Be the Dad Bonus Round - Have Fun, Be You
Find your sweet spot of being yourself, having fun and continuing to grow as a Dad.
There is no perfect Dad. You will try your best and some days it will work and sometimes it won’t. Just never give up. Being the Dad is a journey of always seeking to be better. So how do you find that sweet spot, the point of balance where you can be you, have fun and continue to grow? Here are:
11 Ways to be You:
Have fun and be you
There is no perfect Dad, only Human Dads
Don’t disqualify yourself
Your Dad life is like building a house that takes your whole life
Don’t compare yourself to the glimpses that you get of others
Find other Dads to be real with
Recognise the seasons
Keep it simple, choose a couple of work-ons and major in these
Kids are a blessing, enjoy them.
What does winning as a Dad look like?
What it is not
1/ Have fun and be you
Do you know how blessed you are to be alive and reading this? Life is a gift, we can take it too seriously and miss out on the fun.
Who are you? What jokes come naturally to you? What do you like doing? How do you naturally show love? Have fun and create fun, may your kids and wife say, ‘Dad brought us Fun’.
Are you a weirdo, everyone is, people just hide the true them to ‘fit in’. Embrace being an individual, no one was meant to be the same as anyone else.
Have fun and be you.
2/ There is no perfect Dad, only Human Dads
I can’t do everything in this book all the time but I can aim for them all the time. Perfection in being a Dad is not the goal, growth is.
This is not a race against other Dads, it is a race of who you are against who you can be
3/ Don’t disqualify yourself
Never give up, there is too much at stake to stop trying. When you get discouraged, grit your teeth, re-look at your vision and re familiarise with the steps that you need to get there. Recognise that change takes time. If you consistently do the right things, success will come. Winning is waking up everyday and deciding that you will do your best even if yesterday was awful.
I love this quote from Winston Churchill, the man who guided Britain through some of its darkest days in WW2 and on to victory:
Success consists of going from Failure to Failure without loss of Enthusiasm.
Winston Churchill
4/ Your Dad life is like building a house that takes your whole life and slowly becomes more and more of a complete structure.
You lay down a foundation of the most important things: Loving Mum, Loving the Kids understanding what type of family you want to have.
Then you lay down some bricks of learning how to show your love to them, the love languages and making these relationships strong. You lay and re lay these bricks a couple of times figuring out how to get these fitting together best.
Then you put up some walls of being present, getting educated on parenting and discipline.
And on and on, day by day, until the house gets bigger and bigger as you keep coming back to the foundation, the walls and the roof, tweaking them, adding on and making them stronger.
5/ Don’t compare yourself to the glimpses that you get of others
Social Media is where we show our life’s wins. The happy family at the great holiday destination doing something amazing. It's really easy to look at these images and feel like you are not doing well, but what you don’t know is if an argument had broken out just before or after this photo. The same goes for when you see families in public, WW3 could have taken place in the car minutes before and now the couple is smiling and everyone is behaving.
Everyone struggles, argues and has bad days, don’t compare yourself to what you think another couple is like to measure your progress.
6/ Find other Dads to be real with and be real with them.
Find good friends that you can trust and confide in. Being the Dad is not being the macho Man. Share your struggles and feelings and as you open up, it will enable them to as well. Sharing the burdens with trusted friends who can listen and offer good advice makes these burdens weigh much less. You are then pushing forward as a team and not as solo men. It also gives you a real world picture of being a Dad and smashes through the appearances that we can put up to the outside world. It takes us out of isolation and creates an unstoppable band of brothers.
7/ Recognise the seasons
Recognise that some seasons of parenting and life are particularly harder than others, for example pregnancy and the first three months to year of the new child. When you take a step back and look at your total life realise that this time is just for a period and that you will come out of it. In these hard times, you need to trust in the process of getting good sleep, getting input daily, exercising, working the love languages and digging deep. If you are in a tough season in your marriage, keep going and put into practise keys like, giving, listening, quality time and forgiving. We have seen marriages on the brink of breakup that did these things and now they are more in love than ever.
8/ Keep it simple, choose a couple of work-ons and major in these
Work out what the 1-2 key things are that you need to work on now in your parenting and relationships and focus on these. Just like a basketball player who wants to raise their free throw shooting %, they will go into the gym and put in hard work shooting many hoops from the foul line until they master this area. Take this same approach, focus on the work-on, get education and work on these daily.
9/ Kids are a blessing, enjoy them.
Don’t get so caught up in parenting them or providing for them that you miss the joy of being with them. Enjoy your life with kids.
10/ What does winning as a Dad look like?
Trying new things
Being yourself
Having fun
Loving your family and being there for them
Always seeking growth and wisdom for yourself and your family
Finding a community for your family of safe uplifting people
Doing your job to the best best of your ability and always finding ways to add value to yourself and your work
Sharing your emotions with trusted people
Looking after your health so that you can be around for a long time,
Forgiving
Speaking words of life over your family
11/ What it is not:
Being perfect
Getting it right all the time
Comparing yourself to other Dads
Doing every parenting technique
Giving up
Going alone
So Dad’s take everyday as it comes, never give up, do your best in that day and
I know that you will succeed at Being the Dad
- Ferg
