or where you should go to school, because I think that we do this disservice to students. We tell them that, “Hey, 17-year-old, you should know where you retire from before you go to college. Otherwise, your life is ruined, and you’ll have to insert whatever terrible job you think people that don’t get college degrees get, right?” And that was never really great advice, but it’s absolutely crazy advice now because the world changes so fast that there’s just absolutely no way you can predict that.

Jonathan Brush: 00:11:06.206
Yeah, a few people will have some sort of plan like that, but they’re really a small, tiny minority. They just happen to be the one to talk all the time because their life worked out perfectly. They want to tell everybody about it. For most of us, it’s a matter of making the best decision for what’s next and just staying in motion. First of all, there’s a practical aspect of that. That’s just the way the world works. But there’s a beauty to that too and an excitement, right? And I wish that I had known the excitement part instead of spending literally my entire 20s going, “Dear Lord, have mercy. I have a wife and children. And I have no idea what I’m supposed to do in life.” And instead, the answer was just do the best you can in what you’re doing, and then take the next step. And God keeps opening doors and new horizons become available. And I look back at that and think, “Man, I could have relaxed a lot more and had a lot more fun, and probably been more successful.” And if I would’ve had a bit of knowledge to know that that’s a normal instead of thinking, “Man, if I don’t know exactly what I want to do until I punch the retirement clock, I’m an idiot.” So [crosstalk] listening to your–

Gretchen Roe: 00:12:07.644
Well, I think you bring up a really important point is because we put an enormous amount of pressure on kids from about the age of 14 to figure out what you want to do. And when I look back at my five college graduates, none of them are now working in the field for which they obtained their degrees.

Jonathan Brush: 00:12:29.897
Absolutely.

Gretchen Roe: 00:12:31.092
And it’s because the world they live in now is not the world from which they obtained their degrees. So I think it’s important for us as parents to frame the conversation of what is the next right step for you, not what does the rest of your life look like. And we’re no longer the gold watch generation. That doesn’t exist anymore. And so I think we have to play flexible.

Jonathan Brush: 00:13:00.405
And I think there’s some peace in that, but there’s also some excitement in that. In Navigate and actually in all of Unbound, we actually tell our students, “Hey, it’s not that you shouldn’t think about what you want to do. It’s that you shouldn’t think of what you want to do in terms of what job you hold.” We actually, we have a book that we just released, and we teach some courses on this, and we weave it into our program. But we teach our students that there’s kind of three kinds of people. There’s create, connect, and coordinate type people. And we also tell people, “Don’t get confused. You can be any of these you want.” This is not like some innate. I know I’m going to step on some toes here, but I personally really dislike Myers-Briggs and Enneagram stuff and things like that. Because I think people take them and they think it’s prescriptive and that therefore that it defines who they are. They’re kind of locked into that. I believe that you can be any of these that you want, but most of us are gifted in one area and we tend to like to work in that area. And so, create people are all about new ideas, coordinate people are putting all things together, connect people are all about people.

Jonathan Brush: 00:14:02.003
And then we say that in business, there’s vision, there’s operations and there’s storytelling. So vision’s all about figuring out what comes next. Operations is all about delivering the product, and storytelling is about telling people what you make and why. Now look, you can be any of those people in any of those places. So if you’re in storytelling, which is like sales and marketing, if you’re a connect person, you’re probably on the phone. If you’re a coordinate person, you’re running the data for all the social media campaigns. And if you’re a create person, you’re coming up with a brand new ad campaign for people to do, right? And similarly to all the rest of those points. And so we tell students is like, “Look, just get out there and start doing stuff and then ask yourself the question, if I could master anything here, what would I master?” And then go back and say, “Did I master things that were create, connect or coordinate type stuff? And did I pick places in the business to work that were storytelling, operations, or vision-type stuff?”

Jonathan Brush: 00:14:48.540
And as you start to see that pattern, and again, nobody’s clear on the ends. We actually use a triangle for our illustration here and we say, “People are somewhere in that triangle kind of drifting towards typically two points,” right? I’m kind of a vision storytelling person or a connect create type of person, which means I’m really not good at organizing stuff, right? And so I have to occasionally, I mean, I have to keep my own checkbook balanced, but I generally try not to get paid to organize other people’s stuff because that’s bad for everybody involved. And so once you start to so those things, here’s the cool stuff. Every business needs those people, right? Every business has an operations of storytelling and a vision wing. And if you know how you interact with each of those wings, now those skills are the transferable skills. And so yeah, you need to get some industry stuff. I know lots of stuff about education. I’ve spent a long time here. But if I left education tomorrow, I know I wouldn’t look for a job managing inventory somewhere, right? Because that would be bad for everybody, right? But I could look for a job where I’m telling stories about what’s going on, or I’m trying to help a company figure out where they need to go next. And so if you think about in those terms, then it becomes quite freeing. And I tell students, “Instead of sitting down trying to think, what am I, what am I, what am I? Go do stuff and see what it is that you like doing.” But don’t think about that in terms of, “I really like running running the cash register at Chick-fil-A. No, no, no. Think about, do you like talking to customers at Chick-fil-A or do you like making sure that the fries get out really fast? One of those is an operational job, and one of those is a storytelling job. And knowing the difference between the two is transferable to a whole lot of areas afterwards.

