Asheville sits in the heart of the Blue Ridge mountains with plenty to do. This isn’t an exhaustive list by any means, but these are all things we’ve done with the whole family over the years – with new borns and big kids alike. Fun for the whole family, if you will.

First on the list, a trip to Asheville wouldn’t be complete without visiting the Biltmore Estate. This is America’s largest privately owned residence, coming in at just over 178,000 square feet set on 8,000 acres. I’ll never forget seeing this place in the movie Richie Rich and thinking how unbelievable it looked – like it wasn’t real, that it had to be a movie prop. The reality is that house itself is even more gargantuan in person than I thought it would be. When you go, here are the things to make sure and hit while there:

• Do the full audio tour. If you have kids above 5 or 6, they have one for them too that incorporates lots of kid friendly facts. Ours loved the stories from the family dog, Cedric the St. Bernard. (Yes – he is talking from his point of view.) So much so that we came home with two of them from the gift shop. Well played Biltmore, well played.

• Have a meal at the Stable Cafe. We’ve eaten there three or four times and everything we’ve had has been delicious. We even did a Christmas Eve dinner that was an incredible candlelight 3-course experience!
• Explore the grounds on foot, this includes the winery and Antler Hill Village. There are endless places for picture taking, so don’t be worried that if you miss one, that it’ll be the last chance you get. Right around the corner you’re guaranteed to see another picturesque landscape.

After spending all day walking around, you’re bound to have worked up quite an appetite…even if you stopped for a bite at the Stable Cafe like I recommended above. No worries, Asheville (and the surrounding area) has plenty of good places to eat. Here are a few of our favorites:

• First – HOLE Donuts. Place your pre-order online and prepare to have your world rocked upon pickup and first bite. I think their inside seating has opened back up in the past couple months. If that is the case, go inside and enjoy watching them prepare your doughnuts from scratch. They are from yeasted dough and fried in rice-bran oil, so they’re crispy on the outside and fluffy on the inside. They also forage for some of their own specialty ingredients, like using the honeysuckle plants right outside their door for a glaze. These are the best donuts you will ever have. If you don’t agree, you are wrong. And remember to get a picture with their little bus outside.

• Tupelo Honey Cafe. They are a modern take on southern, scratch made food. They have a couple locations to choose from and are usually pretty busy so grab a reservation ahead of time.
• We also frequent Barley’s Taproom and Pizzeria, Stoneridge Tavern, and Apollo Flame Bistro. The latter two are also very close to Asheville Cottages, a big win for those “didn’t think about dinner plans in time to go somewhere” kind of days.
• Papa’s and Beer Mexican restaurant, because what’s a solid day of hiking without great cali-style mexican to wash it down!? 
• Farm Burger in downtown Asheville. Grass-fed burgers – what more can you ask for?
• An annual tradition of ours has become a trip to Rocky’s Grill and Soda Shop in Brevard, just a few minutes outside of AVL. It’s a 1940’s drugstore style restaurant that serves up sandwiches, milkshakes, malts and other old school fare. Sadly, in putting this together, I learned that they closed on August 5th. My heart is broken, this is our kids favorite place to eat every time we’re in town.

• Finally – our newest and most favorite discovery is Pack’s Tavern, in Downtown Asheville. I had a dish of homemade mac and cheese topped with sliced BBQ brisket…oh my word, it was to die for.

Depending on the season you come to visit, you might enjoy heading over to nearby Hendersonville for some apple picking. There are bunch of farms that you can choose from; we’ve had the best success with Stepps Hillcrest Orchard.

If you live in a land with long, flat, straight roads like we do in Florida, then it’s a must to take some longer drives on the nearby Blue Ridge Parkway. To this day, my eyes open in awe more and more at every turn as the views fight to top the previous ones. There are countless places to pull off the side of the road and grab amazing panoramic pictures. Some of the hiking spots down below are also accessed by the Parkway. And in a nod to my mom, be sure to honk your horn as you drive through all the tunnels. 

Saving the best for last – hiking for waterfalls. There are a ton to choose from, but I will say this – you can bring your kids to all of them, no matter their age. This is a great list to get you started, but if you fancy some more just let me know – we’ve been to a ton more. Each year, we return to our staples down below and also add a few new ones.

• First – start with DuPont Forest. Park at the Hooker Falls parking lot and check out three amazing falls right in a row: Hooker Falls, Triple Falls, and High Falls. 

