A short micro-chapter podcast by Brian Johnson offering three concise parenting practices for fathers (and parents): be an exemplar, give presence, and embrace challenges via a growth mindset. Inspired by a post-keynote conversation with entrepreneurs, Johnson frames parenting as "bringing forth" children's latent heroic potential and closes with reflective questions for parents to apply and share their top practices.
Chapters
Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to another Arete plus one degree. A micro chapter from Arete. Activate your heroic potential. One of 451 of my favorite big ideas. Here it is. Parenting three tips lessons on how to be a great dad After a keynote I gave to a group of venture capitalists and entrepreneurs in Los Angeles, One of the CEOs came up and asked me how to apply the wisdom I shared to his parenting. Then another guy who was also waiting to connect said, I'd love to hear your thoughts on that as well. Now I was struck by how inspiring it was that these super successful and ambitious guys were so committed to being great dads. So first I briefly told them about the etymology of the word parent. The word means to bring forth. I told them that from my perspective, our primary job as parents is to help bring forth and help activate the latent heroic potential within our kids. Then I shared three things that I think are the most powerful ways to help bring forth that awesomeness. Here's a quick take. Number one Be an exemplar. It's a truism, but kids don't listen to what we tell them to do. They model what we actually do. Therefore, the most important thing we can do for our kids is to be a demonstration of what we hope is they will aspire to be important. Note this is by far my greatest motivation as a human being, a man, and a father. Number two Give presence. The second thing I shared is also ridiculously obvious. Be present as often as possible. Put your smartphone in airplane mode in another room when you spend time with your kids and your spouse and, well, any human. This simple act removes the greatest barrier to our presence and provides the fastest route to both connecting with our kids and modeling this style of connection. See number one on being an exemplar that will be so important for our kids in a more and more hyper connected yet paradoxically disconnected world. Embrace challenges. The third thing we talked about was the importance of embracing what Carol Dweck calls a growth mindset. Her book Mindset has been my go to playbook for parenting. I highly recommend it. I've been very deliberate in following Dweck's advice to embrace challenges and always reward effort, not ability. For example, on the effort front, I say things like nice trail running rather than you're a great trail runner or I saw how hard you worked to climb up that slide and and that you almost fell, then caught yourself and kept on going. I love how hard you tried rather than you're such a great climber on the challenges front, Dweck tells us to talk about our own challenges and how we're facing them. She encourages us to literally rub our hands together with excitement when things are hard. I'm all about this. I again, literally rub my hands together anytime something is challenging, but on the most mundane things and say, oh wow, I love challenges. Or when I watch the kids do something hard, whether that's build a Lego set or play a tough opponent in chess, I say, awesome. That one's challenging. How fun. It's almost surreal how much the kids have embraced this. Emerson once asked his nanny, do you love challenges? I do. So back to me and the two dads and you and our plus one degree. If you're a parent, what's working and what needs work? What are your top 3 all time most powerful parenting practices and what specifically can you do to bring forth the best in yourself and your kids? Let's create the strength for two as we do the hard work to activate our and our kids heroic potential today.