Gretchen Roe: 00:16:15.101
Absolutely. Absolutely. And I think we also need to give kids permission to think creatively. And I think in a lot of ways, our public and private education trains that out of them a little bit because they’re, “Here’s what you’re going to do.” And I know my youngest is a senior in high school. He’s in public school. It has been the best fit for him. But he still has that, “Well, I’m going to do it my way,” homeschooler attitude that he cultivated through fifth grade. And I think that that, “There’s got to be a better mouse trap,” is something we need to make sure that we create in our children. So part of our conversation last week when we talked about this is, tell me some of the ways that Unbound helps those kids figure out that creativity.

Jonathan Brush: 00:17:11.184
Yeah, so let me start kind of macro and then go micro really quickly here. So some of the stuff I was saying, we have an educational framework that we call ADULT, and it stands for ask, do, understand, live and thrive. And so we won’t go into all the details about that. You can go to our site and learn about it, or we do some online events to teach people about it. But basically with Ask, we say, “Hey, we live in a world where questions have become more important than answers,” because answers are really fast available to us in terms of internet technology and all those things. So educational training has to focus more on teaching people how to sort answers than teaching people how to memorize answers. And so we got a little bit of that in terms of practical education. Do says that your experience is going to trump your degree. So in the world that we live in, saying that I’ve done this is way more valuable than saying I have a degree in this, because by and large employers, with some notable exceptions, engineering, nursing, things like that– by and large, employers go, “Yeah, you probably don’t know how to do that,” because the educational system is so far behind the reality system, right?

Jonathan Brush: 00:18:14.373
With Understand, we say, “Hey, you have to have some macro understanding of how the world works.” We’re a unapologetically Christian company. And so we say, “Hey, we believe that there’s a story. There’s kind of a beginning, a plot twist, and an end. And knowing that you’re part of a story and your place in that story, that’s helpful for you to understand how the whole world works.” And so that’s a big part of it. And then we say an education should be about teaching you how to live, have good skills to live, not just to help you make more money or get a better job. And then not just live, thrive, which we really define as resilience, that we need to teach students that failure is an option. It is going to happen, that you don’t get to live in an Instagram world, and that there’s going to be setbacks and changes and detours, and that’s part of life. So that’s the framework that we do. And then, Gretchen, in terms of what Unbound does, is that we can help you starting at high school, where we can provide a coach that will coach you through whatever curriculum you’re using.

Jonathan Brush: 00:19:04.400
And so a lot of people say, “Well, I got to the high school years, and now all of a sudden I’m in this death battle with my son about trying to get him to do his assignments.” And we’ll say, “Hey, we’ll teach you some study skills, some life skills,” around the stuff I just I talked about, “we’ll use that as a foil to then teach your curriculum. And we’re not going to teach it. We’re just going to coach your student through it. So you’re still the teacher, you’re still in charge of your homeschool, but one of the ways we’re going to do that is we’re going to have Kyle or Lydia or one of our coaches be calling your student and saying, ‘We talked last week and next week I’m going to be checking in on you. And last week, you said you’re going to finish your math and finish your writing and finish your whatever and science. And so next week I’ll be asking you those questions.’ And now, instead of telling mom, ‘Oh, yeah, I didn’t do my math, who cares?’ You gotta tell Lydia you didn’t do your math. And that may be a little bit more painful.”

Jonathan Brush: 00:19:49.364
And so we coach students through high school. And then at the college years, we have a program called Ascend. And Ascend will help you earn a college degree. And it’s fully accredited. We work with degree be partners like Liberty, and we have like eight or nine different schools you can graduate from. But Ascend is really designed around these elements I just talked about, this adult system of learning. And we’re saying, “Look, if you need a degree, it’s totally fine. We can help you get it probably for way cheaper than you can anyplace else.” But Ascend, the heart of it, is we call it a project-based higher education system. And Ascend is built to be a replacement for your college experience that will prepare your student for the world we actually live in, and we’ll train them to be really good at everyday life. And we kind of have a saying around the office. We say, “Our job is to teach, train special forces for the real world.” We want our students to be better at real-world everyday stuff like Army Rangers are better at military army stuff. And there’s a way to break that down. It involves leadership skills and communication skills and experience and ability to get things done and work with other people. And so we systematically go through, and we train students how to do that. And we allow them to stay embedded in their local communities, which is a fancy way of saying, “We teach a lot of our courses online, and so you can stay home. Take advantage of that.” But I don’t believe education can be only online. And so we fly you around the country. And so if you’re part of Ascend, you’re going to get on a plane every couple of months, and you’re going to go to these really intense live interactions in Michigan and Alabama on the Gulf Coast and Florida and Colorado and all these places where you’re going to live in community and be with people and stuff like that. And so when students graduate, yeah, you’ll have a degree if you want that. You have certifications that are really powerful. You’ll have the training and skills that’ll make you successful. But you’ll also have this amazing network of students that by the nature of the fact that they’ve decided to join our program were already people who thought differently. And then they care about the same stuff.

