How to Turn a Boy Into a Man
Episode Stats
Summary
John Tyson didn t want his son to flounder on the way to maturity, nor miss out on having an initiation into manhood. So he set out to create a six-year journey for him that would help him move from boy to man.
Transcript
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Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.
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A lot of young men today struggle in finding their footing in adulthood.
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They feel lost, directionless, and unsure of who they are and how to confidently and
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Part of the reason for this is that most young men today lack something which was once part
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of nearly every culture in the world, but has now almost entirely disappeared, a rite
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My guest today didn't want his son to flounder on the way to maturity, nor miss out on having
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an initiation into manhood, so he set out to create a six-year journey for him that would
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His name is John Tyson, and he's the author of The Intentional Father, a practical guide
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Today on the show, John unpacks the components of the years-long journey into manhood he created
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for his son, beginning with how he brainstormed those components by doing the day your son
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We then discuss how old John's son was when he started his rite of passage and why it
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began with him having a severing dinner with his mom.
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We get into what his rite of passage consisted of, from the kickoff ceremony to the challenges,
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experiences, trips, and daily rituals John used to impart values, teach his son the five
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John shares how moving his son's focus from being a good man to being good at being a man
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helped him get re-motivated to continue the process, why his rite of passage included
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a gap year after high school, and how John celebrated the end of his son's journey into
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We also discuss whether John did something similar with his daughter.
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We end our conversation with some key principles any dad can use to start intentionally helping
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their kids become well-rounded individuals who can confidently step out on their own
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After the show's over, check out our show notes at aom.is slash passage.
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So you got a book out called The Intentional Father, A Practical Guide to Raise Sons of Courage
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And in this book, you walk readers through on how you developed and carried out a years-long
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When did you first get the idea of doing this sort of, this was involved, like this started,
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Started when he became a teenager, went through until he left the house.
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I think the first moment that really hit me was driving back from the doctor when they
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told me, hey, do you want to know if your son's a boy or a girl?
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And I just had this profound sense of being overwhelmed that I personally did not have
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I got married young and faced all the challenges of my own inadequacy, dealing with the complications
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And I thought, I have got to do better for my son.
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So I think another key moment, I was meeting with a local faith leader, and he was talking
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about the way their community helped young men move from adolescence into manhood.
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And I thought, I don't have anything like that, and I have got to build something like
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So very, very early on, and I spent about a decade reading, trying to figure out how
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Did you have something like that in your own life when you were a boy transitioning to
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A lot of folks out there sort of feel there's a hole in their life, and they're trying to
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figure out how to catch up, fill that, and then do something better for their own kids.
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They didn't have that experience, but they want it for their own sons.
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So they're trying to give their sons the experience that they didn't have.
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And something you start off in the book talking about is the research.
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You've done a lot of research about what happens when boys don't have fathers, don't have
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What does the research say as to what happens to boys when they lack a strong father figure?
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I mean, sort of the go-to research most people reference is from fatherhood.org.
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Kids are four times more likely to live in poverty, more likely to suffer emotional behavioral
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problems, higher levels of risky and aggressive behavior, two times the risk of infant
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mortality, which is crazy, more likely to go to prison.
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Only one in five inmates grow up in a home where their father is present, twice as likely
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So the presence of a dad in a home makes an incredible difference.
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You know, with all of our conversations about justice in the world today, I don't know why
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this one doesn't get more attention because one of the greatest cultural advantages that
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someone can have in life is a present loving father figure.
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Well, and besides, you're trying to move beyond just having a present involved dad.
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Like your ideal of a good dad is an intentional father, where a father intentionally thinks
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about walking their sons through an initiation process.
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What do you think men lack when they transition into adulthood without having almost like a ritual
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Well, I think there's some kind of deep internal inadequacy.
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There's some sense of a desire to bless, pass on and help, but they don't have a source
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You know, our culture has gotten rid of most of the sort of life passages other than formal
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And so there's a lot of people walking around really wondering, am I even a man?
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When you lose your virginity, the first time you drink alcohol, when you get your first
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No one seems to know when manhood is confirmed on them and then how they distribute it to other
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So yeah, I think there's a hole in the soul of most men and they're seeking and striving
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One way men often fill that hole is they create self-initiations for themselves.
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Young people, I mean, you obviously remember this.
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And the number one thing you're trying to figure out what to do with it is how do you channel
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this in a life-giving rather than destructive way?
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And that's what these rites of passage historically were designed to do, to create guardrails so
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the gift of male energy could be channeled for the good of the community and the man.
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Without those guardrails, you see all the damage we see in our world today.
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But without initiation, young men will seek to do something with their energy that confers
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So whether it's risky behavior, whether it's underage drinking, whether it is sexual behavior
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or whatever, you've basically got young men saying, help me figure out what to do with
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And when you look at some of the other rites of passage that other cultures have had, they
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And we would probably take kids away from parents who did some of these ancient rites
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But when you look at the levels of anxiety with our young people today, depression with
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young men, the challenges that teenage boys face, our lack of initiation at scale is more
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damaging than the initiation cultures, no matter how intense they were of other societies.
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So yeah, I'm a big believer that we have to reclaim rites of passage, create guardrails
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so that male energy can be channeled for the good of society.
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And that's definitely what I'm trying to address in the book.
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Yeah, I like that idea of, this is, the idea is to channel male energy or masculine energy.
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And it's one of the analogies I've used throughout the years when I've tried to explain the difference
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Masculinity is just that energy and vigor that's born through testosterone, right?
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And then manliness is a culture that you use to direct that energy or manhood is a culture
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You create a culture of manliness or manhood to funnel that energy.
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But if you don't have any wires that's directing that masculine energy, it becomes dangerous.
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Okay, so let's talk about, you had this idea, your son was born, you're like, okay, I want
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to create an initiation for him to give him the thing that I didn't have.
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And so when you started this planning process, you went through this exercise you called the
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What kind of questions are you asking yourself as you guide yourself through this thought
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Yeah, I got the idea from Stephen Covey's book, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People,
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where he talks about begin with the end in mind.
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And he has that exercise where you pretend it's your funeral and then you go back and sort
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of ask yourself the question, what sort of life and legacy do I want to leave?
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And I thought, you know, that's a great framework to apply to a ton of different areas of life.
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And I thought, I'm going to apply this to the day where I send my son off to either college
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And I thought about this when he was really young and I basically just worked my way backwards,
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try to keep that day very, very vivid and real in my heart, and then ask a series of questions
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And the first one was like, what do I want my son to know?
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I want him to be able to navigate the complexities of life.
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And this was about his moral, ethical, and character formation.
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A man should be able to do stuff, step in a room and add value through skill acquisition.
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And then what experiences do I need to design to make this happen?
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With all the best intentions in the world, without a conscious pathway and designing experiences
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where these things are developed, it's never going to be there.
