Rob Evans, managing partner of Imaginal Labs, reflects on his career growth as a management consultant and contrasts it with a major personal mistake: failing to apply the same learner’s posture at home that he used at work. He describes avoiding fatherhood early on, delegating child-rearing to his wife, later rebuilding close relationships with his son Jonah and daughter Abigail by intentionally learning, failing, and improving as a parent. He urges others to proactively learn how to be parents.
Hi, my name is Rob Evans. I'm managing partner of a company called Imaginal Labs. I lead large decision making, problem solving, solution, designing workshops for groups of 30, 50, 70, and we do amazing work in three days. The biggest mistake of my life was not being the same person at home that I was at work. I've done many things. I've been the clinical director of a drug and alcohol treatment program, in fact several of them. And I didn't start out knowing that, but I learned. I taught myself, I read, I went to authorities, they taught me and I got better and better. I did doctoral work on fire walking. Nobody knew anything about that. I studied the different cultures where it worked, I did workshops on it and I looked at the effect it had on people's lives. I learned, I became a management consultant, took courses, I read books. But most of all, I learned by experience. And every engagement taught me something. And I got better and better and better at what I did. The mistake was forgetting to be that kind of a student at home, in my marriage and in my family. As I was at work, I was afraid to be a father. I felt like I didn't have a good model in my own family and in many of the families that I grew up watching. And I was a little intimidated by the very thought of having young children looking up to me and I ducked it. I avoided the issue. What I wish I had done would be to know that most men don't know how to be fathers. They may have seen a father and had a great father, but they still have to learn it on their own. It's a learnable skill. There are books to read, there are workshops to attend, and every interaction with your child can teach you something. But I went on for years semi conscious at home and abdicated a lot of the raising of the young children to my wife. While I traveled and was a big shot after the divorce, I had the challenge of recreating a relationship with my son Jonah and my daughter Abigail. And I'm so grateful to them that they still were able to open their hearts to me. As adults, we learned how to have a relationship as father and son and father and daughter. And today we're very close, but only because I started to pay attention and I was willing to be the open hearted, open minded student willing to fail and get back up and do it better next time and truly have a warm and loving relationship, the one I could have had my whole life. I hope you don't make that same mistake.