Jonathan Brush: 00:21:45.084
And this is the part, Gretchen, that every day I get up and pinch myself. I go, “I can’t believe I work with students like this,” because it’s hard for me to describe how different these students and these student events are from probably anything else you’ve ever experienced. Just in terms of the drive, the ability to think outside the box, the commitment, the integrity, the seriousness in which they take their faith and the interactions. It’s the only group of students, Gretchen, I’ve ever worked with that don’t split into easily identifiable cliques. You go to public school, you got the jocks, and you got the nerds, and I’m dating myself. When I was touring high schools, he had the goths, and he had all this kind of stuff, right? You go into an unbound event, and there’s just no way to easily define people. These people are mixed up with these people are mixed up with these people. And they kind of shift and move around these different groups because they’re all just really thrilled to be with people of their same caliber who are working on important things together. And that’s what Unbound does in terms of a macro sense.

Gretchen Roe: 00:22:41.239
And I don’t think there’s a platform or an avenue for those kinds of conversations. Here we are, as parents, when we are struggling to get our kids to adulthood. It’s a different journey for every parent, but it requires that element of cooperation on the part of your student. And some of us have kids who are readily willing to cooperate with us. And some of us have kids, like some of my kids, who said, “I’ll figure this out. I’ll do it my way. You stand over there and cheer me on,” which is terrific until you don’t get what you want. And so having you guys to be able to come along beside a family and be that second voice of authority, and maybe not even so much authority but collaboration, is enormous to be able to help kids see themselves in the future. And I want to pause for just a hot second. I want you to tell the story of your son.

Jonathan Brush: 00:23:50.506
He had met a bunch of folks through the events and all those things. And so when I tell people, people always ask like, “What is it?” And so they think it’s an academic system and it is. And it’s a way to get a degree without debt. And it can be and all those things. But they always are a little strange. Look at strange when we say, well, it’s a community. And they say, “Well, what is?” I mean, it’s an online event. How is that even possible? But I just got to tell you that that’s the most that when I ask my students what they’re getting out of the program, that’s the answer. Everything else is a distant second to that. And so one of the ways to illustrate that, as I said, my son met somebody through the program and they had a lot of similar interests. They were named the same. They were Caleb, which shows they were all homeschooled because we have more Caleb’s than any other per capita than any other organization. And so Caleb and Caleb decide they want to take a big adventure. And so they wanted to go backpacking through the national parks out west and stuff. And so they got an old minivan and I mean, I mean, a really old minivan, like 300,000 plus mile Toyota minivan. And they kind of retrofitted some of the back and was on a really shoestring budget. And they took off and they left from Virginia and they went up north through the Dakotas and out across through Yellowstone and Montana and up through Washington, down through California and back through Colorado, a little over a month, big long trip and all kinds of fun stuff. And so two things to this trip are notable to me. The first is when they weren’t on backcountry passes, they never stayed in a hotel. They stayed with Unbound friends the entire way around the country. So I’m telling you that like these students who are on this online program stayed with friends that they knew well enough to say, “Oh, yes, please come to my house the entire way around the country.” And so they had that kind of network. But the part that really tackled me was that they broke down outside of Yellowstone. And they were in the middle of nowhere in Montana. And they called and he said, “Hey, we broke down.” And I said, “Well, hey, strangely enough, Caleb–” different Caleb, “–lives in Montana and he graduated a couple of years ago. You’ve never met him, never heard of him. But let me call him.” So I call the third Caleb, who lives in Montana, and I tell him the situation. He says, “Oh, Mr. Brush, no problem. I’ll take care of this.” And so my son tells me afterwards, what happens is Caleb from Montana calls him and says, “Hey, I hear you’re broken down. Tell me where you are.” Caleb tells him. He says, “Oh, that’s in the neighborhood. That’s like three and a half hours from us,” which in Montana is apparently in the neighborhood. And he says, “Here’s the deal. My brother owns a tow truck company and we’ll come out and get you and tow you back and fix the van. You can stay for us as long as it happens. And actually, that would be fun because we’d love to meet you. But my cousin is a Toyota mechanic. He’s at his kid’s birthday party right now. I’m going to have him call you and he might be able to fix it on the phone with him.” So the cousin got interrupted from his kid’s birthday party, called my son and his buddy, explained to them how to fix the van. They did. And then the cousin said, “Here’s my number. Let me know how you’re doing as you’re traveling around the country and call me again if anything breaks and we’ll get this fixed.” And the van, Caleb said that they– I think they used 29 quarts of oil. So there was that problem. But other than that, they made the rest of the way back without another problem. That’s the kind of network I’m talking about. And that’s a fun story for me because it’s part of my family. But I’m telling you that I hear stories like that every single day in terms of the network of students because I tell people this is service academy-level network. Like the network you get if you graduated from Annapolis or the Air Force Academy or something like that, where you can literally drop into someplace, look up somebody who’s Unbound that you’ve never heard of before and say, I’m Unbound. And they’d say, “Great, what do you need?” And that’s the kind of kind of community that we get to be a part of.

Gretchen Roe: 00:27:07.351
And that to me is such a remarkable story. But I heard a few inklings of this the first time I met Jonathan and this is what got me excited about wanting to have a deeper conversation with him. So I love the fact that we’re having this conversation today. We had so many registrants for this event today. There’s some questions I would love to ask you. So before I move into the questions, is there anything else you would like to add to the Unbound story before I start asking you some of these terrific questions?