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And just like you do with a college degree, sort of, you know, you say, hey, in order to
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get a degree, you're going to have to do X amount of classes and it's going to have to
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either be a two-year associate or a four-year or a graduate degree.
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I just worked backwards starting at around age 13 when he was hitting puberty and then
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worked it out until he was 18 and then created a pathway around knowledge and character and
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skill development and the experiences to help him do that.
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And then one of the things I did was to basically ask the question, who can help me with this?
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You know, I'm a big believer that, you know, dads are fundamental in a young man's formation,
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but we're living in a world where a lot of people don't have dads or they're stepdads or
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And so I sort of came up with this idea of building a tribe or a cohort of fathers who
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And then coming up with those dads with an asset map and sort of everybody puts in the
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middle of the room, what assets do you have available in your life?
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Someone may say, I got a second car and I'm willing to let the boys learn a drive in it.
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Someone may say, hey, I've got a series of key relationships in my industry and I can,
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you know, or I've got access to some cool sporting events.
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And then you sort of start dreaming from there.
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And then I worked my way backwards and that was how I basically designed what I called the
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primal path, which is this, you know, this sort of six-year journey I came up with.
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No, the day your son leaves home exercise is really powerful.
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Like I, I went through it through my head and trying to imagine what my son, he's 11
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right now and imagine when he's 18 and he's leaving the roost.
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It's just, it really gets you, it's a gut punch.
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You're just like, and you want to know like, what, what is he going to be like?
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And I like this idea of developing an asset map.
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So it's, you, you get the idea of what the things that you want your son to know,
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understand, be able to do, but then try to figure out, okay, what do I have at my disposal
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And not just things, but you know, who are the other people in my life that can help
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I think that was, I loved how you, you focused on that and making this a community project.
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Oftentimes when I think when I hear dads talk about, I want to do a rite of passage for
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But I think something, there's a power when you bring other men into the process as well.
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Yeah, if you put too much pressure on a dad, I mean, no dad is going to be a perfect father.
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And so to put all that psychic pressure on a dad can be overwhelming, but to distribute
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that through a community of men where, you know, a father or a mentor plays a primary
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role, but is surrounded by this cast of other sort of like wise, passionate, you know, helpful
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And I think it's actually something that young men ache for.
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Or why is there such devotion to teams, team sports, having coaches around us?
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Because we need that sense of community and belonging as we grow and develop.
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So yeah, it was very, very important for me, not just to be, you know, my son and I, but
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it was like my son and I and a cohort of other guys walking through this.
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Well, I think too, you know, part of what you're trying to do in initiation or rite of passage
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is help the boy cut themselves off in a way from their family.
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That's going to be hard to do because if you're always there in the process, it's hard to cut
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But if you have another man there, you can have those periods where you can experience
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And I've noticed in my own life, I look back at my own life, you know, my dad was always
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there and he taught me a lot of important things.
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But I remember it really like a lot of times, oftentimes the things that he told me or he
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modeled hit home when there was another man that wasn't my father.
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So you came with this idea, what you want your son to be like.
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Then you did, you start off an initial ceremony, but it was with your wife.
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What's that's, I think that a lot of guys think what's going on there.
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Well, that was interestingly enough, the most controversial piece of this period.
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Just to take a little half step back, James Hollis, who was, I think, the president of
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the Jungian Society, he's written a ton of books on midlife, on pathways, on stage development
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He basically said all societies have a six-step process of walking boys through adolescence
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And one of those stages is what he calls the death of childhood thinking.
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And it's an environment where you've got to be cut off from the primary influences of
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And one of the things that a lot of societies did was like consciously severed an overemphasized
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bond between mother and child so that he could learn to be formed by the community of men.
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So I did what I called a severing dinner, which the publisher reduced down to a directional
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And it was basically, I talked to my wife into doing this, and my wife's an absolute legend.
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And I said, hey, look, I need Nate not to shrink back to you for comfort, but I need you to push
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him back to me for formation and for challenge.
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And so she took him out for a dinner to his favorite restaurant, even though I'm from Australia.
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And then, you know, I come from a faith background.
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So she prayed a prayer of blessing over him, sort of like an important marking moment.
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And then she said to him, hey, I'm your mother.
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I'll always be here for you, and I'll care for you.
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But you need to be handed to your father to learn how to become a man.
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It's going to be a challenge, and you're going to want to come back to me to ease and find
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comfort for the discomfort and challenges you're facing.
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And I want you to know I'm going to push you back to your dad, and I'm not going to nurture
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Now, to fast forward several years, when I was with my son closing out our journey together,
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I said to him, hey, Nate, I'm getting quite a bit of pushback on the dinner that you did
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And he said, no, no, no, no, you have to include that.
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He said, I cannot put into words how psychologically powerful that was for me to realize I was
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entering this journey primarily being formed by men.
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And he was like, that jump started this whole thing in my heart that I was actually entering
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So, yeah, it began with my wife and then sort of moved to a formal initiation ceremony on
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I've been in New York City for the last 17 years.
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So, it was a few other dads who were my son's closest friends and basically cast this vision
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for him about building this pathway from adolescence into manhood.
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So, they'd be a little nervous and also excited.
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And then when the day came, when all the boys had turned 13, this is late summer, we took
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them out to the beach and sat them in the sand and gathered around, told them a series
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of stories, shared some of our own personal lessons and learning, and then sort of try
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to put, to say it in a good way, sort of inspire them and paint a picture of what was coming
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and put the fear of God in them about how hard this was going to be.
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So, there was sort of like that anticipatory terror.
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And then they ran into the water, sort of like a religious baptism into this journey,
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dying to their old ways of childhood, and then rising into this journey.
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And then we took them to Coney Island where they played a bunch of games together.
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And, you know, there's something potent of one generation passing on something to the
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next generation that they can handle and know that they're in a part of a continuing story.
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So, I gave my son a really strong leather journal, gave him a really nice pen, and then along
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the way, a whole series of gifts to sort of like mark it out and get all along.
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I had this vision before I started where I wanted my son to start on the coast of New York,
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and I wanted his journey to end on the coast of Spain.
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And there's a little town called Finisterre, and it's a place where pilgrims, after they
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do this long hike, leave behind something at the end of their pilgrimage.
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And I had planned to sort of like go into the ocean in New York and go into the ocean in
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And so, that's why it was done at the beach, and that's why water was an important part of
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So, yeah, you were thinking with the end in mind, again, going back to Stephen Covey.
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And the when he leaves home, I really just, and this is one thing I would encourage dads
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A lot of times, men get into the workplace, and they have, you know, they're casting vision.
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They're thinking about sales or strategy or how to build things out, how to take ground.
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And they've got a ton of energy and gifts, vision casting, and that sort of stuff.
