Calm Parenting Podcast - DADS: 2 Noble Goals, 2 Big Challenges

Episode Date: June 12, 2022

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Calm Parenting Podcast listeners get an exclusive 20% off an IXL membership when you sign up today at ixl.com slash kirk. Visit ixl.com slash kirk to get the most effective learning program out there at the best price. This is a special podcast for my fellow dads out there. I try to talk quickly so I don't waste your time. I try to hit on really relevant points, so I appreciate you listening. Look, there are two things I wanted to address here. The main theme of this is you have noble goals as a dad. You work hard to provide so that your kids, your wife can have a good life. And that drives you. You want your kids to respect you, not because you just need respect, but because you want your kids, you don't

want them to make the same mistakes you did. It's a very noble purpose. That's why respect is so important to men, right? It's not just that we need it. It's that we want to pass along our wisdom to our kids. It's very strong within us. And there are two things working against most of us as men. One is our childhood experience with our own dads. And two, our prime earning time and career promotion years are when our kids are young. So do both of those. Number one, your childhood. What we're about is breaking generational patterns. Look, if you don't know who we are, my name is Kirk Martin, founder of Celebrate Calm. You can find us at CelebrateCalm.com. If you ever need help with anything, you reach out directly to me. My name is Kirk, K-I-R-K, at CelebrateCalm.com. I will help

you out. My dad was known in our home as the Colonel. He was career military. He had four sons. It was really fun growing up. So he was a tough guy. He we all do? My we're the highway approach. We can't handle anything going wrong. We don't like it when there are Legos left on the floor. And we start dominating. We use fear because we wanted our kids just to be quiet and do what we wanted. Well, what happens when you do that is you break your relationship with your child. They no longer trust you. They just fear you. They don't respect you. They fear you. And so the greatest gift that I gave my son, who is 29 now, is this. I broke the generational pattern because I nearly ruined my relationship with him. Because what I wanted to transition to, look, discipline, the word means to teach, right? It doesn't mean to punish or send to the room or yell at them. It means to teach. And my goal was to have a trusting, solid relationship with my son. He is a very disciplined young man now, but he looks up to me. He respects me. And for me as a dad, that is priceless.

Now, if you want to listen to how I almost ruined it and I did everything wrong, just listen to the other podcasts. You'll find out pretty quickly. So here are a couple of common analogies I think all men can relate to. So I'm talking to this firefighter at a conference and he struggles. He's like, I struggle. I struggle to stay calm. I yell a lot, right?

I kind of discipline how my dad does. And then my wife and I fight over it. And there's a lot of anger and frustration. And sometimes I don't have great self-control. I was like, okay, welcome to being a man. So I begin asking him questions. Like when you get the call that there's a fire, what happens? And so his answer, of course, was, well, we're already prepared for it at all times.

When we get there, we assess the situation. You know, what kind of fire is it? What are we dealing with? We come up with a strategy. Then we act decisively and we stay calm under pressure. And I was like, look, is there any reason you'd ever dump gasoline on the fire for any reason? And he looked at me like I was an idiot. And then he got that knowing look like, oh, that's what I do when I yell, demand, threaten, stand over my strong-willed child.

Just pouring fuel on the fire. Dads, how many of you notice it escalates? Look, here's what I'm asking you. The last 73 times something happened in your home and you reacted a certain way and it escalated, eventually we have to say within ourselves, look, past 73 times we ran that certain play on the football field, or did that strategy at work? If it didn't work, we ran that certain play on the football field. Or did that strategy at work? If it didn't work, we changed our strategy, right? So I asked like, so how is this any different than when you walk into your home and there's chaos and Legos on the floor and your child's melting down and your wife's upset, right? You want to have a code word. You want to have a

game plan for this, right? You assess the situation before dumping more fuel on the fire. And you figure out, is my son just being defiant or did something happen at school today? Is it caused by anxiety? A lot of your kids struggle with anxiety and anxiety will cause them to lash out. But if you know it's anxiety, you can deal with their anxiety and their frustration instead of just yelling and screaming and making it worse, right? And you can sit down. You can ask questions. You can use firm, even matter-of-fact tone. Works really well with upset kids. And then you invite your child into an activity to do with you because doing an activity rather than talking, because when has this ever worked? Young man, young lady, we need to have a talk about your attitude right now. Like when has that ever worked in the history of man? It doesn't work. Creates a defensive

response. But I invite my child into an activity that he or she enjoys. We're together now. And now when everybody's calmed down, I can teach. Right? Same thing with, we do a lot of training on military bases, right? So you don't just run into a situation, guns blazing most of the time without having a plan. But the most important part that I wanted to hit on is this. I always ask the military guys, if your buddy is down on the battlefield, what's your ethos? And they're like, well, you never leave a brother behind. And I said, that's noble and that's good. So you will lay your life down for your brother in arms. But what I want to encourage you to do is do the same thing for your wife and kids. Because some of you have left your wife on the battlefield alone.

