Transcript #52 – Brotherhood of Fatherhood
We speak with Scott Rammage, host of the popular podcast the Brotherhood of Fatherhood. Scott has strong opinions on how to be the best man and dad you can be.
Highlights of our conversation include:
Why you sometimes need to make poor financial decisions to better serve your family
The importance of auditing your schedule
Breathing tips to help you get in the zone for your family
What we can learn from the Bison
Enjoy this wide-ranging fatherhood conversation!
Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music, Stitcher, or your favorite podcast platform. Like this episode? You can check out more of our Dad Podcasts.
Will Braunstein, A Dad’s Path: Hello, and welcome to another episode of A Dad’s Path podcast, I’m Will Braunstein. Today we’re here with Scott Ramage, from Brotherhood of Fatherhood podcast, and the Brotherhood of Fatherhood Facebook group. You should check that out. Thank you for joining us, Scott. I’m really excited to dive in here.
Scott Rammage, Brotherhood of Fatherhood: Thank you, Will. It’s an honor to be a guest. I love it.
Will: Well, hopefully, you’ll feel that way at the end too.
[laughter]
Scott: As a podcaster, my favorite thing is to be on other people’s shows. It’s kind of a funny thing.
Will: Nice. That’s interesting. First, Brotherhood of Fatherhood, I love the name, and just looking from your sight, Brotherhood of Fatherhood is a resource to help men be better pillars in their household, work, and community. I love that. It’s like, yes, it sounds great. Where do I start though? It also sounds overwhelming. As a new dad, what’s step one there? Where do you start?
Scott: That’s a really, really loaded question because the Brotherhood of Fatherhood was birthed out of two things happening. One, when my first son was born, I decided I was going to dive into the entrepreneurial world. Very entrepreneurial, I was also an educator. I was working full-time as a teacher, and I decided to open a brick-and-mortar business. It was really born from that history, where you fast forward six years, I believe, I now had two kids, and I was working 100 hours a week, and all my free time was, air quotes, “building my business”.
That’s like the precipice of the event and the Scott that emerged out of that failure is what I would call it, out of that failure, and kind of grew from there. The second part that created this whole thing was my good friend, Josh Price, who is like my wingman, or I’m his wingman, I don’t know, we became fast friends and he was a father of a young son and was dealing with some stuff.
About a year in our friendship, he said, “Man, you do realize you’re my parenting mentor.” I’m like, “Oh.” He’s like, “I have learned so much from you.” He had done quite a lot. He talked to me a lot about the mistakes he was making with his wife and his son because it was just where he was at in life. Through that, and me wanting to create something for men I wanted when I was that age, and needed when I was that age with young kids, is where the birthing of the Brotherhood of Fatherhood came.
To actually answer your question, I believe that the absolute best way we can be fathers is to be incredible husbands if we’re married, incredible partners, and create a foundation in our home where there’s stability, love, the ability to fail and not hide from that, and learn from our mistakes. I believe that all of that exudes in everything we do, and that’s why I say our community and our work because the better we become as husbands, partners, parents, the better we’re going to be everywhere.
Will: Yes, wow, there was a lot there, highly dense. I’m going to have to listen to that again, slow down, but there’s a lot. I didn’t realize your story quite, and I want to maybe stop there and unpack for a second because it sounds like you had two, like you said, pushes; an external one from your wingman, or your friend, and then an internal one. I want to dig into that internal one a little bit. You said you were, air quotes, “working 100 hours a week”. I guess that means you weren’t really working or wasn’t that efficient, or what–
Scott: I was efficient. I was working. The air quotes is “working for my family”, but really I wasn’t working for my family because I was only working. I would get up at around 4:30 in the morning before anybody in my house is awake. I would go to the gym, come home, get ready, go to my business, get it ready for the day, go to school, teach, come back, go to the business, and then I would get home at 7:30, 8:00, or 9:00 at night.