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But when it comes to their own kids, we don't apply any of the skills we have in our jobs
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And if, you know, if you would have put me on like a strength finder test, strategic
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So, I was like, hey, I'm a pretty strategic person.
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Why not apply this to fatherhood and then build this out?
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So, yeah, I had thought through this journey and tried to figure out the core components
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And that certainly took away a lot of the panic and fear, even though there still was a
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So, when do you think a son should start the rite of passage?
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I think, you know, universally through history, it's sort of around the age of 13 or so.
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And I don't know if that is, I don't know if there's anything sort of like culturally specific
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Certainly not in our world anymore, like turning 13, I guess you're a teenager, but that's not
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It's when you start to think about your strength.
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That's when you start thinking about, I don't know, even a sense of vocation.
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You stop wanting to be the things you say when you're four or five and you've got a bit
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You know, you're getting into sports or into academics in a new way.
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And so, I think, again, it's about that male energy.
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You're trying to figure out, what do I do with this?
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It can be very, very confusing and disorienting energy too.
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So, right around the time this is happening within you, you want a community of men to come
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around you and to tell you the energy is good, it's a gift, it must be channeled the
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So, yeah, universally, it seems to be sort of around 13, around the age of puberty.
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You have the initiation ceremony with his friends and some other dads at the beach.
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The first part of this initiation, years-long initiation process, was you actually took
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Well, I mean, if I could sum up modern culture in one phrase, it would be this, project self.
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We live in a world that's telling you all the time, you are the center of everything.
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Narcissism is at epidemic proportions in our world today.
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And, you know, particularly when you're a teenager, you can be pretty inwardly focused.
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And you can think that there's nothing outside of yourself and that there's nothing that mattered
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And I wanted my son to have a bigger picture of life.
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I wanted my son to realize what shaped me, what was going to be shaping him.
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And I wanted him to step into sort of a family narrative.
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You know, various family traditions, some ethnic, some religious, record family trees for different
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I happen to have a cousin who was a history buff and has got a PhD in history.
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And he traced our family line back to the 10th century.
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And so, he presented me like this hundreds of pages of book of our family story.
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And I mean, the whole thing, family crests, family mottos.
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Hey, you know, you're a part of a long line of Tyson men and this is what it means.
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And then I wanted him to see, you know, where I grew up and what it was like for me to develop
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So, I took him back to Australia and where I grew up, I'm from a city called Adelaide
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and basically had him, you know, go through the places that form the values of my life
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so that when I talked about something, he didn't use what it was.
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I wanted him to have a context for the story that he was stepping into.
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And I think without Alistair McIntyre said this, we can only ask the question, what am
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And so, if you're going to figure out your role, you've got to figure out the story that
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And I really felt it was important to give my son a sense of continuity and history so
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he could understand the story that he was extending.
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I think another way you can sum up modern life is lack of context.
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A lot of people were just, you're kind of thrown into this milieu where it's just, you're
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getting bombarded by all these different stories, right?
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And you don't have a story that you're embedded in.
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And I think telling your kid, like, hey, this is, this is, you're part of this story.
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Now, and I think this is important because it can give them, one, they could step into
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But even if they decide not to, by giving them that story, right?
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They're able to know like, oh, how can I make myself different?
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Like, it gives them something to push back against, if that makes sense.
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I think a lot of young people, like, they're just kind of flapping their arms.
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They don't, they don't know what they're doing.
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And I think there's a, I think it's important too, to tell the family story in, in a compelling
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I mean, you know, the whole idea of a family reunion where it's like a bunch of people you
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don't really like wearing weird t-shirts, you know, like I wasn't trying to do that with
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I was trying to let him know, hey man, our family has an incredible history.
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It's a history of people who have taken big risks.
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It's a history of people who've paid a real price for you to be where you are in the world
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And I want you to know you come from good stock.
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I, you know, I, I have the carry the fire lighters from the art of man.
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But like that, that whole concept, man, this, you're born into a legacy and you don't get
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And there's, there's good things I want you to have.
00:25:27.460
There's bad things I want to warn you about that could flow into your life because of,
00:25:34.040
And then I want to figure out how to help you carry this forward through your calling
00:25:39.640
And that was actually a really, really amazing time.
00:25:44.840
I dropped out of high school, worked in a meat factory, bought a house when I was 19,
00:25:54.040
And I wanted my son to sort of like see that and feel the weight of that so he could understand
00:26:03.040
Even though I was heartbroken that he came back saying, dad, American food is better than
00:26:09.000
I mean, I know what I like about what you did too, is you would take them to places
00:26:12.640
where you made really big decisions in your own life.
00:26:17.100
And I think that's a really great idea because it allows your son, it gives them, it gives
00:26:22.040
them a pattern to follow when he's making his own big decisions.
00:26:26.740
My values were vision, passion, discipline, and risk.
00:26:30.060
You know, when I go back through history, I've always valued visionary men.
00:26:33.860
They look beyond the horizons of what is possible, you know, and they didn't.
00:26:38.980
They dream bigger dreams for themselves and for the culture.
00:26:45.060
I've respected men of discipline who have channeled, again, their energy to something,
00:26:51.440
And then if you're good at those things, if you've got vision and passion and your discipline,
00:26:56.700
So, I took him to the four places I learned those values.
00:27:03.040
When something emerges in your life, in order for it to be internalized and to become a sacred
00:27:11.360
You know, the power of ritual and recognition so our life is not just a blur of ordinary days.
00:27:21.180
My son will take time and say, this place matters to me.
00:27:28.240
So, yeah, he learned that by seeing it on the trip.
00:27:31.100
We're going to take a quick break for your words from our sponsors.
00:27:36.820
So, one of your big goals through this whole entire process was to teach your son values,
00:27:41.760
family values, help them develop his own personal values.
00:27:45.000
But you also had this idea, like, I want to inculcate masculine values into my son.
00:27:49.380
What were those values and why do you think that was important?
00:27:53.120
It is a confusing time in our culture to ask the question, what is a man?
00:28:05.760
One of the things I try to emphasize to sort of get away from the controversy, and there
00:28:10.240
is a lot of controversy, was the power of classical virtues.
00:28:14.080
So, the four classical virtues, justice, wisdom, courage, and self-restraint.
00:28:18.680
I felt like the men we need in our world today are embodied in these values.
00:28:36.620
You know, again, as someone from a faith tradition, the most important values according to St. Paul
00:28:43.920
And so, to extend that, I'm like, we need faithful men in a world of compromise.
00:28:51.240
So, I try to take these noble, historically proven virtues and make those the baseline.
00:28:59.520
And particularly in Greco-Roman culture, these were masculine values.
00:29:04.040
These were values that were associated with men.
00:29:07.060
And so, rather than just sort of pluck from thin air, choose random cultural values, I try to find something that was a little more timeless and rooted.