Jonathan Brush: 00:27:38.655
I think just with– and I can’t wait to get to the questions too. So we’ll keep this really short. If you’re interested in Unbound, here’s what I tell people, it’s different, right? And so it takes a little bit of understanding. I refuse to enroll you. I refuse to have you even consider giving me money until I’m absolutely positive you know how it works. And both you and your student appreciate where we’re going, okay? And so, and if that doesn’t happen, you just, you don’t get a chance to enroll. Not because I don’t want you, but because I know we’ll both be upset with each other in a couple of months, right? And so if you’re interested in us, check us out and call us, but this isn’t a sales call. This is a kind of make-sure-that-we-know-what-we’re-doing call. And so if you go to– I was just lost. Oh, beunbound.us/demme. I wanted to make sure that I had this thing correct. We have a landing page built especially for you guys. You can sign up there for an appointment where we’ll walk you through this stuff, but you also get a free course on decision-making, which is a kind of a condensed course, that one I referenced earlier. So even if you’re not interested in us, you can get the free course and some more content there. But certainly, if you are, that’s the way to get in touch with us. We have all the social media platforms. If you’re a student, check out YouTube. You’ll see that, and go, “These are my people,” or, “Option B, please.” So you’ll be able to figure it out, right? If you’re a parent or a student, you can check out the Be Unbound Podcast and you can hear about us there. And the website, of course, has lots of information. But bottom line here is that this is a different way to do things. You understanding it is essential for you to make a good decision, and that’s our job. So when you call in and talk to us, that’s what we’re looking to do, so. And we’ll be delighted to have a further conversation.

Gretchen Roe: 00:29:17.855
So if I wanted to go check out Unbound on YouTube, I would go to Be Unbound?

Jonathan Brush: 00:29:23.126
Yeah, just put in Be Unbound, B-E Unbound, and you’ll see our logo and we’ll pop up there. And you’ll find lots and lots of videos, wrap-ups of our events, if you want to see what these live events look like, skits and inspirational stuff about the kind of issues our students like to talk about, and then just kind of a cross-section. Like I said, you’ll sort of see that and say, “Oh, I kind of get a feeling for what it’s like to be a student.” And one of two things will happen. You won’t be like, “Eh.” You’ll be like, “These are my people,” or, “Oh, no, Mom, I’m ready to go to traditional college.” So one of those two things will happen. And that’s good, right? That’s the point. We want you to know what you’re getting into, so.

Gretchen Roe: 00:29:58.274
As a parent, I find that comforting because what I found with my kids as they went off to colleges, despite the fact that we thought we knew what they were doing and we thought we had researched carefully, there was this huge depth and breadth of what we did not know. And having that known commodity makes it easier, particularly if you’re sending off a first student to college. And I was thinking about this after our conversation the other day. None of my kids’ college experiences actually shook out like they anticipated they would. And I think that that’s a very common denominator because then I started thinking about my friends in my homeschool circles whose kids went to college. And I realized none of us had kids, who at 17 were talking one thing and actually did exactly what they were talking about. So I think in setting expectations for parents who might have a freshman now, you have to be willing to be flexible. And people laugh at me because I say “Semper Gumby” all the time, always flexible. You have to be. You have to be willing to be that and to foster those kinds of conversations. And if those conversations aren’t happening in your household, maybe some of the tools that Jonathan is offering would be helpful to you all.

Jonathan Brush: 00:31:29.708
We almost guarantee that your Unbound experience won’t be exactly and precisely as what you think it is, so I won’t be able to give you that precision. But I’ll tell you what we do and then I’ll tell you something else. I’ll make sure you know exactly how much it costs because that’s obviously an issue. Both what you’d pay to us plus what you’d have to pay to a school if you’re going to graduate with a degree. But then the other thing I’ll tell you, Gretchen, because we understand that if you’re doing something different, there’s a risk involved in that, and that we should share that risk. So here’s how we share it. In writing, so you’ll find this in the paperwork that we send you when you have a meeting with us. We tell you that if you earn all of our certificates, so we offer a certificate for every year in the program, we offer three full years, and then the fourth year, typically folks are finishing up if they do the degree with an online degree, or we offer some special four-year programs. But for three years, if you do three years with us and earn all our certificates, which means you earn our entire certificate or Unbound certificate, we guarantee you will be employed at a college-level paying or hired job. And if that does not happen, we will refund all the tuition you ever paid to us. And that’s our way of saying like, “Hey, I have a network that I really believe in, and I have a set of trainings that I know will really pay off. But I know you don’t know that because you’ve never seen this before. It’s not like you can gauge it against something else. And so for us to be able to share that risk, I want to make a promise to you that I’ll put in writing so that you know that I’m taking this really seriously. I’m not going to enroll you in the program and then like shrug my shoulders. I’m going to enroll you in the program and make sure that we do everything we possibly can to make your students successful.” Even though things are going to twist and turn and they’re going to end up doing things they didn’t necessarily think they were going to do and there’ll be surprises, but ultimately, this is an education that must help them to live and thrive. It has to lead to good outcomes. And that’s a way for us to kind of share some of that risk.

Gretchen Roe: 00:33:12.357
And you said that when we talked last week, and I’m still marveling over that because I don’t know an institute of higher education that would offer you that kind of a guarantee. So to me, that’s pretty impressive with that content, so. I think I want to start with this question, because I know this question is in a lot of parents’ minds, and it says, “When do you start having conversations with your child about what they want to do post-high school? When is too early or when is it too late?” And I don’t ever think it’s too late. Is it ever too early?