This was when I first started a zero-year-old to six, and then with my second, he at that time would have been four. I was working all of the time and I thought I was doing it for my family. The other piece of that is when I did have time off, it was actually a bicycle shop, it was very successful. It grew very fast. I had, I think, five to seven full-time employees depending on the time of year, but when I wasn’t working, I was out riding with everybody building that community. I was just 100% absent. My wife and I were just basically living parallel lives, where she was taking care of the kids in the household and I was doing my own thing.
Will: Got you, and what changed?
Scott: I came home one night. I call these Mack truck moments, you’re basically hit by a truck. I came home one night and I really– call it God moment, call it whatever you want. I walked in, the lights were off. The vision in my head is so incredibly clear still. The lights were off in the house. I walked in right into the dining room. We had a door that went right in the dining room, and there on the table, this never happened before, was my place setting empty, and the house was completely dark and everyone was asleep in bed.
At that very minute or moment, I’m like, “What in the world am I doing? I just went an entire day and haven’t seen anybody in my house. Here I am coming home with the evidence that I wasn’t home for dinner.” I don’t know why my wife left the table setting out. She never did that. She doesn’t remember that, but it was just that moment. What I did, well, is I went and talked to my wife and I said- not that night, but after that, I said, “Something’s got to change. I feel like we’re headed for a disaster and I’m not doing what I need to do and something has got to change.”
We went and sought counsel, and at that time, the counsel was somebody that owned a business and they said, “Hey, stay with the stable job,” which was teaching,” and, “Sell your business.” That was the moment that this started, but what happened was I found a buyer for my business, and the way that businesses like that run, you run on a credit cycle. You do these big orders, preseason orders, and then they were all about to ship.
In the 11th hour, literally, it was either the day of or the day before, I can’t remember, I just remember the conversation, the buyer who had done all the work said, “I’m out. I changed my mind,” and I had not liquidated any inventory, had not done anything. We literally– my wife and I put our heads together. I’m like, “We literally now because of the sales and inventory cycle have $350,000 in debt if we close this down immediately,” and we did. I closed it down immediately and took on over quarter million dollars of debt overnight as a teacher, but I was so determined to get out of that cycle.
At that point, I didn’t have the tools I have for time management and management and organization and leadership structure to change it and keep it, but not be the guy that was always there. I wasn’t developed enough, but all I cared about was getting time back with my wife and kids. We took on that debt. We’ve just eventually paid it off. That was in 2009 when we took that debt on. It’s been a bit of a burden, [chuckles] but that’s where this all stems from, and Will, to be honest, I thought I was going to fix everything, but here’s the truth, and I want men to hear this who might be working a lot right now.
You have to be very persistent and you have to be very forgiving of yourself because the next two years of my life, literally I had no clue how to spend time with my family. I was depressed. I had gained a bunch of weight. I didn’t know what to do when I was sitting there with my kids. I’d walk them to the park, and I just remember feeling numb, just letting them play. I did try to stay off my phone, but I was just there. It took me two years to start to really be able to function again and learn, and that whole span of time is the reason I do Brotherhood. I don’t want other guys to make the mistakes I made.
Will: Yes, it’s– This might not be the smartest thing financially, “I’m going to take on this debt because it’s the smartest thing mentally, emotionally, and for my family,” and you did it and you’re on the other side of that now, and as you’re saying, you look great, you sound great. It seems like it was absolutely the right choice, even though it might not have felt so easy at the time, or I’m sure there were challenges.
Scott: Yes. I think what’s happened is it gives me a lot of empathy. What I find inside of my Facebook group is a lot of men come when they’re in turmoil, when there’s nowhere else to go because they’ll say, “I would put this on my personal post, but it’s too raw. It’s too deep.” What I’ve found is that’s really what we’ve become is like, “Guys, I am at this place right now. I am at this place of frustration with my kids. I am at this place with my wife. We just had our second baby and we’re not clicking, or the hormones are out of control, or my kids are screaming.” All these things and they’re coming, and I’m like, “Man, if I would’ve had this resource where I wasn’t tied to someone in the community that I felt would judge me, I had this group of men, and there was wisdom there,” there’s wisdom there.