00:29:15.540
And one way you passed on these values or taught your son these values, you did this, you'd take them on trips and you'd kind of, you'd just show it, right?
00:29:23.340
I think that's a very, I think it's probably the most powerful way.
00:29:25.300
But then you'd have these, every morning you'd sit down with them and you'd have these little talks.
00:29:33.340
Yeah, well, I mean, again, I think I got the vision of like just college or high school, which is what do you need to cover in order to graduate?
00:29:47.800
And again, getting back to, you know, know, be and do as the sort of core tenets there.
00:29:52.300
So, yeah, I just, I got a calendar and I worked back through a series of months and I just said, here's the content I want to cover in this time.
00:30:04.320
And then I just broke it up into little chunks and then we just talked through it.
00:30:08.020
So, yeah, I just wanted to have this point every day where I was connecting.
00:30:12.080
When you ask the question, how does somebody grow?
00:30:21.100
It's big, powerful, catalytic, defining moments.
00:30:26.220
And then it's like the ordinary, everyday, habitual, repetitive stuff we do in our lives.
00:30:32.840
And so, that's what I was doing in the daily little check-ins.
00:30:35.980
You know, sometimes they're 15 minutes, sometimes they're 40 minutes, depending on what we're talking about.
00:30:40.480
But it was just getting up early before school and then picking the theme we were working on, whether it was like, you know, one of the archetypes or one of the shifts.
00:30:47.840
And then I just come up with content and we just talk it through.
00:30:51.420
So, I think just sowing those small seeds every day over the course of years produces a massive kind of fruit.
00:30:59.000
So, I asked my son, like, you know, like, what are some of the takeaways that you got from that?
00:31:03.320
And a lot of it were like pithy little phrases.
00:31:06.740
My son said the number one thing that I've taken away from all of those years of content was this idea.
00:31:15.720
When you're accountable as your own man in the world before you're created.
00:31:20.300
That's who you really are without people pushing you.
00:31:23.440
And that was just something like I winged one morning.
00:31:26.720
You know, I was just like, okay, let me just like throw that in, you know.
00:31:29.660
So, again, you never know by sowing those seeds what's going to stick and what's really going to like impact and help.
00:31:35.580
And also, throughout the process, you'd read books together or you'd even watch movies.
00:31:39.220
So, if you're talking about courage, you would watch Band of Brothers, for example.
00:31:48.700
If you're a busy dad, I can tell you, come up with a few discussion questions, watch a movie, make them thoughtful, and you can have a great night together.
00:31:56.480
Yeah, the Band of Brothers and Barbecue was a very, very strong season that we did.
00:32:00.920
So, we would just like talk about, you know, watch an episode, talk about what we learned in the characters, and then we'd go out and eat meat.
00:32:07.580
And we sort of went through the, yeah, because I used to be a butcher,
00:32:13.800
And we honestly sort of ate our way around New York City as a reward for doing these nights together.
00:32:24.260
You know, she didn't want to eat brisket every week.
00:32:26.480
Well, yeah, I want to talk about something you did with your daughter in a bit here.
00:32:30.980
Okay, so one of the things you did with this rite of passage process is you really,
00:32:35.620
you used the work or looked at the work of Richard Rohr.
00:32:38.180
Or, we've had him on the podcast before, Franciscan monk, who's thought and does a lot about male initiation.
00:32:44.660
And you took this idea that Rohr has of the five rules of manhood that every boy needs to learn in order to become a man.
00:32:52.500
And then you modified it to, and you called them the shifts of manhood.
00:33:01.820
I mean, he spent half a lifetime thinking about this stuff and has some very, very strong works on that.
00:33:08.720
But I felt like, I mean, how do you say to a 13-year-old kid, you are going to die, you're not that important, life is not about you.
00:33:17.180
And then how do you help him see that he's making progress on that?
00:33:22.100
And so, I sort of converted him into these shifts.
00:33:24.380
So, the shifts are from ease to difficulty, boys embrace ease, men embrace difficulty.
00:33:30.840
From self to others, boys are about themselves, men are about others.
00:33:34.460
From the whole to apart, boys are all about themselves, men realize they're only a part of a greater story.
00:33:39.640
From control to surrender, boys think they can maintain control, men understand the mysterious power of surrender.
00:33:45.240
And then from the temporary to the eternal, boys only think about what matters right now, but men think out of a larger picture.
00:33:51.100
And then, yeah, I designed these units to help him really learn these lessons.
00:33:57.540
And so, to be able to say, hey, boys are about ease themselves, the whole thing, control and temporary things, and men are about difficulty, others, humility, surrender, you know, think in big picture.
00:34:09.620
So, yeah, I would take a couple of months on each of these, have a little daily talk about it, do this weekly thing that we called man school.
00:34:17.560
And then at the end of it, we would do a challenge.
00:34:19.580
So, from ease to difficulty, for example, my son's terrified of heights.
00:34:23.860
So, I took him in Australia to the highest ropes course and made this thing was, I hate heights too.
00:34:30.240
This was horrific, but I wanted him to see, hey, man, if you do this, you've passed, like you have now embraced difficulty, like you're ready to move on to the next unit.
00:34:39.180
And so, it was a real joy seeing him like do an actual challenge that kind of scared him a bit where he had to overcome something.
00:34:47.260
I think there's nothing more demoralizing for men than working hard and seeing no progress from your labor.
00:34:55.200
And so, I wanted to build in this sense of I am taking ground.
00:35:00.940
I am heading down the road from, you know, adolescence into manhood.
00:35:04.640
And this was something that, particularly with my son, was very, very effective.
00:35:08.920
No, and I love for the shift for temporary to the eternal, like you took him to a graveyard.
00:35:14.720
That was one of those other, you know, things that really stuck with your son when you asked him, like, what was some of the things that stuck?
00:35:19.880
And it was like this pithy, off-the-cuff remark about, you know, you look at a gravestone and you see the date someone's born, then a dash, then the date they die.
00:35:29.560
And you said, like, you know, that dash, that was their life.
00:35:40.520
And my son, anytime we go past a graveyard, we'll to this day be like, what's your dash, dad?
00:35:46.700
And it is kind of amazing to think, you know, there's that person, their life is over.
00:35:52.840
Like, if they'd do anything to get a second chance at it, gosh, don't squander your life, man.
00:36:01.620
And so, like, think properly and steward your time.
00:36:05.100
And I think he is, to this day, my son is very time conscious as a result of that moment.
00:36:11.060
Okay, so these five shifts, you would spend a few months.
00:36:13.400
Would you revisit, like, you know, say if you did, you know, from whole story to part of the story, you know, a year before, would you revisit it?
00:36:20.420
Say, hey, here's another, we're going to talk about this some more.
00:36:23.380
Yeah, I'm always just, I mean, when you talk about how memory works, you know, we forget in a week 75% of what we've heard a week earlier.