Jonathan Brush: 00:33:48.007
Yeah, I really love this question. I think that this is a question that everybody has but very few people are able to articulate it or kind of think through it enough deeply to ask it. So whoever asked this, I really appreciate you putting it this way. So let’s get both of those things. The too late thing is haunting to parents, right? What happens if? And so there is a lingering idea– my dad said this to me. I had an option to go do some volunteer work when I was graduating from high school. And then I had it again partway through college. And my dad both times said, “Don’t do that. Go to college and finish, or you’ll never go back.” And he was correct. That was the right– it was the right advice. And here’s why, because at the time, college was only on campus. And so the idea that you would spend a couple of years doing something and then want to go move back into a dorm with everybody else, or that she would move out of a dorm, move back into a dorm. That’s kind of crazy, right? For the most part, and then, doing it some other way was going to be really difficult because you had to figure out how to job flexibility, all that kind of stuff. All right. So there’s still that lingering idea that if I don’t make all the right decisions at 18, as soon as I graduate from high school, that my road is going to be terrible. And so I just want, more than anything else, to really specifically say this. That is not true. That is not true. That is not true. That is not true. So I just want to be really clear about this. For all the problems we have in our world today, there has never been a time when it has been easier to go back and get a college degree whenever you need one, if you need one. There’s never been a time when a college degree has been less important. And that’s not true on a historical basis, but from the last 40 years, there’s never been a time when a college degree is less important, right? And there’s never been a time when there’s been more options available, not just because today’s economy is looking for workers. That’ll change. Things shift, stuff like that. But because students who are willing to do real-world stuff and learn from their experience are going to be in demand no matter what the economy says. And so the first thing I just say is that if you feel like you’re in a too late position, you’re not. There’s always a chance to turn around and make this work. And look, unless you have some really significant issues that’ll put you under a bridge somewhere, eventually, reality catches up and people figure out how to do stuff. So your unmotivated kid will get motivated when they have to pay bills. Your unmotivated kid that didn’t want to go to college will decide they want to go to college after spending a couple of months on a road crew holding the sign on the McAdam in 110-degree weather. You know what I mean? So, in other words, experience will teach. So that’s, that’s the first thing. Then too early, I don’t know if there’s really a too early. I mean, it’s always going to be prepared. But I would just say this, I see a lot of students who are worried about this, so they pass the worry onto their kid, and they talk about it early because they think they have to make all these decisions. And in that case, it’s too early, because that’s stressful for everybody. It’s terrifying. And again, I can’t say this enough. It’s absurd for us to think a 17-year-old knows what they’re going to do five years or two years hence, let alone 20 years hence. So if your version of the conversation is, what do you do post-high school meeting like, “Son, daughter, you need to figure out what you’re doing for college and what you’re majoring in and all that stuff. Because if you don’t know that, you won’t know what job you’re going to work. If you don’t know what job you’re going to work, you don’t know how you’re going to be successful. And you’re probably going to end up living under a bridge somewhere.” I mean, like, that’s the sort of logical thing that’s going on. People don’t actually say it straight up. And so in that sense, I would just say never have that conversation just because I don’t think it’s necessary. But instead I would have conversations about what I said earlier. I would look for opportunities to have your son or daughter get real-world experience doing anything. And then I would just have reflective conversations and try to help them think, “What is it you like doing? And if you were going to master something in this situation, what would you master?” And then help them categorize that. “Did you master something that was operations, storytelling, or vision? Did you use connect, coordinate, or create type skills?” And those will be the transferable skills that they’ll be able to then keep leveraging forward and learning as they go on. And the more they double down in using those skills, the better they’ll be and the more employable they’ll be. And then the rest will kind of take care of itself. So I hope that– the whole point there is that I’m guessing that whatever you’re stressed out in, you can cut it in half, cut it in half again, and then take 5% of that. And that’s the proper stress level, which I know sounds counterintuitive, but I’m telling you, I had the advantage of sitting on a situation where I literally watch thousands of students go through this process. You’ve only watched yours. I’ve been paid for the last 20-plus years to watch thousands of students go through this process. And that’s my conclusion. So I’m not just spinning out my own personal parenting experience. I’m telling you that that’s what I’ve been able to do professionally and see.

Gretchen Roe: 00:38:13.698
Absolutely. And I love the way that you described that. I know in my own personal family, my youngest son has said since he was about seven years old, and we might have put this thought in his head because he can argue with a post. And he has said, “I want to be a lawyer.” So last year, my nephew, who is a very high-powered attorney here in the US, offered to let him do a three-week internship with him. And when he left for that internship, everyone in the family was convinced that he would come back going, “That. That is exactly what I want to do.” And do you know what he came back and said? “Not a chance. I do not want to do that.” Can you imagine how it would have been if he had gone to college, making that presumption, gone to law school, and then figured out he didn’t really want to do that? He would be thousands of dollars in debt and sort of behind his peers as far as finding a path for himself. So I’m absolutely delighted that he had the opportunity to do that because what it did for him was equally valuable. It didn’t prove he wanted to do it. It proved he didn’t want to do it. And sometimes that’s important.