I just hands off– I watch the answers come in, when people ask their questions, and I have my answer, but usually someone else will come with it. Then you get different experiences coming in, and it’s a really beautiful synergy of this stuff, and then there’s some really bad advice, but that’s where I get to come in and say, “Okay, whoa, whoa, whoa,” but it’s something I wish I had had; a safe place to go and air what’s going on and say, “Help. I need help.”
Will: I think that’s missing from a lot of dads and fathers and a lot of people’s lives, I should say, is just that “brotherhood”, a place where you can feel safe. Digging into that for a minute, as a dad myself, I have friends, friends who are dads mostly, some single, but what’s the difference between that and a brotherhood in your mind, or how do you build that brotherhood? I know I can join your Facebook group and I will, but in real life, the face to face, what have you found that works there?
Scott: This is a really good question because it’s what I was really struggling with because I’d moved from my home in Oregon, my wife and I raised our kids in Oregon early on, and that’s where my bike shop was. Then we went through a thing. I finally created a business that dug us out of that ditch of debt, most of the debt, it was very successful. Quit teaching, opened a gym.
I have this huge community in Oregon. It’s where I was raised. I went to grad school on the East Coast, but it’s where I was raised. It’s where my foundation was. I had people at my corner, parents within two blocks each way, best friends everywhere. I’m picked up and we moved my family to Texas. We sold the business, we moved the family to Texas, and here I am nobody.
I started doing virtual– I did some corporate work and then I started doing virtual work, and I felt lost. I felt like I’ve got all these people I know online, but I don’t have anything closer. That’s when I met Josh who does the Brotherhood with me. We became really tight. When we met each other in person is when that happened. We actually met each other in Sweden at a show, and then we started calling every day and I started to create a deeper connection. It’s a long trajectory because I’m two and a half years into the Brotherhood of Fatherhood, but when I go and meet one of these men in person, it’s a whole new level.
The online community is a starting place. It’s not like dating, it’s like testing the water. “This guy had the same values as me. Does he appreciate the things that I appreciate? Is there synergy? Is there help back and forth?” The guy I’m doing this event with next week for our first Brotherhood event up in Montana, I’ve never met him. I met him through podcasting in the Brotherhood of Fatherhood group. My son and I, he turned 18, so we did this massive road trip together, 5,000 miles.
We ended up at the furthest point really far north of Montana where he lives. It was just like literally– I was walking into my best friend’s house that I’d known my entire life, and that’s what I want other men to have, and every time I meet one of these guys that I’ve met through the Brotherhood, and started to– or through the podcast and a lot of these guys I’ll have on the podcast to tell their story, it’s a whole nother level of connection.
The beauty of it is then they’re not in my backyard. They’re not here. I know this is really weird, but the connection when you do make the effort to get together is very close and tight, and it’s different than somebody living in your backyard or in your town. I can’t explain it. You have to have the in-person, but also that distant– there’s something for men that’s really safe with having men distant, but you can also jump right into something that they need face to face when it’s time.
Will: I know. That makes a lot of sense. Piggybacking on that point, I have friends here in Colorado who will go periods where we’ll talk on the phone a lot and say similar things in person. Then we’ll see each other in person, we’ll have a similar conversation, but at the end of that in-person one, I just feel like a weight is off my shoulders. I just feel so much better.
“Hey, we just had a real connection,” and talk and I think it’s easy to lose that and we just went through the whole– someone just went through different COVID things, where you’re isolating or you’re on Zoom or you’re on– we all know this, but it’s important. It’s so important. We should say it, the physical being with someone, can’t beat that.
Scott: No, you can’t.
Will: You just can’t beat it.
Scott: No. That’s why I’m doing the event because there’s guys– what I found is that the guys are coming– they’re having to work hard to get to this event, by the way, but they’re coming because they need that now. In fact, it’s so odd, Will. I think four of them are either selling or just sold their businesses, and they all have the same story. They all have the same story I had, is we were so wrapped in– our identity was so wrapped in our business, in what we do for a living. That’s another thing I’m incredibly passionate about is that they’re lost. They’re like, “Scott, I don’t know who I am or what I’m supposed to do. I needed to get rid of my business. I just sold it. I’m just feeling like I’m a wanderer.”
