Staying Afloat: Gina Berman's Journey through Careers, Relationships and Family Life

Speaker 1: 0:11

Hello everyone, welcome back to the Emotional man podcast. I'm just tickled today because I have Gina Berman with me. We were her fellow classmates in the WP Kerry School of Business Executive MBA program. We're going to spend a good two years together and form a really good friendship. She's an incredible entrepreneur, medical professional, mother and spouse. Welcome to the show, gina.

Speaker 2: 0:35

Hi, thank you for having me.

Speaker 1: 0:38

Yeah, I'd like to start off because, from the conversations we've had in the past, both you and your husband have at one point been practicing medicine at the same time with your family. So maybe you can introduce your family and then introduce how you met your husband and what it was like serving both of you at the same time as medical professionals.

Speaker 2: 0:59

I met my husband in the hospital. We were residents together Even though I swore I'd never dated a doctor. We spent a lot of time together in residency to get very close and we developed a relationship and we were actually in the same class. Even we were both in the Emergency Medicine program at Maricopa County and we were in the exact same year. So it was a controversial thing because it's a small group and if anything happens it could be awkward for everybody. But thankfully it worked out and we made it through residency and tax. We were married in 2000.

Speaker 2: 1:35

He started working at one hospital and I worked at a different one, so we weren't working together at that point, but we had spent two years intensively working together. We had a very good understanding exactly what the other person was going through. But the challenge then came when we started having kids. So our first child was born in 2006. So he's 16 now, and then we had another child in 2008 and then another in 2010.

Speaker 2: 2:03

And I am one of those weird which he probably picked up on in school one of those weird personalities and I worked almost all nights. I really enjoyed working at night. So you can imagine the chaos of two ER doctors with schedules all over the place Like I get home at four in the morning, he's taking off at 5.30, little kids to take care of. It was insane and we tried to have a live in nanny. It was really the only thing that we thought would make sense for us. But that's a very difficult situation when somebody is living in your home balancing their personal needs with your needs of childcare and our really weird schedules. So we had three different live in nannies and it just didn't work out.

Speaker 2: 2:49

But that kind of got us through some of those first early years. And then it got to the point where we realized that, especially once the third child came along, that our schedule was just not going to work. I went down to part time and the reason that it was me that went down to part time, which I was resentful about because I was a partner and I had to give up my partnership and I was giving up my career and the reason for that was because I worked in an urban, more intercity hospital and he worked in a more affluent area and his income was it was just a dollar's in cents decision he just made so much more money than I did, even though I liked the job better than he did, that we just kept. That was the right decision for our family, for me to go to part 10.

Speaker 1: 3:41

You just shared a lot. I want to unpack, if you're okay with.

Speaker 2: 3:44

Sure.

Speaker 1: 3:46

Let's get to where to begin. Let's set up first with just let's just talk relationship for a moment. You were working two different shifts. How much crossover were you seeing each other on average on a day to day basis?

Speaker 2: 4:02

For that period of time we were shifts passing in the night.

Speaker 1: 4:05

In different hospitals.

Speaker 2: 4:07

We worked at different hospitals and so it was basically like a baton handoff when one of us would get home, the other would release the home and children to the nonworking parent and then go off to work.

Speaker 1: 4:21

What was your relationship like during that period? Because a lot of entrepreneurs and business owners, one of the big stressors that could occur in a family is time away from each other, and what that time away generally means is a lack of communication. The spouses stop communicating with each other, they stop emotionally investing in each other. So how did you keep it going during that phase?

Speaker 2: 4:47

I think the underlying theme for what has kept Greg and I together is that we did everything together. Everything we did was as a team. So we both started off as ER doctors, so when one of us would get home we would decompress with each other and we still do it today Like Greg was at work yesterday and we run through his cases or what he saw, what was interesting or frustrating, and we just debrief, if you will, after a shift and then do the turnover. And so we just were connected, not only because we knew exactly what each other was doing. So if Greg was at our lake coming home or I was late coming home, we knew exactly why. We had a code come in at the end of our shift. Something happened with a patient. We had to stay late. That's just the job. And so I think that helped with communication, understanding and then not resenting each other for what could be perceived as dropping the ball or not taking your part, your fair structure, part in the family.