00:36:31.200
And so, you've got to do what they call deep encoding.
00:36:35.260
And that primarily comes through spaced repetition.
00:36:38.240
And we all know that you can cram overnight and pass a test and learn nothing.
00:36:42.200
Or you can study, which means, like, every couple of days, you're, like, loading it back into your mind.
00:36:48.140
And, yeah, I was constantly trying to reinforce the core ideas.
00:36:52.980
And I did that over the course of several years.
00:36:55.040
So, your spaced repetition is really important.
00:36:57.440
Keep hitting the same things again and again and again.
00:37:00.560
And I think all people that educate well get this, just, like, refocusing, putting the emphasis on these things so they go from external into an internal component where they can carry with them for the rest of their lives.
00:37:13.740
Another thing that I really, I like that you talked about in the book is this idea of preparing for moments that your adolescent is going to face as they go through puberty, right, into adulthood.
00:37:24.180
And I think these moments are often, if left, if you're not, if you don't have a conscious, intentional rite of passage, these moments often become the rite of passage.
00:37:34.880
But what you're trying to do with this idea of preparing for moments is making these moments part of a larger rite of passage.
00:37:42.100
And so, these are things like, you know, first shave, when they get, your kid gets their first cell phone, when they get a driver's license.
00:37:48.220
And you thought about, like, what can I do to make these, Mel, my son, see these moments are part of a bigger picture.
00:37:55.220
I mean, I'm a big believer that the book, The Power of Moments by Chip and Dan Heath, I mean, that was just a masterclass.
00:38:03.180
You know, as a leader, you know, as a person, your life is really a series of defining moments that have shaped you.
00:38:10.520
If you were to sort of map out your story, you know, you're basically going to pull out some disproportionately impactful moments, either of pain or of wounding.
00:38:19.280
And I was like, okay, so these moments, like, we're going to be shaped by these moments.
00:38:24.540
Is there a way to, like, consciously cultivate them to prepare in advance when they, you know, the young men ones happen?
00:38:31.160
But then sort of have a framework on how to do it.
00:38:36.660
And, you know, I think scientists tell us as well, like, the memories we form in our late teens and early 20s tend to be the strongest memories we carry our whole life.
00:38:44.140
Because we're going through so many firsts and they find their way into our long-term memory.
00:38:50.500
They're converted into our long-term memory by the potency and novelty of the event.
00:38:55.420
So, yeah, I was, like, trying to figure out how to do those things and how to build them up.
00:39:00.280
A classic, I mean, my son got his driver's license.
00:39:05.900
And you want to talk about a harrowing adventure, taking your driving test in New York City.
00:39:11.480
And when he comes back, he didn't even know if he passed or not.
00:39:16.780
Like, the lady just said to him, you need to work on your three-point turns.
00:39:27.640
She could have said to him, young man, congratulations.
00:39:39.920
Welcome, I mean, she could have built this into a thing and he would remember that forever.
00:39:44.100
Instead, he had a terrible moment and he barely remembers it.
00:39:49.940
So, how do you make these moments and use them in ways that bring healing and blessing
00:39:58.280
One of the big ideas they say in the book that I love is, beware the soul-sucking voice
00:40:03.700
of reasonableness, you know, and you can blow a moment out into a lifetime memory by adding
00:40:13.480
So, you know, just by adding a few more little details to it, you can change the whole experience.
00:40:22.080
I had some dads who read my book who flew in from Colorado to have a cigar and talk with
00:40:32.580
I could have sat him down and I could have said, hey, thanks for coming, fellas.
00:40:37.840
I went and bought a couple of bottles of, you know, very, very exquisite beverages to pair
00:40:48.360
I had this elaborate presentation and when they sat down, they were kind of dumbfounded.
00:40:59.020
And at the end of the night, I let them keep the glasses so that every time they use that
00:41:05.580
And it's like, those guys will remember that for a very, very long time because a normal
00:41:11.580
And so, I wanted to get a black belt in creating moments that shape people.
00:41:15.160
And so, I encourage dad to be intentional, to think about these in advance, to have a
00:41:20.640
Like, what are you going to do if you find out your kid's looking at porn, which statistically
00:41:24.500
almost 90% of kids at some point will look at porn?
00:41:29.280
Are you going to create a culture of shame or are you going to help them understand sexuality
00:41:35.020
So, I just went through those moments and I've got a list of them in the book, some of the
00:41:37.880
big ones that you can think through and begin to plan around.
00:41:40.420
But to me, getting those moments right is a huge, huge part of helping us move through
00:41:46.940
So, as you went through this process, I'm sure your kid was really excited at the beginning
00:41:50.180
because beginnings are always exciting and new because you're doing new things.
00:41:53.540
But then your son hit a wall with this process.
00:41:57.920
He's like, yeah, geez, dad, we really have to do these morning talks.
00:42:06.040
This is the part where, whether it's you're starting a business, you're doing a fitness
00:42:10.700
routine, start trying to start a fitness routine.
00:42:13.620
Well, you made a shift at this point to make the process not just about becoming a good
00:42:20.200
Because I think that's what you're trying to do.
00:42:21.060
You're trying to help your son harness his masculine energy for the good of the community.
00:42:25.620
But then you shifted it to about becoming good at being a man.
00:42:31.380
And why did that shift reignite the fire in your son?
00:42:35.220
I mean, you've had Jack Donovan on before in his book, The Way of Men.
00:42:39.140
And, you know, he's a somewhat controversial figure, I want to note.
00:42:43.740
But he had a core concept that I think really, really shook me.
00:42:48.140
His concept was he talked about Christian men's movements.
00:42:53.260
And that's a part of the tradition that I come from.
00:42:55.740
And he talked about like a vision of good men in our society today.
00:42:59.580
It looks typically like an overwhelmed suburban dad struggling to get his life together.
00:43:09.120
It's an overwhelmed, somewhat bored dad driven by obligation trying to get his life together.
00:43:24.460
And it's actually a pretty kind of tame vision.
00:43:29.880
And he says what men actually want is to be good at being a man, which means like when a
00:43:34.880
man walks in the room, he should have a sense of confidence that he's adding value.
00:43:39.440
And so when you're good at being a man, which means like I am good at understanding how women
00:43:46.260
So I am good at practical skills around the home, obviously, which your website is a,
00:43:50.500
you know, you are part of our central curriculum.
00:43:53.320
You've got thousands of articles on practical stuff.
00:43:56.440
And so I said to my son, hey, why do you think we're doing this?
00:44:03.320
And I said, I do not want you to be a good man.
00:44:07.780
I was like, nah, I want you to be good at being a man.
00:44:10.240
I was like, do you want to walk into a room and understand how women think and not be
00:44:16.840
I said, do you want to be able to like get through your high school years and have social
00:44:20.960
skills where you can navigate bullies and build friends?