That’s what I felt when I closed down the bike shop. I felt like I had zero identity, and men so frequently will wrap their identity in what they do for a living as opposed to the bigger things like wrapping it into, “I am here to raise future adults who are successful and vibrant in the community and have wonderful relationships. I have these bigger things,” and we frequently cap ourselves at wrapping our identity in our work.
Now, I get this reciprocated opportunity to look them in the eye and say, “Hey, man, I get where you’re at. I’ve been there, but you are not your work. Your identity is not your issues.” Those two things are so huge with men. Your issue is your identity or your work is your identity. Those are totally, totally wrong because they will lead you down the wrong path.
Will: Oh, absolutely. I think that’s spot on. That’s spot on. To the people who sold their business, congratulations if it’s a good sale, and to you who shut it down, it wasn’t ideal, but those were all decisions that you guys had to make. How do you stop before you get to that point? Because that’s kind of a rip cord. Again, it could be a great outcome, but it’s still a rip cord kind of event.
A two-part question, how do you stop it before it gets too out of whack, and then attached to that is it takes a lot of time to run a business, so how do we deal with time management, knowing there’s X hours in the day and your family needs Y hours, and you need to sleep, all that sort of thing? How do you keep that balance?
Scott: You just hit on two super passionate points of mine. How do you stop that pattern? One, you identify it, and that’s really my goal. Tell stories, listen to stories, and just scream it from the mountaintops. Look at your life, investigate your life as it stands right this minute. I say all the time, do be relentless in your self-auditing. Audit your day. What conversations did you have? Who did you spend your time with? Did you leave work at work? The daily audit and weekly audit for me are things I talk about all the time, things I do all the time.
I have non-negotiables. For me and I don’t push this on anybody, but I’m very clear on this, for me, my number one is I spend time in the Bible and devotion. Then my number two is my wife. I make sure that I have undivided attention with my wife and I pretty much have a 30-minute per day like there’s nothing else going on. It is laser-focused. I would challenge most men that they don’t do that much time. Then there’s a minimum of five minutes, undivided, conversational, deep focus on each of my kids. Again, it may not sound like a lot, but it’s a lot, there’s more time spent with them, but this is undivided, “How are you? What are your challenges?”
Then what you really have to do is get rid of the time thing and think, “Okay, I’m working a lot right now. I’m building a new branch of the business. I’m working 10 hours a day, 12 hours a day,” it’s not that time. It’s the– make sure I get all those other things I talk about in and that when I am not working, and when I am focused on my family, I am 100% dialed in, and that is so hard to do. I fail every single day, but it is something that I’m striving for. I think every man needs to strive for it.
A lot of people will say, “Well, I drive home from work and I’m just beat. I don’t want–” You come in the house, you’ve been making decisions all day. You come in the house, your wife needs you to help make decisions. She’s been making decisions if she works or if she doesn’t on a different level as well. What I teach men is like, “Hey, when you pull up to your house, have a breathing routine, have a statement you say in your head, and touch something and leave it all behind.”
For me, it’s box breathing, do one round of box breathing, the four in, four hold, four out, four hold. I do a couple rounds of that. I don’t drive anymore, but this is what I would do. I make a out-loud statement. I still do this when I walk out the door of this office, I’ll say, “What can I do to best serve my family now?” That is my cue to leave everything else behind. I say it out loud and then I touch the door on the way out. For men, if they’re getting out of their car, touch a tree, touch a pillar on the house, do something, I’m leaving it behind. Those physical actions make a difference in your brain.
That box breathing actually allows your brain to make that switch so that when you go in the house, you’re actually ready to serve and you’re not just going to sit on the couch and drink a beer and tune out to TV. Nobody needs that. That doesn’t help you at all. That moves into the time management. That’s a deep hole. I’ve been working on time management and productivity for three years, full-on studying, and I’ve created my own systems and my own way that I don’t forget anything. I make sure things are done, and I strategize, and I choose what’s on top, but really, Will, what it comes down to is when it’s time for family, it’s time for family.