• If you fancy a longer hike, Bridal Veil falls is WELL worth the trek, but its a solid hour hike to get there. There are some lakes (Lake Julia) and nice picnic spots along this trail. You can access this one past High Falls or if you just want to do this one, park at the High Falls parking lot and follow the signage from there.

• Next – because I mentioned some are accessed via the Blue Ridge Parkway, check out Graveyard Fields (recommend just doing the lower falls trail) and then Skinny Dip Falls. 

• Pisgah Forest has some great options, but it’ll be the most crowded all things being equal. Skip Looking Glass Falls and go for Moore Cove (Jesse’s all-time favorite), Daniel Ridge, and Cove Creek. 

• Best resource in terms of directions to each of the falls: https://www.romanticasheville.com/waterfalls.htm

I’m going to put together more in-depth articles on a few more places, to include:

• Brevard
• Hendersonville
• More in-depth waterfall hiking, what to bring, best times to go, etc.

Hopefully this will get you started!

(And if you missed part 1 of this series, click here.)

After my recent post, ‘Sacrificing My Family At the Altar of My Business,’ I had folks reach out for a few different reasons, one of which was to ask questions about the values and priorities piece in there. Specifically:

• How can I differentiate between the two?
• How can I put them into practice?

Before we get to that, I do want to highlight the importance of establishing your values and priorities. After all, this is the first step in my process of working with clients in my coaching practice. Put simply, we start here because they offer a strong anchor that you can tie actions around to eventually create habits that turn into sustainable behaviors.

• Anchor -> Action -> Habit -> Behavior

When we guide ourselves to explore what we each really want and what really matters, it takes time, so be patient.

In terms of the difference between the two, here is the way I think about it:

Values can best be described as ‘basic and fundamental beliefs that guide or motivate attitudes or actions.’

Priorities can best be described as ‘where our time is spent.’

In other words, values are our own subjective view on what matters to us while priorities are the objective measure of where time is invested.

• Values = our words
• Priorities = our actions

All that said, here are a series of questions meant to put yourself in the right frame of mind to tease out the truth:

1. What do you hold up as the highest values and priorities in your life?
2. What are your stress levels? What brings the most stress? How do you manage it?
3. What do you love talking about to others?
4. Where do you spend most of your time?
5. Where do you spend most of your energy?
6. What brings you the most joy?
7. Do you feel equipped with the resources and support you need to achieve your goals?
8. What habits do you think are vital to moving you towards your goals?
9. What are you doing to make progress toward your goals today?
10. What does success look like to you?
11. If you achieve your goal, but your priorities fall to the wayside, is that still seen as a success?
12. In what areas, actions, and activities within your life do you have the most consistency, rhythm, and routine? This can be as simple as a morning routine, routes you take as you drive, or paths you walk in your neighborhood.
13. If you meet your goal in 3 months, what happens next?
14. What is the last goal you achieved that you are most proud of? Why? How long did it take?

It’s important to note that although you’ll use your answers to inform your actions, you don’t use it in such a way that is akin to “holding it over your head” to make yourself feel guilty for taking an action not in line with your V/P. For instance, if you listed ‘Be a healthy role model for my daughter’ as a priority and then you noticed that you had pizza and beer the last five nights, you wouldn’t say “what happened to being a role model?” I know that seems like an extreme example, but the sentiment rings true. You use information to guide your decisions and conversations in a way that can move you forward.

One final thing to keep in mind:

This is a potentially uncomfortable exercise to go through. For instance, imagine that you list ‘family’ as value number one. While you may also think that ‘family’ is also priority number one, upon actual investigation you may discover that after a 10-hour work day, dinner out with friends, and a ninety-minute commute, family is actually not that high on the priority list. Again, there is no judgement, you are just painting as clear a picture of yourself as possible.

Armed with this information, you can begin to unpack, understand, and then change decisions you’ve made that are in misalignment with your V/P. In the meantime, why don’t you take the time to answer the above questions? Send your replies to me: josh@coachingforglory.com

In 2009, after two trips to Vegas (once for our honeymoon and one more for our anniversary), Mandy and I were looking for somewhere different to go.

She wanted to go somewhere tropical, but I didn’t.

I wanted to go somewhere with snow, but she didn’t.

This is partly how we decided on Vegas for our honeymoon, but that’s a story for another day.