00:44:25.260
So just, you know, like I'm trying to do the Winston Churchill, which is like get them saying
00:44:30.480
And I said, well, that's what we're here for, man.
00:44:32.460
I am here to help you be good at being a man, not to be some opaque kind of good man.
00:44:38.380
And that's when I sort of unleashed the archetype content, which was about, you know, like how to
00:44:45.060
How to understand influence and be a leader, how to get in a fight or how to have a cause
00:44:55.560
And so when I sort of rolled out that, those components, his motivation was so high, setting
00:45:01.920
his own alarm, disciplining his life to get involved with it.
00:45:05.460
So yeah, I kind of bland, feeble morality with a stereotypical roles that has no passion,
00:45:20.780
And I think a lot of people today are sort of like living half their lives because they've
00:45:25.240
been shoved into these passionless scripts that they think this is what it is to be a
00:45:30.100
I wanted to turn him loose, you know, give him a bit of a, as they say, fire in the belly.
00:45:36.940
So it went from me trying to get him up to him voluntarily getting up.
00:45:47.960
And I liked how you took this idea of being good at being a man and tied it into these
00:45:52.800
different roles that you started talking about, okay, as a man, these are the roles you're
00:46:03.100
And I think that gives some direction for that, again, that masculine energy that teenage
00:46:09.920
If you don't, I mean, there's nothing worse than standing in a room and feeling awkward.
00:46:22.340
Like if you're projecting that sort of emotional field, it's not going to go well for you.
00:46:26.020
And that's going to lead, like that's going to spiral into unhealthy places.
00:46:30.320
So to begin to like logically, sequentially, strategically break down the elements of how to be a man in
00:46:43.840
And I'm going to train you to be able to do those things.
00:46:48.940
And I said, and then here's what you do when you don't know.
00:46:57.600
And then they feel confident in themselves because they're teaching you and they're
00:47:02.180
So, man, we did so much stuff on like all the practical sort of like archetype stuff of how
00:47:09.960
When I asked my son today, he turns 22 this next week.
00:47:14.020
I said, okay, man, we're a couple years out for this.
00:47:21.640
And he said, the number one takeaway is the mental framework that I can figure out and
00:47:32.840
If you can get that kind of internal confidence in a young man's heart where he feels like
00:47:38.520
he can face the challenges of life, I mean, that just felt like such a win for me.
00:47:42.680
So just to start, you mentioned some of these roles.
00:47:45.180
So you're talking about, okay, how can I be, how can I get along with women?
00:47:50.960
That's, I think a lot of boys, they're interested in that because they just feel awkward.
00:47:56.860
I mean, I guess like if you're going back to like Jungian archetypes, be like the king,
00:48:03.600
Yeah, the leader, the warrior, the brother, the wise man.
00:48:07.060
There's probably a few more you can put in there.
00:48:09.000
But these, I try to sort of put these in things I felt my son from my tradition needed.
00:48:16.280
And so, you know, one of it was like a faith one, which is being a disciple.
00:48:22.080
One was about like how to have the influence in the world through leadership, how to get
00:48:26.200
There's so much, you know, I mean, in many ways, we're driven by two forces, hope and
00:48:32.940
And then like the thing that's stopping it, the threat against the thing that's stopping
00:48:37.100
So, you know, like that's what the warrior energy is.
00:48:39.720
It's like going after the thing you want and then fighting off the thing that's a threat
00:48:44.480
Then the power of friendships, you know, male friendships are so awkward, particularly
00:48:50.640
But, you know, like how do you be a faithful brother to somebody else?
00:49:04.720
And because of some of the stuff we've talked about, they now do an annual reunion.
00:49:11.320
A couple of them have gone on and gotten married.
00:49:13.240
But every year, they've got this little tribe that gets together to mark the milestones of
00:49:18.380
their life and just talk about like the joys and sorrows they've been through the previous
00:49:21.940
So, it's been a real joy to see him, you know, build a little brotherhood.
00:49:27.800
It's filled with pain, regret, lack of certainty, confusion.
00:49:32.740
And like how do you navigate, you know, some of the complexities of life?
00:49:36.140
So, we spent a lot of time talking about like what is wisdom?
00:49:40.700
And how do you, you know, learn to grow in wisdom?
00:49:43.460
The book of Proverbs talks about five kinds of fools.
00:49:47.500
And there's five ways of being foolish in the world.
00:49:50.160
And there's five kinds of wisdom to overcome the five fools.
00:49:52.840
So, you know, we spent time talking through that, that sort of stuff.
00:49:55.720
One idea that I really liked, and I'm going to swipe from you.
00:49:58.500
I'm going to use it with my own kids, is the LifeArc interview.
00:50:05.940
Well, yeah, the LifeArc interview is basically saying, you know,
00:50:13.040
And without a sense of like knowing what stage you're in or what season you're in,
00:50:18.720
like life can just feel very long and very painful and very, very confusing.
00:50:22.540
But if you realize this, hey, there's certain things you've got to get right,
00:50:25.600
certain things to look out for, certain things to avoid at these various stages,
00:50:34.560
When you're a freshman at college, they do a campus orientation.
00:50:39.640
They're basically trying to say to you like, open your eyes and here's how to navigate this world.
00:50:44.480
So, yeah, I wanted my son to go through life and figure out what to do with each decade or each stage of life.
00:50:51.360
So, to sit down with someone and basically ask, hey, like, what did you most enjoy about this stage and why?
00:50:56.960
What are three or four of your favorite memories from this stage?
00:50:59.680
What are the biggest regrets you had in this particular stage of your life?
00:51:03.400
If you could do it again, what did you do differently?
00:51:10.540
And then you begin to get a bit of an arc of what life is.
00:51:14.560
And so, you know, one of the great challenges with young people today is like they want the lifestyle in their 20s that their parents worked for in their 40s.
00:51:22.880
And so, if you say, hey, I mean, your 20s are not for like wealth accumulation as much as they are about vocational experimentation and understanding yourself, you're going to put some relief valves from the pressure of success and confusion.
00:51:38.080
And then hopefully, you know, they've got to have their own chronology, their friends got their own journey to walk, their own challenges and their own pace that they have to navigate.
00:51:46.200
But that at least gets some sense about like here's the territory.
00:51:49.120
If you go on any journey, at some point, you're going to break the journey down into stages.
00:52:03.220
So, that was my vision to sort of like break that down and send him out talking to people older than him who have navigated this with some measure of skill so he can get their accumulated wisdom and have an idea of where to go from there.
00:52:14.680
Yeah, when I read that, I was thinking, man, I need to do this for my kid.
00:52:17.860
Like get, find an 18-year-old or a 20-year-old who's just on it, right?
00:52:22.800
Who was a great kid, you know, had a great teenage part of their life.
00:52:27.280
And it'd be awesome to have my son just like talk to him.