Put the phone away, make that practice something, and then I challenge my family to put the phones away. We eat dinner every time we possibly can. It’s at least three times a week, we eat a family dinner, no phones allowed, but time management is a super hard one, but you’ve got to be relentless in taking care of yourself. If you have to get up super early and you have a long commute to work, don’t waste that time listening to talk radio or news radio. Use that time learning something. Listen to your podcast, listen to a audiobook that’s going to help you with your mindset.
Quit wasting time. Entertainment is not growing you. No source of entertainment is growing you, except for the stuff that you do in person, like with your life, if you go to a concert, you need that stuff, but the personal all-by-yourself entertainment is a lie. I truly believe that as relaxation is a 100% lie. If you’re by yourself, you should be growing or producing. I just don’t watch TV on my own.
Yes, I’m either going to be watching something I’m learning about, or I’m going to be doing something productive. If I actually have time, I’ll put on my pack, I’ll go for a rock, but I’m listening to a podcast or I’m doing some planning, and I have my phone and I talk into it. I just think men waste time. I’m even going to go as far as sports. We love our sports, and yes, you should watch them, but it should be very contained, and you should be like, “This is 100% a waste of time unless I’m bonding with other people at that moment.”
I know that’s harsh, I know that’s going to fall hard on other people’s ears. Even with your kids with you, it might be okay, depending on how they like it, but really audit. That audit is going to make you really define and decide if you’re spending your time wisely.
Will: Yes. That’s awesome and that I think is a key to some people who seem to have more than 24 hours in a day or seem to get a ton done. It’s while we have the same amount of time, it’s how you use that time.
Scott: It is, yes. Prioritization is huge. Like I said, I have a whole system where I write down– I don’t write it down. I capture it in my phone, and then just because it’s in there doesn’t mean you do it. You reprioritize like, “Oh, that.” I find that those things that I move from one bucket, my daily bucket, into what I call my inbox, and I go to my inbox every day and I look at it, I’m like, “Still don’t need to do that, still don’t need to do that, still don’t need to do that. Okay, I can get rid of that. I don’t need to ever do that,” because I used to just do everything that came in front of me. I just do it, go do it.
Now, everything goes into a bucket and I evaluate it and I found that I’m saving probably thousands of hours a year not doing things that don’t matter. Even if a boss says, and I had this, I was contracting for a guy, he’s like, “We need to do–” and I would go do it. I’d have it ready the next day or the next meeting, and he– “Yes, I changed my mind.” I learned, and I think that happens to a lot of people.
It’s like do a second check, put it aside there for a second unless he’s giving you a timeline, he or she, and then say, “Okay, hey, we talked about this yesterday. I’m just wondering what the priority of that is? Because I want to make sure that I put it in the right place in what I’m doing.” Don’t just make assumptions because so many times we do things, we’re spinning our wheels instead of evaluating, “All right, these are the four non-negotiables today for my work. How am I going to get those done?” Now, if you do get them done, beautiful, you go back to that inbox, you say, “Ah, hey, here’s all these things. What’s the most important? I have an hour.” Boom, and I pull it down, and we get it done, I feel amazing. It’s really important to shuffle, prioritize, and give time to assess whether something’s worth doing or not.
Will: Like you said, you have these rules you have, and you make sure you spend X amount of time with your wife, and with each kid. The last topic I want to touch on is, I assume you’re also setting aside time to exercise. I want to talk about physical and then mental health, how they’re related. Physical health– is that on your– You said– oh, yes, you ran a gym, but talk about how you make time for that and what that looks like, I guess.
Scott: Yes. Years in the making because I’ve been ebbs and flows, and I went through a whole period where I wasn’t doing any physical or mental health practices at all. I have spent a lot of time dialing in what works for me and works for my family. My non-negotiables every weekday is a 45-minute walk. I think every man needs time to himself. This is technology-free. I spend the first 10 minutes with gratitude and I have what I call an extreme gratitude practice, where I’m literally saying the things out loud that I’m grateful for, for 10 minutes.
