Dad Guilt and Regret - the secret struggle

00:00 Welcome, Team Super Dad. Are you working and feeling guilty about not seeing your kids and then playing with your kids and feeling guilty about not working? That stuff will take you down. And today, we're going to get it sorted. Roll three. Welcome to Team Super Dad. Real dads creating their best lives ever. More time, more money, more fun. You are not alone. You're on Team Super Dad. Hello, gang. Welcome. I've adjusted the setup. So if you're watching, you might see perhaps better than it was last week, although it's not dark today.

00:43 Welcome to the Team Super Dad podcast. If you're live, it's good to have you here. You can comment. You can get involved in this whole event, this session, this live, this podcast. And if you're watching on the replay, give me a hashtag replay. Like, share, subscribe. Bring in, this is the most important thing. If you're watching this right at the start, bring in other people that you feel might need to hear this message today. Dad guilt, dad guilt, the unspoken struggle. If you're new to Team Super Dad, we are a community of modern, motivated dads creating the life we desire, not a life we feel stuck in.

01:21 If you want to get some input and help with structuring your dad life so you have success and work and home, then book yourself on a discovery call at teamsuperdad.com forward slash 15. Call. Easy. All the crew in the Team Superdad group, I can see you coming on live. That's good. You can comment, of course. And basically, it's good to have you here. It's the weekend. I don't know when you're listening, but if you're watching live, it is Saturday morning in the UK. March, still bloody cold. And I said in the beginning, didn't I? I said, if you're struggling with all that

02:03 stuff, I was going to say another S word. They're getting a lot tighter on swearing. So I don't know. It is Saturday morning. And some dads say to me, well, I listen when we're in the car with the kids, but if you swear too much, then I can't have it on. So the late night ones with Glenn, Glenn and I both have girlfriends now. So is that what is what is what can we say about that? Plus, it's not lockdown either. If you enjoyed the wrap up previously, then hopefully Glenn and I will at least get together and give you an update of where we're all at. But back on theme, dad guilt and regret. This really is an unspoken struggle.

02:42 It's not often that if you, you know, you said to one of your mates, oh, how's it going? They would say to you, oh, yeah, I feel incredibly guilty about how much I'm working and not seeing my family. It just gets covered up like, oh, I'm fine, thanks. It's like you wear it like it's something you're sort of stuck with. You just have to get on with it. It's part and parcel of having your own business or performing at the top or whatever your, whatever your work is, you know, people, some of the dads at football, my kids' football, they work their ass off. They're away on work like six days a week. And full respect to them for doing that because they're providing.

03:25 But somewhere in amongst it all, you know, even if that's what you need to do, there's still this challenge of managing the dad guilt because we only get one chance at our kids' childhoods. And even that's in chapters. You know, baby, toddler, young kid. I think that's my favorite bit really. Four to seven was just lush. Well, it's all lush, really. Pardon when they're teething. That's bit shit. And then, of course, when they're teenagers, there's another whole load of challenges. But it is what it is, right?

04:05 So whilst we do only get one chance, feeling guilty about what you need to do is crazy. It will take you down. Now, some of this might be controversial to you, right? But that's okay. This is my view. This is Team Superdad ethos and methodology. It's about having balance across your whole life so that you can succeed in every area. If you're thriving in work because you're working so hard, but your relationship's struggling and your, you know, your time with the children is struggling, you're not even getting to see your mate, then I can assure you that sooner or later you will be burnt out and it will all come crumbling down.

04:47 Dramatic, perhaps, but also pretty damn accurate, seeing it over and over again. The complete opposite of that is where you do create balance across each of those areas of your life and you are creating. creating space for yourself to thrive and to do what it needs to be done to make it work. You can't run a car in first gear all the time. It's going to break. It's literally going to break. And our life is no different than that. We don't live in the 70s or 80s anymore. Like some kind of sell, sell, sell, work, work, work. Come home to a nice clean house and expect everything to be okay. You know,

05:31 that wasn't realistic. It might have been for the time, but there was a lot of unhappiness there. You know, to manage our family well, to keep that relationship full of energy and laughter and passion, we've got to play our part in it. Let alone, there should be a desire to want to do those things to contribute and to be an equal player in the whole family setup. So what it boils down to is working, literally working as hard as you possibly can. And then it gets at some point to that time at the end of the day, and you've got to go. And you say you've got to go and you say you've got to go.