Speaker 2: 5:51

And Greg and I, very early on before we even got married, were very clear as to what we wanted in our lives and what we wanted to do was we wanted a family.

Speaker 2: 6:01

We both agreed without hesitation on that.

Speaker 2: 6:04

That was not anything we ever debated or that anybody was thinking about or not sure about, and we wanted to work extremely hard while those kids, while we were young, and while those kids were young, so that we could be home with them when they were the age they are now, so that we would have a financial freedom.

Speaker 2: 6:24

We said by 40, we can have financial freedom and then we would be able to be physically present, which at a time when our children's life we thought was most important, which it is now. And so we were willing to make the sacrifices in our relationships, both with each other and with our friends. You can imagine that had a big impact on when you have three little kids and you're working all over the place and we have no family here to support us zero family here. We were willing to make that sacrifice. We had agreed upon it ahead of time and we stuck with it. We still helped by those principles. I think that helped us out a lot, that we verbalized what our goals were and we understood what the other person was doing, so that there was a lot of we could give each other a lot of grace.

Speaker 1: 7:13

That's incredible, that the ability to understand and, I think, being able to give your spouse grace and empathy and also, I think, being able to understand where they're coming from or why things happen, is so powerful. And I think that's normally the one of the first breakdowns in any relationship is that you stop talking. Even when you're talking, you start talking past each other, you stop communicating, stop connecting. That connection starts fraying and there goes the relationship. So that's incredible. Okay, you talked about. You reached the point where you're like okay, this isn't sustainable anymore. Can you share? What brought you to that point? How did you recognize that you were at that point? So a lot of times when we're suffering, it's easy just to keep going until you're broken, versus seeing a something needs to change and then enacting the change.

Speaker 2: 8:07

I don't know that we didn't break, but it was our third child that came along. She had special needs and so took a lot more time. She was, I think, a great sign to us that we needed to slow down and we needed to pivot and we both couldn't work anymore. It really was her birth that was the pivoting point for us. That was the inflection point for us where we knew that we had to change something.

Speaker 1: 8:33

Are you willing to share what that conversation, as best as you can recall what that conversation looked like? Because imagine that's a pretty difficult conversation it has. There's a lot of difficult things to decide during that time. Who's going to step back? What does that step back look like? How do you even approach the conversation in the first place? Talk to me a little bit about how you went about making those decisions. You said there's a dollars and cents decisions, but I'm sure there's a lot of emotions involved. How did you go through all that and come out? As you're still married? This was years ago. The relationship survived. A lot of times when people come to those critical points, when something has to change or things will break down even further, a lot of families just break down further. Why was the pivot point versus just a total collapse point?

Speaker 2: 9:26

There was an extenuating factor that I'll bring you to know. But first, neither of us trusted. We only had one other person that we trusted with our daughter. It was a babysitter that we had found she was just amazing and wonderful. She even has her limits on how much she could be around. The priority then was the safety of our child and making sure that she was in good hands, which we believe were ours. That was a big part of it. We wanted either one of us or this wonderful woman who was our babysitter to be taking care of, especially their child. But the special needs that was also an agreement.

Speaker 2: 10:07

It wasn't one conversation, it was many conversations. You're right, there was a lot of emotion attached to it. I've given up my name Now I'm giving up my career. I can't be a partner anymore, which is what I had earned a partnership in my group. I can't be a partner anymore. I can still be an ER doctor, but I can't be a partner, which is part of the career building. There was a lot of thought about it. I think we made the right decision for our family, but you have to accept it. It comes at a cost, and that was the cost for me.

Speaker 2: 10:45

The extenuating circumstance was that we had the housing issue in 2008. Our third child was born in 2010. If we'll all remember 2008, we could probably wish we could forget it, but it happened. It provided actually an opportunity. The real estate market had crashed In 2009,. We purchased our first foreclosure foreclose apartment, which is historically what my family had done. My family is in real estate. Greg saw this investment portfolio that my parents were able to build and he wanted to do the same thing. This was Greg, not me. He started looking for opportunities within this real estate crash in order to acquire properties. Between 2009 and, I want to say probably 2012, we acquired nine 18 forplexes. Most of those almost all of those, except for the few at the very end, were short sales or they were foreclosures and required extensive rehab.

