Twenty Seconds of Insane Courage.

Reprogramming your Dad brain

I am writing this from the West Coast, early in the morning, as I fly back from a work trip. While I was sleeping, my wife (East Coast) sent me a couple of videos of our daughter, throwback clips from when she was younger and quite the ham in front of a camera. As I watched both (twice), I really began to miss her. Almost immediately, I had the thought that I should send her a video back, and almost as immediately I talked myself out of it. The first voice said it would feel awkward. The second, thankfully, told me to get over myself. Daughters need to know how their fathers feel about them. I debated it, paused, and then did it.

I am not an emotional person. Anyone who knows me is laughing at that understatement. If you have ever listened to the Jocko podcast, he has this line about his robotic personality not having a birthday, only a manufacturing date, and I resonate with that. I don’t like to talk about my feelings. I don’t ever feel the need to share what’s going on in my life. I am the person who never gets too high or too low. Even keeled is a perfect description. This wiring has its advantages, and the older I get as a husband and father the more I realize how much of it is not how I was made so much as how I was programmed. It is how I learned to operate, from the examples and influences around me, and most of the time I don’t even notice the software running in the background.

This isn’t a blame the previous generation article. In fact, I quite like my stoicism. It is more of an awareness article. How am I inclined, how do I operate, and is all of that best for myself and my family?

There are three main arenas where I’ve come up against the programming and have decided it is best to fight it: in how I express what I feel on the inside (particularly toward my wife and kids), in how I structure my work around my family, and in how I lead spiritually.

The emotional lane

I didn’t grow up with the tools to put my feelings into words, and I couldn’t tell you exactly why. I don’t feel like I wasn’t loved or cared for. I just know the muscle wasn’t there, and as I got older I started to wonder whether that was something I wanted to pass on.

A thought struck me a while back: its not fair for the people around me to never really know what I think of them or how I feel about them, especially when those things would be encouraging. Withholding the good stuff, keeping it buttoned up inside, is a kind of selfishness. If the only reason I’m not saying it, is to avoid feeling awkward or unnatural or I am unsure about how it will be perceived, those aren’t good enough reasons. So I have started trying, in a hundred small ways, to give the people I love a window into my mind and heart.

My wife has been my model on this. She wrote a letter to my grandfather once for no particular reason, just to tell him how grateful she was to have been given a bonus grandfather when she married into our family who was so intentional and kind. The next time we visited his house, the letter was framed on his wall. He told her it brought him joy to know the feeling was mutual—that he was grateful she was a part of our family. What good would it have done anyone to keep that inside? It took her almost no effort, and the return on it is something he looks at every day.

My attempts to enter this arena look small and happen daily. Might be asking my daughter to come sit next to me on the couch so I can put my arm around her for some intentional physical touch. Or doing a “boys hangout” with Lincoln after school where no girls are allowed to come. There was also a time recently where one of my younger sons was staying home from school, and I told him he had better not kiss my wife while I was gone. He immediately ran across the room with his lips puckered, and I stood there laughing while my son loved his mom right in front of me (he repeated this spectacle when I got home later to demonstrate just how much fun he had). That is the triangle I want my kids to live inside: me loving her, me loving them, them loving her, and all of us in the middle of it. That is the type of positive affection/emotion I am trying to get better at modeling because it is exactly what they need for stability, safety, and the assurance that they belong right here with us.

The flexible work lane

A few years ago I sat in a men’s Bible study at a Chick-fil-A in Charlotte. The room was bankers, finance guys, and construction leaders, mostly fifteen or twenty years older than me. We had initially moved to Charlotte so I could take a ministry job I felt called to, making not a lot more than minimum wage. At the same time, my wife was a year into a master’s program to become a nurse practitioner. We had run the math and decided the credential was worth the squeeze: two years of long hours and tight finances on the front end, and on the back end she could cut her hours roughly in half and still make about what she made before. The flexibility built into my role at that time meant I could absorb the bridge season. I handled preschool drop-offs, took my daughter to the occasional donor meeting, and got in the habit of turning my conference calls into long walks with my daughter Savannah along the trails behind our house. We knew it wasn’t forever. It was a difficult season and a really good one, all at the same time.