I remember a coworker had just come back from Asheville, and I was reminded how much I always wanted to go. Largely in part because of the memories I gained from watching Richie Rich as a kid!

After chatting it over with Mandy, figuring out some things we’d do while there, we decided that this would be our next adventure. Now it was time to figure out where we’d be staying. Heading to the mountains, we naturally wanted to stay in a cabin, so I headed to google and typed in something along the lines of ‘cabins in Asheville.’ I flipped through a few websites and, for a reason I don’t remember, one site caught my eye: www.ashevillecottages.com

Fast forward 14 years and more than a dozen trips up there (sometimes twice in one year), this is the only place we stay and recommend to others.

I’ll never forget that first trip up there. After getting the rental car from the airport, we followed the personally emailed directions (with a printed map from MapQuest) from the owners. We pulled up a bit earlier than our stated check-in and, much to our amazement, we saw what looked like an entire army cleaning and preparing our cabin for arrival. The owners, Tracie and Marshall, came out to greet us and were so welcoming and after introducing us to their cleaning crew (most of whom were their family), they told us that we’d be the first to stay in their newest cabin. How exciting!!

To top off their level of care, both Tracie and Marshall have personally reached out over the years just to say hello and see how the family is doing. We’ve exchanged book recommendations with each other, they’ve indulged my curiosity about their cabin layout and shared building plans with me, and told me where I can buy the exact bed we sleep on because it’s so fantastic.

Since that first trip, we’ve stayed in six or seven different cabins that they own. They use to have two different ‘sites’ or groupings of cabins, but now they own a plot of 14 acres where all their cabins reside. It is the most well kept, gorgeous, and peaceful place to spend a vacation. Actually, this may seem weird to say, but it doesn’t even feel like we’re on vacation, away from our home. To be honest, staying with Asheville Cottages feels just like home.

For you ladies out there, Mandy asked me to make sure I relay this message: “It’s the only place where I don’t feel like I have to reorganize and clean right when we get there. It is spotless. I can get right to nesting! They think of everything, they have everything – even those things you never think to bring but always need on vacation.”

The other nice thing about staying here is the proximity to everything you could want to do. It’s super close to the Blue Ridge Parkway, minutes from downtown and the Biltmore Estate, and depending on what waterfalls you want to hunt down, within 30-60 minutes of some of the best memory making outdoor adventures you could imagine. All while being secluded enough to feel like you are in the middle of nowhere.

I’d be failing our two kids if I didn’t make mention of a few things they love about staying here:

• Rabbits, deer, bears, and foxes. We’ve seen them all around the cabins.
• Fireflies…or are they called lightening bugs? See these too!
• Hot tub and grill on every private back patio
• Softest, most giant beds, that we’ve ever stayed on
• Ditto for the robes in every bathroom
• Heated toilet seats – now personally I don’t like this, so of course when my kids found that out, they kept pranking me by turning it on every time they could

So if you’re headed to Asheville and wondering where to stay, look no further than Asheville Cottages. Tell em’ the Martin family sent ya.

Just the other night, Mandy and I were doing a favorite parenting past-time activity – fondly looking back through photos from when the kids were much younger. Now I don’t claim to have the greatest memory, but a few caught my eye because I didn’t recall anything about a succession of photos from a few different places. And I didn’t bother asking Mandy where I was because I knew. 

I had been down that road before. 

I wasn’t there. 

I was away on a work trip, again. 

As entrepreneurs, it’s very easy to get sucked into the maelstrom of work. The thrill of building something is intoxicating. As my career progressed, I got opportunities to travel and do more of the work that I loved all over the world. 

I never had the desire to travel on my own, but the burden on Mandy and our two littles to accompany me was just too much at the time, so off I went. At the time, we thought it was better for Mandy and I to operate separately – so I would travel for work and she would stay versus taking the kids along and nobody having the best of times. There is much more to unpack here at another time, but parents of little kids will understand that the rhythms and routines that make family life enjoyable are to be protected…for sanity purposes, lol. In fact, we had a staff member that at the time often asked ‘How come Mandy and the kids don’t travel with you to these things?’ Now that this person has little kids of her own, she gets it. 

You can substitute ‘travel’ with any sort of work that needs to get done as part of the process of operating a business – marketing, service delivery, staff training, writing SOP’s (yes, there are people out there who love that stuff), sales…the list goes on. 