Speaker 2: 11:51

Greg was working in the ER. I was working part-time in the ER and I was taking on more of the kids. Then he took on the rehabilitation in addition to his full-time job rehabilitation of these apartments. Then I was the property manager. There were other things for me to be doing in order to establish what our collective goal was was work hard, diversify, invest, make a great portfolio for our families so we can have financial independence we were hoping by the age of 40. As a marketing point. There was no consequence to it. That was just in our minds that was around the time, around the age that the kids were going to be that we'd want to have freedom in what we did. That was a lot of work that we were both taking on.

Speaker 2: 12:43

But to the theme of teamwork and sticking together, if he had to run off to the apartments to do something, I totally understood. If I had to run off to the apartments to do something, he understood it wasn't like I was doing something that he couldn't relate to or didn't understand. It was a project we were working on together. We worked on a project of ER together to become ER doctors. We worked on this property project to have this as an investment, which we both agreed we wanted to do. We weren't either of us doing anything unilaterally. I remember my dad gave me this advice in marriage before we got married. He said whatever you do it together, I think it's really good advice because it keeps you connected to each other even when things get really busy and hectic and your ship's passing in the night. All of that collectively was like okay, I can go to any part time and there are some consequences to that. But there are opportunities over here that we are agreeing that we're going to capitalize on.

Speaker 1: 13:39

Let's talk about staying together. One of the difficult aspects of making a decision as a couple is when your values or what you think you should do, verge or compete with each other. What the other person's ideas should be, for example, hypothetically speaking, it could have been you thought that he should relinquish, step back from his ER and do real estate full-time while you pursue your career Could have been one of the options. How do you maintain a sense of unity, teamwork, working towards the same goal? I think that's one of the most difficult aspects of being married is knowing when, or having that willingness to sacrifice for a higher objective when it competes per se with thoughts about where you place your value. You could have been so wrapped up in your career you would be unwilling to let that go because your career to find your value as a person. I'm not saying that's what was happening, but that is the case for some people. Talk to me about how is it that you've been managing such phenomenal teamwork this whole time?

Speaker 2: 14:57

I will tell you two personality traits that I have that, I think, helped out. It may be interesting for Greg to be here but one is I have a very difficult time pivoting when I decide on something. It's very hard for me to change path. I wasn't going to change what we were going to do. I think we were able to see the roadmap so clearly that we were able to stay the course when we were able with those apartments because we purchased them for almost nothing we were able to see the financial benefit. That positive reinforcement came back on us and helped us stay on the same track.

Speaker 2: 15:35

The other is that it's very hard, when you spent 12 years achieving a goal, to then not so identify with that. That you can't let it go For me to leave the ER and not be a doctor anymore, which eventually is what I did or me to even leave and go part-time and leave a partnership, which is a state, if you will in my record, is actually part of my life's philosophy is that I don't want to do the same thing for the rest of my life. I think of life while lived as a very life. When you've done something and you do it well, now you move on and do something else, find another challenge. It's very difficult, especially for people who reach the professional level, such as a physician, to leave that and do something where they may not know what they're doing and have no standing and they lose all the privilege and rights that go along with the accomplishments that they've achieved. That was not difficult for me and in terms of I was resentful in a way of it's gotta be me who's gonna go part-time, it's gotta be me who's gonna lose my partnership. Like that was tough.

Speaker 2: 16:49

But in terms of my identity as who I was, I did not identify that I was a physician number one that wasn't so high on the hierarchy of how I identified and how I saw myself and I couldn't let it go. And I don't know where Brevia is in that of how hard it would be for him to be. But doctors who are like 90 years old, they just won't quit. They're so identified with what they do. They who are, they're not that I knew who I was. If I wasn't at that, I had other things that I could identify with and so those two things that they, knowing that we were moving towards this point, we had this bowl and wine and seeing that was a play that we could make, and having me not have my ego wrapped up in what I was doing, I was able to pivot, so I think those were helpful things.

Speaker 1: 17:35

Yeah, I think our ability to pivot and we see this on business all the time the companies and businesses that are able to adapt, innovate, change are the ones who thrive and thrive. And I think it's the same way with marriages the couples that are able to change, adapt, innovate are the ones that thrive when circumstances change. A third child is a change of circumstance, right, right.