Jonathan Brush: 00:39:26.012
That’s super important. I am highly suspicious of any kid who tells me they want to be a doctor or a lawyer. And that’s not because we don’t need doctors and lawyers. And I’m delighted for it. And you do need to have some burning passion in your belly to be that. I just want to know, do they really have a burning passion or are they saying that because they got sick of people asking what they want to do and that sounds cool? And I generally find that high performing academic students think that’s what they ought to do. And there’s a real danger there because the longer they think that, the more embarrassing it is to decide they don’t want to do it. And I have several friends who are attorneys who hate their life and their work and are bazillions of dollars in debt because they knew they really didn’t want to do this halfway through undergrad stuff, but they didn’t have the guts to tell mom, dad, grandparents, relatives, professors that they were going to take their 4.0 and go to diesel mechanics school. And so I guess I’m not really that authority in everybody’s life, but if I can, I would give you permission to ditch that. And I’d also say that if you have a fire in your ability to do that, that’s God’s blessing. Go for it, man. Just run that hard. But if you’re not sure, do what Gretchen said, get some hands-on experience, and don’t be afraid to say no.

Gretchen Roe: 00:40:31.536
Absolutely. And I think one of the things that’s really important there is establishing that relationship with your child, to be able to give them permission to say, I’m not willing to do that is absolutely an essential. And so one of the things that I wanted you to talk about is this question is to help create a safe route to exit into a place of job satisfaction. So we as a culture have become obsessed with helping our children find their path to adulthood based on what their net income could be. And I think we’ve skewed that something horribly. And I know that you bring sanity to this conversation. So can you talk a little bit about that?

Jonathan Brush: 00:41:29.000
Yeah, I’m super passionate about this. So I’ll try to condense it down. And I’ll give you some good resources from the very beginning. “Drive” by Daniel Pink and “So Good They Can’t Ignore You” by Cal Newport. So if you read those books, you’ll hear some of these ideas reflected in what I’m about to tell you. So credit where credit’s due, those are some great things. There’s lots of other resources out there. But here’s what the research says. I found this really surprising and also super enlightening. And so I just, I repeated ad nauseam everywhere I go when I’m speaking and everything else. So people love their job. According to the research and experience, and you could probably find some personal experiences, people love their job when they have autonomy, they have the ability to decide how to do their job, and when they’re doing a job that they think makes a difference in the world so that they feel like it’s important, and then when it pays the bills. When those three things line up, people love their work. Now listen carefully. It does not matter what it is. People run septic system companies. They clean portagons. They run recycling companies, which is a fancy way of saying they run dumps. All the things that you would think that are like the bottom-of-the-barrel type jobs, right? You will find people who are passionate about that and love their work because they have autonomy. They think it makes a difference in the world and it pays their bills. Now, here’s the thing, you trade skill for autonomy and you trade experience for work that makes a difference. Now, if you know that, you could now back engineer this thing. And listen carefully, this is not about picking the right major. This is not about finding the sexiest job. This is not about– my favorite thing is like, no matter where I went as admissions counselor, there was always some kid who had a 2.0 that wanted to be a marine biologist. And I’d asked them why they wanted to be a marine biologist. It’s because they wanted to swim with dolphins. And I mean, honestly, if you could get paid to swim with dolphins, who wouldn’t want to be a marine biologist, right? I mean, but that was the point. It wasn’t that there was a real connection to the job was that it sounded cool. And then whatever TV show was hot at the time, that’s what people wanted to be, right? And yet it’s much simpler than that. You trade skill for autonomy, you trade experience for work that makes a difference. What does that mean? Well, it means that the earlier you have your kid start building skill. And I would say in those things we talked about, operations, vision, storytelling, the faster they build skill and the more experience they gain, the faster they’ll be able to change it for work that they love. Last piece here. That process typically does not take less than five years and can take as many as 10. That’s not abnormal. That’s normal. So we need to be telling our students and our children, “Hey, look, five years out of whatever you finished in terms of education, five five years in the real world, it is totally normal for you to still be going, “I sort of kind of figured this is what I want to do.” Right? I mean, that’s not surprising. But it’s hard for kids who are in a four year, graduate from college, graduate from high school, whatever, type of thing. And it’s typically not until mid 30s or something that people go, “Oh, now this, this, and this. Yeah, I’m on the right track.” But if you know that– that the answer is always, build skill, gain experience. And if you know that, you will eventually get to the point that doing all kinds of things that you never imagined. When I graduated from high school, I wanted to be a veterinary surgeon [laughter]. And I’m running an education company. And there’s a whole fill gap between what I thought was reality and what reality was, and I have never been happier in my life in terms of my vocational experience.

Gretchen Roe: 00:44:47.520
And you know what? If you get the chance to spend some real world time with Jonathan, it’s palpable. It’s contagious too. So that’s pretty exciting. Because you are so articulate, I want you to address this question, because I know that this is not the only mom who’s dealing with this. She says, “My son is not one to process out loud. So any ideas how I can encourage him in thinking about the future would be helpful.” And that, in some ways, is the definition of boy. So how do you encourage kids to think about their process?