And then you come along and criticize her for being too soft or coddling your child. Only the truth is, she's really coddling you. Because she knows you can't handle tough situations at home, right? She knows you can handle it at the office, in your business, at work, at a fire, on the battlefield, but you can't handle things at home. So she has to walk around managing your emotions for you. And that, my friend, is when she loses respect for you because she married a man. And now she's trying to manage the emotions of her kids

and her husband and that makes her feel abandoned on the battlefield and so I'm asking you to step up. I'm asking you to learn some tools, some strategies so that when you walk into that tough situation, your wife looks at you and says, here comes that noble husband of mine. He knows what to do with the office on the battlefield in a fire. He also knows how to deescalate situations in our house. And by the way, men, that'll make her want you more than anything else. Trust me on that. And ask her that. Go home and ask your wife, hey, if I start de-escalating and you see me connecting with your kids when they're upset instead of yelling and ruining my relationship, will that make

you want me more? She'd be like, darn right. Now, it may take a little time because you may have burned a lot of bridges. So don't expect it like one time like, hey, honey, I just did that well. Ready to go upstairs? Give it some time. You have to rebuild the trust with your kids and your wife, but it's worth it. So here's the second thing. It's the prime earning year conundrum. And I face this. I used to be in the corporate world.

And so I'm a young executive. I have a young kid. So here's what's in my brain. I want to be home to see my son because I really liked him. The truth is I didn't like him a lot of times because he was really difficult. But I knew I needed to be home with him. But I also knew, well, he's a pretty tough kid. I'm probably going to need to pay for some private school. I want to live in a good neighborhood so we have good schools. I want to provide for my family so we're better off than I was as a kid because I was kind of raised by a single mom after my parents got divorced. And so there's this thing of like, I don't really want to be at the office, but I need to stay a little bit later. So my boss sees me here at 630 at night. So I get a

promotion. So I make more money so we can live in that nice house in that nice neighborhood. That's really hard because it's these years are when your kids are young, right? I'm 56 now. My son's 29. I could work all the time now, but now I don't have to, right? And so it's really hard. So what I used to ask myself is this, what would I want 55-year-old Kirk to say to me when I was 35, when I'm 40, when I'm 45. And what I would say to

you, if you want to benefit from my wisdom, because I'm older than most of you, it's relationships. It is relationships that will make your life for the rest of your life that you will remember, right? What do you have to prove now? Really, what do you have to prove, right? Most of you have been successful. Who cares about all, like your kids are never gonna be like, well, my dad did this at work. I remember I worked at America Online. It's the last place I worked before starting this. I got fired there and I'm glad I did. I should have quit. So we're at this huge meeting and they were rolling out VoIP, voice over phone internet protocol, right?

It was new at the time and they're like, and so the VP gets up and he's like, I just want to thank all of you who missed your kids baseball game or ball games, who missed their dance recitals, who weren't home for dinner. And I want you to tell your kids, I was there and I helped launch this new service. And I should have stood up and said, you know what? You're a complete, and then fill in the word. That was such utter BS. Besides the fact that that service lasted literally three days before they shut it down.

What a horrible thing to tell a bunch of people. Like your kids and be like, my dad was there when they released a new product at AOL. Like who cares, right? So I just say that to say, reprioritize. A couple of tough questions. Are you still trying to earn your dad's approval? I was. My dad never told me he was proud of me.

Never. Never. And that will drive some of you, right? And I want you to have that confidence to say, you know what? I make my decisions now. I break those generational patterns. Look, if your dad was a good dad, this is what he'd tell you. And this is what I will tell you. I'm proud of you, son. You worked hard. You made something good of yourself. You've provided for your family. You're a good man. Now here's what I want you to put your energy into. Build your relationships like you build your career. It's the only thing that will matter to you for the final 30 or 40 years of your life. Now that's the nice way to say it. Here's the way I want to say it to you as a Celebrate Calm guy, and I like being talked to in a tough way. The truth is, if you don't do this, your wife is going to leave you when the kids are gone. She absolutely will. She's not going to leave her

kids, but she will leave you. And many of your wives are counting down the days until the kids are gone and she is out of here. Because you have dismissed her emotions for too long. You have been absent. You're there, but you're not really present. And sometimes you make things worse and you escalate situations. And I promise you, because I've worked with a million families, I would bet money on this. I wish I could. I would make a lot of money I would bet money on this. I wish I could. I would make a lot of money.

Your wife will leave you. You will be lonely. And then half of everything you have worked for and invested will be gone. And then your kids are going to have to choose, who do we spend Thanksgiving with? Who do we spend Christmas with this year? Do we do it with mom? Do we do it with dad? Divorce has ramifications

that are just brutal and it doesn't have to be that way, right? You tell your kids, you've got choices to make son, daughter, make good ones. You have a choice to make too. Do the hard work. Dig into this. I will help you. I will help you. Any man who emails us, if you get our programs, look, go to celebrate calm.com. There's a Father's Day package there. I know. Why do you charge so much? It's not that much. It's way cheaper than therapy and it's way cheaper than divorce, right?

And it's worth it because it will change your relationships. It may actually save your relationship with your child and with your spouse. Wives, you're probably listening. Go ahead and get this for your husband. Say, this is what I want. Let's do this over the summer. It will change you. As you go through those programs, you email me. Any man that emails me and is vulnerable and asks for help learning how to calm down and deal with his triggers and de-escalate situations, I will work with you till the day I die because this is the most important thing I have ever done in my life.

I had a full corporate career for 20 years. Did fine. Well in that. Fine. Whatever. Doesn't matter. But what matters is I changed my relationships and I rebuilt them from the ground up and I have trusting, good relationships and I will enjoy that now till the day that I die.

So men, I'm proud of you. You have noble purposes. You just need some tools. You just need to break some of those generational patterns that you probably got at home when you were a kid. I did that as well. If I can help you, you reach out to us. Reach out to me at Kirk at Celebrate Calm.

You need help with any of our products, it's Casey, it's our son. C-A-S-E-Y, CelebrateCalm.com. We will be glad to help you, okay? Respect you all. Bye-bye.