You were fighting before you even started.

Yeah.

And so as such, and on top of that, that obviously nurture was going to become far more important to me than nature in terms of raising my kids.

So raising my kids with a deep intention of how to do it well was also all a part of that mix.

And so fast forward to today, I'm the dad of two incredible boys.

They're six and nine and they're the lights of my life.

And about three years ago, so I'm a leadership expert and an executive coach, and I build leadership development programs for executive teams all around the globe.

different bull guy over

So welcome, Jeff.

Well, thank you for having me.

It's great to be here.

So if you want, yeah, I'm happy to give a little background.

So Ambitious Dads got started.

There's kind of the short version and the long version.

The long version, since we are doing a podcast, is that about, I knew I wanted to be a dad my entire life.

So what are the six dad gants you've identified in your research?

But I'd love to just work through that and have an organic conversation, if that's interesting to you.

Yeah.

It's, it's an important conversation, and it came about for lots of different reasons for me.

I run programs for dads, and I'm an executive coach and, and leadership expert, and I kept having this curious experience where I would be coaching CEOs that are men and women.

And men, I would...

You know, they would have no problem telling me their, their specific vision for their business, for their career, and then when I asked them a s- a similar question about their fatherhood, they were kinda stunned, and they didn't really have an answer.

And I got really curious about this, and I decided that I was gonna kinda plead my ignorance and start to interview these, these dads and see what's going on.

I know that I, I am like that sometimes, so I guess maybe I'm just speaking to myself, but yeah.

So why do a lot of ambitious parents, specifically dads – feel like they're constantly torn choosing between work and career and home and family and even themselves, right? Like, why is there always having to be this sort of on-off binary sacrifice as opposed to let's try to find and elevate all the above?

The answer is more nuanced.

So on the one hand, at the simplest level, it's because we think we have to be two different people, one person at work and one person at home.

And it's quite exhausting to switch between the man you are at the office and the father or husband you want to be at home.

And that doesn't need to be the case, but that's also a values misalignment, often with how we think about how we need to achieve and what success should be.

But it's very possible to be sort of one engine and be the same man in both spheres.

But it takes some sort of mindset shifts to do that.

It just kind of really just turned down the temperature around how easy and frictionless this can be if we just learn to connect on that level.