That was really hard to develop. John Gordon, he’s an author, he said five-minute gratitude walk. I took it to 10 minutes, then it became 15, then it became 30, and I’m like, “Okay, I’m addicted to this. I got to cut it off.” I do that every single morning. That helps with the brain. I say that you either command your day or your day will command you. I don’t look at my phone, I don’t look at my emails, I won’t look at social media, I won’t look at my project management system, I won’t look at anything that will hit me with a massive release of dopamine.
I want my natural body to kick in until I have finished that walk, so I got to get out there and do that, but I always work out every day too. I recently changed my workout schedule because my 14-year-old son came to me about nine months ago and said, “Dad, I want to work out with you,” and I’m like, “Okay.” No, he is there every single morning like clockwork before me in the gym, and he is a beast. He’s been watching me out and be consistent his whole life in the gym, so we have our own personal gym here. I’ve had to change it up a little bit. Now, I go straight to the gym and work out with him, but the big things are keeping the phone, all the dopamine creators out of my life for at least the first hour of my day, making sure I practice gratitude.
For mental health, there’s almost nothing better. If you wake up and go with the thoughts that are on your brain, your negative emotions are going to run your day. There’s just no way around it. You’ve got to reprogram. I’m telling you what, if there’s somebody who wakes up negative and not going to make it and things suck and it’s horrible, I’m probably king of that. This has been a lifesaver for me. Working out and the walk every single day. On the weekends, I walk over an hour with my wife both days.
Will: Wow. When you say gratitude walk, you’re just thinking of things that you’re grateful of, that you’re–
Scott: I’m going through. I think of possessions, which is weird, but I think we really need to know that what we have is amazing. Then I go through my family, my wife, what things am I grateful for her? I’ll say these out loud. Then I’ll do it for each of my sons. Then I’ll do it for my parents. I’m not always the same. Sometimes it’s free flow, sometimes it’s formulaic, but I’m always listing as many things as I can that I’m grateful for.
Then specific opportunities. “Hey, I am so grateful that I got a paycheck from myself this month. I’m so grateful that I have a really awesome truck to drive around. I am grateful that I have a dog to walk who loves me and wags his tail every–” Just silly, crazy things. There’s so much beauty in the morning. I’m like, “I’m so grateful for an amazing sun and the trees and the terra firma I’m walking on.” All those things, you just get crazy. You just go and you go and you go. I’ll tell you what, it’s nearly impossible to be grumpy after that, almost impossible.
Will: No, I love that. That is so true. It brings home such an important point that fatherhood has its highs, it has its lows. Even at its lows, when you’re feeling really low, chances are you have a roof over your head. Hopefully, you have three meals to look forward to, or you can afford. A lot of our basics are really taken care of and look at it and say, “Yes, maybe things aren’t great, but are they bad? How bad are they really?” If you can–
Scott: I ask myself that all the time.
Will: Yes, but just reversing that and inverting it like you’re doing and saying, “What can I be grateful for?” It’s okay to feel sad. It’s okay to have ups and downs but to recognize them. That’s what you’re saying both with your time, you do the time audit and don’t give yourself the opportunity to let your random thoughts create– [chuckles] your monkey thoughts create that type of day whereas you want to create a day that you run, not the day that runs you.
Scott: Absolutely. Absolutely. There’s just a reframing. I almost have to tell a story every time. There’s a reframing that us men need to have. The other people have done this and they have their own sayings, but I call it the way of the bison. There’s a picture of bison behind me, there’s one over here, there’s one everywhere. They’re everywhere in my house, the way the buffalo or the bison respond to things in their lives. Mostly what we’re referring to is storms coming over the Rocky Mountains.
These storms will come over the Rocky Mountains, and they’re life-threatening storms. We’re talking about snow. We’re talking about heavy winds. We’re talking about– it’ll kill you. When these storms come, there’s two ways to respond, and I’m getting somewhere with this. The cattle will turn and walk away from the storm, but you know what happens then? That storm catches up with them and they keep moving and they’re in the storm longer and many of them die in these big storms. The bison will actually turn towards the storm and start running. It’ll run and it’ll run right into the storm and through it.