Here was the problem: every time that I was saying ‘yes’ to traveling, there was plenty I was saying ‘no’ to – and my family took the brunt of that. 

That all changed a few years ago after a conversation with my lovely bride.

We were casually talking about the upcoming travel I had for work when she firmly and politely told me that I wouldn’t be going.  

Here’s what she was getting at – we had come to a point in our family dynamic that was untenable for the long term. She saw the writing on the wall that we were out of alignment between our values and priorities. In fact, we had been for quite some time.

There is a difference between the two. 

Values are the words you use to describe the things that are the most important to you. 

Priorities are the actions you take, or the time you spend, on your daily tasks. 

I was misaligned between what I was saying (ex: I value quality family time) and what I was doing (ex: traveling all over without them).

I know, I know – why didn’t the family just go along with me? As I mentioned earlier, having two little kids changes things. What she meant with her statement was that letting them sit in a hotel room while I was off working was not a practical use of our family time. 

Here’s another part of the challenge that Mandy had when bringing this up to me: she was/is keenly aware that I am the provider for the family, and that these responsibilities were simply a part of the job. There was a tension in understanding that in order for there to be provision, I had to do the work. But she was also aware enough to recognize that we were quickly establishing family patterns that were leading us down a path that we didn’t want our family to go down.

For whatever reason, that very straightforward statement in 2019 was like a veil being lifted from my head. In an instant, I saw it all through her (and our kids’) eyes. In that moment, I made a permanent change. We set clear guidelines for what it meant to live out our specific values of Faith, Family, and Freedom. That allowed us to put up very clear boundaries around what we’d do and how, the things we’d say yes to, and what we poured our resources into. 

But that’s not entirely the full truth of how it happened. That’s simply how I view it looking back now. The reality was fraught with much more heartache and difficulty.

You see, up to that point Mandy and I had had many conversations over the years about all of the travel I was doing. She told me that I was actually away much more than I wanted to admit and that I really wasn’t “home” when I was home, yet I still didn’t see what she was talking about. 

Call it ‘being present’, but in my mind I was still prioritizing what was most important to me – my family. I had been all over the world, but without fail was home every weekend save for less than 5 occurrences. 

At least that’s what I thought, until we took time to scribble out my travel history on a yellow legal pad. Tough to argue with hard evidence. 

When it comes to lasting, transformational change, I’ve learned in my 21 years of coaching that it can come about it two ways: 

1. Small steps that easily integrate into your daily life that become unconscious habits. Adding a glass of water at each meal and walking daily are examples. 
2. A sudden event causes a permanent change virtually overnight. These can be violent and tragic things like natural disasters or medical emergencies. 

Most of the things that make up who I am today are the result of the former – small steps that became habits over a long period of time. 

However, arguably the most impactful change for our family legacy occurred during that conversation with Mandy in early 2019. 

Before I wrap this up, there are a few things I must make mention of. 

To be perfectly clear, I am fully aware that there are plenty of people who travel far more than I could imagine. I also don’t regret one bit of the travel I did. I am not resentful. But I am abundantly aware that I spent countless hours building a community at work while neglecting the one that matters most to me – the one at home. 

I am beyond blessed that I have a wife who loves me enough to know when to step in and help make the invisible, visible. And not give up on us. 

I am grateful that I never crossed a line with my loved ones that I might not get a chance to walk back. 

So I write this in case there is someone reading who is in a similar position, that may be as dangerously close to the edge as I was…and not really know it. 

What do I hope you take away from this? 

The importance of regular family check-ins. Normalize deep conversations – not the surface level, in passing type ones. 

Schedule them in your calendar if need be. After all – we do this for work and wouldn’t break a client appointment, right? Our family deserves this level of commitment at the very least.

Be intentional and really listen to the other person. Simon Sinek describes listening as “when the other person feels heard.” 

When you listen, don’t get defensive. Recognize that while you might not see it, they are telling you there is a need there. Don’t kick the can down the road. Have the uncomfortable conversations.

Sit down, constantly reevaluate, and reprioritize depending on the season your family is in. Things look far different for us today with an 8 and 11 year old than with a new born (who wouldn’t let me hold her for 18 months) and a 3 year old.

Today, I’m thankful for the small daily habits that help reinforce our family values. But I’ll be forever grateful for the transformational change that shifted the course of our family’s trajectory, helping to ensure that I never again sacrifice my family at the altar of my business.