Don McGuire

I come from an Italian-Irish-Catholic family, and I'm the youngest of four boys.

So I used to get the crap kicked out of me on a daily basis.

That in itself, you know, teaches you resilience.

My parents were that nice mix of empathy and nurture and grit and sort of suck it up.

And so I had, you know, I had the suck it up from my father and, you know, who was super driven and super ambitious and climbing the corporate ladder and didn't have time for the squishy stuff.

And then my Italian emotional mother who was nurturing and oftentimes, you know, used food

too, as a way to make up for bad things.

But she was very nurturing and very loving unconditionally.

And so I think it was a nice kind of yin and yang to help with things like that.

And again, being the youngest, it was so funny.

I used to joke with my parents that by the time I got into high school, my parents were so exhausted for having raised three other boys.

And for me, it was like, if I woke up in the morning and I was in my room and I came down to breakfast, they were like,

good, right?

Yeah, we're a success because my other three brothers had kind of put them through the ringer.

And so I got the advantage of that.

And you know, you learn from, like, if you're a younger sibling, you kind of watch what goes on with your older siblings and you learn a lot from that.

And even with my children, I have three kids and my youngest, they observe.

I think that was sort of helpful as well.

It's like, how did my brother handle something that

went wrong or how did my, whether it's with sports or with school or relationships or whatever that might be.