That morning at Chick-fil-A one of the older guys was walking through 1 Timothy 5:8.

“Anyone who does not provide for their relatives, and especially for their own household, has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.”

After he finished, he hammered home his point: that no wife should ever make more than her husband. Then he asked the room to raise their hand if their wife did. Looking back, a pretty insane question to ask a group of men but regardless, I was the only one who raised my hand.

What followed was a long, uncomfortable group conversation about whether my work was biblical or masculine enough, and whether I should switch jobs to catch up to my wife’s salary. Not one man at that table asked about the season we were in, or the calling I felt, or how the flexibility was serving my family, or the freedom it would bring us long term, or what kind of memories I was making on those mornings with my daughter. They couldn’t see that the integrated role I was doing was actually harder work. All they could see was the paycheck column, and the fact my hours looked a lot different than theirs (different, not less). By those standards, I was failing.

Every man in that room had bought the same equation. Male provision looks a certain way. Provision is primarily a paycheck. Work happens at an office. Anything else a dad gives his family is nice, but isn’t essential.

The problem with this traditional provision equation is that you can crush it at work and still be failing at the most important and specific things your family needs you to do. You can win at work and never have walked your daughter into a classroom, never caught your son’s practice or come downstairs at 7:00 in the morning to wrestle before breakfast. Their equation did not see any of that.

Two things have happened in the modern economy that previous generations did not have to navigate, and they have changed the math of what a dad’s life can look like.

The first is the headwind. The economic weather of the last twenty-five years has been brutal on families. Student debt, housing costs, inflation, and the rising cost of living have pushed more and more households into two sources of income, whether or not that was the plan. Even when one parent goes part-time, the load is no longer cleanly divided the way it used to be. The work of running a family is now actually shared in a way it was not when one parent worked an inflexible job and the other ran the house.

The second is the tailwind. The same era that produced the headwind also produced something prior generations literally did not have available to them: remote work, hybrid schedules, async communication, multi-time-zone teams, the kind of role you can do from a park bench while your kids climb a tree. The flexibility is real, and for a meaningful number of dads, it is right there for the taking.

We talk about the headwind constantly. Almost no one is talking honestly about the tailwind. And a lot of dads who could be putting it to use are leaving opportunity on the table.

That season with my wife in grad school taught me so much about this. Six years later, my daughter still calls those years our Savvy-Daddy days. She remembers them fondly. They were special, formative, and irreplaceable. They weren’t a step down. They were one of the most important seasons of my life as a dad, and I would not trade them for anything.

Here is the part we need to contend with, what if long hours at the office are the easier game? They are known. They reward what we were already trained to do. Show up early, stay late, no kids underfoot, no interruptions, no one climbing you like a spider monkey while you try to have a professional conversation. What if traditional siloed work life is the thing we default to because it is the most comfortable and natural for us?

I think creative integration of work and family is the harder task. It is wiping spit-up off your shirt before a lunch meeting. It is doing expense reports at eight at night because you cut out at three to coach the game. It is taking a Zoom from the carpool line at nine in the morning, without feeling shame. It is knocking out your run at 4:30AM so you can do bath time while your wife runs. The muscles required for that kind of integration are not the muscles most of us have built. They are dormant. Flexing them feels awkward and sometimes looks awkward in culture today. The people around you may not understand what you are doing (and to be honest they may judge you for it). That is exactly the work I am talking about.

Most dads do not choose this path. Not because their work won’t let them. But because the office game is the easier choice for them. Now, we lie and tell ourselves the long hours we pull are about excellence, about provision, about being the kind of man who shows up. Some of that is true. A lot of it is that we like winning at work, and the office is the place where the rules make sense to us.

I tell younger dads this all the time. You have to be very careful to never turn in an A+ at work when an B+ will do. The effort to win a game six to nothing is wasted if three to nothing would’ve sufficiently impressed. We default to running up the score at work because that is the column we know how to crush but this story only holds together if you ignore the other columns you are not maxing out. An A+ at work and a C- at home is not winning. It is a misread scorecard.