00:52:29.980
I mean, that, I was, I'm thinking when, if when I was a kid and I was like, you know, 13 and I got to rub shoulders with some really cool 18-year-old, that has a big impact.
00:52:42.860
You're actually helping form that 18-year-old because you're going to make him sort of like codify what he's learned.
00:52:50.400
And he's going to realize, hey, I'm 18, but I've learned a lot.
00:52:54.700
And that'll be something you can pass on to someone else.
00:52:56.700
People, you do the best, you learn your lessons best when you teach it to other people.
00:53:00.280
So, yeah, I'm definitely grateful to be a part of a community that is multi-generational.
00:53:05.920
And, you know, living in the middle of New York City, my son's, you know, growing up in Manhattan for 17 years before he left home.
00:53:11.760
And so, for him, you know, he was surrounded by some like very, very accomplished people, but also people with a lot of pain.
00:53:18.500
Like, you know, unhealthy ambition and lack of focus.
00:53:22.360
And so, like, yeah, that being surrounded by a multi-generational community was a real gift.
00:53:28.380
But this, I think, is this sort of multi-generational long-term thinking doesn't happen in our world at large.
00:53:34.460
And this is definitely something that I think kids will appreciate.
00:53:44.700
All of these traditions, like when James Hollis talks about this, he says that all traditions have this thing they call the ordeal.
00:53:50.560
And the ordeal was to send the young man out into the world to see whether or not he is internalized and taken on the lessons that have been given to him from the community.
00:54:04.140
Some communities have a mission that they go on.
00:54:08.900
Very, very common to do a gap year, which is, you know, basically debaucherous hitchhiking across parts of Europe.
00:54:16.660
I was like, okay, I've put a lot of content and a lot of experiences in my son.
00:54:28.460
And I was like, I need to give him a little bit of space before he just rushes headlong into college to sort of see the kind of man he has become away from me where he could test it in the real world.
00:54:41.180
I want to, you know, like I'm surrounded by a lot of wealth in Manhattan where he grew up and a lot of privilege.
00:54:48.040
And I was like, I want to irreparably break my son's heart for the global poor.
00:54:52.480
Like I want him to see that the privilege is growing in, the disparity in the world.
00:54:59.660
And I want him to be exposed to other places and other cultures so he's not just like, you know, an American only in terms of his worldview and his thinking.
00:55:15.680
He went all over the place and has since traveled all over the place.
00:55:20.860
And he came back, and I'm going to tell you, he was a different kid.
00:55:23.400
And he was like being with a few friends, like I said, he built this little brotherhood, this little tribe.
00:55:30.400
And stuff that like, so the biggest example, my son, and I don't say this to sort of put him down.
00:55:43.620
And it was like such an unattractive quality to just complain.
00:55:48.040
And, you know, I'd have my wife's, you know, daughters come over and talk like how attractive, you know, like a little panel.
00:55:56.740
So like here's five women and here's my son interviewing these five women on the panel.
00:56:01.380
And I'd say like, you know, do you think, what do you think about men who complain?
00:56:06.520
But even that, these like attractive young women in their 20s on this little panel that my wife had formed, none of that worked.
00:56:14.780
Like, my son is like a yes, sir, on it, sir, kind of kid.
00:56:20.840
He said, dad, two weeks in, I realized I was a whiny, complaining child.
00:56:26.440
And I had a mirror amongst my peers of how unattractive it was.
00:56:32.260
And to this day, my son just like owns it and solves it.
00:56:37.380
But that never would have happened with all of my years of effort.
00:56:45.320
He also just came back from, he just did another three-month trip that he went on.
00:56:54.740
And I was like, the maturity that was developed by getting out of his regular life and context was massive.
00:57:02.340
You know, one bad year of college can undo 18 years of good parenting.
00:57:06.420
And so I think there's a lot of wisdom in, you know, having a liminal space where they can go through the world and sort of figure it out.
00:57:16.980
Interestingly enough, like my daughter did not want to do that.
00:57:19.880
So that was something I had to sort of cast some vision for for my son.
00:57:23.680
He was worried like, hey, all my friends are going to college.
00:57:27.040
And we processed that and eventually he came over and realized, hey, this would probably be good for me.
00:57:32.260
So part of this gap year, we're getting to the end, right?
00:57:45.220
How did you cap this journey off into manhood with your son?
00:57:49.680
Well, one of the things I realized by talking, like I said, there's quite a few sort of different groups and different organizations.
00:58:01.760
And one of the things in my research about sort of the come down from the high of the gap year is that they didn't debrief them too well.
00:58:09.120
So I said, I'm going to do the Camino de Santiago, which is a 500-mile hike across Spain.
00:58:24.200
And we're just going to debrief this journey together.
00:58:26.680
We're going to debrief the gap year, what happened in him, what did he learn.
00:58:31.060
We're going to debrief all the content we went through.
00:58:33.180
So I did like a series of questions every day, sort of recap in the six-year journey, you know, just trying to, again, deepen coding, reinforcement.
00:58:42.220
And at the end of the 33 days, you come to the city and there's this big cathedral.
00:58:56.080
And you come into this cathedral, this city, and there's another 80-kilometer walk or so where you enter this village called Finisterre.
00:59:06.120
And, you know, the idea of a pilgrimage was you're leaving something behind.
00:59:09.540
And our idea for this pilgrimage was he's leaving his childhood behind.
00:59:12.980
So we end up in this city called, this little town called Finisterre, and we go to this cove on a beach.
00:59:19.160
And I've got all these letters from these men who've, you know, been journeying with him, spoken into his life, many respects.
00:59:25.380
And I take him down on this beach and I'm like, mate, I want to tell you right now, man, this, well done.
00:59:32.940
You have earned this for the rest of your life.
00:59:39.760
In the Christian tradition, there's a scene in the life of Jesus where he is baptized at the start of the Gospels.
00:59:47.720
And a voice from heaven says, this is my beloved son who I love.
00:59:53.740
And because Jesus knew he was beloved at the start of his ministry, he had the courage and security in his identity to heal the sick, confront hypocrisy, fight off evil forces in his confrontation with the devil.
01:00:08.000
So, he was blessed to, his sense of identity enabled him to overcome.
01:00:13.340
And I wanted to say to my son, you have my blessing.
01:00:16.440
You are moving through the world, a blessed man.
01:00:19.660
And you can overcome anything because you have what it takes within you.
01:00:23.880
So, anyway, so he runs into the ocean like he did when he was 13, but now he's 19.
01:00:28.560
And he comes out and I do this big booming voice, you know, like my God voice or whatever.
01:00:34.600
And I'm just like, who is this man that's emerging from the ocean?
01:00:39.560
And then he comes out and, you know, we just cry.
01:00:42.080
And it's a super, super powerful and emotional moment.
