Brian Johnson presents ten ideas for fatherhood that balance presence with ambition: treating life as a virtue-building lecture, mastering family fundamentals, building a growth mindset, and protecting deep love time-blocks. He covers grit, hope, humility, repair, and the trade-offs required to be both a present father and pursue your life's work.
Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to the Optimal Living 101 Masterclass Series. Today I'm thrilled to be chatting about Fatherhood 101, how to win dad of the year while doing your life's work. Alexandra recently taught Mamahood 101. We got some requests for Fatherhood 101 and I realized it now is the time to do that. I'm pretty early on in my fatherhood journey. Emerson, our son is only three and a half years old as I record this, but I'm really excited to share 10 of my favorite big ideas that I strive to embrace as we raise Emerson and hope to have another kid or two. As always, we're going to have 10 of these big ideas. We'll start with a quick introduction and then we'll go into depth on each. Alright, our first big idea is to bring forth and your life is your lecture. Did you know that the Latin root of the word parenting literally means to bring forth? As parents, that's what we're doing. We are bringing forth what our child's potential. But have we slowed down long enough to really think about what is it that we aspire to bring forth in our children? It's a really powerful thing to consider and we're going to look at the difference between resume virtues and eulogy virtues. David Brooks in a great book called the Road to Character talks about the importance of moving to eulogy virtues. Our entire culture is all about the big me. We're going to talk about the importance of virtue. Then we're going to talk about the fact that you and your life are your biggest lectures. You can't just tell your kids what to do. Kids don't listen to that, but they will imitate you. We're going to share some wisdom on that. The second big idea, family fundies plus kryptonites. If you want to bring forth certain qualities in your children, you need to embody those qualities. And that starts with your fundamentals. But we also need to support mom in the process. What are her fundamentals? What's her number one thing that helps her stay plugged in? Help her rock that. How about your kids? Are they eating, moving, sleeping? We're going to talk about those fundies in the family context and we're going to look at kryptonite. What are the things that trip you up, the things that trip your kids up, the things that trip your spouse up or your partner? We want to identify our kryptonites and have a strategy to deal with them. Our third big idea is wise Parenting plus Post it notes in her recent book Grit, Angela Duckworth talks about wise parenting. If you want to cultivate grit, you can do that internally and you can do that from the outside in. As parents, obviously we have an opportunity to help our kids cultivate grit and all the other virtues we're going to talk about. We want to be wise parents where we are simultaneously warm and caring and supportive and we have high standards. We'll talk about what happens when one of those two slips. And we'll talk about some fascinating research on warmth and high standards and and how to put a post it note on our feedback that we give to our kids. The fourth big idea Attention plus presence plus power leads. We talk about the fact that psychologists tell us that our attention is our number one asset. We talk about that all the time. If attention, our ability to put our minds where we want, when we want, is a core strength of happy people who are flourishing, we as fathers and and parents would be wise to help cultivate our attention. We need to reduce the screen time. They reduce the amount of tv. Right. We'll talk about our practices which are pretty extreme, but talk about how we can cultivate attention and then presence when we're with our kids. Put the iPhone away. We're gonna revisit the iPhone effect. We're gonna talk about power leads. How you start an interaction is often how it ends. Michelle Guy went in her new book called Broadcasting Happiness talks about the science behind that. We'll talk about that. The fifth big idea is mindsets, Mistakes and Practice Growth mindset. Carol Dweck her research. We're going to talk about how I try to apply this in my fathering and give some stories about how we've done so really, really powerful research. Fixed versus growth mindset. It's one of the most important things we can do as fathers. Fascinating stuff. We'll get into detail on. The sixth big idea is willpower plus grit plus hard things. We talk about the fact that Willpower out predicts IQ for academic performance by a factor of two all the time. Willpower out predicts IQ for academic performance by a factor of two and it's learnable, yet no one teaches it. We're going to talk about the importance of cultivating willpower and then cultivating grit and how to do so and then the importance of doing hard things. And the rules going to go back to Angela Duckworth again for developing grit. 7th Big idea we're going to look at is hope plus realistic optimism plus true confidence. Hope is the belief that your Future is going to be better than the present and that you have the ability to make it happen. It's also very much like realistic optimism. We're going to talk about the importance of that and how to cultivate it and why it matters. The eighth big idea is humility plus purpose. At the end of the day, we need to see our interconnectedness, have the humility to see where we need to do the work. Have the humility to see where other people are really extraordinary and teach our kids true confidence, that humility and the sense of purpose. Our purpose is very simple in my perspective, which is we're here to help people. We're here to actualize our potential and help people. We'll talk about how I work with Emerson on that on a daily basis. Honoring other people's strengths and talking about this is how we can help people. Everyone helps everyone else. The ninth big idea is respect plus repair plus needs work. We want to respect our kids, treat them as the same way we want to be treated. Golden Rule 101. It's a big aspect of what Alexander has brought into our parenting. And then we want to repair when things don't go well. We of course is going to happen. I'm sorry. I could have done this and instead I did that. I'm sorry about that. Repairing our relationships quickly and then needs work when we inevitably make that head bump mistake. Think about what could you have done better? I love doing this. Oh, wow. Okay. So this happened and that happened. I could have done this and it wouldn't have led to that. It would have led to this. Needs work. The tenth and final big idea Trade offs plus deep love time blocks and cherishing. The reality is if we want to win dad of the year while doing our life's work, we're going to need to make some trade offs. You can't have it all. And we need to prioritize. Is our golf handicap more important than our kids? Flourishing Powerful thing. We're going to talk about what your kids are going to say about you at your eulogy. Let's focus on that for a moment and aspire to be that on a daily basis. Deep love time blocks. We need to schedule time with our kids iPhone off complete presents. We're not watching TV together. We're engaging in life together. And then we're going to talk about cherishing. John Gottman, the relationship expert talks about the importance of fondness and admiration for your significant other relationships. Well, it's just as important with your kids. Take the time to cherish. Them. Imagine and savor the moments that have really lit you up and see their amazing qualities on a daily basis. We're going to talk about writing a love letter to your kids to celebrate them and cherish them. I just love that word, cherish. So Those are our 10 big ideas. High level. Let's take a deeper look at each.