Let me be explicit about two other things, because the cultural pressure in both directions is real.

First, this is not a call to make dad mom. My wife is better with kids than me. Being a mother energizes her it did not for me, especially when our kids were infants. We do not look the same after spending 8 hours with our children. She is far more equipped at every level to be the primary parent. I am not advocating for trading places. I am advocating for maximizing your parental investment within the actual flexibility your work gives you.

Second, yes, obviously, this can be overdone. If you swing so hard toward presence that you sacrifice the provision side, that is its own failure. You have to be strategic and calculate what is the maximum you need to do at work to preserve future opportunities, continue growing professionally, while also refusing to do an ounce more that could be diverted into spouse and kids. The argument is not that work doesn’t matter. The argument is that most dads are running up the score on a game they have already won.

Finally, I am keenly aware of how fortunate we are to even be having this conversation. Plenty of dads work in trades, the military, or in rigid roles, in industries that simply do not allow for this level of hybrid integration. But I will tell you this, having worked in jobs before that did not allow for flexibility myself, there are thousands of men who would absolutely kill to be inconvenienced at work by their kid barging into the room. They would kill to do a preschool drop-off or get some windshield time on the way to school. None of them, given the chance, would turn it down.

That is exactly why the rest of us should not. The whole reason this is a privileged conversation is the same reason it is a convicting one. If you have the chance and you are not taking it, you are turning down something a lot of other men would give a great deal to have, and you are telling yourself a story about excellence to keep from noticing.

I know this phase won’t last. Whether through a job change or my kids growing up, the access I have to them right now is a temporary gift. I can imagine future workdays in a quiet office with no interruptions, and I suspect when that time comes, I will miss three little hooligan boys running through the background of my Zoom call, having somehow escaped nap-time confinements. It is because I have the opportunity now that I want to seize it, even when it is not natural for me.

The spiritual lane

Spiritual leadership expands outward in circles. You lead yourself first. Then you lead your wife. Then you lead your family. The order matters. The credibility of each circle depends on the one inside it. In 10+ years of marriage I made it through the first two. But the third is where the programming has hit me the hardest.

The first circle came easiest to me. Leading myself meant getting up early, reading, writing, praying, serving, getting into God’s word, finding men I trusted for counsel, and forcing myself into the discipline of tithing. All of it felt like a challenge, but it was the kind of battle I liked fighting. Self mastery, self discipline, and ultimately self-leadership is a journey I am built to enjoy. Hard, lonely, repeatable work that nobody but God needed to see me do.

The second circle did not come naturally at all. I married an athlete, a great student, and a disciplined person (best marriage advice: don’t marry a loser). But after we got married, finding the space to lead my wife spiritually was not something I knew how to do. She is sharp, capable, and a hard worker in her own right. Trying to share, guide, or even just chat with her about spiritual things felt awkward in a way self-leadership never had. I did not want to come across as patronizing.

Then we lost our first baby to miscarriage, and everything changed. Necessity threw us into dependency on each other and ultimately on God. Suddenly these deep conversations were the only kind of conversations we were having, through tears, consoling each other, asking out loud why this would happen and what God could possibly be doing. We did not have answers. We had each other and we had Him, and that turned out to be enough. The rhythms we built in that valley wore themselves into grooves that eventually felt natural. By the time we were on the other side of it, the second circle was ours.

Then we had kids.

Marriage and family (if you lean into them) will grow you up. They have a way of shaping you, more and more, into who God created you to be. The pruning is real, and its painful. I knew when our first kid arrived that I had a responsibility to teach her, to instill rhythms and disciplines that would form her faith and her understanding of the world. I knew it was my job. Scripture commands fathers to impart it. But this was not a job I had been given a map for. It had not been part of my childhood. Whatever it was going to look like in our home, I was going to have to chart it on my own, and that paralyzed me for longer than I am comfortable admitting.