06:13 And then you know the kids are going to be going to bed and then you've missed it again. Or you're going home and you're catching the last bit. It's okay once or twice. It's okay one month to two months. But when it's constant, that's when it's going to start to eat away at you. The flip of that is then deciding on Saturday or whatever version of time it is for you. Oh, right, I'm going to play with the kids now. And this happened to me a lot when I had before I was divorced, when we had the family, I had the business, I had the home, I had, and so I would make that time to play with the kids, but often I would be too distracted about what I should be doing instead or what email I wasn't responding to.

07:03 I spent about two years trying to learn how to trade, like trade, like shares and stuff. It was intense. There would be times when I was playing with the kids where I would be like drilling into my brain, what should I be doing? What's going up? What's going down? And so you're not present with your kids. And your children know this. You think they don't know it? They know it. And ultimately, the difference is in your relationship with them. And the biggest kick in the nuts that any kid can, any dad can hear from their kid is: Daddy, why do you work so much? A good guy I know, been a coach of mine at various points,

07:49 Fraser over in, he's in New Zealand now. He tells his backstory of his child saying to him, Daddy, why are you so unhappy? And like it was out of the, well, they call it out of the mouth of babes comes wisdom. I just bastardize that completely. But it's something that gets close on that. And that was his epiphany. That is his moment where he realized that all this hard work that he was doing, his child, his toddler, saw in him that he wasn't happy. So you've got to craft your life,

08:28 in particular around your work, so that you can have it all. So you can have time to work, time with the kids, time with your partner. And elements of that are inside do the work, which is the W of the power code, the Team Superdad methodology. But first of all, comes ownership. It's about your mindset. There are times when you're going to have to work, but sitting there feeling guilty is completely pointless. There are times when you want to play with your children. You're going to make time for that. Feeling guilty about what you aren't doing at work is completely pointless. You can only be doing what you're doing. You can't be in two places at once.

09:05 Even the idea that we can multitask is pretty ludicrous because you're not giving either thing your 100% attention. Cook dinner and listen to a podcast, fair dues. But don't try and play with your kids and email your colleagues, your team. It's just bollocks. You won't do either well. And this ownership side of all of the Team Superdad method is about your mindset. There's flow. We all have flow energy. When we're experiencing a lot of toxic thoughts, a lot of toxic concerns, guilt and regret, obviously falling to that side, it will slow you down.

09:48 It will impact your confidence, your creativity, your sleep. It will impact. how much fun you are to be around. You'll start being much more snappy at the people you love most. So, toxic energy is criminal. It literally, as well as the long-term effects of it, will actually make you ill. So, but the complete opposite of that is creating the positive flow. So, if you're experiencing a lot of guilt around the work that you're doing, you just can't shake that off. You've got to frame it in a much better way. You can create two columns, put the top of one concerns, and then in the other column, actually look to create the complete opposite of that.

10:29 Like, what rather than it be a concern, what's an opportunity, or rather than it being a concern, how could you flip that, like create a solution to it that would work for you and everybody else concerned? Because it's not that you can suddenly make guilt go away, it's not a switch you can turn off. If it was, you wouldn't be thinking it in the first place. You're going to have to do something practical to work it out, to erase it, so that it does so that it moves from being that toxic energy into the positive energy. Ownership fundamentally is about 100% responsibility. You know, feeling guilty about being at work is on you. If you're going to feel that bit get guilty about it, go home, like go home.

11:15 Clearly, you've got to plan and be more structured and be more organized. Communication is a clear part of it, letting the people in your life know where you're going to be and what you're going to do, but then make solid commitments, like honor your own integrity when you say you're going to do something. If you say, Right, I'm going to work late on these days, and I'm always going to do the school run and be home in time to play with you before bed and have dinner together. Then stick to it. You wouldn't miss a flight at an airport, you wouldn't turn up painfully late for some important meeting.