I keep this story on the top of my mind every day. Now, do bison suffer from this? Yes. Some of them die, but much, much, much less time in the storm and much less harm than those who run from it. Every single day, if fear pops in, if I’m struggling with my kids, if I’m struggling with energy, how do I attack this head-on? This is why you need to listen to podcasts and books because you need to have the tools to know what that looks like. What does it mean to run into the storm?
Anytime something comes to me, it’s like, “I’m going to be like a bison. I’m going to turn towards this and run into it and get through it as fast as I can.” That can be for hard conversations, do them right away. Then my good buddy, Josh, who we’ve talked about said, “Hey, Scott, one other thing about bison is, do you ever see them alone?” I’m like, “Not really.” The guys might wander a little bit from the herd, but they work in herds. He’s like, “That’s right. Brotherhood’s a herd. The men in your life, those guys you call brothers are your herd and you need them. You don’t have to walk through the storm alone.”
This point of the story is, life’s going to bring you all sorts of crap, and it’s going to sling it at you every opportunity you can get. Walk with gratitude. Get that gratitude mindset, and then approach the stuff that’s coming at you with resolve and with wisdom. A lot of times wisdom takes having a brotherhood who’s someone who’s gone through it before.
Will: That’s beautiful. That’s just great about bison. It’s a good analogy. I get those confused or whatever, but it’s true. We know you face your troubles straight on because it’s not like– if you run with the storm or you avoid it, well, it could keep going.
Scott: It just prolongs it. I mean, it’s the same with forgiving somebody or being upset with somebody. If you just sit in it for too long, it’s destroying you, and all these things. What is the answer? The answer is attacking it head-on. Now, we have to be smart. Sometimes invasion is really important, but we also know maybe there’s certain circumstances, but when it comes to life as men, what can we best do to be the example for our kids?
One, be okay with failure. Use your failure to teach your kids. Tell them about it. I’ve told all these stories to my boys. I don’t want you to doing this, and it’s over, and over, and over, and over again. Then when they come to me with a failure, I’m like, “Okay, all right, what are you going to learn from it?” Because it’s not a failure unless you don’t learn from it. As parents, especially young parents, we want to keep our kids from doing the dangerous things. We want to keep our kids out of danger. We don’t want them to get hurt, their feelings hurt, but guess what? That’s building resiliency, and especially with you as their helm, you at the helm in the background, not saying, “Ooh, turn away from that,” instead of being like, “Oh, okay, that just happened. Hey, bud, what can we take away from this?”
Of course, then they’re up and running, but that builds up over time so that when they do become teenagers, they’re super resilient. They’re just out there again, they don’t make the team. My son didn’t make something this– and he’s just like, “I don’t care, dad,” and hopefully, what I’m doing is rubbing off and that’s why, but he didn’t make a certain band section in his band, and he’s good.
He’s going, and he’s going, and he’s going, he’s challenging these guys that are holding the position he wants, and everyone calls him stupid. He’s like, “No, if I don’t try, then I failed,” but that’s what we want in our kids. We want them just go after it and it not affect their emotion. Sure, it’s going to, but they want to have that resiliency of like, “Hey, how do I know if I don’t know? I don’t know.” I just think we as fathers have to embrace this now so that our kids can be successful, resilient, strong, successful, and leaders in their community.
Will: Absolutely. I love it. That’s a great message to end on, Scott, and I hope we all can live that and live that for our kids, even when our kids live those lives. I appreciate, Scott, you joining us here again. You can find Scott online at the Brotherhood of Fatherhood on Facebook. It’s a Facebook group, very popular. There’s a lot of other dads like us on there, so you should check it out. You should check it out.
Scott: That’s right.
Will: Well, thanks for joining us, Scott. Until next time, we’ll chat soon.
Scott: Thank you, Will, very much.