Ask me to sit down with my kids and lead a Bible story, or to plan a family tradition with any intentionality behind it, and I am Bambi on ice. I feel unqualified and awkward. My impulse is to outsource it to Sunday morning, to my wife, to anyone. I can spend two hours debating Greek, write an article a few thousand people will read, but get nervous thinking about starting an Advent tradition with the kids. I built the first circle. I grew into the second. The third has been a grind.

My first win in this circle was a tradition. Not a Bible study, not a devotional, not a sit-down lesson. A tradition. We call it Family Birthday. On our wedding anniversary, my wife and I celebrate our marriage with our kids, because our marriage is the founding of their family and part of their story. They each get a gift, we eat a cake together, and we pull out the wedding album and tell them how we met. It took me awhile to work up the courage. I can remember the soft pitch to my wife, stacked with every stupid qualifier: “Hey, this might be weird, I don’t know if this is a good idea, but I want our kids to know that our relationship is the most important thing in our family, that it holds them together, and that they are really lucky to have two parents who love each other. If that story matters to them, why would we keep the celebration just for us?” Saying those words out loud was the hard part, because I had never seen anyone else do something like this. My wife, being the wonderful partner she is, was all in and helped me plan the first one. Now the kids love it. We tell them, every year, that marriage is good because that is how God designed it, and that the joy and stability and fun they live inside is what it looks like when a family lives under that design. They are not just along for the ride. They are inside something good God built. This articulation of the ideal is an important lesson for them that I hope will impact the way they form families themselves.

The second tradition we call Passover Day, and it walked the circles in order. It started inside the first one. When my wife and I were in the miscarriage season, I began deliberately writing down the specific times God had been faithful to us, so I would not forget when forgetting would have been the easier thing. It was for me at first. Then I brought my wife in after we had exited that period of time. Later, after our kids came, we expanded it into a Holy Week tradition the whole family does together. Now we gather every year to teach our kids how God has come through for our family, how He has been faithful, and to help them think through what He is doing in their own lives too. We pull out our Passover document, the running record of the times He has shown up for us, and we read through it together. Each year the document gets a little longer. Looking back, God was using that progression to prepare me. Self, then spouse, then family, the same order spiritual leadership is supposed to follow. The awkwardness was in every step I took out of my circle and slowly God gave me the tools to make it all feel natural.

Twenty seconds

There is a line in We Bought a Zoo where Matt Damon’s character tells his son: “You know, sometimes all you need is twenty seconds of insane courage. Just literally twenty seconds of just embarrassing bravery. And I promise you, something great will come of it.”

It sounds corny, but I actually think there is something real in it. (Maybe my impulse to call it corny is itself a reflection of my allergy to emotion)

You see, in reality, when you hit the programming and begin to feel the unnatural awkwardness that tempts you to hesitate or quit it is helpful to remember that it only takes twenty seconds to pick up the phone and record a video: “Hey Savannah, I was watching those old videos your mom sent me this morning and I miss you like crazy. You were so cute. Good luck in your soccer game.”

It takes twenty seconds at dinner to grab your Bible and say: “Hey guys, how about we read a little story tonight?”

It takes twenty seconds to tell your boss: “I’m going to cut out a little early to catch my kid’s game,” or, “Can we hop on a phone call instead of Zoom so I can take the kids to the park?”

You are charting a new course, mostly without a map.
The opportunity is enormous. But so is the resistance.

The programming will be loud. It will tell you that the carpool line at nine in the morning is wrong, that the video to your daughter is awkward, that the Bible at the dinner table is silly, that integrating your kids into your work is unprofessional.

It will keep being loud. The first time you push against it, in any of these arenas, it is going to feel unnatural and a little ridiculous, and that feeling is not a sign that you are doing it wrong. It is a sign that you are doing something new. Twenty seconds of insane courage is all it takes to start moving in a different direction.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Currently, I serve as the Executive Director of Them Before Us, advocating globally for the rights and well-being of children.

I am also the co-founder of All The Good, a leadership organization helping non-profits do all the good they are called to do.

I studied Cross-Cultural Ministry and Humanitarian and Disaster Leadership at Messiah and Wheaton. I read a lot and sleep less than I probably should.

My wife and I live in Charlotte, North Carolina with our 4 kids.