Jonathan Brush: 00:45:27.249
Yeah, that’s a great question. So I have two kind of ways to go with this. And look, this is such a big deal that whoever asked this question, if– if we don’t hit it here, feel free to hit us through the site and– and just tell whoever answers the phone or contacts us that– that you just were with Jonathan on a webinar and had a question for him. And literally, you’ll get pushed on through, and I’ll be happy to schedule a call with you. We can kind of hit this in a little more detail. That’s not to say that I have all the perfect answers. That is to say I really deeply appreciate this question and I understand how frustrating it is a little bit. And because I don’t get to be a super person here, I just– this happens to be the particular thing I do. I just had a guy out looking at some trees in my yard, and he cuts trees. And I cut trees too, but I don’t do it every day [laughter]. And so when the trees are dangerous and can kill me, I hire somebody else to do it. Because he’s cut thousands of trees, and I’ve only cut a few trees, right, for firewood here and there, and so it’s the same thing. I’ve got to see this happen thousands of times. So you asking the question doesn’t mean you’re a bad parent. It just means that I got to do it lots and lots and lots of times. And so I can offer perspective, not perfect answers, but perspective. So here’s two things for perspective. The first is if the conversation is, “Son,” it’s son, right? “Son, you’re about to jump off the cliff and land in real life, and you better figure out what you got to do.” If you’ve done a reasonably good job as a parent at providing a good home with a good relationship, your son is like, “I don’t want to talk about this,” [laughter] because that’s a terrifying thought, right? “I’m doing pretty good. I finally got a driver’s license and I got a little spending money because maybe I’m working a part-time job and– and the girl that I like kind of talked back to me, and I’ve got some good friends and life is awesome. And you’re about to tell me the whole thing is going to explode, and I got to make decisions. Uh-uh. I don’t want to think about this. I just want to be right here, right now,” right? And so there could be in a level of this where this– you’re kind of forcing stress that’s unnecessary. Maybe because you’re saying, “You got to figure out what your majoring in if you’re going to college,” and all these kinds of things.

Jonathan Brush: 00:47:19.249
And so maybe it’d be helpful if you could reframe it with just kind of a, “Hey, reflect with me, ask questions and tell me what is it you like about what you’re doing right now?” Or, “What is it you should be doing right now? What could you be doing? Or how do we get you into some more experience? And then once you do those things, working whatever job it is, what do you like in there? If you had to continue this job for the next five years, what would you have to get really good at?” Now you’re kind of indirectly getting at some of those things we talked about in terms of, “Are you storytelling? Are you operations? Are you connect? Are you coordinate?” Those kinds of things. And so that might be one way to do it. The other way I would say is that do not be, and especially this is mom going to son, right? Understand that you can be the best parent in the world and perspectives a big deal. And somebody outside your family can offer that perspective in ways you can’t. Look, I do this for a living. And my son, I wasn’t getting anywhere with. And then he came back the other day and he had this conversation with a friend of mine and he was super excited and he was saying all this stuff. And in the back of my head, I’m going, “Damn, I’ve been telling this kid this for three damn long years,” right? But here’s the thing. I have a great relationship with my son. There’s no tension there. But he’s heard me talk about this on stage for years. Why in the world would he listen to it? And I don’t mean this in a bad way. It’s just like it’s familiar, right? There’s a familiarity there that is not worth kind of pursuing. But when somebody else says it, it’s a whole new fresh perspective and they go, “Oh, that makes sense.” And so don’t miss the opportunity to put mentors in your son’s life who can reflect those kinds of things in a way, and don’t be offended when they say the same thing, and then they get it. Instead, thank God that that perspective was available and know that the reason they got it is because you taught it to them. I mean, that’s why they got it, even if it had to come from somebody else.

Gretchen Roe: 00:49:03.239
Right. You paved the way, so.

Jonathan Brush: 00:49:05.964
Right. Yeah. But for any of these, if you want to follow up, feel free to hit the site. And again, it’s not that we have perfect answers, but we probably have seen the pattern enough that we can say, “Hey, we’ve seen this a couple times. Let me give you two or three angles to look at that and see if this helps you in your particular situation.”

Gretchen Roe: 00:49:21.076
Absolutely. And I’m reminded of a conversation I had with a parent last spring who said she had a daughter who wanted a college experience, but she wasn’t sure what she wanted in a college experience. And so this parent, I think, was very wise and gave some really good advice. And she said, “Go to the adults you respect and ask them to see what kind of talent they think you have.” And so she was telling this story as a perspective of a child who is now a rising junior in college. And based on those adults’ wisdom, that daughter picked a degree field that she is thrilled to bits with. So we use community in so many ways when we homeschool. And then we forget that community exists when we’re getting ready to launch these kids into adulthood. So I think we need to reach community, and the way in which you have talked about it has been so terrific. And I think it has been so encouraging to me, even though I’m at the bitter end, so to speak, or the better end [crosstalk].

Jonathan Brush: 00:50:32.544
Yeah. [crosstalk]–

Gretchen Roe: 00:50:34.754
But I think this makes such a difference for us to figure out how to frame these conversations in an affirmative way. And I cannot believe we are almost to the top of the hour because I have 1,000 more questions I want to ask you. But we’re kind of coming into the end here. So what are the things you would want parents to take away, those last things that you would say to someone so that they remember those and can savor them, if you will.