11:52 And the idea that you can have success in life, right? If success in life is determined by your success at work, then you haven't really got success in life because you decided to get married, you decided to have kids, you decided to open a business. These are all things that you committed to. So, why would you have one fail and the other one succeed? That really isn't success. Okay, so a couple of things. First of all, get honest with yourself. You know, if you're feeling, if you are feeling this, then don't bottle it up inside.

12:31 It's not, it's not like a heavy burden that you have to take on as someone who is performing at work or someone who feels like they need to make money for their family, someone who's chosen to run a business. It needs to be something you express. You need to share it with your loved ones and with your mates. Like, how do you do you experience this? How do you deal with it? Being part of an accountability group, having a coach, being in a community of other like-minded dads is clearly a positive way to do that. That's why you should get inside the teamsuperdad.com forward slash group and be part of everything we're doing. But the next part of it is recognizing when it's running the show, when it's constantly on your mind, when anything's constantly on your mind, unless it's really exciting and positive, then you're going to have to address it.

13:22 If you've talked to the people in your life and you've organized it, if you're scheduling and honoring that diary, the final part of taking ownership of this is to really celebrate what you've achieved. Don't get fixated on what you haven't done. I haven't done this, I haven't done that, I haven't done that. Like that is exhausting. A lot of guilt will fester inside of there. You know, if there's work to be done during the day, get it, get it done up until the point that you need to go. Acknowledge, go through the things you've done, be proud. Like, people aren't proud. Be proud of what you've achieved that day. Not focusing on what you haven't done.

14:02 Then go home and do what you said you were going to do then. And then actually take a moment to acknowledge yourself at the end of the day. Like, yeah, I did that. The kids are happy. I'm happy. She's happy. We go again tomorrow. Guilt is a choice. It's a perspective. It's a frame on the situation. So we have to reframe it in the way that I've just outlined so that it becomes we take away that habitual way of thinking of guilt and we put it into a different frame of someone who is smashing it in all areas, who's a kick-ass business person, who's an incredible dad, an amazing partner.

14:41 Like, and you're having fun in your life with your mates. If we were talking about what do you want, surely you'd be saying to me, that's what I want. Okay, so start to create it instead of going around feeling guilty, running a number on yourself. It's a downward spiral that you are fully responsible for. So there we go, 15 minutes, boom. Go back if you haven't, if you're just catching this for the first time, go back and listen to the last few weeks where we went through the P, purpose. in the power code we're working on through ownership over the next couple of weeks before going into do the work engage and reward

15:24 if you are a dad who wants to take control take more control over their clarity and their confidence so they can create the life they desire rather than a life they feel stuck in then get on board go to teamsuperdad.com forward slash 15 call and you can book a free discovery call where we'll talk about exactly what you want to achieve why that's a struggle and uh begin um we won't begin to explore too much there but we'll schedule a longer call to actually get into that and we can talk about some of the cool tools we have available and maybe you'll choose to come and work and be part of the team super dad

16:01 community so that's it what are you doing this weekend where are you going i'm officially off football after tottenham's disastrous week i've been listening to center force all week haven't put talk sport on once going out with jo and her friends for birthday drinks last year that resulted in her being incredibly drunk not really her fault i was kind of aware of people kick topping up drinks and i'm not sure she was um uh but all the more testimony to how fun and awesome my beautiful lady is uh haven't got the junior jays uh they're with their mum um but they're happy it's rosie's dress rehearsal for her dance has dance season like she's in a whole bunch of contests uh coming up over the next six months

16:55 so it's a it's a pretty cool weekend that we're going into if you don't plan for fun you ain't gonna have fun so make sure whatever you're doing get on the phone to friends get out in the fresh air get your daily sweat on with some exercise and uh and and just make the most of your weekend don't have monday come around all too quickly and you've not done anything i'm jonna jensen this is team superdad podcast i'll see you on the next episode team super dad out this has been team super dad find us at teamsuperdad.com join the program and create the best life ever for you and your children you are not alone you're on team super dad