01:00:47.460
And, you know, we both have a tattoo on our arms.
01:00:54.840
And it's the route of that Camino that ends in this little bay, this little cove where
01:01:02.120
So, if you were to ask my son, how do you know you're a man?
01:01:17.820
So, that was such a definitive moment that was six years in the making.
01:01:25.160
It was marking a journey that he had been through that we had sort of done together.
01:01:41.240
Well, have you and your wife done anything similar with her?
01:01:46.180
My wife played sort of the primary role in the formation of my daughter.
01:01:50.940
So, she's got a whole thing she did, you know, starting when she hit puberty and walked
01:01:58.480
In her senior year, she came to me and she said, Dad, like, I want you to just give me
01:02:05.100
a year of your best, like, development into adulthood.
01:02:08.980
So, I did a thing with her that I just, you know, I'm a bit of a branding guy.
01:02:14.080
So, I created this thing for her called 50 Pieces of My Heart, 50 Key Deposits Every
01:02:19.180
Dad Has to Make in His Daughter's Life Before She Leaves Home.
01:02:22.580
So, I did 50 weeks and it was like a little daily check-in and then one dinner a week where
01:02:29.500
we talked about, like, the 50 most important things I wanted her to know about life.
01:02:37.140
My daughter, sadly, her senior year was in COVID and my daughter loves beauty.
01:02:43.940
So, like, on the Camino when we're walking 500 miles, it's a heat wave.
01:02:47.700
We've got blisters that are almost down to the bone.
01:02:57.440
So, one of the only countries that was open in COVID was Iceland.
01:03:04.580
We rented a car and we drove around the country of Iceland.
01:03:08.660
And I sort of, like, created this experience for her, recapping these important things and
01:03:18.440
Buechner is obviously a very, very prolific, gifted author.
01:03:28.560
And so, our whole year was based around beauty and terror.
01:03:33.540
Like, the terror of life and the beauty of life and not being afraid to enter into it.
01:03:37.660
And so, that Iceland trip was an immersion in beauty.
01:03:41.180
And again, that was, like, a really powerful time.
01:03:43.280
So, very, very different relationship with her.
01:03:45.620
My daughter is a very feminine in the traditional sense and wonderful, wonderful young woman.
01:03:54.060
And so, but my wife will have to write the book of what she did with her.
01:03:57.700
I was just intentional in my relationship with her, but really did a strong year with her
01:04:01.680
to sort of close out her adolescence and to send her off.
01:04:05.080
I tell you, a very, very, very, very moving moment about the importance of seizing time.
01:04:14.380
My wife left the day before, and I had one bonus day with her.
01:04:17.200
And after, you know, 18 years of meeting with her every week, this really intense year,
01:04:23.320
we spent an hour together every day for a year.
01:04:26.620
And at the end of it, we had our final dinner, and I'm walking back to my car,
01:04:30.860
and she's walking to her dorms, and we have this one last hug.
01:04:45.760
And I was like, sweet girl, you've got what it takes.
01:04:57.920
I was like, gosh, our kids are gone before we know it.
01:05:02.500
And so a lot of times people say, John, this sounds pretty intense.
01:05:07.220
And listen, man, I am a busy man in the middle of New York City.
01:05:13.280
I got a lot on my plate, a lot of responsibilities, a lot of stuff I handle.
01:05:17.420
So it was a real sacrifice to take the time to do this for my kids.
01:05:21.440
But like now that they're both gone, if I had my time again, I'd go harder.
01:05:28.940
You know, those days, like I just entrusted, you know, the hands of God and say, hey, I
01:05:40.900
So it probably, yeah, maybe someone's listening to this and they're like, oh, my gosh, this
01:05:48.760
Well, I mean, let's say you guys listen to this and like, well, you know, maybe I just,
01:05:55.780
And maybe some guys just don't have the bandwidth, creativity, etc.
01:06:00.780
What would you say like, okay, just to get the ball rolling?
01:06:03.880
Because I think oftentimes, once you get the ball rolling, you pick up steam and you start
01:06:08.080
What are a few practices that you would think could help that?
01:06:17.620
So I would say, I mean, it's like if you want to lose weight.
01:06:20.520
Yeah, I mean, you can do a liquid fast for 30 days and then intermittent fast and eat
01:06:27.200
And you'll probably do that for six weeks and put all the weight back on.
01:06:32.800
And then you can cut out soda and then you can cut out dessert.
01:06:36.500
I mean, like, it's just like, it's what can you do consistently?
01:06:43.020
So you've got to find, like, every kid is different.
01:06:45.320
You know, you've got to find that tension of, like, is this actually making a difference
01:06:50.220
And how much does each kid need in what season after that?
01:06:54.380
Let me give you a larger principle rather than a specific because that's so personal.
01:06:58.660
I think the number one goal is to build and maintain an emotional bond.
01:07:07.180
Because if that bond is there in the relationship, you can pass anything through that bond.
01:07:21.160
But if that bond is not there, it is very, very hard to reinsert yourself because it just
01:07:29.820
So to me, it would be like whatever it takes to build that bond.
01:07:33.580
You know, you might do something as simple as, I know on your website, you've got a list
01:07:38.680
I mean, you might just do something as simple as, like, sit down and create a ritual where
01:07:48.940
But whatever it is that keeps that bond alive, that's the most important factor.
01:07:53.820
Put a date on your calendar and work backwards and just say, okay, here's what I'm going to
01:08:08.980
And then secondly, if your kids are gone and maybe you're sitting here with a sense of
01:08:14.500
regret, I would just say to you, it's never too late.
01:08:18.080
You just don't know the power of a father or a mentor's heart moving towards a kid with
01:08:31.500
I mean, part of what I do is I lead a faith community in New York, you know, and over
01:08:37.020
the past almost 20 years, thousands and thousands of stories of impossible relational reconciliations
01:08:43.800
when you're willing to move with, like, forgiveness and humility.
01:08:48.600
Set your heart and, you know, move towards your kids slowly in love.
01:08:53.440
And you'd be amazed at the blessing they ache for, the relationship they ache for, and the
01:08:59.200
power of restoration if you do it with humility and consistency.
01:09:02.620
Well, John, this has been a fantastic conversation.
01:09:04.540
Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?
01:09:11.580
And on there, there's a link for a weekly email.
01:09:13.960
So every week I send out, like, a short thought for dads and men about how to navigate the
01:09:24.260
And then if you go to Amazon and just look at The Intentional Father, you'll see that that
01:09:36.880
He's the author of the book, The Intentional Father.
01:09:40.180
You can find more information about his work at primalpath.co.
01:09:43.020
Also, check out our show notes at aom.is slash passage.
01:09:55.780
Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast.
01:09:58.280
Make sure to check out our website at artofmanly.com, where you find our podcast archives, as well
01:10:02.460
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01:10:05.840
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