Speaker 2: 18:05

Okay, so Fundamentally having similar values in future. And it's easy when you're we had Marianne, I was 30. I think it's easier to say try it at that age where you want to be moving forward into these areas of life I want my career, I want family, I want all these things and trying to put the puzzle pieces together. It's easy to think that something's not important when it is in a relationship and you really do have to have similar values to some and otherwise. It's such a core thing that you're right when you do need to pivot and innovate. If you have different values, you may want to go in separate directions.

Speaker 1: 18:46

Yeah, if you have separate values and you don't have a set of shared values that supersede your personal values, it's definitely going to be a bridge. And then I think it's interesting if we're picking up the breadcrumbs here. You have a very strong value sense both of you do and you had a very strong vision based on those values. That's really allowed you to create these plans and adjust and pivot and follow these plans and goals in your life. It's incredible, so fast forward. Now your three kids are older. They're all teenagers. You're involved in business and real estate. Do you still have real estate holdings?

Speaker 2: 19:22

We still have all the real estate, yeah.

Speaker 1: 19:24

Wow, okay. So tell me how has life changed since being an ER doctor? And is it, are you still passing the baton between different shifts? Or you could talk to me about what it's like being you managing business and he's still an ER doc, so talk to us. What's life like now?

Speaker 2: 19:42

Well, life is like now is what we had one minute to be. He's not here right now. He's not working today. I'm at my home. I've dropped my kids off at school. I'm gonna go pick them up in a half hour or so. I'm gonna go do yoga with my daughter. Later I'm gonna take her to an appointment, and we are so super resident with our kids.

Speaker 2: 20:06

I was just telling you that I didn't spend three days in a row at home between June and July because I was traveling with my son for sports His son, he's obsessed with sports. I was able to take my two girls before I went out on a 10 day trip to Europe. And I'm able to work from home the work that we do now. Greg is working part-time in the ER. I'm running my business from home because I do all the back end accounting, compliance, regulatory stuff, health insurance, all of those things I can do from home and so I have the luxury of being able to do those things. Greg still works on the apartments, but they're coming along cause we've been doing it now for so long that we have a rhythm to it and we have laid the tracks that we planned on laying and actually, through hard work, luck and a plan came together, and so we are where we wanted to be 20 years ago.

Speaker 1: 21:03

I'm giving you a virtual high five. That is awesome. I'm sure it's not all rainbows and roses right now. What are the challenges of where you are right now? You laid the groundwork, the train has chugged along. You're at where you plan to be. What's expected, what's not expected in terms of the challenges that you're facing right now?

Speaker 2: 21:26

I think that so we look at financially, we've achieved our financial freedom so we can do what we want. That's check Chants. We have family and we're around the kids at a time when we felt was credible and so that was good. The challenges come and I think it's just as we as human beings are constantly changing and evolving, and even though we do have core values, I think that we're both pregnant, are both in midlife now I'm 48, he's 52.

Speaker 2: 21:56

I think, during that time of life, as your kids are starting to launch out of the home and as you've gone through some some ultra is very crazy or you have some time to now think back and introspect and who are you going to be in the next chapter of your life?

Speaker 2: 22:13

And so I think we both have had some time of looking at ourselves, looking at what's, just trying to figure out what has happened over the last 20 years right, and because it wasn't all rainbows and roses, there were some really hard times and coming to peace with those and finding ourselves in a new way, and that's a journey we're both going on separately in terms of figuring out what's happened to us and where we're going and who we are, and we're supportive of each other in that.

Speaker 2: 22:46

But I think it's a time of re-evaluation in life right now. I'm not going to call it a crisis, but I think it's a fair and the right thing to do to re-evaluate now. Now, what is the plan going forward, and am I going to be the same person which I'm not, and he's not going to be the same person either, and how do we continue to make it as we're changing and as we may change some of our positions in life? I don't know how to put it, but, because it's not our values of life, I think we still have the same values, but refining ourselves individually and then each other as a couple is a process.

Speaker 1: 23:22

How do you go about? You arrive to the destination you planned 20 years ago and now you're going through the process of defining what is the next destination look like. How do you do that with kids in the house and also? So you're in this process of redefining what is it that you want to do in the next 10, 20 years? But you're also really busy with the needs of your children, and so what are some of the challenges there that come with you arrived at the destination and now you have to kind of pick somewhere else to go, but your children also getting really close to launching from the nest, so to say. So talk to me about some of the things that you've been approaching. How are you communicating and talking about this with Greg?