Jonathan Brush: 00:51:03.210
Yeah. So I think I would just offer this. My wife and I are not expert parents. We stand on the shoulders of giants and that helps a lot. But we tend to fix things when we’re on fire and about to auger in from 20,000 feet. And somewhere in the death dive, we look at each other like, “We should probably fix something here.” You know what I mean? So I just want you to know that we are not– you go to homeschool stuff and every once in a while, you go to the first homeschool convention and you’re like, “Man, we’re going to teach our kids to speak Hebrew and Greek and graduate from college with no debt at 12 and go to master’s school and be PhDs.” And then five more years down the road, we’re like, “Actually, potty training and reading sounds awesome if we could just get to that point.” And so I just want you to know that there’s not a– that we live a realistic life too and we’re in reality here. And so because of that, when we’re in the death dive, I sometimes have to pull back and say, “What really matters here?” And so here’s here’s the– setting aside, yeah, I’d love you to come to unbound. I’d love to enroll your students in our programs. I’d love to see you at activities, all that kind of good stuff. But here’s the bigger kind of thing that I’d like you to sort of grasp onto and understand. The problem with homeschooling and education in general is that it offers a series of easy measurements. And so it’s really easy to gauge and compare yourself to everybody else. Your kid did or didn’t pass the class. Your kid did or didn’t get into college. They did or didn’t get a scholarship. They did or didn’t have a 4.0 GPA, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, right? And the more you can conform to that– and you can match it all up and you can say, “Oh, look, I won.” It’s like, it’s easy to find out who won the soccer game. Somebody scored more goals than the other person. It’s easier to see who won the Super Bowl. Somebody had more points on the board than somebody else, right?

Jonathan Brush: 00:52:46.776
And so those things then create this whole loop of competitiveness and comparison games and all those kinds of things. I guess what I’d like to tell you more than anything else is that’s not the game. That’s not the game that’s important. The game that’s important has always to do with relationships. So, one of the core– we tell people all the time, we’re not a church. We’re not replacing your local church. When it comes down to doctrine and issues and all that stuff, your local pastor and your local churches, that’s their job. But we are unapologetically Christian. And so, we teach kind of from the wisdom literature. We teach life as it ought to be, right? I mean, like that broad stuff. And so, we teach two main theological concepts. Everybody is made in the image of God, the ‘Imago Dei’, right? So, anybody’s not made in the image of God. And ‘Coram Deo’, you live in the presence of God. And so, we tell our students, you never get an excuse to not recognize the image of God than somebody else. And you never get an excuse to say, I’m not in the presence of God. And so all these things, and we teach you all kinds of leadership skills and time skills and task skills and all this stuff. And then we have this– and we just did this at our live event recently. And I have a series of slides. And I say, time and tasks only make sense in the context of relationships.

Jonathan Brush: 00:53:54.862
So, I would say grades and scholarships, college degrees and jobs, careers, and being an adult only makes sense in the context of relationships. So, at the end of the day, the only thing that really matters is your relationship with your child. You equipping them to have relationship with others, including the one who made them, and their relationship and your relationship with the one who made you and made them. And no matter how bad things are going, if those things are intact, things will go better. They will write themselves. Sometimes it’s more painful than for others. Sometimes it takes longer than for others, but you will get there, and you will arrive. And so, at the end of the day, it’s not about whether they passed the test or not. It’s not whether they finished chemistry. It’s not whether they got whatever. It’s your relationship with them and their relationship with one who made them and their ability to have relationship with other people. And so, default to that. And find ways to help there when all else fails, and then the rest of it will figure it out.

Gretchen Roe: 00:54:52.099
And now you all see why I have been so excited to have this conversation with Jonathan, because his wisdom is profound. And he speaks in a simple way that I think we as parents can relate to and understand. And it makes such a huge difference for you when you’re in the middle of trying to get your teenager out of bed for some event and they don’t want to. By the way, frozen marbles work great because they roll towards you, and they don’t melt. But that’s just an aside–

Jonathan Brush: 00:55:21.172
I’m taking notes for that. I’ve now taken something away from the webinar that is totally useful. So, yeah. [laughter]

Gretchen Roe: 00:55:28.655
But I just want to say thank you all so much for joining us this afternoon. There will be resources that come with this video. If you’re watching it as a recording, you will have show notes. There will be ways to get in touch with Jonathan. Jonathan, would you please, in closing, share with our families one more time how they can find you?

Jonathan Brush: 00:55:47.864
Right. So, if you search Be Unbound anywhere, you should find us. But if you want to get the special goodies for being on this webinar, it’s beunbound.us/demme. And that will take you to the landing page that will get you the free course and all that good stuff. And then of course, if you search us under anything you’ll– search Be Unbound under anything, you’ll find us.

Gretchen Roe: 00:56:09.596
Absolutely. And I know parents who have kids who are stepping into the high school years, it can feel like a scary proposition. I want you to reframe that. I want you to recognize that you are in the most precious time with your children. And this is when they differentiate themselves from you, when they learn who they are in the world. And it’s a great privilege to watch that happen. I have loved my kids at every age, but my teenagers were very, very special indeed and are special indeed, I should say. And I want you to enjoy that journey because it’s a journey you only get to take once. And don’t look back with regret. Look back with joy on what you experience and what you know your child is growing into as an adult.

Gretchen Roe: 00:56:58.174
Thank you all so much for joining us today. I appreciate you more than you know. And we do have one comment here. I didn’t want to miss it, Jonathan. So let me make sure that it is shared. It says this. It says, “Thank you for sharing your wisdom on this topic. I have been preaching this to my family for years, and it’s so refreshing to hear another with the same values and thought process. I will keep Unbound in consideration, keep up the good work, and honoring God each day.”

Gretchen Roe: 00:57:28.910
This is Gretchen Roe for The Demme Learning Show. Thanks for joining us. You can access the show notes and watch a recording at demmelearning.com/show or go on our YouTube channel. Be sure to rate, review, follow, or subscribe wherever you may be hearing this, especially if you really enjoyed it.

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