Speaker 2: 24:10

I think that what you need to do and what we're trying to do now is we have taken on. So we took on roles, initially as a couple, and we put together this plan, and then we became parents and we became entrepreneurs and business owners and we had all these other things, we had all these other titles on, and now we moved over to this time where we have more time and to start, and we were okay to sacrifice some stuff in that middle piece. But now we need to refine time for each other and the nice thing is we can go have lunch with each other. Every day. He pops in the office and we talk. I go find him and sit with him. He loves trees. We go on a tree tour and look at how are the trees doing and try to reconnect with it. We've each found the other interests that we have over this time. How can we connect and show interest in each other or make time for each other? Going trips together, and so it has to be at or worse, because the ruts are deep in terms of the track of we're ships passing in the night. We're taking care of the kids, we're taking care of the businesses. That's all we're going to do. That's what we're doing. That's our priority. They don't need us as much anymore None of them do and so we need to then get out of those tracks that we purposely led and form some new that involve each other.

Speaker 2: 25:28

The other night we went out to just go have a drink and play cards at a restaurant. The kids are fine. They had dinner. You know what I mean. Nobody had anything going on. We both like playing games doing that, or I have found this new level of kayaking. He'll go with me. It's too hot right now, but in the mornings we can drop the kids off and go kayaking. But you have to make it purposeful, be allocating of your time, because otherwise it's probably not going to happen, because sit down in the chair, the office and the day takes over from you. It's not easy, but I think, cerebrally, that's what we're trying to do right now.

Speaker 1: 26:08

One of the last questions I always like to end these conversations with Gina is talking about family success In business. You and I both sat through a lot of classes that talked about OKRs, key metrics, kpis. I feel like it's really easy to do that in business because you can look at the bottom line, you can look at profit, evaluating your business. So it's all very, I'd say, black and white.

Speaker 1: 26:35

In business it should be fairly easy to tell whether or not you're winning at the game and, as we've had a lot over the course of this conversation, we've talked a lot about the need to be able to recognize when you need to pivot, when things need to evolve. So how do you go about defining success in your family? If you had to choose key metrics for your family that you use as indicators that something needs to evolve, something needs to change, what would be some of those items?

Speaker 2: 27:09

I think anybody's shown signs of distress, like removing themselves from the family, not talking at dinner. We have dinner together. We're talking at dinner. I think that was again one of the things that was helpful about us being so want to be present with each other. And again, I'm here almost every day together because he's working part-time and the ER.

Speaker 2: 27:35

But, as we were able to see with our daughter, she was not engaged, she was, her posture was off or she needed just body language signs that something needed to be done right. And I know you and I have been involved with that and talked about that. But just being able to have that quantity of realizing that somebody's withdrawing or somebody's more argumentative or maybe nasty or something we say this a lot in our house where people hurt people what's going? If somebody's in distress or showing signs of distress, then you need to really look at what's going on and how do you support that person better.

Speaker 2: 28:14

If in a relationship, a bragg and I are at ends, what's going on here? Why are we at a end so much, especially if it's over little little things? So I think it's just being having that quantity of time and having that awareness and being sensitive to the people that are around you to try to pick up on their signals, cause a lot of times again you'll get body language or other little things. And it's hard with teenagers because sometimes that's just part of the normal thing of them, especially with the oldest like starting to separate and getting ready to transition from a boyhood to manhoods, and sometimes teenagers are a little spicy. Just really trying to keep your finger on the pulse of that it's a big answer. I know it's not like a great answer, but I think that's the best that I could come off with.

Speaker 1: 29:03

I love how you said what are the signals that people are putting off, because everyone puts off signals and it's having the courage to investigate when the signal comes in. Yeah, I think so much is lost when we are too busy or don't perform the energy or to investigate the signals. Can you ask?

Speaker 2: 29:28

me questions Come on.

Speaker 1: 29:30

Thank you so much, gina. Thank you for cutting up some time from being your sons lacrosse Sherpa to on the show today.

Speaker 2: 29:38

Thank you, he's a pleasure for being here. Thank you so much for the time. It's fun to talk about this stuff it's good to think about.